[Mb-hair] The Big Easy

[Michael Butler]

Thanks
Great piece (also on Civic)
Michael
> wanted to share this with everyone
> Peace
> -m
> 
> 
> If New Orleans goes, so does history...
> by blksista  
> Wed Aug 31st, 2005
> 
> I was born in New Orleans.
> 
> I was born at Camp Leroy Johnson Hospital, where
> the University of New Orleans now sits.
> 
> One parent had attended Xavier University for a
> year, but Dillard was supposedly where you found
> a real man.
> 
> My grandmother was a minister--a Mother--in the
> Spiritual Church of New Orleans, a female-headed
> sect that Zora Neale Hurston studied in her
> travels.  Voodoo was still taken seriously.
> 
> My grandfather was buried in one of the few
> potter's fields left in a U.S. city which sits
> next door to a small junior college. Both are in
> the area of the Cities of the Dead for which you
> can board a bus on Canal Street called
> "Cemetaries." The potter's field is the same one
> where Robert Charles, the infamous shooter was
> buried, and later burned and scattered.  The same
> one where Buddy Bolden,  the trumpeter who
> directly influenced Louis Armstrong, is buried.
> 
> Every Mardi Gras time, we would watch the Black
> Indians practice their chants and then parade
> proudly down South Claiborne Avenue.  They had
> cleaned up their act considerably, but the police
> still harassed them.  Tootie Montana practically
> died defending the Black Indians and their
> history recently.
> 
> I heard jazz and its grandbaby: rock and roll.
>  Louis Armstrong left New Orleans after playing
> on the riverboats when Bix Beiderbecke heard him
> from afar one night.  Fats Domino, the Neville
> Brothers and Ernie K-Doe were played on the
> radio.  My stepdad used to sit drums at the Dew
> Drop Inn.
> 
> Everyone read the Louisiana Weekly.
> 
> When you were old enough to stay up late at
> night, you watched Morgus the Magnificent present
> an old horror flick.
> 
> Congo Square was a dusty little piece of land
> that masqueraded as a park.
> 
> The French Quarter was mostly for white folks.
> The French Market wasn't.  The Desire Projects
> took over from where the streetcar went. I didn't
> know about the Cabildo or the Presbytere until
> later.  The Pontalba Apartments for me were like
> the row of San Francisco Victorian houses made
> famous in postcards.  The real Cafe du Monde
> moved to Metairie, but when I knew it, it was on
> a street that jutted out like a V, and it was
> small and French looking and it wasn't just for
> tourists.  We knew about Tennessee Williams and
> William Faulkner staying there.  
> 
> The poet Marcus Christian, ousted from the
> Dillard faculty for not having a degree, was
> quietly keeping together his voluminous archives
> of black folkways and history from his days as
> head of the Colored Federal Writers Project for
> that day when he could publish a black history of
> Louisiana.  Upon his death, the unfinished volume
> and his archives went to the University of New
> Orleans.
> 
> Rampart Street was where a sharp-dressed man got
> set up with a good tailor and with good shoes.
>  It was the gateway street where the descendants
> of the Creoles of color, the gens de couleur
> lived in the shadow of their ancestors.  The late
> Anatole Broyard of the New Yorker had already
> passed into the white world by then.
> 
> Storyville was long gone but whorehouses were
> still open secrets.  My grandmother once rented
> one of her apartments to a whore and her
> children.  And she did it, she said, supposedly
> for the children.
> 
> I attended Blessed Sacrament School, located near
> Magazine Street, which was run by the same
> Catholic religious as Xavier, for a short time.
>  Magazine Street was the same area where Lee
> Harvey Oswald lived.  The Magazine Street bus
> ended at Audubon Park where every New Orleans
> schoolkid discovers Monkey Hill, reputedly the
> highest point in New Orleans, and built by the
> WPA to show the children what a hill looks like.
> 
> We went to Lincoln Beach, not Pontchartrain
> Beach.
> 
> Our name for dragonflies was mosquito hawk.
>  Probably because they killed mosquitoes that
> carried yellow fever, the epidemic that flared up
> several times, causing catastrophic losses of
> life before being conquered in the 20th century.
> 
> My mother would regularly see Al Hirt buying
> groceries at the Canal Villerie supermarket on
> Freret Street.  But Schwegmann's was better than
> Winn-Dixie.  
> 
> Dooky Chase was our showcase restaurant.
> 
> The streets where I lived were bounded by
> Louisiana Avenue, Napoleon Avenue, South
> Claiborne, Freret Street.  I also knew where
> uptown, downtown, back-a-town, riverside or
> lakeside was.  
> 
> All these memories and more are crowding on me as
> I think about New Orleans.  Many of the links I
> planned to write in are down. New Orleans is
> dying, and this time, it may not rise again.
> 
> Link is here
> http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/8/31/95157/3076
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