The 400 block of South Rampart Street is home to three of the most important buildings in jazz history. First is the Eagle Saloon, once a venue that hosted early jazz greats like King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, and Kid Ory; second is the Iroquois, a Negro vaudeville theater where young Louis Armstrong won a talent show by dunking his head in flour and doing a whiteface routine; and the Karnofsky Store, a tailor shop owned by the Jewish family who took young Louis Armstrong under their wing.
In 2011, John Hasse, the American Music curator at the Smithsonian Institution, told The Times-Picayune, “There is probably no other block in America with buildings bearing so much significance to the history of our country’s great art form, jazz.” Yet there these buildings sit, across the street from City Hall, derelict and in danger of collapse. The Eagle should be our La Scala, our Carnegie Hall, and that block ought to be the Lincoln Center of New Orleans. But decades of neglect have left all three buildings barely standing.
Fortunately, the properties received historical landmark status in 2009, which will likely preserve them from destruction. That’s the hope, anyway. How a city that celebrates its culture in so many ways can neglect it so grievously in others is one of the most frustrating mysteries about New Orleans life. As Creighton Bernette, Treme’s oracle, said in the first season, “Down here in the city of misrule, we are always our own worst enemy.”
And yet people keep coming. Texas-born Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens) migrated to New Orleans to become a chef but, like so many of the city’s chefs, saw her small restaurant capsized by Katrina. Her story line somewhat parallels Delmond Lambreaux’s, in that she heads to New York to hit it big, cooking with chefs like Eric Ripert and David Chang (as he did with top musicians, Simon loved to bring in culinary rock stars for Treme cameos). Though Janette, whose character is partially based on Bayona’s Susan Spicer, loves not having to deal with the craziness of post-Katrina New Orleans, she longs to be back. When an investor lures her home with the promise of opening her own splashy, top-tier restaurant, Janette takes the bait.
The hopeful chef learns in time that the investor is really a cynical businessman who wants to crush what is best in her for the sake of commercial success. What saves Janette, in the end, is the integrity of her art, which redeems her from this deal she made with the devil.
Treme was the first time a fictional television show really explored the culinary world in a sustained way—especially, of course, the New Orleans food scene. Having Lolis, with his encyclopedic culinary knowledge, on staff was a godsend, as was hiring Anthony Bourdain to write the restaurant scenes. During Treme’s run, there were blogs dedicated to discussing what Janette was cooking, how she was cooking it, and what everyone in the show was eating on particular episodes. We featured Crescent City restaurants, from the high-end places like Galatoire’s and Bayona, down to the more democratic joints, like Mosca’s and Li’l Dizzy’s. We also celebrated favorite local eats, like the lemon ice at Angelo Brocato’s and the fried pies from Hubig’s (which, sadly, burned to the ground in 2012). I am immensely proud of the fact that Treme captured on film what it meant to be in New Orleans, living and eating (a distinction without much difference in the Big Easy) in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Treme’s other artists who found their way to New Orleans are the musician couple Sonny (Michiel Huisman) and Annie (Lucia Micarelli), whom we meet busking on the street in the French Quarter. Those two symbolize the adopted New Orleanians who come to town for Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, fall in love with the place, and never leave. This has been happening for three hundred years. It even happened to country people like the Edwardses, my own family, some of whom found their way down the river and never left.
After Katrina, this phenomenon exploded. People from the world over saw what had happened to us and came to help. Sonny and Annie were there before the storm—Sonny helped rescue stranded people—but they did not abandon New Orleans. They are accomplished enough musicians to want to move past the standards tourists want to hear and are approaching a crossroads in their personal and professional lives. Annie, the greater talent of the two, leaves Sonny and his drug habit to make a run at greatness. Sonny, who will never be better than second-rate, drifts in and out of despair before finally finding safe harbor with a life and a wife away from the music scene.
When Annie finds her musician mentor Harley (Steve Earle), who teaches her how to channel her experience of living in New Orleans into her music, she sets anchor. Harley’s murder by a street criminal reminds her of the harshness of life in this chaotic city, but the gift he gave her, of helping her find her song, will restore her and redeem his memory. This too is a story told over and over, from generation to generation in my city.
Everyone who has ever loved New Orleans, whether they were born here or got here as fast as they could, knows that that love costs, sometimes not less than everything. But if you can be faithful, if you can hold on through all the hurt and heartache, you may find resurrection in the life of a spirited culture like no other on earth.
So that is how Treme explains New Orleans. The final Treme episode aired on December 29, 2013. It was a bittersweet moment for me. God knows I was sorry that the good times I had making the show had come to an end. I was sad that a series that served as a rallying point within the Crescent City community had ended. And I was regretful that we would not have the opportunity to tell more stories about the life and times of the people of New Orleans.
