The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  That was Delmond. It took the storm, and trying to care for his stubborn father from afar, to awaken him to the richness of the music, culture, and tradition in New Orleans, and to bring him back home. In Delmond’s past was his future. He learned that his artistic freedom and creativity did not have to come at the expense of his family and his tradition, but that they could exist together. This really happened to Donald Harrison, Jr., who served as a Treme consultant and appeared in nine episodes. After his father’s death in 1998, he returned to New Orleans and became Big Chief of his dad’s tribe. That was the true story behind Delmond’s story.

  Delmond’s biggest challenge is to figure out how to be inspired by his father’s legacy rather than be crushed by it. Big Chief Albert Lambreaux symbolizes the deep pride so many African American men in the city developed within their own communities, in part because they were denied pride and the attention and opportunities they deserved outside their communities.

  When Treme begins, Chief Lambreaux returns to his storm-devastated neighborhood, and to the now abandoned bar where his Indian tribe used to practice. The Mardi Gras Indians are an African American New Orleans social tradition going back to at least the mid–nineteenth century. Each “tribe” is composed of men from a certain neighborhood, or “ward,” gathered around a leader, known as the Big Chief. On Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph’s Day (March 19), they “mask”—that is, don extremely elaborate, colorful costumes made of beads and feathers—and march and dance through the streets, chanting and drumming. Lore has it that the tribes model themselves after Native Americans in homage to those who offered refuge to slaves escaping the city and plantations.

  In the event that two tribes’ paths cross, they will engage in a ritualistic, highly theatrical battle in the streets. In the old days, these meetings were frequently violent, as they were used to settle scores. In modern times, though, the battles are entirely symbolic and offer an opportunity for opposing tribes to show off their own costumes (called “suits”) and prowess. The greatest compliment a Mardi Gras Indian can be paid is to be told that he is “pretty.”

  It’s an “only in New Orleans” institution that looks frivolous to outsiders, but that has profound, abiding meaning to its participants, and to the black community. The sense of brotherhood among the Indians is powerful, and the craftsmanship that goes into the creation of their hand-sewn suits—which the men make themselves—is breathtaking. The chants they use have been handed down from generation to generation.

  In Treme, Chief Lambreaux’s dogged determination to bring back his lost tribe members to the city is his declaration that the colorful tradition must be saved, no matter what. It’s not really about feathers, chants, and Mardi Gras rituals involving fake Indian tribes; it’s about the survival of the community—the real-life tribe. Indian masking on Mardi Gras is the way they know who they are, and what it means to be part of their culture. Chief Lambreaux knows that by fighting for his tribe, he’s fighting for the soul of his people.

  As Big Chief, Albert Lambreaux has to be steadfast. He tries to demonstrate steadfastness to his adult children and to all the members of his community. He tells them by his words and his actions that if they don’t understand this pride and protect this legacy, no one else will. It takes strength to stand fast in the face of life’s storms. I mentioned earlier, in talking about my late uncle L. H. Edwards, the 1931 Sterling Brown poem “Strong Men.” It reads, in part:

  The strong men keep a-comin’ on

  Gittin’ stronger. . . .

  That poem—my favorite—is Chief Lambreaux. That poem is my father. That poem is Ellis Marsalis and the legacy of all those musicians. The poem discloses the particular quality of Chief Lambreaux’s character: He’s protective of his community and its cultural traditions, and he demonstrates how those cultural traditions can rebuild family and community scattered to the winds. He is a craftsman who is proud of his construction work. He is rebuilding his community both spiritually and materially. When he finishes restoring his home, Chief Lambreaux can lie down and let his spirit fly away.

  He is the embodiment of all those men—some known, most unknown—who have built and sustained their families and tribes, no matter how materially impoverished they were. We may have little money, but we are rich in spirit, culture, and family—but that is a wealth that must be reinvested by and in each generation if it is to remain.

