The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  We’ve got to be ready for the times. I had been there for four years shooting Treme, four years to prepare for this moment. So I could be strong for Daddy. So I could be strong for myself. So I could fulfill my mother’s wish.

  We filmed the last episode of Treme in early 2013, halfway through its fourth season. On the last night of shooting, I turned to David Simon and said, “This was more than a job. This was more than a TV show. I was brought here to spend these last years with my mother. And you gave me that gift.”

  For my part, I was able to help him on the front end of Treme production, guiding him to people in New Orleans that he had to meet. One of the first I sent him to was Karen Livers, a veteran actress who is steeped in Crescent City culture. If you know Karen, you’ll end up knowing everyone worth knowing in town. She’s friends with artists, writers, Mardi Gras Indians, musicians, bartenders, chefs, the social aid and pleasure clubs, and all the characters who make New Orleans so colorful.

  Though Treme was about the city of New Orleans and its struggle to rebuild after Katrina, David and series co-creator Eric Overmyer chose to focus on what David called the city’s “culture bearers.” The show took its name from the historically black neighborhood that was the home of Congo Square, where Africans and Europeans and Creoles, slaves and masters and free people of color, came together and created jazz. The Faubourg Tremé was where what the world knows and loves as New Orleans culture was born. David wanted to avoid what some folks derisively call “N’Awlins”—the kitschy version of the city that so many tourists come wanting to see, but that has only a tangential relationship to the real place. Our show would not be N’Awlins; it would be Treme.

  To help Team Treme get it right, I advised David to hook up with my great friend Lolis Eric Elie, whom he had met at a past Mardi Gras. Lolis is a New Orleanian to the marrow. The son of Lolis Edward Elie, one of the city’s preeminent civil rights attorneys, he was at that time a columnist for The Times-Picayune, as well as the author of several well-regarded books about food. He had just completed, with filmmaker Dawn Logsdon, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, a prize-winning documentary about the historic neighborhood. David not only reconnected with Lolis, but hired him as story editor for Treme, a gig that turned into a television career for my friend.

  I was terrified at the beginning of Treme, because I knew that if there was anything false about New Orleans in the series, I would never hear the end of it. I constantly took cast members around town to clubs, to restaurants, and to second lines, helping them with their character research. They met real New Orleanians—people like musician Kermit Ruffins, chefs Donald Link and Susan Spicer, and many others who were invited by David to appear on the show. Combine this with David’s love of New Orleans music and his sense of storytelling, and you have a fictional television series that combines the relevance of a documentary with the poignancy of a poem. The series aired on HBO from 2010 through the end of 2013. By the end of its run, Treme had become an inextricable part of the culture it celebrated.

  My experience with Treme deepened my appreciation of the art that came out of New Orleans. I realized that so many New Orleanians are people who are artistic though they lack the privilege of art being their occupation. Still, they create. That a working man would give a year to constructing a Mardi Gras Indian suit, a grandiose costume resplendent with brightly colored feathers and intricate, hand-stitched beadwork. That a schoolteacher would work a year organizing her walking krewe (a parade club that marches but has no floats) for Carnival season. That a high school musician would work out physically to prepare to march with his band in a parade every night for a two-week period, to play music and make his city dance and shout for joy.

  Before Treme, I knew how much beauty and how much fun the end result of these labors were. No one from New Orleans can fail to appreciate that. What I did not know until after Treme was how deeply art, and the love of art, imbues the everyday lives of the city and its people. It wasn’t just entertainment. It wasn’t just for fun. It was for love, for beauty, for transcendence.

  You could not get a better example of art and life imitating each other, at least for me. Katrina’s near-destruction of my family’s life, and the challenge of rebuilding that life despite the constant fear that most of the people, places, and things we loved were washed away forever—this was what hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians were coping with, and what the characters on Treme wrestled with too. Where does hope come from, then? How do you find the strength to go on? What makes life worth living when almost all of the things that made life worth living before are gone, or nearly so?

