[Mb-civic] The Big Easy

[Mike Blaxill]

Daily Kos diary from blksista - just read it...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/8/31/95157/3076

If New Orleans goes, so does history... 
by blksista  
Wed Aug 31st, 2005 at 06:51:57 PDT

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.