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Most years, the parade is a fun evening out. This year, it was over in about 10 minutes. Back in November, the city of New Orleans canceled Carnival parades for 2021. So, like many Carnival organizations, the Krewe of Jeanne d’Arc came up with a workaround. In an inverted parade experience, spectators in cars were the ones who rolled through a suburban park, peering at elaborate stationary tableaux along the “route.” The artistry was alive in the plywood ramparts of Orléans; Joan-at-the-pyre shimmied over fluttery flames as a brass band played nearby; her army’s hobby horses, usually ridden to comedic effect, were lined up along a guardrail, like toys in a shop.

The krewe’s effort and enthusiasm honored the start of the season. But the drive-thru experience was also quick and frictionless, leaving me wistful for the real thing.

I’ve lived in New Orleans for pretty much my whole life and have roughly four dozen Carnivals under my belt, which feels absurd to write. Carnival is a complicated phenomenon, rooted deep in the spirit of the city but also kaleidoscopic, existing in as many forms as there are revelers and creating itself anew each year. While marketed year-round to fuel tourism, it’s also more narrowly celebrated as a wild, festive release meant to expend worldly desire before Ash Wednesday, which starts the Christian Lenten period of deprivation and austerity before Easter. Carnival parades, which dominate New Orleans for the two weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, are visceral and snag on the life of the city. They slow down for tight turns, or stop for a low hanging power line, then speed up to close the gaps between floats; they wobble under highway overpasses to the thunderous echoes of marching bands.

Beloved as parades are, I could not get anyone to come with me to the Jeanne d’Arc tableaux this year. The steeply spiking pandemic had tamped down my kids’ excitement about Mardi Gras. That first day of Carnival, a.k.a. the Feast of the Epiphany, was also the same day that the Capitol riots violently broke open their world. (Yes, social media produced Mardi Gras/Capitol invasion mash-up memes with alacrity.) For my children, attending a non-parade would just be another reminder of how sideways their lives had slid.

Kicking off Carnival 2021 at the peak of the pandemic and on such a traumatic day for the country has made it difficult to access the season’s carefree, celebratory spirit. But here we are, celebrating a Carnival shaped by 2020, which means a more home-centered, socially distanced, tech-embracing, innovative and existentially contemplative season. In a city so bound to its past, I wonder how Carnival 2021 might accelerate the transformation of an evolving tradition? And will this break from the usual all-consuming Carnival allow us a fresh look at what we value in it?

Some trace Carnival’s origins back to ancient pagan Roman festivals like the Saturnalia, in which all civic business shut down for city-wide parties, citizens shed their togas for wild outfits, and social hierarchies were upended, often with the enslaved being served by their masters at the heads of tables. Over time, European Catholics, including the French and Spanish who colonized Louisiana, absorbed elements of these festivals into their religious calendars, an acknowledgement of the existence and potency of chaos, and of a distinct human need for individual freedom. Revelers rejected authority and embraced the possibility of transformation. Often, a kind of communal transcendence was achieved, as well as millennia of hangovers.

Carnival mythology reaches back centuries on Louisiana soil. On Fat Tuesday 1699, French Canadian-born explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, having finally located the mouth of the Mississippi River, dragged his longboats to the brambly shore of the soon-to-be colony of La Louisiane. He remembered that on that date in France, in the royal courts and public squares, people were celebrating, and so he christened the spot Pointe du Mardi Gras. Ambition, exploitation, and Carnival were instantly joined on that riverbank.  

In the centuries since, Mardi Gras in New Orleans has metabolized American racial and class attitudes, consumption, globalism. In the 18th century, downtown Creole Catholics observed Mardi Gras in the European tradition, with elaborate balls and ribald costumed street parties that scandalously mixed classes, sexes and races. Eventually, violence and mayhem, attributed to port riffraff and “newcomers,” also became a hallmark of the celebration.

Modern Mardi Gras, consisting of parades and “royal” balls, emerged in 1857 when moneyed uptown Anglo Protestants sought to rehabilitate Carnival, which they felt had become too wild and debased. They redirected public focus from the unruly street behavior toward the refined spectacle and pageantry of a parade. The made-up, archaic spelling of “krewe” gave their new organization the illusion of a courtly Anglo history. Instead of upending social structures, the longtime function of Carnivals, this vision of Carnival reinforced them, coronating already socially elite whites. Even then, it was conceived as a business venture, as a way to promote the city to tourists.

Over the years, the elitist parade model became democratized. Groups who were not welcome in the old line Anglo krewes formed their own, and spread parading to neighborhoods across the city, giving rise to middle and working class krewes, all female krewes, gay krewes. The most famous example is the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, formed in 1909 by the Black Community, a self-described “everyman club” with a membership ranging from laborers to politicians.

In the late 20th century, when the bottom dropped out of the oil market, the city’s reliance on tourism ramped up and Mardi Gras became its gaudy centerpiece. Contemporary Carnival’s economic impact on the region is estimated by some to be about a billion dollars a year. But this legacy of over-tourism has exacerbated persistent racial inequities in wages, housing, and social mobility in New Orleans, so when COVID arrived and tourism evaporated, the city suffered further still, reporting the highest number of homeowners in danger of losing their homes in any major city in the country. Canceling parades, while a public health necessity, compounded the economic damage for float artists, ball venues, caterers, bars, restaurants, and hotels along the parade route.

So we scramble to fill the void. A variety of organizations have issued an earnest, collective call to stay home, and learn about the history and cultural significance of Mardi Gras through online Carnival educational and promotional programming. There are virtual costume contests, and virtual parades with apps and virtual throws (beads and plastic trinkets tossed from floats) for those craving the grabby consumer parade experience. COVID-safe Carnival events have fanned out across the city. The Krewe of Red Beans has been raising money to hire out-of-work artists to transform homes into elaborate stationary floats. One parade deconstructed itself into art installations to be admired at locations throughout downtown. At City Park, the sold-out Floats in the Oaks brings together parked iconic floats from dozens of krewes, a “once in a lifetime” gathering to be admired at your leisure, without jostling crowds and the distractions of flying beads and sloshing beers.

Some see Carnival 2021 as an opportunity to detach the celebration from the excess and waste associated with parades. Threatened by flooding and sea-level rise from climate change, we still host an annual event that lavishly trashes our city. Beads and plastic throws arrive from China by the containerful, tons of which parade goers never catch, ending up in landfills, gutters and waterways. (Infamously, in 2018, 46 tons of beads were pulled out of the sewer along just a five-block length of the main parade route.) This year, environmental groups and grassroots organizations dedicated to a greener Carnival are hoping that this pause might open up space for conversation. One group received a $500,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to encourage the inclusion of more locally made and sustainable throws.

Though a wholesale change in longstanding public appetites is unlikely (people love beads! They’re fun to catch!), there has been a significant shift in 21st-century Carnival. In recent years, more and more New Orleanians have been creating the spectacle themselves, not just consuming it curbside at parades behind police barricades. Along with an increased interest in costuming, revelers have been joining and creating bawdily themed dance troupes like the Pussyfooters or the Camel Toe Lady Steppers and attaching themselves to loosely organized but spectacular walking parades like the Krewe of St. Ann.

While maybe new to some, this grassroots tradition has found expression among Black New Orleanians since at least the 19th century. The glorious crosstown tribes of Mardi Gras Indians, the tough satin attitude of the Baby Dolls, and the pre-dawn memento mori of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang all represent a distillation of artistry and community, tradition and joy that produces pure Carnival ethos. This year many Mardi Gras Indians, who spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars creating their museum-worthy hand-beaded and feather-crowned suits, are opting out because the toll of the coronavirus on their community has been so profound.

Though it’s been difficult to conjure the usual enthusiasm, celebrating Carnival, safely, in whatever modified form, seems more necessary than ever. “THE STREETS WILL RISE UP,” a friend texted after the city announced the parade cancelations, with an almost primal excitement about a Carnival liberated from civic organization. One of the great marvels of Carnivals the world over is how public spaces are spontaneously transformed into prismatic, communal expressions of joy and freedom. I like to think this desire for creative connection reflects Carnival’s ancient purposes of ritual and release—a tangible response to the stressors of contemporary life, to the screws of digital platforms tightening into our souls, to living within systems over which we have diminishing control.

In these last weeks of Carnival, the streets have risen up, though maybe not in the way my friend intended. The Krewe of House Floats phenomenon has transformed them with an unprecedented blossoming of domestic creativity. It’s been inspiring to see how quickly the idea ignited across the city and what the citizenry can accomplish with cardboard and spray paint, foil fringe and string lights. Like parades, whole blocks and neighborhoods are coordinating themes, from satirical to historical. Houses range from modest and sweet to well-funded and fabulous, like the official Krewe of Muses manse-float (full disclosure, designed by my sister). Stumbling upon these surprises of color and light and humor as they proliferate across town has become the unexpected joy of the season, a fresh reminder of the work, the social connection and imagination that propel it.

