Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0817352864
- ISBN-13:
- 9780817352868
- Pub. Date:
- 03/12/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Alabama Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0817352864
- ISBN-13:
- 9780817352868
- Pub. Date:
- 03/12/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Alabama Press
Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817352868 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 03/12/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition, First Edition |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Southern Heritage on Display
Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism
By Celeste Ray
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5286-8
CHAPTER 1
"Keeping Jazz Funerals Alive"
Blackness and the Politics of Memory in New Orleans
Helen A. Regis
I heard a tourist couple ask a grand marshal at a funeral, "This dead man must have been quite a big figure to rate a big funeral like this, huh?" The answer was the usual one, "Oh, no, he was just an ordinary fellow, an old porter who worked at a bank for forty-five years. He was a paid-up member in the old society, and that's what the society does — turn out with music for all the members who wants it. If you was a member of the society, we would turn out for you" (Barker 1986, 53).
When Alfred Lazard passed, his funeral procession was jointly sponsored by many of the social organizations active in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.. Mr. Lazard, also known as "Dute," had been a member of the Money Wasters and the Black Men of Labor, and served as Grand Marshal for the original Dirty Dozen Brass Band before he became ill and had to restrict his activities. At his Treme funeral, his image was everywhere, photocopied onto handheld fans, T-shirts, and pins. "We love you," his mourners proclaimed as they paraded his image throughout the Sixth Ward of the city. As is common in New Orleans black funerals, the deceased is addressed in the second person. His or her presence at the funeral is unquestioned: "We love you, Dute!" Mr. Lazard's funeral was particularly dramatic because it happened to take place on the Saturday before Mardi Gras, and as his procession went down Orleans Avenue by the Iberville and Lafitte housing projects, the Mardi Gras floats for the Krewe of Endymion (one of the major carnival krewes) were heading toward City Park where they were scheduled to line up to begin their annual procession through the city later that evening. However, due to the voluminous crowd, which composed Mr. Lazard's funeral procession, Endymion's passage was blocked. This huge carnival organization that for many New Orleanians represents the powerful white establishment had its passage obstructed by a funeral procession honoring a working-class black man.
During the funeral I saw many members of the parade turn to look at the frustrated convoy of Mardi Gras floats and smile gleefully. For once, a sacred parade of black New Orleans had bested a powerful white parade, if only on one Saturday afternoon in front of a housing project on Orleans Avenue. In this way Dute's funeral, a community-based performance of the celebration of one man's life, managed to immobilize the cortege of floats representing the hegemonic cultural forms of Mardi Gras and the tourism industry it serves. This particular jazz funeral, a sacred funeral procession, which is emphatically and self-consciously "owned" by the black community, interrupted and even displaced a mainstream cultural institution, claiming urban space for its own distinctive celebration of life through death. The funeral for Mr. Lazard emphasized his achievements and strengths, which enabled him to live a life of dignity and respect in the interstices of a highly inequitable society. And the community's homage to him thus became a collective accomplishment and an affirming declaration of membership in a noble lineage for all those who, through their gestures of commemoration, claim this man as a departed "ancestor."
Community-Based Second Lines and Funerals
Participation in funerals in New Orleans as in many other cultures is a profound way of strengthening and repairing social fabric, which in this city is severely weakened by poverty, joblessness, violence, class inequities, and race-based segregation. The neighborhood-based funerals are often sponsored by African-American benevolent societies, usually known as "social clubs" or "social and pleasure clubs." Operating in the city since at least the late eighteenth century (Jankowiak, Regis, and Turner 1989, 5; Jacobs 1980; Blassingame 1973, 13, 166-71) and playing an increasingly important role after the Civil War, social clubs historically combined benevolent functions (such as providing insurance benefits to members) with "pleasure" in providing for the collective entertainment of its members. Contemporary social clubs are active in their communities throughout the year, giving dances, balls, birthday parties, and fund-raisers, and organizing massive anniversary parades known as "second lines." These parades, sponsored by over forty parading organizations, take place nearly every Sunday afternoon and routinely involve from two to five thousand people. They are called second lines after the "joiners," or followers, who join in the parade behind the first line (composed of musicians and social club members whose musical and organizational force make the parades happen).
