by Edward Ball
“It is as though we are in a box that is invisible to those on the outside of it,” she says. The people outside, I infer, are white. Ms. Marsalis nods yes. “We are boxed-in and can’t break out.”
She describes the first print as “a Malcolm X type who is going to get out of the box, no matter what” and the second as “a Martin Luther King Jr. type using his intellect and kindness to get out of the box.” A third is “a person confounded, outdone, and defeated.” Ms. Marsalis explains the process as “etchings on matte acetate, with graphite, and then images layered in like collage, with acrylic. The whole image is etched on a zinc plate, which is inked.”
She pulls one more print that shows a mouth, wide open and talking. “It’s called ‘Communication.’ Meaning, no matter how much we communicate, they still don’t understand.” She raises her eyebrows and smiles. “‘They’ are your people.”
After graduating from Tulane, Ms. Marsalis started teaching part-time at the University of New Orleans, then moved to Dillard University. Both are historically black schools. She taught studio art at Dillard for fifteen years and moved to Xavier, another black university. She retired from Xavier in 2005.
“Recently I did images of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, two of my heroes. And one of Harriet Tubman, when it was decided that she would be on the twenty-dollar bill.” The Tubman picture is a fine print that depicts a woman in middle age with wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
“I sent one copy to President Obama and one to the U.S. treasurer, and I said, ‘Do her when she was young and active and not old and in a shawl.’”
On a near table is a letter from the Democratic Party thanking Ms. Marsalis for a contribution. Pictures of the forty-fourth president, Barack Obama, peek out from under a pile, on newspapers and postcards. When Ms. Marsalis leads me back to her living room, I glance in the corner at a life-size cardboard cutout of President Obama. It is one of the few pictures in the house that Ms. Marsalis did not make herself.
The descendants of Lucien Capla make a big family, maybe one hundred. And to hear the women tell it, a lot of them know the story of the Mechanics Institute. In 1918, Emily Capla, the grandmother who spoke Creole, married a musician and housepainter, Willie Santiago. One of their sons, Alton Santiago, married a woman named Ethel Oliver, who produced eleven children. Janel Marsalis and Alice Richard are two of them. Many of the eleven brothers and sisters stayed in Louisiana and raised families. Some moved away, in the American style, and put down roots elsewhere. Living family members who trace their ancestry to Alfred Capla the tailor live in Alabama, California, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.
One line in the family, which leads to Joann St. Cyr and the two sisters, passes through the heart of black music. I visit Ms. St. Cyr, the woman who stressed the word “Creole” when we first met. And she shares the story of her grandfather, a jazz musician.
“My father was named John St. Cyr, and his father was John Alexander St. Cyr, my grandfather. That was Johnny St. Cyr, and he had the music. He was a banjo player and guitarist. And he played with Jelly Roll Morton.” I am a little startled at this news, a gentle Creole woman linked to some of the pioneers of jazz. Jelly Roll Morton was a Creole of color, born in New Orleans in 1885. He boasted that he invented jazz, and it is fifty percent true. “Along with Jelly Roll,” says Ms. St. Cyr, “my grandfather played with Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five.” That does it for me. I did not expect that a race massacre would lead down a hallway to great inventors in music. Louis Armstrong was not a Creole of color. In 1901, he was born poor and black in a section known as “Back of Town,” a hard half-mile west of the French Quarter.
Ms. St. Cyr’s story means that a branch of the Capla family was present during the birth hours of a black American art form. The connection of the banjo-and-guitar player Johnny St. Cyr with the massacre survivor Alfred Capla is a little distant but real.
Johnny St. Cyr married into the Capla family. He knew Alfred Capla, and he played with another jazz pioneer in the Capla family, named Willie Santiago, a second banjo player, as well as the grandfather of Janel Santiago Marsalis. These two, Johnny St. Cyr and Willie Santiago, played the ballrooms and riverboats of Prohibition-era New Orleans. And what they did with music swept the table clean.
Johnny St. Cyr was a handsome Creole, soft-spoken and lean, with a beautiful baritone speaking voice. “He was a plasterer,” said his granddaughter, Joann St. Cyr. “A lot of the jazz men worked construction for a steady income when they weren’t doing regular gigs.” In the era before Sheetrock, Johnny St. Cyr shaped the walls of old New Orleans houses with wet cement, switching between the banjo and the trowel for much of his life.