We don’t know what shape Mardi Gras day will take this year, but we do know it will be unlike any other in New Orleans history. Our mayor invited tourists to Carnival, and then chided them for doing what Mardi Gras visitors often do. For the last two weekends social media has been roiling with footage of a packed Bourbon Street and the flaunting of local COVID gathering restrictions. In order to avoid a repeat of 2020’s unwitting superspreader Carnival, the mayor ordered the city-wide closure of all bars from Friday to Ash Wednesday, along with checkpoints around the French Quarter and the shutting down of other traditional Mardi Gras gathering places. The hope is that the revelers will stay closer to home, enjoy the celebratory endeavors of their neighborhoods, toast from porches. Luckily, mask wearing and being outdoors are already part of the tradition. Social distancing, not so much. My younger son is planning a “plague doctor” costume—complete with six-foot-long staff—to keep congregating revelers on our block separated.

Over the last year, the pandemic has intensified the role of intentionality and contingency in our lives, something Carnival does in its own chaotic and unpredictable way. Schools are already worrying about a post-Carnival spike that could prolong the purgatory of virtual learning, and some businesses and hospitality workers are already feeling the pain of the new restrictions. But Carnival 2021 also holds the possibility for renewal. Maybe some of its gifts will thrive and carry forward: the festive house floats, the community-mindedness, the attention to our environment. The start of this year’s Carnival might have been marked by the destructive energy of the crowd at the Capitol. Maybe it can be redeemed by the generative energy of a masked and distanced and gorgeous community, creating a singular moment of celebration together.

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In 2006, six months after the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, I was at Donna’s, a now-defunct club on the northern fringe of the French Quarter. Shannon Powell sat at his drum kit, welcoming trumpeters and trombonists, singers and saxophonists to the stage for one traditional tune after another. Most of these musicians had driven in from evacuation centers or temporary homes in, say, Atlanta or Houston. They simply had to play together. And we needed to hear them, to clap on two and four. Weeks later, I was among the hundreds following the Hot 8 Brass Band past carcasses of former homes during a second-line parade, a tradition at least a century old, derived from jazz funeral processions. It felt like—it was—both a necessary group embrace and a protest march declaring a right to return. In desolate streets, moving together in rhythm, I grasped their feeling of fullness and sense of purpose.

Throughout my career as a culture reporter and jazz critic, disorienting moments of crisis have been clarified—even answered—through rituals of live improvised music, shared in real time, in physical spaces either buzzing with energy or near-sacred for their calm. Those experiences and the music itself have answered urgent needs, calmed frayed nerves, voiced outrage, summoned spirits, and leaned into hope.

Until now. In March, as the COVID-19 lockdown came with sudden severity, musicians scrambled home from wherever they were and then watched calendars go blank. Gigs gone. Tours canceled. Clubs and concert halls closed. This was true everywhere, all at once. This new reality was especially stark in New York City and New Orleans, the two focal points of my work and life. Both cities have storied jazz histories and vital contemporary cultures staked to improvised music. And both were early epicenters of the pandemic. The absence of brass bands on New Orleans streets and the shuttering of jazz clubs in both places meant the sudden denial of something communal and necessary, especially in times of disorientation and grief. How do we find tenderness, relief, and meaning now? Flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell told me that what she misses most are group rehearsals: “Being in the process of making new music together, because that’s where you build new worlds.”

Meanwhile, our existing world paused. Late April did not bring the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which, shortly after Katrina and long before the city rebuilt, felt like a big soul-generating battery. “If, for two weekends, people could plug in,” Jazz Fest producer Quint Davis had told me, “it’ll mean something.” And it did. Back then, New Orleans was enduring what David Winkler-Schmidt of the local Gambit Weekly called “the horrible unending of not knowing.” In an essay this April, bassist Christian McBride, who hosts NPR’s “Jazz Night in America,” likened Mother Nature to an orchestra conductor and the pandemic to a fermata in our collective score, “a pause of unspecified length on a rest or note.”

In New York, musicians and fans need no clearer reminder of the arrested state of affairs than the red double doors on Seventh Avenue South leading to the Village Vanguard, New York’s oldest continuously operating jazz club, which have been locked since March 16. “I thought we’d be dark for a month, and that seemed like forever,” said Deborah Gordon, who started working at the Vanguard in 1989 and took over running the club full time after her mother, Lorraine, died in 2018. “But look where we are now.” The place hasn’t been entirely empty. Jed Eisenman, who began washing dishes in the club in 1981 and now directs its weekly bookings, has stopped by four or five times a week. “Mostly I come to convene,” he said. “I don’t want the spirits in the place to be forsaken. The place still crackles with energy.” Ask any jazz musician: These spirits are inseparable from the living culture.

Like many other venues, the Vanguard now livestreams performances from its stage. That’s a welcome development, not least because it employs musicians. The first such performance, from drummer Billy Hart’s quartet, looked and sounded like a stylish documentary that gets the music. Still, it couldn’t capture the feeling Lorraine Gordon once described to me, “when the club is full, when the people seem happy and they’re at one with the artist, when everybody’s face is absolutely glued to the stage. It’s like a painting but it’s real life, every night.”

The last live performance I heard was by drummer Tyshawn Sorey’s band, at Manhattan’s Jazz Gallery in early March. McCoy Tyner, a pianist as spiritually minded as he was influential, had died the day before. After two hours of original music, Sorey’s group slid gently into Tyner’s “Search for Peace.” It was wordless release of grief I hadn’t known I needed, one last bit of communal uplift before lockdown.

In the ensuing weeks, the coronavirus pandemic began claiming the lives of noteworthy jazz musicians: trumpeter Wallace Roney, saxophonist Lee Konitz, and bassists Henry Grimes and Andy Gonzalez. Among the dead in New Orleans are Ronald Lewis, a beloved figure of Sunday second-line parades who founded a Lower Ninth Ward museum dedicated to Crescent City traditions, and Leona “Chine” Grandison, whose Candlelight Lounge in the Tremé neighborhood has nurtured New Orleans jazz for more than 35 years. The death of pianist, educator, and jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis, on April 1, hit me hard. Sitting on the front-porch swing of his Uptown New Orleans home, Marsalis had described his music and his city to me as inseparable, joined by “values we can share.”

The day after his father’s death, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis led 16 musicians through the first installment of “Memorial For Us All,” a digital Lincoln Center series meant as “a secular community remembrance.” The concert was virtual, stitched together from individual videos. Still, moving from the dirge “Flee As a Bird” to an up-tempo version of “Didn’t He Ramble,” the group stayed faithful to the jazz funeral tradition: a defining element of New Orleans culture that transforms mourners into celebrants through music, simulating the moment a body is cut loose, its spirit set free.

This was both cathartic and a stark reminder that these rituals can’t happen now as they should. For clarinetist Michael White, who played in Marsalis’s online memorial, and who has by his own estimation has played some 200 jazz funerals spanning nearly a half-century in his hometown, “It feels unnatural not to properly release and send off members of our musical community. What happens to all these souls? And to ours?”

I’ll never forget watching two horses—one black, one white—amble down a New Orleans street in the early morning mist, pulling a carriage carrying the late trumpeter and brass band-leader Ernest “Doc” Paulin as his former employees (including White), clad in white shirts, ties, and black five-pointed hats, played a dirge. Or, for that matter, the line of New York pianists in 2010 who played solo, one by one, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in celebration of one of their own, Hank Jones. In such communities, the passing of a musician is a significant moment. You stop. You show up. Ritual is important.

In Jason Berry’s book City of a Million Dreams, a sweeping, 300-year history of New Orleans, jazz funerals form “caravans of memory” that hold a mirror to the society. “As black people danced in the sunrise of jazz,” Berry wrote, “the official city gazed backward, seeking salvation in a sanitized Confederate past.”

New Orleans removed four Confederate monuments in 2017. Yet the fact and legacy of structural racism stands sturdy there and throughout this country. As the cruel pain of the coronavirus pandemic converges with the pain of cruel murders that have led so many into the streets to declare that Black lives matter, tenderness and truth-telling are more necessary than ever. So are musical traditions that embody these ideals, and that roll acts of creation and of memorializing into unified gestures of defiance and hope.

Sometimes galvanizing ideas animate the music itself and, like acts of protest, benefit from repetition. On a 2011 album, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire devoted one track to reciting details of the shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III by a transit officer in Oakland, over a drum solo. On “Rollcall for Those Absent,” from a later release, a child recited the names of those killed in similar circumstances: Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, and others.