It was hard for me to say good-bye to Antoine Batiste. There was a whole world inside him that we were just beginning to explore. They had a saying in 1910 when Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters first opened in Moscow: “Let’s go see how the sisters are doing.” The idea was that the sisters lived before the curtain rose, and they would live after the curtain came down. That’s how I felt about Antoine: that his life would go on, and that he would live forever through the lives he would influence as a high school music teacher. As with portraying Bunk Moreland, I was never fully satisfied that I fleshed out Antoine’s character, but in both cases, I’m grateful that I was able to have the opportunity to try.
BUT MOSTLY I was proud and grateful that I had been part of the creation of an enduring work of art celebrating the soul of my city. Treme will endure not only because David Simon and his cast and crew made a television drama of exceptional quality, but also because, like so much imperishable art, Treme told a universal story about the power of the human spirit.
In Treme’s third season, we filmed a scene re-creating the Waiting for Godot production in which I had starred. Melissa Leo, portraying Toni Bernette, sat in the bleachers and cried. Her tears were tears of recognition: that we have come through the storm, and survived. For so many New Orleanians, each Sunday night during the season was a time when we gathered around the campfire, so to speak, and saw acted in the lives of these fictional characters the story of our lives. It was a cathartic experience, but also an edifying one, because it reminded us of what mattered to us, who we were, and who we could become again.
Memory and desire, life and the people who live it, all came together for an hour each week in a drama that reminded us of why the sacrifices we made to come home and rebuild were worth it. In Treme, we used the art of television drama to declare to the world (and maybe even to ourselves) that this city will never drown, that there’s no use in losing heart now, because the strong men and women of New Orleans are just gittin’ stronger.
TEN
TEE AND THE JOYFUL MYSTERIES
Back in 2004, as a friend returned home from a trip to Africa, I told her that while she was away, this guy Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and it was a knockout.
“You can see it online,” I said. “You’ve got to watch this thing.” On and on I went.
I knew Barack Obama was going to be a big deal, and I was right. Obama, who was at the t
ime a Democratic candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, spoke of the fundamental unity we Americans share amid our diversity.
“It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family,” Obama told the convention crowd. “E pluribus unum—out of many, one.”
Obama warned that there are those who thrive on dividing American against American, for the sake of political gain.
“Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” he proclaimed. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
That was it. I was hooked. This is the vision we need to renew America. It was electrifying.
Could this Obama one day become our nation’s first black president? Shirley Chisholm, an African American Democrat, made history with her 1972 run for the White House. Jesse Jackson made his historic first bid for the presidency in 1984, but despite his surprising primary showings, there was never a real chance that a man as controversial as he had been, and who was as far to the left as he was, could win office in a country in the grip of the Reagan Revolution.
Obama was different. For one, he may have been a community organizer, but he had an Ivy League pedigree. He was a member of the establishment and knew how to talk their language. For another, he was from a younger generation, one that was poised to build on the foundation built by the Rev. Jackson and the civil rights movement. Barack Obama, who emerged politically in the post-Clinton era, had the political and cultural sensibility to take the progressive fight into the future.
In 2007, I was living in New Orleans again, working to reconstitute the Pontchartrain Park Neighborhood Association and getting a fast, harsh education in practical politics. I realized that if we were going to get things done in Pontchartrain Park, we residents—about fifteen hundred of us—were going to have to get politically active. If we didn’t organize and find our collective voice, we would have no leverage to fight the city and well-connected developers when they came to grab our land. Politics, I learned quickly, mattered. If we homeowners didn’t get involved to protect our own interests, we would by default surrender the battlefield to those who do not have our interests at heart. Simple as that.
This is how I came to volunteer for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Nobody knew how much things needed to change in America more than the people of New Orleans, who had suffered like nobody else under the incompetence of the George W. Bush administration. It was intolerable to think that America could stand four more years of a Republican in the White House.
What’s more, it was impossible for me to believe that Hillary Clinton would be the change agent the country needed. Had she won the Democratic nomination and then the presidency, that would have meant at least twenty-four years of the White House being in the hands of members of the Bush or Clinton dynasties. That’s not change.
Finally, the opportunity to be part of a campaign that, if successful, would result in the first black president was not to be missed. Ours was a nation that enslaved my ancestors. It fought a civil war that ended slavery, but spent the next century treating us like second-class citizens, keeping us poor, uneducated, and oppressed. Yet we endured, from generation to generation. And now we had the real possibility of triumph: that the country that brought us here as chattel would elect one of us as its president.