Johnny St. Cyr (banjo) with Louis Armstrong (trumpet) in Chicago, 1925
When he was sixteen, in 1906, Johnny St. Cyr heard Jelly Roll Morton play piano with a dance orchestra in New Orleans, and he was hooked. The banjo would be his ticket to the life. In 1908, St. Cyr married sixteen-year-old Marguerite Peralt. “I come from Marguerite Peralt,” said Joann St. Cyr, her papers and pictures scattered on a coffee table. “She was my grandmother.”
About 1910, ragtime, with its mid-speed syncopation, started to give way to “hot bands” that cranked up the tempo and melodies. A cornet player named Manny Gabriel asked St. Cyr to join his band, the National Orchestra, and he stayed for two years, playing rhythm guitar and banjo.
“We played parties, balls, picnics, banquets, parades and on advertising wagons,” Johnny St. Cyr remembered in a taped interview with folklorist Alan Lomax in 1949. “We played both for white and colored, all over New Orleans. One night might be on St. Charles Avenue at a private party for wealthy white people, next night we might play in the District.”
The District was Storyville. Most agree that jazz surfaced in the brothels and dance halls of Storyville, the prostitution quarter of the city. Storyville measured about a mile square and lay just northwest of the Vieux Carré, beyond Congo Square. It got its name from Sidney Story, a city councilman who wrote an ordinance that created the city’s legal sex trade zone—the District. Commercial sex was legal in Storyville for twenty years, between 1897 and 1917, and jazz was born in its naked rooms.
In 1918, St. Cyr graduated from $2.50-per-gig work to a weekly payday with a dance orchestra on the S.S. Capitol, a paddlewheel riverboat that plied the Mississippi. The Capitol docked half the year in New Orleans and half the year in St. Louis, Missouri, and it cruised the river at night, a floating dance hall. It was whites-only all week, with Monday nights pegged for Negroes. St. Cyr was twenty-eight.
The banjo player told an interviewer that he helped Louis Armstrong—a cornet player, then age seventeen—to get a job on the Capitol. And that he persuaded the boat’s manager to buy the teenage Louis Armstrong the first horn he actually owned. According to St. Cyr, he and Louis Armstrong went together to a music store in St. Louis in 1918, bought a $67 cornet, and sent the bill to the steamship company.
About 1910, jazz emerged out of the rattling tempos of ragtime. Jazz was a syncopated stomp that sped up the bass and rhythm, carried by piano and by Johnny St. Cyr’s guitar, and put the melody instruments out in front of the band. St. Cyr was one of the two hundred or so musicians who first heard and then created the new form.
With World War I, jazz players started moving from New Orleans to Chicago, including a bandleader named Joseph “King” Oliver, a cornet player. The money was better, the dance halls full, and the race codes not set in concrete. At the same time, a still-young recording industry, getting rich on gramophone disks, decided money could be made with black music. White promoters had a name for the big sounds coming north with the black migration—blues from Mississippi, jazz from Louisiana. It was “race music.” In Chicago, King Oliver recorded as well as played live. In 1923, Oliver sent a telegram to Johnny St. Cyr in New Orleans asking him to come a thousand miles north to join his act. Oliver sent the same telegram to Louis Armstrong, and both Armstrong and St. Cyr found themselves in Ch
icago on the bandstand with King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band.
St. Cyr went to Illinois with his wife, Marguerite. Armstrong married a singer and pianist in Chicago, Lillian Hardin. In Chicago, New Orleans jazz went onto gramophone records and from there traveled out to stores and into living rooms throughout the country. After two years in the dance halls with King Oliver, Louis Armstrong formed his own band, the Hot Five, and recruited Johnny St. Cyr to play his banjo.
Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five went to the office of a race music company called OKeh Records and recorded some of the most important tracks in twentieth-century American music. Johnny St. Cyr played on fifty of the Hot Five’s jazz and blues tunes, and today they sound like a foundation for popular music. The titles only gesture at the content, but they have funk: “Potato Head Blues,” “Big Butter and Egg Man,” “Heebie-Jeebies,” “Gut Bucket Blues,” “The King of the Zulus,” “Skid-Dat-De-Dat” … In the scat singing alone, on “Heebie-Jeebies” and “Skid-Dat-De-Dat,” you might locate the kernel of rap music.
While in Chicago, Johnny St. Cyr and his wife, Marguerite, had two children, including the father of Joann St. Cyr. Ms. St. Cyr is the woman in New Orleans who says about the long-ago massacre, “My mother didn’t raise me to hate.”
In 1926, Johnny St. Cyr recorded with a second New Orleans genius, Jelly Roll Morton. Born with the name Ferdinand LaMothe, the pianist renamed himself “Jelly Roll Morton” when he made a living at the keyboard in the brothels of Storyville, the jelly roll a joke that pointed to sex for sale. In Chicago, he led a band he called the Red Hot Peppers. With Jelly Roll Morton, St. Cyr again found himself recording songs in blues and jazz that throw a shadow over the next hundred years of popular music—“Black Bottom Stomp,” “Cannonball Blues,” “Doctor Jazz Stomp,” a dozen more. St. Cyr himself sings on “Dead Man Blues.”
By 1930, musicians started to come home from Chicago to New Orleans. As the money drained out of hot jazz, and the Depression arrived, Johnny St. Cyr retreated to the Crescent City. He went back to plastering. St. Cyr spent the next twenty-five years in New Orleans, playing with part-time bands, working in construction, and eventually recording an album of his own material.
In New Orleans in 1940, Joann St. Cyr was born, giving the banjoist a granddaughter.
Johnny St. Cyr moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s. He spent the last years of his life on a lucrative but strange bandstand—at Disneyland. Until his death, in 1966, St. Cyr led a seven-piece band that played on the Mark Twain, a miniature steamboat that cruised the theme park, the banjo player doing cheerful arrangements of early jazz. By that time, the sound of a hot band was tamed. The white crowds of Disneyland sipped Coke on the pint-sized steamboat and looked over at St. Cyr and his band. I imagine they found the Negroes to be quaint.
* * *
“My mother says we are Creoles, but I do not have that problem. I completely identify with the African American experience in this country.”
Ricardo Coleman says he is forty-three, but he looks thirty. He is handsome and vigorous and deep-voiced, with leather jacket and beard. His mother is Joann St. Cyr, his great-grandfather was guitarist Johnny St. Cyr. Ricardo Coleman, one of the Capla family circle, has a tranquil manner. He is not an artist, like Janel Marsalis, but a historian in training. Coleman is in a graduate program in history and is writing a thesis about Creoles of color in politics after the Civil War.
“I do not think you can separate Creole life from African American life. The paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan did not make those distinctions.”
It is Carnival season when I visit Ricardo Coleman. Mardi Gras is a week away, and every day a dozen parades ripple through the city. We meet at a coffee shop and sit out on the patio. Within sight is Veterans Boulevard, a commercial strip through the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. It is a parade route for the day. The loud cavalcade of the Little Rascals Krewe rolls past. Bands, floats, and marching clubs, costumes, plastic beads flying, thousands lining the road. A fantastic and foolish scene, and almost everyone is white. The suburb of Metairie, a ten-minute drive from uptown New Orleans, bloomed during the 1960s and ’70s as two hundred thousand whites left the half-black center city and moved west.
I spent my teenage and high school years growing up in Metairie. It was a big place, the white younger brother of majority-black New Orleans—a three-bedroom sprawl over a filled-in swamp, with shopping malls, drive-through daiquiri bars, a golf course, the New Orleans airport, and some nice cemeteries.
Ricardo Coleman lives in Metairie. “Primarily we get micro-aggression,” he says. “I walk into a coffee shop and there is tension. People watch you in the parking lot, clutch their pocketbooks. It happens every day. It is highly Republican out here, highly conservative, and it reflects what they want New Orleans to be.”
A loud high school band overwhelms the conversation. When it passes, I share one interpretation with the historian in training. “I have the feeling there is white supremacy that is violent and aggressive and white supremacy that is psychological and soft. And that they are in communication.”