In January, when Akinmusire recorded “Hooded procession (read the names outloud)” for his most recent album, before his ambitious tour was canceled due to the pandemic, George Floyd was still alive. “I was trying to express my exhaustion,” Akinmusire told me. “I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years. In asking listeners to read the names out loud, I’m telling them, ‘It’s your turn here. Maybe this will be more effective.’” Forsaking his trumpet, playing glistening chords on a Fender Rhodes piano, taking his time as if in a church processional, he moves nearly imperceptibly from minor key to major, finding fleeting resolution.

Yet sometimes, only taking to the streets will do. One sunny Sunday afternoon in June in Manhattan’s Union Square, pianist Jon Batiste spoke through a mask and a megaphone about the need to “implement systemic change and avoid collective apathy.” Then, along with members of the Stay Human band he directs on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and dozens of other musicians, he led roughly a thousand people up Sixth Avenue. He passed just blocks from the Village Vanguard, where he’d recorded two albums, and drew on the second-line parade tradition he learned as a boy. He played and sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” composed more than a century ago and often referred to as the “Black National Anthem.” Following that, “We Are,” an original song released as a single in June, featuring the St. Augustine High School Marching 100 band, of which he was once a member. The song is a call-to-arms, Batiste told me, “meant to confront the choice between profit and humanity, and between freedom and the bondage of racism and all the terrible things that have been accepted and perpetuated in this country.”

This is a pent-up, fast-changing time with promise for transformative change. It’s also a frozen moment, still mostly locked down. Across “social distance,” even virtually, the rituals of improvised jazz carry resonant and newly urgent meaning. Yet someday—soon, I hope—musicians will step back on stages before audiences, all of us less than six feet apart. Brass bands will lead second-line parades, crowded and messy and moving as one. I want to be in that number.

Larry Blumenfeld’s Pandemic Playlist:

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Finally coming face-to-face with Bertonneau’s image, I was shocked. I had been reading about Bertonneau for book research. But while Bertonneau fought valiantly for the rights of black Americans, he didn’t look “black” himself. In the photo, his skin was fair, his eyes were light, and his hair was wavy. In contemporary America he might read as Latino, with a complexion somewhere on the spectrum between Pope Francis pale and Marco Rubio tan. Looking at the late great Bertonneau reminded me that the way passersby perceive a stranger’s race on the streets of America doesn’t necessarily match their actual background. Indeed, one’s own ethnic background may not even be what one assumes it is—as genetic testing has recently made clear to millions of Americans.

The leading civil rights litigants of the Reconstruction era, including Bertonneau, lived these complex racial realities—and it led them to challenge racism by challenging the concept of race itself. Most were openly mixed-race Creoles from New Orleans with roots in both Africa and Europe. This gave them a piercing perspective on American white supremacy and a unique legal arsenal for attacking it.

The most famous civil rights plaintiff of them all, Homer Plessy, who challenged railcar segregation at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896, was described in the African American New Orleans Crusader newspaper as being “as white as the average white Southerner.” To launch his case, he had had to out himself to the train conductor as mixed-race to get ejected from the whites-only car. Plessy’s ethnic background was estimated to be seven-eighths European and one-eighth African but it was impossible to pin down for sure. That was the whole point. As Plessy’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court justices, “Is not the question of race … very often impossible of determination?” Plessy’s case was an attempt to resist not merely segregation but binary racial labels like “white” and “colored” altogether.

It was only after Plessy, Bertonneau, and the other leaders of the first civil rights movement had been defeated—and indeed because of their defeat—that the black-white binary solidified. Even on the Census, multiracial options dwindled and then died out. Tellingly, on the 1910 Census, Homer Plessy was black but, in 1920, white.

These early Creole civil rights activists who fought against the constricting racial categories of “black” or “white” defined themselves not by color but by culture—much as Latinos in the U.S. do today. Creoles came in every shade and had no pretense to racial purity. What bound the community together was their linguistic roots in a Romance language—French and its Caribbean Kreyol off-shoots—and their Mediterranean-influenced mindset.

Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, as Latin American Nouvelle-Orléans/Nueva Orleans was turned into Anglo-American New Orleans, the Creole community was racialized by outsiders. Anglo-Americans, who were wary of influential free-born Creoles and who were increasingly making “whiteness” a prerequisite for citizenship, obsessed over who among the Creoles had family-tree roots in African soil. The Anglo-Americans began revoking rights, including suffrage, on the murky basis of “race.” Soon after the purchase, they passed an “anti-miscegenation” law requiring whites to marry whites, blacks to marry blacks, and biracial people to marry one another.

Activists like Bertonneau and Plessy, who descended from this third group, fought against all racial categorizations. They were skeptical of the Anglos’ concept of race and their arrogant presumption to assign it on sight. After all, Plessy had had to explicitly tell the train conductor that he was mixed-race to launch his test case.

For nearly 30 years, Creole activists brought a series of cases that needled the Anglo-Americans’ binary view of race. This legal tradition was launched at the height of Radical Reconstruction when the light-skinned newly elected Orleans Parish sheriff, Charles St. Albin Sauvinet, was refused a drink in a French Quarter bar in 1870 and responded by suing for “violation of his civil rights.” In court, the Creole Sauvinet explained that his roots were in the Caribbean, where race was no black-or-white matter. “Whether I am a colored man or not is a matter I myself do not know,” he told the court. And he pointed out that no one could know anyone’s race for sure. Of his two drinking buddies, he remarked, “Finnegan and Conklin who were with me are said to be white men. I do not know. To all appearances they are.” But, of course, as Sherriff Sauvinet himself proved, you couldn’t necessarily ascertain people’s backgrounds by sight.

Sauvinet’s line of argument was seconded by Creole civil rights plaintiff Josephine DeCuir in her challenge to riverboat segregation. In 1872, she’d bought a first-class “ladies’ cabin” ticket for a journey upriver from New Orleans only to be asked to move to the inferior “colored cabin.” The ship’s crew cuttingly referred that section as “the Freedman’s Bureau,” which DeCuir took as a grave insult since she’d been born free into a wealthy slave-holding family. In court, DeCuir, who had roots on the European, African, and North American continents, was described as being the color of a “law book.” To problematize the whole concept of race for the jury, her attorney called to the stand a light-skinned French Quarter resident of Caribbean descent, one Mr. Duconge. In New Orleans, where his Creole heritage was widely known, Duconge explained, he was considered a person of color but in the rest of America, where he was a stranger, he was considered a white man. Hoping to show the jury how absurd the American racial system looked—and, indeed, still looks—to the rest of the world, he offered the statement: “the difference between a white man and a colored man is that the colored man has a darker face than the white man, but you can find a quantity of colored men reputed to be colored men who have white faces.”

Creoles then, like Latinos now, accepted that in the New World—in the U.S. no less than the Caribbean and Latin America—people from different continents have been mixing for centuries. Ultimately, in this view, New World people have become a race unto ourselves—referred to as la raza in Spanish. But Anglo-Americans rejected this reality by engaging in the dastardly fool’s errand of retroactively sorting New World people back out into definitive races, a practice that continues to this day.

Unfortunately, the brilliant Creole legal strategy to challenge racism by challenging race did not win in its time. While Sheriff Sauvinet’s civil rights victory was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices overturned DeCuir’s state court victory and Homer Plessy lost his precedent-setting case 7-to-1.

Learning of their defeat, the Creole Citizens’ Committee that had planned Plessy’s civil disobedience and funded his suit put out a statement: “Notwithstanding this decision … we … still believe that we were right.” Indeed, they were. The Supreme Court could permit the states to draw stark lines between black and white but that didn’t make actual Americans any less mixed.

An older Cuban-born gentleman illustrated this point precisely when he raised his hand after I presented at the Miami Book Fair last November. Recounting his introduction to race in America, he explained that he’d moved to Miami as an 8-year-old boy, in 1960, and at the neighborhood supermarket encountered his first segregated water fountains. Florida had lived under Jim Crow for more than half a century but to the boy it was brand new. Flummoxed, he asked his mother which fountain he should drink from. To the child, the people on the streets of Florida with their full range of skin tones didn’t look much different from the people on the streets of Cuba. But while Cubans acknowledged that they had mixed roots on different continents and thought of themselves, even in the same families, as lighter or darker, the Americans insisted that everyone was distinctly either “white” or “colored.” While Cubans considered “Cuban” to be an ethnicity, Americans refused to see “American” that way—even though they too were a New World melting-pot society.

On his mother’s advice, the boy chose the whites-only water-fountain—after all, he was light-skinned and it was clearly the superior appliance. His decision echoed E. Arnold Bertonneau’s in the previous century. After losing his federal case challenging school segregation and the racial binary, Bertonneau moved out to California and he, too, became “white.”

Americans long ago abolished the segregated water fountains but the binary racial mindset survives both in the American psyche and in American outcomes in health, wealth, education, and criminal justice. But the Latino concept of la raza has the potential to again take up the torch of challenging American racism by challenging the idea of race itself. Through this lens, America is not a society of warring tribes but a dysfunctional family. Warring tribes can only make peace treaties; dysfunctional families are better adept to reconcile and heal. At the dawn of Jim Crow, W.E.B. DuBois observed, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” The question of the 21st century may be whether we continue to see ourselves divided by race or unified as la raza.

