Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans: After Hurricane Katrina

By Richard Brent Turner

This scholarly study demonstrates “that while post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans is changing, the vibrant traditions of jazz . . . must continue” (Journal of African American History).

An examination of the musical, religious, and political landscape of black New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, this revised edition looks at how these factors play out in a new millennium of global apartheid. Richard Brent Turner explores the history and contemporary significance of second lines—the group of dancers who follow the first procession of church and club members, brass bands, and grand marshals in black New Orleans’s jazz street parades.

Here music and religion interplay, and Turner’s study reveals how these identities and traditions from Haiti and West and Central Africa are reinterpreted. He also describes how second line participants create their own social space and become proficient in the arts of political disguise, resistance, and performance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253025128

Book preview

Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans

Jazz Religion,

the Second Line,

and Black New Orleans

AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA

New Edition

RICHARD BRENT TURNER

Indiana University Press

Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2017 by Richard Brent Turner

First edition © 2009 by Richard Brent Turner

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier edition as follows:

Turner, Richard Brent.

Jazz religion, the second line, and Black New Orleans / Richard Brent Turner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35357-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22120-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Jazz—Religious aspects— Louisiana—New Orleans. 2. Jazz— Religious aspects—Voodooism. 3. African Americans—Louisiana— New Orleans—Music—History and criticism. I. Title.

ML3921.8.J39T87 2009

305.896'073076335—dc22

2009014084

ISBN 978-0-253-02494-7 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-253-02512-8 (eb.)

1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17

FOR THE ANCESTORS

FOR

Social justice in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The inspiration for this book can be traced to Sidney Bechet’s reflections about New Orleans music in Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography: jazz is there in that bend in the road in the American South and you gotta treat it gentle.¹ Like the saxophonist Bechet, I have traveled many roads to understand New Orleans music and the joy and pain alongside it.² I owe thanks to the city of New Orleans, my home from 1996 to 1999, for an extraordinary culture and community that I will never forget. The beautiful sounds of jazz and African drumming floating in the air and the joyful experience of the second line are always waiting for me on the road home to the Crescent City. My mother’s death in 1997, the Parker family’s love, and the spirit world of African American religion led me to that bend in the road along the Mississippi River that is the music itself.³

The road to the music in Jazz Religion began in my hometown, Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1950s with the fascinating stories of the southern branch of my family in North Carolina that my mother, Mavis Turner, and my aunt, Kelsie Foreman, recited to me when I was a young boy. The exciting and mysterious life of my grandfather, Zedock Foreman, the handsome child of a former slave and former slave owner was at the crossroads of those southern stories that eventually brought me back home to the South, to my family’s roots.

My teachers at Princeton University also enabled this book’s publication with the excellent resources they provided in the 1980s. Thanks to John Wilson, who directed my PhD program in the religion department, for including seminars in African religions with James Fernandez in anthropology and Ephraim Isaac at Princeton Theological Seminary. A reading course with Albert Raboteau in 1983 introduced me to his brilliant book, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South, Melville Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past, and a career-long fascination with African continuities in African American religions.

I have been blessed with the advice of several brilliant extramural colleagues in the field of New World African religions. Claudine Michel at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, published shorter versions of my book chapters in the Journal of Haitian Studies. They welcomed me to the Board of Directors of KOSANBA, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou, in 2007, and provided critical feedback for the papers I read at KOSANBA’s international colloquia in Boca Raton, Florida; Detroit, Michigan; and Boston, Massachusetts. Special thanks are due to George Lipsitz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who read my book manuscript for Indiana University Press and provided important suggestions to improve the final product. To Lindsey Reed, I express thanks for brilliant editorial assistance, and Mitch Coleman did a great job with the word processing of the manuscript. It is always a professional pleasure to work with Robert Sloan, the editorial director of Indiana University Press.

DePaul University in Chicago awarded me a Faculty Research and Development Committee Grant, a Competitive Research Grant, and a Humanities Center Fellowship to begin the archival research for Jazz Religion from 1999 to 2001. The University of Iowa, one of the leading public research institutions in the United States, provided generous support to complete the research and writing of this book. During my years on Iowa’s faculty, I received two Arts and Humanities Initiative Grants (2002–2003 and 2005–2006) from the Office of the Vice President for Research and a Career Development Award (fall 2006) from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that gave me the funds and release time from teaching to conduct research at William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Public Library, and the Backstreet Cultural Museum. My second Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant allowed me to travel to New Orleans to attend Big Chief Allison Tootie Montana’s jazz funeral in July 2005—a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

Finally, blessings go out to all the brave New Orleanians who survived Hurricane Katrina. I am still a New Orleanian, and I love my city!