  This is what drew Donald Harrison, Jr., home to become chief of his father’s tribe. He plays jazz all around the world, but on Mardi Gras morning, he puts on the new suit he’s been sewing all year and hits the streets with the Guardians of the Flame. This is what drew Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr., back home to create the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music. And this is what drew me back home to perform in Waiting for Godot, and to dedicate myself to rebuilding Pontchartrain Park. Like Delmond, we rallied from afar to the side of our fathers and our tribes in the hour of their despair, and we found new purpose in old traditions.

  Even Treme’s carpetbagging developer Nelson Hidalgo (Jon Seda) recognizes the beauty and worth of New Orleans’s culture. Even amid the craftiness and carpetbagger planning, in the midst of pillaging for self-gain, he realizes the beauty of the food and the music and the culture of the city.

  Nelson personified the kind of wheeler-dealer who rushes in behind every disaster. They come saying they mean to do good, but they really mean to do well—for themselves. This sort of character flocked to post-Katrina New Orleans like vultures on a carcass. They knew that the hurricane’s flood would be followed by a flood of reconstruction dollars rolling in from the federal government and insurance companies, and they were determined to ride that wave all the way to the bank.

  The carpetbaggers infiltrated the restoration process on the political end. Once they gained the confidence of a particular political leader or bureaucrat, they became “experts” tasked with developing programs that were most beneficial to them.

  You saw that in New Orleans after the storm. Those without the city’s best interests at heart decided that we had to disperse the poor, to break up this concentration of poverty. Thus, they tore down the housing projects. What they were really after is to make sure those precious plots of land so close to the French Quarter and downtown didn’t have poor people in them.

  In Pontchartrain Park, we put together a plan to bring back a neighborhood in which almost every resident owned their house, and which was one of the most stable neighborhoods in the city. But thanks to political machinations and misguided policies, we have been forced to turn away cash buyers for redeveloped Pontchartrain Park houses because city policy requires our Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation to sell to people who have an income that is lower than the average median income. It means that most will have been in public housing. I recognize that those folks need a place to live, but when you won’t let in people who have the means to return to their own community, something is seriously wrong. We had a man who wanted to buy a house right across the street from his grandmother, but we couldn’t sell it to him because he made too much money in the eyes of federal housing law. This is the kind of logic that led to New Orleanians qualifying for government aid to raze their homes, but not to renovate them.

  Nelson Hidalgo reflected the culture of political corruption and economic exploitation that will forever keep New Orleans and Louisiana down if we never overcome it. What redeems us is, again, our culture: our music, our cuisine, our architecture, and our traditions. Take the culture out of Louisiana and I would agree with people who say New Orleans is not worth saving. It’s Newark with oppressive humidity. It’s Cleveland with a better football team. Lafcadio Hearn, a nineteenth-century writer who left Cincinnati for New Orleans, summed it up best in a letter, this quote from which we used in the Treme pilot:

  Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladmi
nistrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

  DAVID SIMON put the Hearn quote in the mouth of Creighton Bernette, a Tulane literature professor played by John Goodman. Creighton is a big, bluff man, a passionate connoisseur of New Orleans culture who is radicalized by Katrina. In the Treme pilot, he explodes in an on-camera interview with a British TV journalist who questions his view about the cause of the city’s destruction (that the hurricane was a natural disaster, but the flooding of the city was a “man-made catastrophe of epic proportions”).

  Creighton’s wife, Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo), is a civil rights attorney. Her character is based on Mary Howell, a legendary New Orleans plaintiffs’ lawyer who made her considerable reputation fighting police brutality and corruption, and representing clients as diverse as whistleblowers and street musicians. Toni symbolizes those New Orleanians who bravely take on the thankless battle of forcing a city that would prefer to let the good times roll than to do the hard work of democratic self-accountability. The Toni character constantly puts the question to the viewer, at least the ones in New Orleans: Are you going to be part of the solution, or are you going to be part of the problem?