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Segreto referred to a familiar catcall heard by Italian kids growing up in New Orleans, forged in the bloody aftermath of the assassination of the city’s police Chief David Hennessy in 1890—and the acquittal and mob-lynching of 11 Sicilians for his murder five months later.

Segreto’s disdain for the topic was justifiable: Popular takes on the Sicilian past in New Orleans often degenerate into reductive tales of Mafiosi and peasants, thanks in part to all-too-frequent retellings of the death of “da chief.” But, as Segreto knew, the real story of Sicilians in New Orleans is far more complex, with roots in the lemon groves around Palermo, Sicily. In fact, Sicilians all over the U.S. arrived here because of lemons.

Sicilian citrus traders came to New Orleans in the 1830s, and by the end of the Civil War were on their way to dominating the city’s food commodity trade. These merchants drove the growth of New Orleans’ port into the engine of the food system linking the Mississippi River Valley with the Midwest. Sure, some Sicilians in New Orleans made fortunes in illegal schemes—but far more opened legendary restaurants, like Commander’s Palace, whose global reputation helped to establish the city’s reputation as a food destination. Other empires they built remain very much with us—Progresso, which has been selling ready-to-eat riffs on Italian soups since 1925, and the company now known as Dole Food Company, which was formerly the Vaccaro brothers’ Standard Fruit Company. Few Americans enjoyed pasta before 1900, but the vast quantity manufactured in the French Quarter propelled it into the mainstream by 1920.

Yet citrus was the foundation. If you bought a lemon almost anywhere in the world before 1900, even in California, it was likely that the fruit in your hand had come from Sicily, and that a prosperous Sicilian immigrant had had something to do with it. A thousand years ago, under the hills of Palermo, Muslim conquerors began building a complex, gravity-fed, irrigation system. It hydrated the arid, volcanic soil and produced nearly ideal conditions for growing citrus—and in particular, lemons. The ability to control the flow of water to the groves around Palermo allowed farmers there to force trees to flower and fruit several times a year.

The Sicily lemon became globally famous in the 19th century, when the Pax Britannica made international shipping less expensive and riverine steamboats opened markets in continental interiors. The fruit was ideal cargo because it could be picked green, and if properly stored, would actually improve over a long sea voyage. The crossing from Palermo to New Orleans could take over 100 days.

The first lemon cargoes arrived at New Orleans in the 1830s, amidst a period of skyrocketing growth in the city. Steamboats opened the Mississippi River Valley to commerce, and steam tugs towed large oceangoing vessels 70 miles upriver to the city’s bustling wharves. Until railroads began to offer competition in the late antebellum period, New Orleans enjoyed uncontested status as the gateway to America’s Upper Midwest.

And lemons were critical to life in the 19th century, far more than they are today. Even though the importance of vitamin C wasn’t fully understood until the early 20th century, regular consumption of citrus was already considered vital to health. Lemons were popular in cooking; open any 19th century cookbook to the beverage pages and most recipes will ask you to “juice a dozen lemons.” And until World War I, the burgeoning canning industry depended on lemon juice and peels as its primary source of citric acid, which was necessary for preserving flavor and color.

The Sicilian merchants who first brought the citrus trade to America ultimately dominated all of the wholesale fruit business in the nation, and before 1850, the number of Sicilians in New Orleans kept pace with the number in New York. They established trading houses along Decatur Street and in the rapidly Italianizing French Quarter. They diversified the goods they handled—selling locally grown citrus, Midwestern apples and pears, and imports like Smyrna figs and (as they spelled the fruit then) Honduran cocoanuts, yet lemons always remained crucial. As late as 1884, lemons represented New Orleans’ third most valuable imported commodity, behind only coffee and sugar.

The ships also brought people: Most Sicilian immigrants to the U.S. came on ships operated by the Mediterranean citrus fleet. When the transatlantic citrus fleet modernized in the late 1870s, the voyage time between Palermo and New Orleans to was slashed to just 29 days—and the same Sicilian tycoons who had dominated the nation’s fruit business emerged as padrones, labor agents who contracted passengers to work in the Gulf South and elsewhere in exchange for Atlantic passage. Agents crisscrossed Sicily seeking workers for New Orleans. Once they got there, these new immigrants, for the first time, met countrymen who for generations had lived only a mountain range away. The city’s French Market soon resonated with the island’s obscure Italian, Greek, and Albanian dialects. Through the lemon trade, the city of New Orleans became a crucible in which people forged an ethnic identity—“Sicilian”—out of what were really disparate cultural traditions.

Sicilian lemon pickers, like these near Palermo in the early 1900s, made their way to the United States. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Many were farmers, laborers, and produce peddlers, but to be Sicilian in New Orleans did not necessarily mean remaining poor and unassimilated. Some Sicilians belonged to the Southern Yacht Club, a prestigious association founded by the city’s elite in 1849, including two restaurateurs who even sponsored trophies for annual regattas. Indeed, by the middle of the 1890s, the Italian names of the well-to-do merchants began appearing next to notable Gallic and Anglo-Saxon ones in the social pages of newspapers. The Sicilians were notable for how quickly they were joining New Orleans’ culture, and the legal fortunes they were amassing were overshadowing those of their neighbors.

Even as a flood of immigrants arrived with the citrus harvest every fall, New Orleans’ Sicilian merchant class set its sights on greater fortunes, branching into the shipment and sale of bananas after the advent of refrigeration in the 1890s. In doing so, they revealed a willingness to take a risk on something new, a vision and dynamism unusual in a city already known for its complacency towards innovation.

It was against this backdrop, along the city’s fruit wharves, that a feud between warring stevedore gangs led by the Matranga and Provenzano clans—both seeking to control trade and handling at the port—climaxed with the assassination of Chief Hennessy.

David Hennessy, most famous for the 1881 arrest and deportation of the Sicilian bandit Giuseppe Esposito, had become chief of police as part of an 1889 political sweep by Reformer Party candidates who opposed the local urban machine called “the Ring,” which enjoyed deep support from the city’s Irish, German, and Sicilian immigrants and Catholic Creoles. He intervened in the Matranga-Provenzano feud on behalf of the Provenzanos; the Matrangas were thought to have had ties to Esposito. After Hennessy was murdered in late 1890, the police rounded up scores of Italians, including many with links to the Matranga family. When a jury acquitted the suspects five months later, the local press and Reformer political figures called for vigilante justice. On March 14, 1891, a mob of over 1,500 people stormed the Marais Street Prison and shot or hanged 11 of the accused men.

Were the Matrangas and Provenzanos Mafiosi? Certainly they were padrones—part of a system that was ripe for abuse, which would become illegal in 1905. Their employees, like all longshoremen, worked in gangs, were loyal to their employers and each other, and sometimes resorted to violence to protect their jobs. But they weren’t organized into any sort of crime syndicate. They were making too much money already, through legal commerce.

Rather, the cotton and sugar traders who lynched New Orleans’ Sicilians were pushing back against a subtler threat. In perhaps killing a corrupt police chief, Sicilians had resorted to the sort of extralegal violence that white Southerners believed was reserved for them alone. Indeed, when the Reformers called the lynch mob to action, they likened it to a similarly violent White League uprising against Louisiana’s biracial government, also led by men of their class. Whether real or imagined, Mafia violence paled in comparison to the casual and widespread white-on-black brutality commonplace at the time.

Commercial envy was also a powerful ingredient. The lynch mob represented an old white mercantile elite in the midst of an economic crisis—manacled to cane sugar, which was plunging into global collapse, and to cotton, which had been in steady decline for three decades. In the meantime Sicilian traders, who had cast their lot with emerging commodities like lemons and bananas, had ascended to the ranks of the city’s wealthiest.

In the end, as both social instruction and commercial intimidation, the Hennessy riot was mostly a failure for the white elite. Charles Matranga, the supposed head of the murder conspiracy, walked out of Marais Street Prison unharmed and enjoyed a productive career for the next four decades—undermining dubious claims by the lynch mob that it wanted to clean out the Mafia. Nor was there any resisting the commercial might of Sicilian shipping and capital, or their incipient social ascendancy.

Still the legend of “who killa da chief?” endured. It spoke to what we, as Americans, like most to believe about Sicilians. It is a false parable rooted in truth, nurtured and kept alive by elite keepers of history, men who belonged to the social class of the lynch mob, who sought to diminish those who dared to challenge their exclusive right to rule.

We don’t remember the Sicilian citrus trade today, in part because it changed so dramatically in the early 20th century. California growers engaged in an aggressive tariff campaign to crush Mediterranean citrus—and it made selling Italian lemons untenable in the U.S., even though they were better tasting. Similarly, modern popular culture’s ardent, revisionist focus on gangster stories—what you might call the “Godfather effect”—has blotted out the truer story of how Sicilian-Americans—in New Orleans and elsewhere—changed the way all Americans eat.