  Some fans of The Wire were disappointed with Treme; they wanted to see The Wire in New Orleans. There was crime and political intrigue in New Orleans, just like in Baltimore, and David addressed that in Treme, though in a different, less gritty way. If the main concern of The Wire was how culture, especially the culture of bureaucracies, tears individuals and society apart, the central theme in Treme was how culture holds people together and helps them endure. In Treme, we achieved that.

  There are, however, many similarities between Baltimore and New Orleans. Both are port cities filled with robust working-class people and culture. Both suffer from deep and abiding poverty. Both have suffered from white flight and the economic losses that brought about. Both love crabs—steamed, then spiced, in Baltimore; boiled in spices in New Orleans. And both have hearts that serve as cultural magnets: the French Quarter and the Inner Harbor.

  Culturally, we have a lot more going on in New Orleans than they do in Baltimore. And African American culture in New Orleans is more southern, and therefore more friendly. But then, in Baltimore, black folk are more aware of their history than we are in New Orleans. They have Frederick Douglass, and a historical memory of insurrection in the nineteenth century. We remember the civil rights movement, but not much before that.

  Treme showed a nation that thinks of New Orleans only as little more than a party town that our culture is not just about entertainment and letting the good times roll. We showed the parades rolling, but we also showed why parades matter. We showed the gumbo pot bubbling on the stove, but we also showed why gumbo makes a difference in the lives of everyday folks. Culture—art, music, food, religion, all of it—is what gives all people everywhere a tangible sense of what they share as a community. There may be no better place to highlight that universal fact of humanity’s life than in New Orleans, where the culture is so singular, and so powerful.

  It’s like this. I would call my mother up sometimes and ask her how her day was, and she would start talking about the string beans and pork chops she had made Daddy for dinner. For Tee, as for so many New Orleanians, to have cooked and eaten a delicious mess of string beans, cooked down in salty bacon, paired with a couple of succulent chops, was pretty much the definition of a good day.

  BECAUSE OF THE WAY it showcased our culture, Treme drew people to New Orleans. I know this for a fact. Once I was at Jazz Fest, hustling across the Fair Grounds, late to see Allen Toussaint play. Someone in the crowd stopped me and said, “Aren’t you the guy from Treme?” Yes, I said, but I really have to go.

  “No, please stop for a second,” she said. “I’m from Cleveland. The only reason I’m here is because I saw Treme.”

  It happened at a restaurant in the city, when a waiter told me he didn’t want to say anything at first, but the reason he moved to New Orleans to live and to work was because of Treme. He told me that he had been walking on the Appalachian Trail, not really knowing where to go when he finished, and stopped at a hotel overnight. He saw Treme on the hotel television and knew where he was headed next. He just had to be a part of New Orleans.

  In New Orleans itself, Treme became group therapy for the entire city struggling to come back after the devastation of Katrina. There were watch parties all over the city on Sunday nights. Those who had gone through the flood were reminded of t
he pain, but also of the virtues of life in New Orleans. Most of all, they were reminded of what we were all fighting for: our culture. Amid all the skepticism both inside and outside the city about whether New Orleans was worth saving, or could be saved at all, Treme answered week after week why our city and its culture were so important. Treme reminded us that the lives our culture would save would be our own. Treme told people who believed that we were nothing but a corrupt, crime-infested, fading good-time town that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we may be flat on our backs, but we are looking up at the stars.

  At its best, Treme helped us remember that pain and suffering and injustice need not have the last word, because even out of something as monstrous as slavery, something as angelic as jazz can arise to redeem the time. I’m biased, but I really do believe that Treme played a part in helping my storm-bedraggled city rediscover its song.

  My character turned out not to be named Wendell, as in the original Treme draft, but Antoine Batiste, a trombone player and the epitome of the journeyman musician in New Orleans. He is someone who puts his hat out on a French Quarter street and plays for tips in the afternoon, and winds his day down in a nightclub playing with a well-oiled band. He ekes out a living doing what he loves to do, adapting to any situation.