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

We feel the pain…. We ain’t even gained…. We come here today to pay homage to those who cross over, to ask for healing upon the families. We mustn’t forget the babies and elders who crossed over here and everywhere in the city, and we want to give thanks to them, because their transition is hopefully bringing us light…. We ask right now … that no police force come upon us…. We ring a bell for the ancestors. We ask that all of them be made well where they are and help us to keep well where we are. We thank you and we ask for peace.

FROM AN AFRICAN AMERICAN HEALING CEREMONY BEFORE A SECOND LINE HELD AT NORTH GALVEZ STREET AND JORDAN AVENUE ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF HURRICANE KATRINA, AUGUST 29, 2015

On August 29, 2015, the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, many black New Orleanians focused on creating their own social spaces in order to experience the African ancestral memory, the communal music, and the healing and resistance arts celebrated in the jazz street parades and African diasporist culture from Congo Square to the Lower Ninth Ward—where the levees broke and black people drowned during the flooding of the city. They looked to their forebears, like Louis Armstrong, who had long ago expressed the spirit of solace and the remembrance of the mysteries of life and death that inspired the mood of the African American community on this anniversary of the hurricane: Jazz actually arose from the dead, he said, the real music came from the grave…. That’s why it brings people to life.¹ Thus the Lower Ninth Ward became an important circum-Atlantic ritual site, where survivors of the storm took part in the spiritual, musical, and dance experiences of the second line to honor the dead who had transitioned into another stage of being. Vodou priestesses dressed in white offered libations to the ancestors and blessed the spaces where the levees broke; Mardi Gras Indians chanted and danced to circulate healing energy at this important Katrina crossroads, expressing the profound relationships between the dead, the living, and the spirits in New Orleans; and a black man posted an elegant banner, Honoring Our Loved Ones, listing the names of people who passed away in the disaster following the storm. The ceremony expressed the healing energy of Vodou, whose roots are in Haiti, and exemplified how its spirited performance traditions were recreated and circulated in jazz and popular religious traditions in New Orleans and indeed globally in the period after Hurricane Katrina.

The appearance of this new edition of Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans marks a renewed interest in New Orleans and second-line culture across America, a decade after Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and the catastrophic flooding in the city and the Gulf Coast region. This new introduction updates the text, analyzes the musical, religious, and political landscape of black New Orleans before and after the storm, and suggests how the book’s themes play out in a new millennium of global apartheid after Hurricane Katrina.

Although the first edition was one of several books in a new wave of scholarship on the subject of African diasporist religious identities and musical traditions in New Orleans at the beginning of the twenty-first century (scholarship acknowledged in the new bibliography to this edition), academic interest in black New Orleans remains marginal. Thus many Americans’ knowledge about African American culture in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is still based on stereotypes and media bites. In the post-Katrina world, this lack of knowledge has only deepened misunderstandings and suspicion of one of the world’s great black urban-based musical and religious traditions. In this introduction, I address some significant issues for African Americans in New Orleans today and explore aspects of the contemporary second lines and their interactions with Vodou and Congo Square music that were not discussed in the first edition. My personal involvement with extended family, friends, and associates in the Crescent City and in KOSANBA (the Congress of Santa Barbara, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou) increased my knowledge and understanding of second-line culture’s elegant healing traditions, which incorporate African diasporic music, religion, and dance and inspired me to write this updated edition.

Black New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, many African American political and cultural leaders conveyed a picture of New Orleans as a city deeply divided by systemic racism and structural inequalities, resulting in vastly different recovery outcomes for black and white communities there. Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League and black mayor of New Orleans in the 1990s puts it this way:

For me this is personal. The neighborhoods that I grew up in were devastated. My friends, my neighbors, and my family members were displaced. So on a very deep and personal level, this has been very difficult for so many people. But what we have tried to do in the Urban League is to focus on where things are ten years later and the best way to characterize it is it’s half time. And at half time you assess the work yet be done: disparities in employment, in education, in housing, still many neighborhoods … have a distance to go…. My encouragement and hope is that equity and inclusion for those neighborhoods will be the focus of the second half of this recovery.²

Wendell Pierce, the black New Orleanian actor who starred in the HBO series Tremé, worked hard to overcome the disparities Morial describes. Pierce established the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation, which has built forty houses for lower-income black citizens displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and developed the new Pontchartrain Park on the site of a historic African American middle-class community that was ravaged by flooding after the storm. These are important accomplishments, but as Pierce suggests, they are not enough. On the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, he observed that 1,800 people … lost their lives on this day ten years ago…. There are people who don’t have the city’s best interest at heart … people who don’t have my community’s best interest at heart.³ Pierce continued, addressing systemic racism and African American resistance strategies before and after Hurricane Katrina:

Grown out of civil rights … Pontchartrain Park was the only place that black people could go to experience green space [in the 1950s]…. We’re going to commemorate those that we lost in the storm and celebrate our rebirth…. We have a tale of two cities … 100,000 people who want to come home, poor and black can’t come home…. They tore down all public housing…. If you really want to bring everyone back you have to look at policy…. This recovery has not been inclusive.⁴

Pierce closed his comments about structural inequalities in post-Katrina New Orleans by saying: It’s wonderful that we have passionate politicians, but we don’t have passion in our policy…. We tried to open a supermarket in the Lower Ninth Ward…. Financiers went to City Hall and met with the mayor and decided not to do that…. There’s no economic development there [in the Lower Ninth Ward].⁵

Yet there are a variety of opinions about the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans. Mitch Landrieu, the first white mayor of the city since the late 1970s spoke to Katrina evacuees in Houston in August 2015; he focused on diversity and resilience but ignored the deep racial and economic inequities in the city’s recovery when he said, I know y’all … are in Houston. I appreciate it. I do. Y’all know y’all can come home whenever y’all want … we have started to rebuild your city in a way that you should be proud of and would love.⁶ However, Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University shows that race profoundly influenced the reception of government resources after Katrina: A failure of government assistance at all levels—federal, state, and local—was responsible for the magnitude of devastation from the storm and the enormous amount of human suffering⁷ that prevented the return of thousands of blacks to their New Orleans neighborhoods. Wright points out that monthly rents in the Mid-City neighborhood had skyrocketed to as much as $1,584 a month by 2008, pricing many African American survivors of Hurricane Katrina out of that neighborhood.⁸ Moreover, the city’s homeless population doubled after the storm to encompass one resident in twenty-five in 2008.⁹

Former President George W. Bush returned to New Orleans on August 28, 2015, to visit black Warren Easton Charter High School. He mentioned Hurricane Katrina’s misery and ruin¹⁰ in his speech but focused on the positive, saying that because of the success schools like this have achieved, it gives a message to Americans that New Orleans is back, and better than ever.¹¹ President Barack Obama’s response when he visited the Andrew Sanchez Community Center in the Lower Ninth Ward on August 28, 2015, reveals a different set of cultural and political perspectives: The world watched in horror. We saw those rising waters drown the iconic streets of New Orleans. Families stranded on rooftops. Bodies in the streets. Children crying, crowded in the Superdome. An American city dark and under water.¹² Then he added:

This is something that was supposed to never happen in … America…. What started out as a natural disaster became a manmade disaster—a failure of government to look out for its own citizens. And the storm laid bare a deeper tragedy that had been brewing for decades because … New Orleans, like so many cities and communities across the country, had for too long been plagued by structural inequalities that left too many people, especially poor people, especially people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing.¹³

New Orleans, ten years after the storm is now richer, whiter, emptier,¹⁴ with a declining black-majority population that fell from 67 to 59 percent¹⁵ in the wake of Katrina, which displaced thousands of citizens and spawned the largest internal migration of blacks in the United States since the twentieth-century Great Migration.¹⁶ The racial demographics in the city’s population have shifted in the post-Katrina years, with approximately 100,000 fewer blacks but only 9,000 fewer whites than in 2005.¹⁷ What we’re seeing is growing income inequality as many of our white households are doing much better but black households are not,¹⁸ says Allison Plyer, demographer for the Data Center, which provided neighborhood reports to help anyone interested understand New Orleans’ economic progress today. According to Plyer’s numbers, employment rates for black men are virtually the same [as] they were before the storm, but for white men they are much better … it’s almost like a tale of two cities and it often splits on racial lines.¹⁹

Petrice Sams-Abiodun’s and Gregory Rattler Jr.’s provocative analysis in Recognizing the Underutilized Economic Potential of Black Men in New Orleans explicates how the postindustrial restructuring of the labor markets in manufacturing, transportation, construction, and tourist industries before and after Hurricane Katrina resulted in a scarcity of good jobs for black workers in the city, such that only 48 percent of the African American men in New Orleans between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four were employed in 2013.²⁰ According to Sams-Abiodun and Rattler, it is important to resolve racial inequities in employment since blacks now represent 56 percent of the city’s working-age population,²¹ black men make up 26 percent of the Crescent City’s potential workforce, and 70 percent of the city’s youth are African American.²² Their recommendations to increase good-paying employment possibilities for African American men and to reduce crime in New Orleans involve policy reforms to decrease arrests of blacks for petty charges, innovative education and career programs with student support components, and partnerships with businesses and the construction and petrochemical industries to train youth for specific job opportunities.²³