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Indeed, Marigny was all of these, as well as one of the guiding forces of the first years of American New Orleans. New Orleans has always loved the strong personalities who defy convention, cross boundaries, and disregard mainstream opinion, and Marigny was the archetype. Born of colonial aristocracy, enrobed in great wealth while just a teen, and armed with a boundless faith in his position and capabilities, Marigny was the first outsized personality of the American era and his imprint is still felt in New Orleans neighborhoods today.

Louisiana was founded as a French colony in 1699 and in 1718, the site of New Orleans was selected to be the territorial capital. New Orleans was the outlet for nearly all trade from the Mississippi Valley, and mountains of sugar, grain, and furs crossed its docks. Legitimate trade was well-supplemented by smuggling, an activity practiced high and low. French interest waxed and waned, and the costly and struggling colony was ceded to Spain in 1762.

Bernard Marigny was born in 1785 to a wealthy, high-ranking French garrison commander in the service of Spain. An ancestor in his Mandeville family had been ennobled as “de Marigny”, and so that name became his legal appellation. In 1799, at age 14, Marigny lost his father and inherited a considerable share of the family estate, then the greatest in the Louisiana colony. Marigny was sent to Pensacola, Florida, and to London for mercantile training, but he didn’t apply himself, and by 1802 he was back in New Orleans.

Portrait of Bernard Marigny. “Ialeské-Chata.” Mandeville: A Historical Compendium. New Orleans: Eugene Joubert, 1918. Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University. Courtesy of Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.

Napoleon Bonaparte, then leader of France, needed money to continue his long-running war with Britain. He ordered the cession of Louisiana from Spain to France, and gladly sold the entire territory to America in 1803. Marigny, just 18 years old at the time, hosted the French commissioner and served as his aide during the transition. Marriage to a prominent American-born woman, Mary Jones, cemented his ties with the territory’s new masters.

At the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans was crowded into the original grid layout of the Vieux Carré, (“old square”), today’s French Quarter, with one small suburb, the Faubourg Marie, just upriver. Vacant property was scarce within the original city, and urban housing was costly for people of average means. In 1805, Bernard laid out a new suburb, or faubourg, of New Orleans, naturally naming it the Faubourg Marigny.

Here is where the legends kick in. Unsourced accounts, repeated endlessly in magazine and online articles, state as “accepted fact” that Bernard lost a fortune at cards and had to sell land to cover his losses. My research shows nothing of the kind. Bernard was rich at the founding of his faubourg, and he only got wealthier, reaching a net worth of $915,000 in 1839; in today’s money about $22 million. Although he probably gambled, any losses at the gaming table were minor compared to deficits from bad banking, national depression, and forces of nature.

The new faubourg occupied about 1,161 acres of land, just across from the eastern gates of New Orleans, and fronted on the Mississippi River. A narrow canal ran from the river to Bayou St. John, once part of the Native American portage between the river and Lake Pontchartrain. The first lots formed a triangular area bounded by the canal, the river, and the streets we know as Esplanade and St. Claude avenues.

Marigny’s engineer laid out streets that mated with their “mother” streets in the Vieux Carré, but bore names Marigny assigned, such as Greatmen, Casa Calvo, and the infamous Craps, named after the game Marigny was said to have imported from the English pastime hazard. Within two years, 68 percent of the lots were sold; Marigny held the notes on many of these mortgages. The old Marigny mansion towered over the collection of cottages that sprang up in the new suburb. Most of the new residents were working class, many operating businesses out of their homes.

Revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) in 1809 washed a wave of refugees to New Orleans. Bernard created another suburb, New Marigny, to accommodate them, just northeast of his original faubourg. These refugees brought Caribbean architecture with them, including the “Creole cottages,” distinguished by four interlocking interior rooms and a roofline paralleling the street.

Marigny’s first wife died in 1808; the next year he married Anna Morales, the fiery daughter of a Spanish Florida grandee. Being of the still-prevailing aristocracy, Bernard naturally assumed the mantle of leadership of the French Creoles. Acclaimed for his eloquence in council, he took on many political roles, among them member of the Louisiana territorial legislature; president of the state senate; and delegate to the state constitutional conventions of 1812 and 1845. He also ran for governor twice but never reached that cherished goal. Most notably, he authored successful bills that ensured the validity of legal documents in the French language.

When British invaders approached in 1814, Marigny was president of the city’s Committee of Defense, marshaling resources for U.S. General Andrew Jackson. As he reported in his memoirs, it was his idea to spring Jean Lafitte’s pirates from jail to contribute their cannons to the meager American forces defending the city. Jackson was victorious, and Marigny reveled in his friendship with the general and later, president.

Marigny defined the role of wealthy bon vivant. He was a leader of revelry at the dance and early New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations. A contemporary described him as the “glass of fashion, the mould of form, a mirror in which our young men dressed themselves.” Well-known for his directness of conversation, eating with his fingers, and singing in public, Marigny never tired of mentioning his friendships with Jackson, King Louis Phillipe of France, and other men of power. Legend holds that he also fought 15 duels. However, the Creole tradition was that the first draw of blood would end the contest, so it is doubtful that Marigny took the lives of most of his opponents. After his son Gustave was killed in a duel in 1830, Marigny turned against the practice.

The height of Marigny’s wealth and influence ran from about 1815-1839, with his apogee of political power in the 1820s as the political and cultural leader of the French Creoles. His wealth was founded upon land, which was the ultimate surety for the overlapping loans and mortgages on holdings that stretched across four parishes. In 1834 he created a new town, Mandeville, north of Lake Pontchartrain, and took prospective purchasers by steamboat to view the property.

Marigny was a backer of the Citizens Bank of Louisiana, whose mission was to increase credit available to planters. A large portion of his wealth was tied up in the bank’s bonds. In 1839, while Marigny was in France, visiting his old friend King Louis Phillipe, the bank’s bonds lost much of their value, and his fortune began its long decline. Levee breaks in 1849 and 1851 washed away most of his sugar crop. His last major asset, a brickyard, went bankrupt and was sold at auction in 1852. Marigny was given a sinecure as recorder of mortgages, which kept his extended family afloat.

The tide of politics seemed to have passed him by, but in 1855 Bernard Marigny had a final, if minor and bizarre, hurrah. The American, or Know Nothing party, dominated New Orleans in the late 1850s. This party was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic in the extreme and often used violence to suppress voting and to control the city. Marigny, a French-Creole Catholic, threw in with the party and probably entertained fantasies of riding this ugly wave of repression back into office. This was not to be, and the Know Nothings governed New Orleans without him.

Bernard’s thoughts on Southern secession remain unknown, but I doubt he was enthusiastic. As a fan of Andrew Jackson, who forced South Carolina to acknowledge federal authority, it is unlikely that Bernard saw secession as anything but the disaster it was. His third son, Mandeville, was a colonel in the Confederate Army and served in the early battles in Virginia. But after New Orleans fell to federal forces in 1862, both father and son took the Union oath of allegiance, saving their property from confiscation.

Postwar New Orleans was a town greatly diminished by ruined trade and high taxes. In this grim setting, Marigny lived out his remaining years in a little house at the intersection of Frenchman and Royal streets, just steps from what is now the bustling Frenchman Street music scene.

Like his city, Marigny was quick in anger; quick in laughter; quick in love; unfazed by contradictions; and secure in his “exceptional” greatness. Even in his last years, Marigny retained his sense of singular nobility. When son Mandeville reproached him for sitting at a table on the sidewalk in his dressing gown, the patriarch replied that the light was better outside, and the gown was cashmere. Then added: “Finally, no matter what anyone thinks, I am Bernard de Marigny. Now you can go.”

The nobly bearded old man was fond of strolling around his faubourg and the Vieux Carré. He passed like a grey ghost down the sidewalks that had witnessed so much history in which he had played a part. On one such French Quarter stroll in February 1868, the 82-year-old Marigny fell from a stroke and died shortly thereafter.

Besides leaving New Orleans the iridescence of his personality, Marigny also set the pattern for individualistic development in his city. Many politicians and real estate moguls of later years envied his personal authority, vision, and freedom from most regulation.

The Faubourg Marigny slumbered as a working-class enclave well into the mid-20th century. and the old name fell into disuse. Over a period of three decades beginning in the 1970s, renovation efforts led by the gay community made the old suburb once again a desirable place. New Orleanians renewed their interest in the memory and lore of Bernard Marigny, with one of the pioneers in the rebirth of the old neighborhood portraying him in public celebrations. The name of Faubourg Marigny was revived in a way that echoed Marigny’s individuality and freedom of expression. Today “the Marigny” has become an internationally recognized historic district, and a pricey neighborhood.

