Days later, FEMA tracked Mr. Willis down and told him that his son had been found; he had been sent to Washington, D.C., and was housed in a shelter there. After his rescue, FEMA saw that he had substance abuse problems and put him into a rehab program.
“What I thought was the bleakest day of my life turned out to be a blessing,” Mr. Willis told us. “The help I never could get my son before the storm, he was getting now. I lost everything, but I think I gained the life of my boy.”
Mr. Willis had no flood insurance and no money to rebuild his ruined house. That did not stop him. “I’m going to go out and get a board, and I’m going to put it up,” he told my parents. “Next day, I’m going to go get another board, and put it up.”
What a balm that man’s hope was to us. He had faith that all would be well, that he would live to see his home restored, and that he would have a role to play in that resurrection miracle. Mr. Willis’s hope validated the impossible dreams Daddy, Tee, and I carried in our heads. Because Mr. Willis believed, that made it easier for us to believe. We could not have known it that October day in 2005, standing in the mud-covered wreckage of our lives, but a few years later, Mr. Willis and his wife would return to their rebuilt Pontchartrain Park home. In that terrible moment of our first return, Mr. Willis helped us see what he could see, and that shared vision cleared the path forward for us too.
That vision made going forward possible, but it did not make it easier. We had to sift through the house like archaeologists excavating our own hearts. Piece by piece, I carried the shattered remains of my family’s life outside to my mother and father. We had to mourn each picture, each office file, each chair, and each pot.
I came to understand the deeper meaning of that process in a conversation I had with my mother as she eyed a particular grime-glazed haul I had laid at her feet.
“These glasses are still good to drink out of,” she said. “We could still use these plates.”
“Tee,” I said, “this has sat in toxic sludge for three months. You don’t want to use this again.”
“Wendell,” she said with a deliberate focused pause, “this was given to me on our wedding day. We’re going to keep it.”
This is how the entire process of recovery and restoration went with them. In my training as an actor, I had been taught that inanimate objects can have a powerful emotional hold on your life and had used that insight in creating characters. I drew on that training to help me be more sensitive to the pain and the grief my parents were suffering as we worked on the house. It’s one thing to practice on a stage this kind of imaginative empathy with a fictional character. It’s something else to do it with your mother and father, in the ruins of the family home.
The place finally became clean enough for them to enter safely and help with the sorting. Every now and then, you’d hear a wail from the back of the house. Oh my God. Oh, Lord have mercy. Ohhh. I heard the cry of a young couple grown old, a man and a woman who had gotten married, started a family, and brought up their children in a modest little home they could call their own. Now, as stooped and frail old people, they had to pick through what was left, through the molded, soured, rotting piles, confronting reminders of their own mortality and the impermanence of all things. The photos that had survived, the mementoes they had collected over the years, the framed diplomas their sons had earned and given to them as certification that their sacrifices had meant something. The report cards they saved. That trophy from Little League. The baptismal garb. The anniversary gifts. The love letters.
We recovered many things, and said good-bye to many more. The item whose loss I mourn more than anything else: the final notice on his mortgage, the one that affirmed that Daddy had paid for his home in full. That he owned a piece of land and the house built upon it free and clear, like any other American man.
Every little thing that could be saved felt like rescuing one of their own children. Everything that could not be was like losing a member of the family. I thought I knew how an inanimate object could be so meaningful, and endowed with so much emotion and purpose, but I had not realized until I wrestled with the ghosts of my family’s past how profoundly real that is. What the fall of 2005 taught me was my own version of The Piano Lesson. The truth of August Wilson’s art was made manifest in those long days full of hurt, hope, and homecoming.
As we made progress, I watched my mother’s spirit rise in her. I began to see the young couple that had bought the house in Pontchartrain Park and were setting out to fill it with the things they needed for everyday life. One day, I found myself shopping with my mother for curtains, dishes, and furniture.
“I’ve always wanted a brass bed,” Tee said. “I’m going to get a brass bed this time.”
I bought my mother a brass bed, and I rejoiced in the opportunity. I was not really buying a place for her and my father to lay their heads at night. I was sharing in her dream, making it real, participating in a side of her that I had never before seen, that had been submerged by the years of teaching school, day in and day out, and the routine of raising three boys. This was who my mother had been before she had my brothers and me. I can hardly express how pleased I was to meet her.
I met Daddy in the same way. Standing in the backyard one day, I heard him say, “We got to get a workbench out here. I got to get my tool chest.” And there he was, the young Army veteran, husband, and new father, building his own castle in America. Katrina had made him a castaway, but now that he had his feet back on solid ground, Daddy remembered what he had always known: You can’t get lost in America.
In January 2006, my parents got a federal rebuilding loan. A few weeks later, I hired a contractor to rebuild the house from the inside out. The normal procedure would have been to tear down the outside walls and construct them from the ground up, but I knew that if my parents ever saw the walls go down and an empty lot, it would mean a breach in the levee from which they might not recover. It cost me a little more to do it that way instead of demolishing it and building new, but it was important to make sure that the family home was regenerated from within.