  NOPD Lieutenant Terry Colson (David Morse), an honest cop whose conscience drives him to cooperate with the FBI in taking down police corruption, is walking the same straight path as Toni. He sacrifices his career to do the right thing. How could he say that he loved New Orleans if he did otherwise? How could he live with himself? Even when Colson’s family leaves New Orleans for Indiana, he stays behind to work for reform in the police department. He knows how much this matters to the city.

  If New Orleans is ever going to be saved, it will be saved in part by good men and women in public service like Terry Colson. The headlines are reserved for bad cops and crooked bureaucrats, but the good public servants have been there all along. They just need to find the courage of their convictions, and to realize that lawyers like Toni Bernette—and her real-life double, Mary Howell—are not the enemy.

  Unlike her fictionalized TV version, Mary Howell, happily, did not have a husband who committed suicide. But John Goodman had signed on for only a year of Treme, so Creighton was going to have to leave the scene somehow. Creighton became a combination of post-Katrina residents who went online to become grassroots activists and advocates for New Orleans—ordinary people who were shaken by the disaster out of their silence.

  The chief inspiration for Creighton was a computer science professor and blogger named Ashley Morris. He was a big-boned, larger-than-life wild man whose profane, often witty blog rants about New Orleans after the storm drew a large local following. One of Morris’s most popular Katrina aftermath jeremiads, one that dropped three f-bombs in the five-word title alone, began like this:

  I’m so glad all you Chicagoans have figured out exactly how to fix New Orleans. Look at your own nasty city and explain why you can’t deal with snow other than to throw tons of salt on the road, and why you can’t buy a beer for under $5. Fuck you, you fucking fucks.

  It went downhill from there. Or uphill, depending on your point of view. Ashley, well known to David Simon as a fan of The Wire, dropped dead of a heart attack in 2008. He never saw the homage that David paid him by putting many of his actual blog lines into Creighton’s mouth, in the character’s YouTube rants. Morris’s f-bomb extravaganza was, word for filthy word, the sign-off of Creighton’s YouTube debut.

  Creighton’s despair over the fate of his city led to his suicide. He took the Algiers ferry over to the West Bank and, at the midway point, jumped overboard into the Mississippi. This too has a real-life analogue: The New Orleans suicide rate after Katrina tripled, and the rate of serious mental disorders reached what government health officials described as an epidemic level never before recorded in the United States—all this, with the mental health treatment infrastructure in collapse. As sad as Creighton’s fate was, this too was a big part of the city’s experience after the storm.

  On the day he took his own life, Creighton savored all the things he loved the most about living in New Orleans. He went to Audubon Park, to Casamento’s for oysters, to Café du Monde for beignets, and Liuzza’s by the Track for gumbo, a barbecue shrimp po’boy, and a cold Abita Amber. At last, he went to the foot of Canal Street and caught a ride on the Algiers into oblivion. Creighton’s last day was an elegy for the Crescent City, and a tragic reminder that for all its power to heal and to renew, culture cannot save us all.

  LaDonna Batiste-Williams withstood all that Creighton Bernette did, and much, much worse, but held on with the tenacity of one of the alligator snapping turtles that have lived in the Louisiana swamps since time out of mind. LaDonna—portrayed by Khandi Alexander, who gave one of the great performances in American television history—represents that indestructible force within the people of New Orleans that helps the city come back time and time again. We said it best on the Treme season-three poster: Hurricanes. Floods. Exile. Crime. Corruption. Betrayal. Greed. Neglect. Is that all you got?

  LaDonna survived the storm, the flood, the death of her brother Daymo at the hands of the criminal justice system, a rape and beating, the collapse of her family, and the burning down of her neighborhood bar, Gigi’s—but she never gives up, and never gives in. I also see in LaDonna a symbol of African American resilience: Slavery. Poverty. Jim Crow. Segregation: Is that all you got?