  Like jazz, his life is improvisational. He is a likable ne’er-do-well who struggles for constancy in his profession and relationships as a father, ex-husband, and partner to his live-in girlfriend. His personal life reflects the turmoil left behind by Katrina, yet when everything else is out of order, the music is the one thing that makes sense to him. It is Antoine’s true north.

  It took the storm and flood to shake Antoine out of his lackadaisical, devil-may-care approach to life and awaken to the awesome responsibility he has as a culture bearer. When he becomes a middle school music teacher, Antoine is surprised to find within himself a new maturity, one that helps him accept his task of teaching the city’s musical tradition to the next generation.

  In New Orleans, high school marching bands are a big deal. Band programs offer some of the poorest and most desperate kids in the nation a way out of the poverty and chaos that threaten to engulf them. Through the love of music and the city’s culture, Antoine discovered a way to love the kids whose education had been entrusted to him. This helped him to become a better father and partner; it helped him to become a better man.

  In season three, Antoine takes one of his students to meet Lionel Ferbos, the living incarnation of New Orleans jazz tradition, at the Palm Court Jazz Café, where he played every Sunday night until his retirement in the spring of 2014, at the age of a hundred two. Mr. Ferbos, as I knew to call him, lived in Pontchartrain Park and had played jazz trumpet for an incredible eighty-seven years. In that episode, Mr. Ferbos, playing himself at the Palm Court, explained to Antoine’s student the importance of jazz in the culture of New Orleans.

  That scene is now a precious historical document; Mr. Ferbos passed away two days after he turned a hundred three. The Archbishop of New Orleans celebrated his funeral mass at the Corpus Christi–Epiphany Catholic Church, in the Seventh Ward, the heart of the city’s old Creole establishment. Hundreds of musicians and mourners second-lined behind the hearse to the cemetery.

  What the storm did to Antoine—reminding him of his responsibility to preserve and pass on the cultural legacy of New Orleans—it did to me as well. All it takes for a tradition to die is for a single generation to refuse it or ignore it. Katrina woke me up and fired me up. I wanted to come home and play a part in the reclaiming of our city—and its rebirth. Our ancestors created something known and loved the world over; we cannot let it go. In the same way, we children of Pontchartrain Park cannot let die the neighborhood legacy created by our parents. My New Orleans homecoming, and the art and activism I have produced these past few years, made a better man of me. When Treme viewers trace the moral arc of Antoine Batiste’s character, they are also, in a real way, following the moral arc of my own.

  Of course there are big differences. I’m a professional actor, not a journeyman street musician. Antoine emerged from research David did with the trumpet player Kermit Ruffins, trombonist Stafford Agee, and saxophonist Donald Harrison, Jr. Antoine also came out of a busker on Royal Street I know only as Wolf.

  Wolf never had a case for his horn, carrying it on his arm like Antoine did. Every horn player I know says that Wolf was one of the defining members of the street brass band renaissance in the 1980s. You could always pick Wolf out of a crowd, they say, because when he would do a solo, he would crouch down into a squat, almost in a fighter’s stance. But I had never seen him.

  Keith Hart, who taught me trombone—I learned how to do all the right moves, but Stafford Agee played the music off screen—told me one day, “Wolf is the guy, but he’s fallen on hard times.” Wolf became a mythical character to me, like John Henry or Paul Bunyan, living and playing somewhere on the streets of New Orleans. He was the mystery musician who carried his horn in the crook of his elbow, who was so soulful that when he squatted with his ’bone on his shoulder, you knew he was going to take you somewhere special.

  After we started shooting Treme in 2010, people would ask me whom Antoine was based on. A combination of people, I would say, but he’s mostly Wolf. The purity of his love for music and the brilliance of his musicianship was clear, but he had a tumultuous personal life that meant you could never really count on him. That was Wolf, and that was Antoine.