Ron had a buddy from West Point who had a construction company in New York. He sent one of his men down to supervise our construction every couple of weeks, to check on the rebuilding process. It took a year.
Just before Christmas 2006, Amos and Althea Pierce returned to their gleaming home in New Orleans for good. “We’re back now,” Daddy said, with the voice of an angelic herald bringing tidings of great joy. For my mother to be able to cook Christmas dinner in her home again was a feast that offered a foretaste of heaven. We finally, as a family, knew that a crushing burden had been lifted. We had wondered if it would ever really happen, if it was possible to rise out of Katrina’s waters and live again.
But we had. We honest to God had.
We ate and drank and laughed and rejoiced at the feast of Christmas, celebrating the birth of a child born in a stable in an obscure corner of the Roman empire. There we sat on that night divine, giving thanks to God for the rebirth of our own family’s life in what, however little known or cared for by the rest of America, had always been the Pierce family’s Promised Land. The thrill of hope, says the Christmas carol, the weary world rejoices. And so did we all, with a peace that passed the understanding of any soul who could not know what it means to miss New Orleans.
“Thank you, Wendell,” my mother said to me that night. “Thank you for this.” It had begun as a gift to them, my own way of saying thank you for all the sacrificial gifts of love Tee and Daddy had given to my brothers and me over the years. But it ended up being a gift to me as well. It was a gift whose meaning the poet T. S. Eliot captured in his poem “Little Gidding,” when he said that we will not end our searching journey through life until we
arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
ON THAT CHRISTMAS NIGHT, in that tiny half-brick house on Debore
Drive, feasting with my mother and father in the joy of our restoration, I knew in a way I never before had what mattered most in life. By the sweat that arose on my brow and the tears that ran down my cheek as I mined the fragments of the past, day after day, until both my hands and my heart were raw, I gained wisdom and strength and vision.
And I gained an awareness of the power I had to use my talents and resources to find, to bind, and to restore. I had helped recover the past and build from it a future for the people I loved more than my own life. If I had within me that power, did I not also have a responsibility to use it for the good of others in my community?
In giving my mother and father their home back, I had taught myself the first bars of the melody that would become my song.
At the table, Daddy and Tee admitted to me that they really had wanted to be back there all along, because this house was the last place they wanted to be on this earth. They had never told me that before: that they wanted to die at home. And now I had made their final dream possible.
In time, nearly all their lost friends would return from the Katrina diaspora. But on the peace of that Christmas night, it was only us three. Behind the walls of that new abode called forth out of the wasteland with faith, hope, love—and with hard, hard labor, not all of it the work of hands—a father, a mother, and a son had returned home together, and rested in what Eliot called
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
EIGHT
GODOT: WHAT’S THE GOOD OF LOSING HEART NOW?
If there is a city in America where art and culture are more intimately woven into the bonds of civic resilience than New Orleans, I have not yet been there. And I’ve been all over.
Albert Murray taught me that culture emerges from a people’s confrontation with and assimilation of experience. Murray and August Wilson further taught me that the peerless creativity of Diaspora Africans on the North American continent is the fruit of their affirmation of life in defiance of suffering and oppression. For Africans in America, the music they created under conditions of unspeakable pain both expressed their sorrows and their joys, and gave them the means to carry on. Their music—blues, jazz, Negro spirituals—were how they imposed aesthetic form on their experiences and redeemed the hard times through which they lived.
These insights give us a way to understand the history of music in New Orleans—and more broadly, the art that came from New Orleans culture—as a social phenomenon of extraordinary importance to the survival of the community. In this sense, art is not merely entertainment; it is life itself.
Consider the amazing story of how New Orleanians created jazz. In the late eighteenth century, when the Spanish ruled the colonial city, masters gave their slaves Sundays off as a day of rest. Hundreds of slaves came together in an open area outside the old city limits to drum, make music, dance, and be free Africans for a day. Historical eyewitness accounts of the scene told of slaves in wild, elaborate dress, and many in no clothing at all. This place, unique in North America, was called Congo Square, and it sits in what would come to be called the Tremé neighborhood.
The Spanish and French Catholics who ruled the city took a relatively relaxed attitude toward African slave culture. Historians speculate that the structures and spirit of their Roman Catholic faith were more easily syncretized with traditional West African religion. Whatever the case, in the 1700s, Europeans, Creoles, and free people of color began coming to Congo Square on Sundays to watch the Africans make music on drums and stringed instruments. Congo Square was also a place of commerce; the Code Noir, or Black Code, allowed the Africans to sell whatever they could and keep the money. When the Protestant Americans took possession of New Orleans in 1804, they tried to suppress Congo Square, but it was useless.
The enslaved musicians communicated with each other through the music on the square, exchanging information in rhythms and melodies. This was a practice that music historians believe launched the jazz practice of “trading fours,” in which jazz band soloists alternate four-bar segments with the drummer.