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From 2012 to 2017, Blatty, a New Orleans-based photographer, drove to small towns and villages on the bayous to document a way of life that is rapidly disappearing. The causes of this decline include the growth of the city of New Orleans and its levees, the hurricanes, and the oil industry. In Blatty’s evocative photos, though, these communities are very much alive: You can smell the mud of the marshes, the shrimp and crabs piled up to be sold, and the oil powering the motorboats. And in quotations from the individuals she photographed you can feel their love and longing for family, tradition, and place.

In the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we’ve become aware of the intermittent extreme dangers faced by these communities. Blatty’s work, as collected in Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities, published by George F. Thompson Publishing and distributed by University of Virginia Press, shows the everyday precariousness of their world.

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Wander inside the shop, and you’ll find every surface packed with totems, oils, potions, pendants, plastic souvenirs, herbs, and unmarked satchels of gris-gris; a variety of Laveau effigies for sale; and small back rooms for tarot and psychic readings. The whole place toes that line one finds all over the city of New Orleans, which presents itself as both tourist pap and the genuine article. But the blurring of that line comes as no disrespect to the shop’s namesake. Marie Laveau, ostensible founder of American Voodoo, was very familiar with borderlands, with following that thin line between the sacred and profane.

Though they have often been overlooked or erased from the official record, prophetesses like Laveau have populated the American scene since the beginning—spiritual innovators and religious visionaries like Shaker messiah Ann Lee, godmother of liberation theology Sojourner Truth, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, among many others. Marie Laveau strikes me as the most fundamentally American of them all.

This painting, produced in 1920, is purportedly a copy of an earlier painting made of Marie Laveau by George Catlin in 1835. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum.

Laveau was born in New Orleans in 1801 (or, according to some accounts, 1794) as a free person of color, descending from a long line of enslaved foremothers. Her parents were both mixed-race, free, though hailing from different lines of the Caribbean slave economy. Not much is known about their genealogies or relationship. Likewise, the particulars of Laveau’s childhood and early adulthood are made of layer upon layer of contesting legend. Was she widowed or abandoned by her first husband, Jacques Paris? Did she have two children or seven? Did she acquire her political intel as a hairdresser? Which female relative trained her in conjure? What we do know for sure is that by the middle of the century, Marie Laveau was a Voodoo (or Voudou, or Voudun) priestess of high repute, presiding over a multiracial, multiclass, multidenominational following.

Her spiritual dominion over New Orleans ushered in a distinctly American Voodoo, one that was more porous and flexible in its influences and practices, encompassing more gods (or “Iwa”) than the Haitian Voudun that had been passed down to her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her. Marie Laveau is thought to be American Voodoo’s earliest public practitioner—and in this way, its prophet. From the 1820s to the 1880s, she was famous across the land. People traveled to her from far and wide for counsel, ceremony, remedy, and insight, and her clientele knew no bounds: poor, rich, white, black, free, enslaved, slave-owning, she administered to them all—and not infrequently she administered to them all at once, together.

Laveau’s community ceremonies took place in big, public spaces like the shores of Lake Ponchartrain and the paving stones of Congo Square, as well as in the private homes of the elite bourgeoisie. Her St. John’s Eve summer solstice ceremonies saw people from every stratum of New Orleans public life, observing sacred rites of annual renewal. In doing this, she wasn’t changing the social structure but instead highlighting what was already there. Her theology and teachings were syncretic, drawing from her experiences in the Catholic church and the Ursuline nuns who, according to her biographer Martha Ward, likely educated her, and above all from the traditions transmuted during the Middle Passage to the Caribbean, where her maternal great-grandmother had been trafficked generations before. Catholic saints took on the names of Hatian Iwa (gods), and vice versa. But even those traditions, by the time they reached Laveau, had been filtered through encounters with other Afro-Caribbean religions like Santería and Yoruba, and even North American indigenous ceremony. It’s the sheer volume of influences and variety, and the scope of her reach, both in her theology and in her following, that seem so deeply in keeping with the long project of American religion-making.

The history of that project has long been told through the experiences and viewpoints of white men, but there have always been a much more diverse set of prophets among us. A prophet is someone who talks to god (or the gods) and brings messages back to the flock. A prophet typically offers a new interpretation of a sacred tradition or text that points toward not only reconsidering the practices or premises of institutionalized religion, but also toward significant social change. A prophet is not a saint and may not be concerned with achieving perfection or ascension or even enlightenment. Prophecy happens to the prophet. In fact, prophets are traditionally made into freaks: so strange or countercultural, presenting an image or carrying a message that is so unwelcome, that they are cast to the margins or the wilderness.

As such outcasts, America’s women prophets were already in a difficult position. Living under patriarchy put them in a double bind of public doubt—which for Laveau, as a black woman, was a triple bind. So they had to assert their power in unusual ways, trying both to “contest the [male] monopoly of the pulpit” (to quote the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments”) while claiming special access to the truth as “outsiders.” This position became more possible for women to assume as the 19th century’s Second Great Awakening unfolded, essentially “awakening” the white public’s belief that anyone—regardless of race, class, sex or age—could have direct access to God, and so more and more, the prophetesses’ outsider status emboldened the public’s regard for her.

While different American prophetesses’ truths may have varied in content, they all endeavored to make the same basic intervention: to spell out or live out their tradition’s concealed wisdom, according to the God (or gods) with whom they communed. They wrested interpretive authority over traditions that had been talking to, or about, them for millennia. In keeping with American tradition, their movements were self-invented, and their images self-made. The American religion scholar Catherine Ann Brekus notes in her book Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740 -1845 that because women’s contributions to religion have been continually stymied or scrubbed from the official record, their history is “characterized not by upward progress, but by discontinuity and reinvention.” But this has struck me as something that, maybe only incidentally, keeps their contributions vital, because they are difficult to appropriate.

Many prophetesses shared a particularly American canniness when it came to navigating the free market to convey their theology. Mary Baker Eddy busted into the for-profit publishing sector (books and newspapers), Sojourner Truth produced a wide array of merchandise (paperback autobiography, self-portrait tintypes), and Aimee Semple McPherson monetized the airwaves (on radio, and almost TV). The private sector provided prophetesses the means to ascend, where the churches had otherwise barred them access. Another commonality was their ability to create an enigmatic public image, of staying just barely out of reach, but also very vivid to people at the same time. Sojourner Truth renamed herself under divine influence. Mary Baker Eddy wrote dozens of conflicting autobiographical accounts. Aimee Semple McPherson is widely believed to have staged her own fake kidnapping, after which she still retained tens of thousands of followers.

Marie Laveau encompassed all of these aspects of American prophetesses, and far more. As a business and property owner, and a personal hair stylist, she developed enduring relationships across the complicated caste system of 19th century New Orleans. Her spiritual work had multiple dimensions, beyond her ceremonies: Biographer Carolyn Morrow Long has unearthed records of her prison activism, including her ministry to men on Death Row, and of her unparalleled triage work during the Yellow Fever epidemic. Martha Ward has pieced together a history of her efforts to liberate slaves by purchasing their freedom, revealing how Laveau’s spiritual practices were part and parcel with her vision of human rights.

And yet, however much we feel we know about her and however much she’s been inscribed on the city of New Orleans—through monuments like her oft-visited grave in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, through shops in the French Quarter, through the New Orleans Voodoo Museum, or through her very spirit—Laveau left no written record whatsoever. Everything we know about her is from census or secondhand, cobbled together from dozens of secondary sources, including contemporary biographers, the oral histories of old-timers recorded by Zora Neale Hurston during the Depression, Robert Tallant’s tall tales, novels, yellow journalism, and folk songs. This adds to her legendary power: We cannot pin her down. We can only trace her edge. The archive of her life and ministry requires our collective imaginations. People can write over her or appropriate her, contest each other’s memories or decrypt public records, but she will always own her story. The truth of her life will remain just out of reach to the rest of us.

If there is a single big takeaway from looking at the history of American prophetesses, it’s that the project has always been about freeing belief systems from powerbrokers, contesting the “monopoly of the pulpit,” and making way for a highly personal truth. Women like Marie Laveau had to elide the powers that be, to tap into the deeper source. Her prophecy was embodied by the community she created, which represented what America had always been and would always be: diverse, multiracial, contradictory, syncretic, mystical, stratified, racist, and only thinly democratized. Laveau embodies all of the complexities of this country, its religious and racial and cultural confusion, its violence and madness, and resolves all of it in her person and her theology. She contains multitudes—whether real or imagined. That’s where her prophetic vision issues from. It’s less that she had a specific prediction of the future, and more that she was the future.