  So one day Doreen Ketchens, among the great clarinetists of New Orleans, was playing on Royal Street and I took a friend to see her. She plays the clubs all the time, but when she hits the street, the other buskers all defer to her. Doreen is the real deal, continuing the legacy of Sidney Bechet, Pete Fountain, and Dr. Michael White.

  Standing a ways down Royal Street listening to Doreen play, I said to my friend, “See how great she is? That’s real New Orleans music.”

  Then Doreen finished her solo, and whomp! there was a mighty trombone blast. “Oh my God,” I told my friend, “Can you hear that? That’s real New Orleans right there! Let’s get closer.”

  Sure enough, the trombone player squatted and tightened like a fist, and nearly knocked us all out with the power of his playing.

  “Wolf!” I shouted. “It’s Wolf!”

  “Yeah, what?” he said, then started playing again.

  After he finished, I went to him, introduced myself, told him about the show, and said, “I think I’m playing you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I heard.”

  Before we walked on, I told him that I had to keep in touch with him.

  “I’ll be in touch with you,” said the lone Wolf.

  I reported back to David that I had met the real Wolf and exhorted him to put him in the show. We finally did, in the season-two re-creation of the jazz funeral for Dinerral Shavers, the real-life snare drummer who was shot to death on Dumaine Street by a street criminal in 2006. In the final season, when Antoine is doubting his music, he plays late into the night at a jam session. Kidd Jordan walks in, and Donald Harrison, Jr., walks in . . . and there, in the musician’s scrum, is Wolf.

  Wolf tells Antoine that he’s no damn good, so they have a cutting contest, an improvised battle between two jazz soloists. It makes me so happy to think that Treme viewers had the opportunity to bear witness to Wolf’s genius. He is one of the grassroots innovators, a street musician who helped start the modern brass-band rebirth in New Orleans—and we were able to get him on film in a way that gives him the honor he deserves.

  This is why Treme was more than a TV show. We documented the culture of our time in New Orleans, in a way that will be there to be explored and studied for decades to come. New Orleanians who were children during the post-Katrina aftermath will one day be able to screen Treme for their grandchildren, and tell them, yes, baby, that’s what it was like. They will have a cultural document.

  And if anybody doub
ts the importance of New Orleans, the vitality and uniqueness of our culture, and its relevance to the meaning of life, let them come to Treme. Every one of us who had anything to do with that show—its producers, writers, actors, crew members, and guest stars, as well as all the people throughout the city who welcomed us and made production possible—all should think of Treme as our gift to New Orleans, to America, and to the future.

  Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown) is the other professional musician in the Treme cast of characters. He is the son of Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters), a laborer and Big Chief of a Mardi Gras Indian tribe (more on this in a moment). Delmond is a refined, sophisticated artist who has taken what he was given in New Orleans, moved to New York City, refined it, and elevated it. He is now a modern jazz star, but he is alienated from his father and his roots, and struggles throughout the series to reestablish contact, and to make New Orleans his own.

  Delmond is a familiar example of the New Orleans artist who leaves home to further his training, because he knows there really is no other way. They told us on our first day at NOCCA that this was how it was going to be, and they were right. Nobody ever really leaves New Orleans in his heart, but the family and friends they leave behind sometimes make it hard to maintain a connection. Like Chief Lambreaux, they may look down on those who leave as having been disloyal to their roots. And truth to tell, there really is a danger that success in the wider world can blind an artist to what he owes to the culture that raised him up.

  Delmond reminds me of Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Donald Harrison, Jr.—his late father was Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame, a Mardi Gras Indian tribe he founded—and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who grew up with me in Pontchartrain Park, and, of course, pianist and singer Harry Connick, Jr. They all became part of the 1980s migration of New Orleans jazz musicians to New York, pioneered by Wynton. They were all from New Orleans, but to some extent, they were no longer of it.