How could I, the great-grandson of a slave, not be part of that? This might be a fulfillment of the hopes that Mamo and Papo, and Tee and Daddy, tendered in their hearts through the long, hard years of struggle. I was too young to march for civil rights during the movement, but this was something I could do in my own time and place. For the first time in my life, I felt the kind of hope that was alive in the 1960s, before it all fell apart. Barack Obama became the Robert F. Kennedy of my political imagination.
My brother Ron and I put ourselves at the Obama campaign’s disposal. Ron went to Iowa, and I went on the radio. I had a contact within the campaign who sent me a schedule of black radio stations around the country that I was to call to rally support for Obama’s election. It felt great to be active in changing my country for the better. What I was working toward at the local level in New Orleans, I was also working toward nationally. This is the difference between being a subject—willing to be passive pawns in a game controlled by others—and a citizen who makes himself a player.
The American people responded to the message of change. You couldn’t get a better example of people needing to see change than what we had gone through in New Orleans. The entire country was suffering the effects of an economic hurricane that had wiped out tens of thousands of families and businesses. We couldn’t keep going like this. If we didn’t get change now, we were going to be in trouble.
On Election Day, I was at my home in California, where I was registered to vote. I woke up early and went to the firehouse down the street from me in Pasadena to cast my ballot. Pasadena is like Uptown New Orleans: well off, heavily white, heavily Republican. I was standing in one of two lines at the firehouse, one of the few African Americans there that morning, when a little old white lady leaned in and said to me, “There’s going to be a lot of people like us today.”
“People like us?” I said.
“Republicans voting for Obama,” she replied.
“I’ve got to tell you, I’m not a Republican.”
“Isn’t this the Republican line?”
“No, they do it by zip code.”
The poor woman looked horrified. She had revealed her political disloyalty to a Democrat!
After voting, I went straight to the airport and flew to Chicago, to be at campaign headquarters on the big night. They put me to work doing more radio calls for the get-out-the-vote effort. That night, when the returns started coming in, you could see David Axelrod and David Plouffe, the Obama campaign’s top strategists, deep in conversation in a conference room. At 6:48 Chicago time, the TV networks called Pennsylvania for Obama—a state that we had been told would be a bellwether.
The shot echoed around the room. All of us had the same thought: Get to Grant Park!
I hustled the two blocks away from the Michigan Avenue campaign headquarters and joined the river of people, tens of thousands strong, flowing into the downtown park. Some were waving flags. Some were holding Yes We Can signs. Some were weeping tears of joy. Everyone was jubilant. Somebody had given me a pass that let me go to the front of the crowd, down by the stage where, win or lose, Obama would soon speak.
At ten p.m., all 240,000 of us in the park were watching the CNN broadcast on the big screens set up on the stage. The polls had just closed in California. And there it was! The banner headline: “Barack Obama Elected President.” The crowd erupted. Tears ran wild down my cheeks. I thought of Papo and Mamo, and all they had endured to get to this moment. I thought of Daddy and Tee, and the fears they faced down to help our country arrive at a night like this. I thought of those who sat humiliated at the back of the bus, dreaming of a day when a man who looked like them would one day be president.
And I thought of all those who died to protect the right to vote. “There’s blood on that ballot box,” the saying goes, and never did those sacred words feel truer than on that glorious November night in Chicago.
There were so many good-hearted folks in the crowd that night who knew what a special meaning this event had for African Americans. They would say to me, “Hey, man, great night”—meaning for my people. I would say to them, “Yes, this is good for my people, but this is good for all of us.”
Then, above us on the big screens appeared the face of John McCain, the vanquished Republican candidate. He was conceding the election to Obama, and damned if his speech didn’t catch me off guard.
“A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Boo
ker T. Washington to visit—to dine at the White House—was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time,” the Republican said. “There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African American to the presidency of the United States. . . . Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth,” he continued. “Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country.”
It was one of the most eloquent speeches in American political history. Everything that was in my heart—the heart of a forty-four-year-old black Democrat from Louisiana—was coming out of the mouth of a seventy-two-year-old white Republican from Arizona. It was a strangely, wonderfully American moment, and it made me flush with patriotism.
At last, the president-elect emerged, taking a victory walk around the stage with his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Sasha and Malia. Then, alone on the stage, Barack Obama said his first public words since learning that he would become America’s first black president.
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he said.
“It’s the answer,” he continued, “that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”
THOSE WORDS from President-Elect Obama called to mind the 1965 speech Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered in Montgomery, Alabama, after completing the long march from Selma to petition the governor to respect voting rights for Negroes. The march began on March 9 in Selma with white lawmen savaging the peaceful protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tear-gassing them and beating them in front of television cameras. Bloody Sunday, as it came to be called, shocked the conscience of the nation.
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