Embracing History, Race, and Creole Soul
Janet Kuypers
1/30/24
Lake Pontchartrain toward sunset looks like a lake of fire
when driving over that never-ending bridge, the causeway claiming
the Guinness World Record as the longest bridge over water for decades...
Getting closer to New Orleans, you have to pass the desolation.
Over those swamps, you overlook decaying trees — and occasionally
a home surrounded by alligators, snakes, bugs, and ever-present crawdads.
Witness a different kind of decay1 from what the religious right
would refer to as the moral decay of the French Quarter. But that
loosey-goosey 2 mindset when Jazz sprung forth was an African-American
movement, and while segregation was still all the rage in the
United States, New Orleans did have mixed-race revelry in creole
Jazz, where people were allowed to mix and mingle, no matter your race.
Maybe that’s what that evangelical mindset misses out on —
including all people, which is what any NOLA regular will expound,
because race is as embraced as gender identity when you walk those beer-
stained streets. Some may be tacky and buy beads from a
cheap shop or degrade themselves enough to strip to get those beads
for free. Don’t even bother with the Marie Laveau trinket shop when
you should visit her tomb marked with X’s between restorations
— that is, unless they’ve restricted access to her cemetery because
teens vandalize tombs near hers. But, you see, that’s the thing about NOLA,
the history of not only the music, not only the voodoo, but also the
history of racial and class segregation that still exists. When Katrina
struck, those religious right talking heads said this was god’s wrath over
the evility of the French Quarter, even though the French Quarter,
comparatively, received more minimal damage. For it was depressed
neighborhoods who felt the brunt as the floodgates opened, as damaged
homes serve as testament to the history of New Orleans as once
the largest slave market in the United States. But maybe we need to
see that in NOLA, understand the brutal history of slavery, and despite that,
creole spirit took blues and bluegrass and created Dixieland Jazz,
that ultimately brought races together... because really, sometimes the
bottom line is that no matter our race or gender, let’s still celebrate together.
1 from the poem “The Bridge to New Orleans”
2 Captain Shaw, Star Trek: Picard, s3 e1
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