The traditional funeral, as typically described, involves a procession from the church to the cemetery, with the playing of solemn church hymns and traditional dirges. After the burial, or "cutting the body loose," the music begins in a fast, up-tempo style as the mourners resolve to celebrate the life being remembered (see Osbey 1996; Smith 1994; Touchet and Bagneris 1998). Danny Barker tells it best in his autobiography, A Life in Jazz:
In a few minutes the big bass drum strikes three extra loud booms and the band starts swinging The Saints, or Didn't he ramble, or Bourbon Street Parade, and the wild, mad, frantic dancing starts, and the hundreds of all-colored umbrellas are seen bouncing high above heads to the rhythm of the great crowd of second liners — tourists who can feel the spirit. All traffic stops on the way back to some popular bar in the near neighborhood. It's the greatest real-live free show on earth." (1986, 56; emphasis added)
The mock jazz funerals that I discuss in this paper are consistent with the common appropriations of black parading practices by the tourism industry. Unlike the better-known carnival parades, which take place on major avenues and along published routes, most second-line parades are held in working-class "back of town" neighborhoods, beyond the gaze of the average tourist. Most white residents of the city have never been to a second-line parade and have little or no awareness of the significance of this black tradition. Yet mock funerals and staged performances put on for tourists have popularized another sort of "second line" — a rather thin burlesque of the massive neighborhood-based events — produced for popular consumption. Many visitors to New Orleans therefore think they have seen a second line, but what they have seen is a cheerful (if not cheesy) minstrel show performed for outsiders (Regis 1999).
The commercial second lines and, as we shall see, some mock jazz funerals involve the diversion of black death rituals into the commodity stream, a process that must be examined in relation to the various locally produced and communally recognized significations of death. According to Appadurai, "Diversions are meaningful only in relation to the paths from which they stray" (1996, 28). For African Americans living in the center of the city, jazz funerals are an important means of producing their own representations of blackness. In contrast to many of the cultural appropriations discussed below, these local representations are produced by, with, and for the black community. These performances constitute an emergent discourse on the meaning of life and death in the contemporary city and on the forms and parameters of grief as experienced by urban residents. Therefore these funerals can reveal how the universal experience of grief is inflected by the registers of generation, class, and life orientation in postmodern economies of production, consumption, predation, and representation.
"Keeping Jazz Funerals Alive"?
When I began researching jazz funerals and the anniversary parades sponsored by African-American benevolent societies and social clubs in the late 1980s, one of the first people I met was Sylvester Francis, also known as "Hawk Minicamera," as he is inseparable from his video and still cameras. Mr. Francis is an independent photographer, documentarian, and historian of New Orleans street culture. He generously invited my coresearchers and me to his home, which also functioned as a studio and archive. We had been commissioned by the National Park Service and the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park to do an ethnographic survey of black social clubs,. which the Park Service felt were a threatened tradition and in danger of disappearing. Mr. Francis was so devoted to his mission, he once explained to me, that he quit his job washing cars at a neighborhood funeral home because they would not let him take time off from work to attend (and photograph) jazz funerals. His photographic work was entirely self-financed. By way of illustration he showed us a tube-like device, perhaps two or three feet long, into which he inserted a roll of film at one end, only to pull out another one from the other end, whenever he found money for developing. "That way it all gets developed, in time," he explained. Francis now runs his own museum in the city's Treme neighborhood. Known as the Backstreet Cultural Museum and housed in the old Blandin Funeral Home on St. Claude Avenue, it is devoted to promoting the preservation of the community-centered history of second lining, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras Indian masking (see Smith 1994). Printed on his business card under his name is the slogan "Keeping Jazz Funerals Alive."
Indeed, members of the city's second-lining communities are increasingly conscious of their culture as something worthy of objectification, preservation, and documentation (see Regis 1999, 2001). But not everyone agrees about what is worth preserving and what exactly is endangered. Gregg Stafford, a traditional jazz trumpeter and leader of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, and Dr. Michael White, professor of music and traditional jazz clarinet player, agree that key aspects of traditional jazz are no longer being learned by young musicians. Many of the most popular brass bands, which are hired to play for jazz funerals, the Sunday afternoon anniversary parades, and dances of the city's black social and pleasure clubs, play a complicated hybrid that owes as much to hip-hop, contemporary R & B, and funk as it does to traditional jazz of the early twentieth century (see Schafer 1977; Riley and Vidacovich 1995). The newer bands play faster, rhythmically complex tunes, sacrificing some of the melodic subtleties of the ensemble playing which, White argues, is the hallmark of traditional jazz music.
Ironically, it is the emergence of the new brass band sound that has led to the renewed popularity of second-lining traditions among the city's youth. Beginning with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band in the 1970s and continuing with the ReBirth, the Treme, the Soul Rebels, PinStripe, CoolBone, Little Rascals, New Birth, Hot Eight, and Lil Stooges brass bands in the 1980s and 1990s, New Orleans musicians have made bold innovations in the brass band genre. Since I first began researching the city's African-American parading organizations in the late 1980s, dozens of new social and pleasure clubs have emerged, expanding into new neighborhoods (such as the Lower Ninth Ward) and new portions of the calendar. Sunday afternoon parades, which once spanned August to December, now routinely extend into February, March, April, May, and even June.