“What started the white flight out to Metairie from New Orleans?” Mr. Coleman asks himself. “The first thing is the change in city government. A mayor called Moon Landrieu, white, was elected in 1969. He campaigned on inclusion and tried to make the city government look like the city. Before Landrieu, twenty percent of the city’s workforce was African American, and after him it was fifty percent or sixty percent. He put African Americans in important positions. That began the talk, ‘We gotta get outta New Orleans.’ The move sped up with the election of Dutch Morial, first black mayor, in 1978—he was a working-class Creole—and then people started moving out to Metairie overnight.”
I throw a question—“When did white supremacy get its legs…”—and he catches it—
“You mean with the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the KKK?” He skips from Reconstruction back to the present. “As far as the legacy of those things, it is invisible, not something you can point to. In some places, it is open, and you can smell it and feel it. But here, people go to parades. Whites talk to blacks, but they don’t see one another. Here, people just want to have a good time. It is a legacy of silence.”
I ask about the massacre, and Ricardo Coleman says—
“Most people, if you ask, say, ‘There was a massacre downtown?’ They don’t know of it.
“After the fights of Reconstruction, eventually the white redemption came, and Jim Crow laws were written,” Coleman says. “At that point, many members of the Creole community understood that reality was changing, and not for the better. Some felt they had no choice, and they crossed over into whiteness. A lot of people went up to Chicago, or to Detroit. People saw Reconstruction had ended, and it was a failure. They had been betrayed, and they had no choice but to pass into whiteness in order to get jobs and to survive.”
Coleman is talking about families he has known personally. Within each family, people disappeared from one race and joined the other. That is, if they were Creole enough, and light enough to pass for white.
“Imagine the terror, the isolation. The idea that you can never any longer be who you are,” he says. “That there is a part of you that is locked away. That you had to carry a lie. Some came back to visit their families, at night. Some did not.”
No one has counted the number of Louisiana Creoles who passed out of blackness into whiteness, but there were many thousand, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.
“But by the way, back to the legacy of the militias, see that guy? The cop?” He waves at a beefy white policeman, one of a dozen manning the Little Rascals parade. “You want to know the legacy of paramilitary organizations? He is the inheritance. People used to look out their windows and see hooded guys with torches. In a similar way, we look out our windows today, and we see a cop.”
“Louisiana has the most black people in prison, per capita, in the nation,” I say.
&
nbsp; “Louisiana is first in the nation, and the United States first in the world. So Louisiana is first in the world. True.” Ricardo Coleman shakes his head.
“The paramilitary organizations may be coming back. Since the election of 2016, we have seen an increase in these militia groups, a normalizing of some of these people.”
On Veterans Boulevard, the parade is ending, and street sweepers swoosh past. Hundreds walk to their cars. Children dressed as alligators, mothers dressed as insects, but also a lot of invisible men in dad jeans. It feels like pattern recognition when I see, climbing into a pickup truck, a familiar sight. It is a white man wearing blackface. He has a handful of plastic beads in one hand, a basketball in the other, and he wears a numbered jersey. He is doing it like the other tribe does it. He knows he has it just right.
PART V
WHITE TERROR
17
The stage is arranged, the Ku-klux pageant begins.
On March 4, 1867, a Monday at 10:00 a.m., two thousand firemen jostle left and right into parade columns on Canal Street, near the levee of the river. Their costume is full dress uniform. Marshals from the Firemen’s Charitable Association yell the lines into order, and the procession moves: thirty-five fire companies, thirty-three marching bands, hundreds of horses, two dozen fire trucks. The firemen carry banners, horns, hoses, and ladders prettily draped with flowers.
Constant Lecorgne appears somewhere in the middle of the long snake of a march. The eighty-five men of Home Hook & Ladder are the eighth company in line, behind the sixty-two men of William Tell Hook & Ladder and in front of the seventy-two of Philadelphia Engine Company, whose draft horse—black and shiny—is named “Nig.” A rustle of laughs whenever the driver yells, “Git, Nig!”
Newspapers run pages of detail, description, and praise. A reporter clocks it: fifty-five minutes for the parade to pass.