  MOST PEOPLE who come to New Orleans to see the culture never go outside the French Quarter, Uptown, or a few other select sites on the tourist map. Those funky little corner barrooms like Gigi’s, the ones few outsiders ever visit, are true incubators of New Orleans culture. They are the town squares for their neighborhoods. From those bars, the Mardi Gras Indians came, and the social aid and pleasure clubs as well.

  These barrooms are places where the diverse cultures of the city cross, and creatively cross-pollinate. Even the businessman from the Central Business District will come have a drink with the man who works in his mailroom, because they both love that piano player, and besides, the red beans and rice that joint has on Mondays is something else. In New Orleans, it started at Congo Square, where black and white, rich and poor, came out to see the slaves sing and dance, and where that fertile social intercourse gave birth to jazz.

  The culture is more fluid in New Orleans than in most places, but also more stable. This is a poetic paradox of life in the Big Easy. Today, you can walk two blocks from a neighborhood where the working poor live, and suddenly you’re on St. Charles Avenue, one of the grandest boulevards in the world, and you think, How about that, the descendants of former slaves and descendants of former slave owners haven’t moved. You have a bar on every corner, and a church on every other, and those two worlds yield to each other as easily as Saturday night gives way to Sunday morning.

  When you listen to the Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, all nine hours of them, you can hear the Rampart Street and St. Charles Avenue, the church and the barroom, the rich and the poor. The grandiose and the grassroots, all rubbing shoulders (and other things too) with each other, because New Orleans is so small. It’s hard to keep these combustible elements mixing without the occasional explosion, but places like Gigi’s, with their cold beer and warm hearts, presided over by happy geniuses like Miss LaDonna, are where New Orleans lays its burdens down on a barstool, puts a dollar in the jukebox, and solves its problems over a plate of red beans and rice.

  Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) is one of those quixotic white guys you run into all over New Orleans. He’s an Uptown blueblood rebelling against his posh upbringing, not for the sake of rebellion, but because he honest to God loves the music of black New Orleans. He can sit with his mother and father wearing the blue blazer that he bought at Perlis, the old-school Upt
own clothing store, and later that night take his bohemian Aunt Mimi (Elizabeth Ashley) to a bounce concert in the hood. Davis’s passion for the city overwhelms him, but his chronic inability to get his life together is deeply representative of New Orleans’s self-sabotaging dysfunction. That “Take it easy, bro’” attitude of his has its charms, but it also has a serious downside.

  The real-life Davis is Davis Rogan, a tall, shambling DJ and musician (a better one than his Treme version, it must be said), a fifth-generation New Orleanian who wrote all the songs for Steve Zahn’s character. His manic reputation has gotten him thrown out of many a Big Easy bar. In one club on Frenchmen Street, they used to have a sign posted that said, “If your name is Davis Rogan, please leave.” David Simon once said of him, “Like New Orleans, Davis Rogan is always one bad move away from falling on his ass. And yet, on at least every other occasion, he’s the cat that drops from the tree and lands on his feet.”

  What the real-life Davises understand that some in their social and economic class do not—I’m talking to you, Jimmy Reiss—is that if you eliminate the grassroots community that you think of as the source of our problems, you also eliminate the community that is the source of so much of our greatness. Jacques Morial, playing himself in a season-one episode of Treme, tries to explain to Davis McAlary what’s really at stake when the feds and the city establishment push for a smaller city—one without poor people.

  “The culture of New Orleans, that’s what’s at risk,” Morial says. “If they knock out the infrastructure that sustains the culture, then it’s gone forever.”

  This is what happened with Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Jelly Roll Morton, and all the artists who created jazz a century ago. The establishment thought, “Oh my God, we’ve got to get rid of this slum”—and bulldozed the Back o’ Town neighborhood where they all came from. That’s where the Superdome is now. And here we are, after Katrina, facing the same thing. The same mentality that tore down Pops’s house, Jelly Roll’s house, Sidney Bechet’s house, is alive and well in New Orleans.