Yet tens of thousands²⁴ of black New Orleanians are internally displaced persons … forcibly displaced from their homes within the [US] by a disaster²⁵ without the economic resources, jobs, or housing to live permanently in their beloved city. Some people have decided not to live in New Orleans again.²⁶ Many of the displaced evacuees who are now living in the Katrina diaspora²⁷ are poor and middle-class African American women who were pushed … to the basement of poverty … by untreated mental and physical health problems … lack of reliable transportation, insufficient childcare, and unstable housing situations.²⁸ These situations hampered or prevented the women’s employment in new locations that lack the complex social networks of black families, neighbors, friends, grassroots-community services, organizations, clubs, and institutions that sustained and enriched African American life in New Orleans.²⁹ Before the storm, more than three quarters of New Orleans’ urban population was born in the state of Louisiana, and many African American women displaced by Hurricane Katrina were both the working-poor breadwinners for the children in their families and the leaders in their community’s complex social networks.³⁰ Lynn Weber and Lori Peek point out that returning residents and new migrants to New Orleans after Katrina were more likely to be white and were more likely to be homeowners and have higher incomes³¹ than pre-Katrina black residents.

Although the United Nations Human Rights Committee condemned the plans hatched by the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the City Council to destroy more than five thousand public housing units and replace the Lafitte, Iberville, C. J. Peete, and St. Bernard projects with mixed-income complexes, four of the projects have now been demolished, and the new developments have not accommodated the housing needs of all the lower-income black families dispersed from their pre-Katrina public housing apartments.³² In the aftermath of this dispersion of poor people from the projects, some black evacuees such as Adrian Crockett, who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward before the storm, now use housing vouchers that are supposed to subsidize rental payments and provide new and safer housing. Despite these governmental moves to provide flexible housing choices for lower-income New Orleanians, Crockett says, They had these vouchers associated with certain zip codes and certain crime-stricken areas. I mean, they say they give you a choice, but really, you don’t have a choice.³³ In 2015, there were 1,900 families in New Orleans public housing, and their reactions to living in the new mixed-income projects were diverse.³⁴ Bobbie Jennings resided in the C. J. Peete projects before Hurricane Katrina, and she now lives in the Harmony Oaks housing development that replaced C. J. Peete.³⁵ You don’t hear all the gunshots you used to hear. You don’t see all the drugs you used to see,³⁶ says Jennings. However, there’s something missing, and you miss it every day. You miss your neighbors … We used to sit on the steps and conversate with our neighbors, and it’s not like that anymore … We can have a party, but it’s more like a secret … That’s not fun.³⁷

American studies scholar Lynnell L. Thomas describes what I call the black post-Katrina dilemma—how the brunt of the post-Katrina suffering in the city was borne by African Americans who experienced disregard of the interests of renters and public housing tenants, most of whom were black; silence around the decimation of the black middle class; and exclusion of minority contractors and community leaders, as well as black residents, from the rebuilding efforts.³⁸ More than 66 percent of poor, middle-class, and affluent blacks lived in flood-prone neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, the Seventh Ward, Gentilly, and New Orleans East³⁹ before the storm. What Thomas describes as the racially inequitable disbursement⁴⁰ of money from federal rebuilding programs like the Road Home has delayed the reconstruction of housing and businesses in large parts of these communities in 2015.

Moreover, when Alden McDonald, president of the African American owned Liberty Bank decried the racism of city leaders and federal programs that chose not to prioritize investment in the reconstruction of New Orleans’ black communities, he expressed the urgency of the black post-Katrina dilemma well.⁴¹ McDonald pointed to gentrification in key black neighborhoods like Tremé, the demise of the Plaza mall and businesses in black middle-class New Orleans East, one grassroots-grocery store serving the entire population of the Lower Ninth Ward (where only 36 percent of the residents have come home), and soaring rents and property taxes in the city, all of which ensure that the poor will stay poor and the middle class can never get ahead.⁴² In 2014, African American Lower Ninth Ward resident Burnell Cotton opened the first grocery store in his community in nine years. We didn’t have no stores, no barber shops, no laundry rooms … you have to catch three buses to get to a store,⁴³ Cotton explains.

Finally, the black post-Katrina dilemma brings to the forefront additional economic, health, and environmental issues. The 2013 median income for white New Orleanian households was $60,000 a year while the average annual income for black families in the city was $25,000 according to the Urban League’s report State of Black New Orleans.⁴⁴ Chad Calder, reporter for the New Orleans Advocate emphasizes a tale of two recoveries⁴⁵ in which 44