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The bordello scenes in the video recall famous photographs from Storyville, New Orleans’s notorious red-light district, which flourished from 1898 to 1917. And while the song is clearly about Beyoncé, the persona she embodies in it resonates with an earlier iconic black female: Lulu White, the self-styled “Diamond Queen” of New Orleans’s turn-of-the-century demimonde. Knowing Lulu White’s story helps us see Beyoncé’s artistic creation within a complex historical framework, for in it are woven together threads of American history: stories of sexual slavery and prostitution; revolution and exile; and, not least, capitalism and the American Dream.

Lulu White was the most notorious madam in Storyville. She earned fame and fortune as the “handsomest octoroon” in the South, and her bordello, Mahogany Hall, featured “octoroon” prostitutes for the pleasure of wealthy white men during one of America’s most virulently—and violently—racist periods. It was also the dawn of consumer culture and the beginning of modern advertising. Thus, Lulu White crafted a persona for herself through stories that had long circulated in New Orleans; she repackaged those stories to create what today we would recognize as her brand.

The first story in White’s compendium was that of the “tragic octoroon.” The word “octoroon” describes a person who is seven parts white, and one part black. By the 1890s, the female octoroon was already a stock character in literature, having entered public discourse as part of antislavery efforts to highlight the moral and sexual depravity of the South. The label “octoroon” actually told a story about the women it described: in it their fathers were always white, and the “black” (enslaved) mothers always got successively lighter, finally producing a white-looking “octoroon.” Even in spite of paternal wishes, their daughters remained in slavery, where their light skin added to their value in the sexual slave market. The octoroon often takes her own life rather than submit—hence the “tragedy.”

The most famous abolitionist novel featured the “tragic octoroon” trope. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe described Eliza as the picture of feminine perfection, with her “rich, full dark eye,” “long lashes,” and “ripples of long silky black hair.” The reader encounters Eliza through the eyes of a visiting slave trader. “The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration.” The trader offers to sell Eliza in the New Orleans slave market. In spite of the “brown of her complexion,” she was fair enough to pass. “You would scarcely know the woman from a white one,” remarks one of the characters.

Even as stories of tragic octoroons protested slavery, they reinscribed “race.” Neither “octoroon” nor other terms, like “mulatta” or “quadroon,” were meant to be precise; the point was “one drop” of “black blood” producing something hidden deep under white skin. This played into a prevailing 19th-century stereotype of upper-class white ladies as sexually pure, pious, and submissive; black women, free or enslaved, were imagined as the opposite—sexually passionate and depraved. The very word octoroon evokes white male racial and sexual domination over several generations, with a prurient twist. The octoroon’s dormant black blood held the promise of intense, and forbidden, sex. She may have looked “white,” but, to quote Beyoncé, she had “hot sauce in her bag.” By incorporating the story of the octoroon into her brand, Lulu White reoriented her tragic fate into a modern sexual fantasy, and promised its fulfillment at Mahogany Hall, also known as the “Octoroon Club.”

The second story White wove into her brand was that of the Caribbean diaspora in New Orleans, which she used to confound her own racial status. White was born in Alabama, but she often claimed to be from the West Indies. After a racetrack refused her entry, a newspaper reported White’s complaint that “some people take her to be colored, but she says there is not a drop of Negro blood in her veins. She says that she is a West Indian, and she was born in the West Indies.” White thus asserted control over her narrative by playing on the illegibility of race in New Orleans.

What did “West Indian” mean there? Several things. New Orleans had a large Caribbean-descended population, stemming from the migrations during the French Revolution, through what became the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and then exile from Cuba several years later. All tiers of Caribbean society entered New Orleans—free whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color—adding to a diverse population that already had a substantial percentage of free people of color. New Orleans, unlike the South as a whole, was a three-caste society, where one’s “race” did not always accord with “free” or “enslaved” status or, later, heritage. There are instances on record of Creole women suing for libel after being labeled “colored.” White’s assertion of West Indian provenance left her “race” ambiguous.

It also increased her value, because when it came to women, “West Indian” signified sublime, ineffable beauty, seemingly created by the mixture of races and the environment. The New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn described the type as “certainly” among “the most beautiful women of the human race,” having “inherited not only the finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and physical conditions.” Antebellum travelers to New Orleans rhapsodized at great length about the beauty of New Orleans “quadroons.” Some of these women participated in a kind of institutionalized concubinage, whereby they entered contracts with white men. The terms of the contract, Frederick Law Olmsted remarked, varied “with the value of the lady in the market.” The female creoles of color were thus imagined as quasi-free “tragic octoroons.” Instead of being fated to sexual slavery, these women were thought to “pass their life in a prostitution,” in the words of another visitor to the antebellum city.

Lulu White’s claim to be at once West Indian, not “Negro,” and “octoroon,” blurred the matter deliberately. In a sense, she claimed both the heritage of white male creoles and of their female creole of color mistresses. This blurring was integral to White’s brand, a selling point for her business. Perhaps Beyoncé is drawing on some of this history, too: “My Daddy Alabama; Momma Louisiana; you mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas Bama.” Lulu White turned the history of Caribbean “creoles” in New Orleans to her own use at Mahogany Hall, where light-skinned black women were literally prostitutes. White was the proprietress there; she determined the value of the lady in the market.

This brings us to the third story White’s brand comprised: the self-made man. The story of the self-made man is among the oldest in American culture, beginning at least as early as Thomas Jefferson’s fabled yeoman farmer, and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. The turn-of-the-century version still reassured Americans that by hard work, honesty, and a bit of luck, anyone could rise from humble circumstances to achieve greatness—or at least a comfortable living. Northern businessmen had long come to New Orleans to make their fortunes. The New South desire to develop the region along the lines of Northern industry created new opportunities for strivers. Lulu White’s self-promotional brand encompassed the men she sought for customers. She could make their (American) dreams come true at Mahogany Hall—as she had her own.

Postcard depicting Basin Street, once a hub of high-end prostitution. Courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

White’s narrative of self-made success presented a distorted, winking reflection. She was a woman of color; her business was selling sex. Yet, it scarcely mattered that “legitimate” New Orleans did not believe White’s self-creation myth. Her customers were unlikely to have believed it themselves. A promotional pamphlet touting the success of “this famous West Indian octoroon,” described Mahogany Hall as having cost $40,000 to erect, and called it “unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant palaces in this or any other country.”

White operated in a netherworld of transgressive pleasure that flouted the morality of respectable society. Lulu White, the brand, was not diminished by newspaper reports deriding her and calling her “negress”; the notoriety amplified her appeal. And men seeking sex with lovely “octoroons” knew just where to go. As the historian Roland Marchand explains about the dawn of the consumer age, “popular convention permitted advertisers to exaggerate, as if all their statements were placed within qualifying ‘quotation marks.’” Lulu White’s keen marketing sensibility predicted the transformations in American mass culture ahead of their time.

Long before Beyoncé sang, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it,” Lulu White built a similar narrative of self-made ascendancy, and even a brand that allowed her to profit from the interweaving of historical narratives. And Beyoncé continues to play with these ideas, so that while her success is premised in part on her sexuality, no one imagines that she’s literally a prostitute, or that she’s really treating her lover to dinner at Red Lobster. Rather, Beyoncé embodies a fantasy, crafted from multiple stories, tinged with the hard realities of racial, sexual, and economic subordination, but, in the end, triumphant.

To be sure, the similarities between White and Beyoncé can be overstated. Lulu White was a real madam who trafficked in young women and girls for the purposes of prostitution; Beyoncé reimagines that role to inhabit all at once the prostitute, the madam, and even the pimp, while embodying a brand that is at once autobiographical and relatable to her millions of fans. If White pioneered this kind of self-packaging, Beyoncé, also known as “Queen,” perfected it.

Lulu White died in obscure poverty in 1931. But her brand has been revived over the years as an emblem of a mythic, romanticized Storyville. The older stories persist, too. At the end of the “Formation” video, Beyoncé lies atop a police car floating in the Mississippi River. She sings as the car sinks into the deep, an homage, perhaps, to the tragic octoroon.

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“Where you from?” he asks.

I hold him in my gaze just long enough to assess the question: Rap? Ploy? Curiosity?

I land on the latter: “Los Angeles,” I say.

Without a beat, he lobs back: “Where’s your mama from?”

I let out an “I give” chuckle. Then: “New Orleans,” I respond. Full stop.

“Okay. Yes, of course.” He says nothing more, moves on so that I may do the same. But as I slide into my seat on the Metro, the exchange cycles through again and again, like always, leaving me wondering how I’m marked and how it shows.

I’m often asked versions of this same question by strangers, always other African Americans of a certain age. Where it might seem a logical inquiry within a train station—a busy hub between here and there, I’ve had it happen in other locales—markets or car washes, the dry cleaners. It’s a way of locating and understanding something essential about who we are, who we’re connected to as Americans—and who we were and what that means in a far-flung place—out of context. It’s a post-Great Migration inquiry. It’s often, in my experience, a “Southern thing”: “Oakland by way of Beaumont”; “San Bernardino by way of Knoxville.” But as time passes, and our favorite uncles and our first cousins become ancestors, I wonder how much longer we’ll be asking, and what it might mean to come from an ancestral elsewhere.