Over time, the music of Congo Square absorbed the influences of all the peoples of the city. European melodies merged with African rhythms. The slaves—and after Emancipation, the freedmen—took up European musical instruments, like brass horns. Whites fascinated by the new music joined in. By the late nineteenth century, a new and distinct musical tradition—jazz—had been born.
It was a musical style that celebrated improvisation within form, one that extolled individuality within the sure foundation of the collective. As Albert Murray said, a form of music as liberated and as liberating as jazz could not have existed except in a condition of freedom. But the slaves were not free, nor, really, were black New Orleanians after the Civil War. Ah, but here’s the thing: Their spirits were free. They had an inner light that hard times and hard men could not extinguish. It came pouring out of those desperately poor, miserably burdened African Americans in the rhythms and melodies of jazz, which migrated out of Tremé, out of the Crescent City, and changed world music and culture forever.
And as the product of a cultural mélange happening nowhere in the world but on Congo Square, jazz was a uniquely American art form. It is, in fact, the manifestation of the American aesthetic. There is the order of the song, and the notes of the melody, and the chords forming the architecture of the piece, but you have freedom to find your own way within those boundaries. This is America, man, and as Daddy said, however far you roam, you can’t get lost in America.
Black New Orleans incorporated the marching band tradition of jazz into a practical form of self-help: social aid and pleasure clubs.
The clubs came out of the late-nineteenth-century tradition of black benevolent societies, a form of social insurance freed slaves developed to protect themselves against calamity in the absence of conventional insurance (which wasn’t available to them). These informal civic organizations, usually centered around neighborhoods, allowed poor and working-class African Americans, through pooling their resources, to pay medical bills and bury their dead. The roots of this practice lie in a West African tradition of communal responsibility.
Eventually the benevolent societies came to be known as “social aid and pleasure clubs”: It is just like New Orleans to give “pleasure” as much emphasis as “social aid.” By the early twentieth century, the clubs were known all over town for their “second-line” parades. They began as jazz funerals. When a club’s member died, the club marched solemnly behind the family and a dirge-playing jazz band to the cemetery. After the burial, the band led mourners out of the realm of the dead and back to the land of the living with raucous up-tempo numbers. “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” are traditional favorites. This is the New Orleans cycle.
The “first line” includes the band and the social aid and pleasure club members. The “second line” consists of mourners and everybody else who joins the band as it parades through the streets. Second-line marchers—if “marching” is the word for the high-stepping and buck-jump dancing—often twirl parasols or hold handkerchiefs high as they roll. If you have ever been to New Orleans in the July heat, you understand how practical those props are in this ritual.
In his 1954 memoir Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong recalled the joy he took as a young musician, then called Dipper, playing in second-line marches with fellow band members from the Colored Waifs’ Home:
In those days some of the social clubs paraded all day long. When the big bands consisting of old-timers complained about such a tiresome job, the club members called on us.
“Those boys,” they said, “will march all day long and won’t squawk one bit.”
They were right. We were so glad to get a chance to walk in the street that we did not care how long we paraded or how far. The day we were engaged by the Merry-Go-Round Social Club we walked all the way to Carrol
[l]ton, a distance of about twenty-five miles. Playing like mad, we loved every foot of the trip.
The first day we paraded through my old neighborhood everybody was gathered on the sidewalks to see us pass. All the whores, pimps, gamblers, thieves and beggars were waiting for the band because they knew that Dipper, Mayann’s son, would be in it. But they had never dreamed that I would be playing the cornet, blowing it as good as I did. They ran to wake up mama, who was sleeping after a night job, so she could see me go by. Then they asked Mr. Davis [one of the Home’s counselors] if they could give me some money. He nodded his head with approval, not thinking that the money would amount to very much. But he did not know that sporting crowd. Those sports gave me so much that I had to borrow the hats of several other boys to hold it all. I took in enough to buy new uniforms and new instruments for everybody who played in the band. The instruments we had been using were old and badly battered.
That second-line parade gave the poor people of Satchmo’s old neighborhood the opportunity to have a great time dancing in the street, as well as donate cash to help the Waifs’ marching band.
Satchmo said no matter how old he got and how far he had gone in the world, he never tired of watching those New Orleans social aid and pleasure clubs parade, calling it “an irresistible and absolutely unique experience.” Eventually the clubs took to parading for its own sake—Zulu, the best-known club, even parades during Mardi Gras—or for reasons having nothing to do with death. We have come a long way from the time when social aid and pleasure clubs were critical to the survival of the community. Folks have come to see only the pleasure part. But the social aid element was where it originally came from.
You can still see that principle informally at work today. The second line literally walks commerce into a neighborhood. This is the tangible, pragmatic impact of culture. The band leads the crowd to one member’s house or business and stops for a while. If you look behind them, you’ll see a candy man, a guy selling beer and soda, or a woman on her stoop selling barbecue. When the parade stops, people have their lunch or a drink with a neighbor. And if it stops at a barroom or a restaurant, and you have a hundred people or more who have been marching and dancing and having a good time for a mile, they’ll come into your place and refresh themselves. The second line literally uses art to bring business and life into a neighborhood.
The Wind in the Reeds Page 21