The new clubs have names that speak volumes about the contemporary economic, aesthetic, and historical sensibilities of New Orleanians — the Black Men of Labor, the Nkrumah, the Perfect Gentlemen, the Revolution, the Popular Ladies, the Treme Sidewalk Steppers, the Double Nine, the OG Steppers (parsed as "original gangsta steppers"), and the Divine Ladies. Some organizations, such as the Black Men of Labor, have advocated a return to a traditional manner of celebrating the respectability of blackness through modest but beautifully designed African-centered costumes and outstanding musicianship. Others such as the Treme Sidewalk Steppers are known for their extravagant sartorial displays and are rumored to have spent over $1,000 each on their shoes in a recent parade. Evocative of the city's current implication in what Jean Comaroff (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; see also Strange 1986) has called casino capitalism, the Double Nine Social and Pleasure Club, with its "gambling dice" logo, expresses the desperate financial strategies of some New Orleans residents. All clubs are united in their efforts to transform the streets of the city in their annual parades, which bring together thousands of residents into a celebration of peace, solidarity, beauty, strength, and joyful togetherness. The anniversary parades are organized and paid for by club members, in conscious opposition to the many negative forces that routinely affect inner-city residents (crime, poverty, chronic unemployment, the vicissitudes of the drug trade, and the indifference of elected officials) and tend to atomize communities.
Situating New Orleans in the South
New Orleanians more often refer to their city as Caribbean than southern. In fact, the distinctive cultural practices of New Orleans owe much to its peculiar history, which contrasts in some important ways with the rest of the South. Jazz funerals and second-line parades have become emblematic of New Orleans because they do not appear anywhere else in the United States. Why is this tradition present in New Orleans and not in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Charleston, or Atlanta? To answer this question, it is important to consider the historical structures that shaped African-American experience in the city. Most accounts of the origins of jazz or of any other aspect of the city's distinctive Afro-Creole culture talk of the importance of the eighteenth-century meeting place referred to as Congo Square (or Place Congo). The square, which originated as a market on the edge of the French colonial city, provided a relatively free space for the mingling of African, Indian, European, and Creole populations on Sundays, when enslaved Africans were proscribed from working. The Code Noir exempted slaves from forced labor on Sundays and religious holidays. Although similar rules protected the Sabbath throughout the American South, enslaved Africans in French Louisiana "came early to be recognized as having the right to use their free time virtually as they saw fit, with little or no supervision" (Johnson 1995, 8). The freedom of movement enjoyed by bondsmen in those days was widely recognized as a customary right in New Orleans by the 1740s. In addition, many slaves grew crops on small plots of land and hired out their labor. A significant number were highly skilled, and although they shared part of the income with their owners, they nonetheless enjoyed a certain amount of buying power, which they could employ in shops throughout the city. Aside from marketing, those who assembled at Congo Square reportedly used the occasion for the performance of African dances and "Voodoo ceremonies." In addition, according to Gwendolyn Hall (1992), eighteenth-century New Orleans was a city with porous boundaries whose markets were constantly infiltrated by escaped slaves, or maroons, who used the crowded square as a place to reconnect with friends and relatives who remained in the city.
The few published descriptions of the events at Congo Square reflect the astonishment of Anglo-American travelers and newcomers to the Creole city where, in the words of Benjamin Latrobe, "everything had an odd look" (Latrobe 1951). Locals apparently took the events at Congo Square for granted and found no need to describe them in their accounts of the city. However, descriptions do appear during the American period, particularly in the years following the Louisiana Purchase, as the new administration under Governor C. C. Claiborne attempted to take control of what he perceived to be an unruly population. They were particularly shocked by how French, Catholic New Orleans observed the Sabbath.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Southern Heritage on Display by Celeste Ray. Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Illustrations,Introduction Celeste Ray,
1. "Keeping Jazz Funerals Alive": Blackness and the Politics of Memory in New Orleans Helen A. Regis,
2. The Mardi Gras Indian Song Cycle: A Heroic Tradition Kathryn VanSpanckeren,
3. "There's a Dance Every Weekend": Powwow Culture in Southeast North Carolina Clyde Ellis,
4. Melungeons and the Politics of Heritage Melissa Schrift,
5. Kin-Religious Gatherings: Display for an "Inner Public" Gwen Kennedy Neville,
6. Religious Healing in Southern Appalachian Communities Susan Emley Keefe,
7. ¡Viva México!: Mexican Independence Day Festivals in Central Florida Joan Flocks and Paul Monaghan,
8. Forget the Alamo: Fiesta and San Antonio's Public Memory Laura Ehrisman,
9. "Where the Old South Still Lives": Displaying Heritage in Natchez, Mississippi Steven Hoelscher,
10. "'Thigibh!' Means 'Y'all Come!'": Renegotiating Regional Memories through Scottish Heritage Celebration Celeste Ray,
Glossary,
Contributors,
Index,