From left to right: Souvenir bookmark; luggage tag from the author’s mother’s train case; memory souvenir book. Images courtesy of Lynell George.

Los Angeles—with its shifting landscape and quick-change acts—is never enough of an answer. It’s seldom the right answer. Even as a native, I understood early, it serves as an incomplete response. That’s why summer still has a tug—why August in particular comes with an emotional pull, a filling up of my senses. Something about the atmosphere shifts, the light, reminds me that it’s right about now that this is when we would start pulling the “other, nicer summer clothes” out of chest-of-drawers; there will be calamine lotion to purchase; a trip to the bootery for sturdy sandals. I can still hear the snapthunk of my mother’s off-white Samsonite train case; I can smell the sharp scent of astringents, of talc, of mosquito repellent. This process was its own season: We are clearing out, getting ready to go “home” for the summer. To the home, I inherited, the one that is marked on me in some both visible and invisible way.

The “George” side of me was more apparent. A good portion of my father’s family had moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Our reunions were informal but frequent. We spent our big fall and winter holidays together in an expansive dining room on 25th Street, or in early summer gathered around picnic and card tables set out upon sturdy St. Augustine backyard grass. Around these relatives, I saw the connections, it was where I’d inherited my jaw, my browline, my height—I wasn’t stooping down to be heard here. These were clearly my people and they ran as a constant thread through my life here.

My New Orleans family was much smaller and more diffuse and, in certain ways, more abstract—an unexplored idea. That complication, my mother knew, required that we travel there, to sit knee-to-knee with relatives to take part in rituals, both elaborate and quieter ones. New Orleans traveled well enough—its sense-awakening food and spell-casting music—but she knew that there wasn’t anything like witnessing life there first-hand.

If reunion means to reunite with what was left behind—or unfinished—these trips were part of a process of essential bridge-building. They were non-negotiable. Landing in Louisiana in the middle of August was more than a “baptism,” it was a dare—a proving ground. I fought it; didn’t want to be pulled away from my routines, my friends, my familiars. If Los Angeles was a collection of jet-age shaped slick surfaces, Googie diners, starburst decorated dingbats, laid end-to-end, New Orleans, especially in the first few days, felt like something pulled out of the attic: a little rumpled, worn and over-ripe—but a keepsake that I needed to find some place for.

Out of the suitcases came the sleeveless, starched dresses, the flat, thick leather sandals, sunhats and mosquito spray. Each day was a battle with the sticky air—atmosphere that seemed to not just have texture but weight—until we’d settled into it, like the pace, slower, more open-ended, leaving space for come what may.

We’d travel to relatives’ homes and sit in dark rooms, drapes and blinds pulled against the sun. Metal oscillating fans buzzed just below conversations that wandered through all sorts of hard-to-decipher territory. We’d leave that home and my grandfather would slide behind the wheel and drive another few blocks to the next address, another home with a front room adorned with a couple of Queen Anne chairs and a brocade sofa with doilies on the arm rests—again curtains drawn. No matter how hot, however, something sumptuous was always going on in the kitchen, wafting through the prim and orderly rooms. If it was Monday, red beans and rice; if it was the weekend, gumbo. If someone offered you a bowl or plate, you couldn’t say no. Even if you’d just sampled from the kitchen pot before this one.

The sitting, to a pre-teen, seemed interminable; the voices, the thick New Orleans accents—clipped and quick with details that I could barely if at all make out, left me marooned.

Even the souvenirs were odd—embarrassing to my West Coast sensibilities: a baby alligator now stuffed and sewn and dressed up like Batman (with a cape and mask and boots, and felt-cutout bat emblem); salt and pepper shakers with black-face mammies and “uncles” with the words “New Orleans” painstakingly hand painted beneath their aprons. Even my Aunt Elsie’s handmade dolls—peach-faced, wide-eyed debutants dressed for a lavish cotillion—were fabricated out of old, large soda pop bottles, outfitted with a sequined “ball gown” and beneath it a crisp and rustling “crinoline,” the yarn “hair” done up in some sort of antebellum upsweep. (I took that doll back to Los Angeles, where it sat on the highest shelf on my bookcase, untouched for 40 years. She, I imagined—among the Malibu Barbies—probably felt marooned, too.) Who were these people? They were gentle, patient and all heart, but I didn’t understand my place in their story for such a long time.

This wasn’t the New Orleans of French Quarter excesses or multi-course meals at some swank fine-dining establishments—places my mother couldn’t have visited let alone paused too long in front of—as stipulated by Jim Crow segregation—until she returned with her family in the late ’60s/early ’70s. As I got older, I began to understand that more—and the stories my relatives told. I understood the role of the social aid and pleasure clubs that would help with all manner of contingency plans and safety nets—medical aid, prayer circles, company for shut-ins and most famously, funerals. I understood what the Krewe of Zulu meant—beyond outrageous costumes, throws, doubloons and coconuts. It was insurance when black people couldn’t get any, it was caring for family—blood kin and near or chosen family.

There was magic too: The sudden thunderbursts that unleashed movie-like rain; the steam that rose from the sidewalk right after a deluge. The long, weekend rides out to the “country”—bayous, Spanish moss, June bugs, fireflies. Back in New Orleans proper, my grandfather waking us in the middle of the night to tell ghost stories, or, on the more stifling evenings, putting us all in the car and making a break for the French Quarter to have 2 a.m. hot beignets and cold milk and watch exotic New Orleans nightlife bloom.

My grandfather taught by example: I’d watch him shuck and shoot oysters, salt his beer, demolish crawfish, pace and embellish a story; but more importantly, I saw the way he interacted with the checker behind the counter at the Circle Market, or how he asked after the family of the young man who prepared and packed his po’boys at Eddie’s on Law Street. You looked folks in the eye, you had a kind word or story or a joke to take their mind off their trouble—and when they saw him coming around the corner, he was always greeted with a “Hey there, Dink,” My grandfather moved through his city in a never-met-a-stranger sort of swagger; it was why, I realized so much later, even after my grandmother and my mother traveled to Los Angeles, he could never leave.

I put all of this on a high shelf and shut it away—or so I thought—after my grandfather died in the early 1980s. New Orleans became a place I spoke about in past tense, a site of memory.

Decades later, 10 years into a new century, I closed the door to the gypsy cab I’d hired to carry me to a cafe in the Marigny for work. I was in New Orleans to conduct a series of interviews for a story. I hadn’t been to Louisiana in more than 20 years, and all those rooms, roads and rituals had become ghosts, like my grandfather himself—distant but present. The driver asked as I stepped out, “You sure this place is open? I’ll come back ’round the corner to make sure.”

One of the first streets in New Orleans that the author’s family lived on. Image courtesy of Lynell George.

He was right to worry. The storefront looked as if it wasn’t simply closed for the night, but had been abandoned, like so much of New Orleans had post-Katrina’s flood. It was a foreboding metaphor.

In the early-morning quiet of the street, the buildings—the cottages and shotguns, the curb-to-curb ratios and overall scale much like my grandfather’s old neighborhood near Tremé, memories and voices rushed back, too fast at moments to hold on to the details, like the accents of my relatives—taking some effort to decipher, yet warm.

I heard my name called out. It echoed, bouncing off the hard surfaces—the crumbling concrete of the banquette (sidewalk), the thick-plastered walls. And then again, suspended. The syllables floated in the, humid air, just a shade cooler because it was both early and fall. My interview subject emerged, coffee cup in hand, smiling, open arms: “Welcome to New Orleans.”

He may as well have said, “Welcome home.” I realized in only few minutes, how much was still at the ready: Language. Location. Longing. I was making myself understood as if no time had passed, as if this were my native place, as if there had been no interruption of time or distance or grief.

Sitting in those dark rooms all those years wasn’t for nothing; it was as essential as learning a language, as breathing. The air had weight and so too, history. It was a keepsake from my grandfather, like a charm on a bracelet.

When your birthplace is a brand-new place chosen as your family’s “next chapter” or “new page,” your native roots are still shallow; “home” means something more complex: a mix of the old and trusted with the new and unexpected possibility. It’s extending the line. While we say we’re from a place, from something that you can pin on a map, really, as Americans we’re citizens of ritual and stories. Those summers marking time in a faraway place gave me not just perspective, but a sense of myself in the world—a prism, perspective and inherited past.

As another August approaches, I already feel that pull, a catch in my heart. Though I have now begun to visit annually, mapping my own, very personal version of the city, I haven’t had the courage to return in the high heat of late summer, to see what will spring up in that very particular New Orleans. But I do know this: The next time I’m asked where I’m from, I’ll go straight for the essence, to the very heart of the matter.

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