A Conversation with Ned Sublette
by Habitus · 09/16/08
In general, though, the American period brought enormous changes for black people in New Orleans.
In the Spanish years, the enslaved person had the legally guaranteed right to purchase his or her own freedom. They had various ways of earning money: they could work on Sunday, they could own businesses, own taverns—they could even own other slaves. So they had a future. And they could play their drums, so they had a past. In the English-speaking parts of North America, they were not permitted to have either. They had to become Protestants. They weren’t allowed to play drums or speak their ancestral languages. And they also knew that their great-great-grandchildren, until the nth generation, would be slaves, even if their father were the slave owner. It was the most psychologically oppressive form of slavery that existed in the hemisphere.
But Congo Square was, in a sense, a kind of Creole resistance to the Anglo Americans. A Catholic resistance to the Protestants. I don’t think it’s an accident that Congo Square, which went through the 1830s, definitively shut down by 1851, lasted about as long as the French Creoles of Louisiana existed as a separate power bloc. And Congo Square was right opposite the French Quarter.
What does the term Creole mean in the context of New Orleans?
It’s tricky. It tends to mean a light-skinned person of color with French or Spanish ancestry in the context of contemporary New Orleans. But, of course, words don’t mean the same thing in New Orleans as they do everywhere else.
It probably comes first from the Portuguese crioulo, or Spanish criollo, from the Portuguese and Spanish verb criar, meaning “to raise or to grow.” It referred to people who were born in the New World. They were second-class citizens. The man who discovered New Orleans, in fact, Iberville, was one of them. His father was born in Canada, and thus he didn’t have the same rights as a French-born citizen. He couldn’t be appointed governor, even though he was a war hero. So he had to accept the commission to go found the colony in Louisiana.
You don’t hear the word “creolized” in New Orleans to describe historical processes, though that is certainly what happened there. Creolization is the basic theory of how culture moved forward in the Latin world. In the United States we don’t acknowledge it as such but, especially in New Orleans, it is a very relevant idea.
One very important thing to understand is that New Orleans had to be a city in ways that the rest of the United States wasn’t. There was plenty of land to spread out elsewhere. But in New Orleans, because of the constraints of the swamp, there was a kind of density—it was more urban. Unlike Manhattan or Philadelphia, though, New Orleans was the first great black urban city. If there’s one thing we learn from reading Fernand Braudel, it’s that cities drive innovation. That’s why something like jazz could emerge in New Orleans, because there was a critical mass. Because the conditions were new, something transformative could appear.
What about the notion of syncretism, especially in the mixing of African and Catholic traditions—how did that express itself in New Orleans?
One tradition takes on the forms of another and, in doing so, becomes something new. The classic example is the Orishas of the Yoruba religion taking on the faces of Catholic saints in Cuba and Brazil.
Louisiana is the only place in North America where Yoruba came in any real numbers. The Yoruba religion was already a process of syncretism. My favorite example is the Yoruba saint Obatalá—that’s Obat-allah—he’s the way that the image of Islam was incorporated into Yoruba religion. Obatalá is temperate; he doesn’t drink. He wears pure white. He has four wives. And he’s part of a polytheistic system!
The Kongo religion was also syncretic since the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese catholicized the Kongo king. An Angolan man became bishop in the sixteenth century in Rome. The crucifix of Catholicism resonated very nicely with the image of the cross in Kongo theology. Although there was a difference: the Kongo version crosses in the middle, not chest-high.
If you look in some of the old cemeteries in New Orleans, like the Saint Louis Cemetery, the typical form of the cross that you see meets in the middle, like the Kongo version. We know that the ironworkers were usually slaves. Those ironworkers left messages all over New Orleans.
Parade traditions are an essential part of New Orleans culture. You write that Mardi Gras was celebrated there since the very beginning of the city.
Mardi Gras was celebrated the very first day the Louisiana colony was founded! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a town that was so parade-mad as New Orleans. In New Orleans, it all goes back to the parade. And what is so remarkable is the way that has continued. The idea of a second-line parade has cognates in other places, like Brazil. But they don’t do it every Sunday! There’s always a parade going on, and all walks of society participate in New Orleans. Not just black people, not just white people.
This spring, I was sitting at my perch in the Bywater neighborhood, resting after a long second line, and I saw another parade going by—a Saint Paddy’s Day Parade. And it was eight days before Saint Patrick’s Day! They told me, “We have to practice!”
