Through the Water
by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09
Rampart Street—the Quarter’s northern boundary, roughly parallel to the river—is wide, rough, and mostly empty. A block beyond is Basin Street, one of the mythic names in the history and lore of jazz. This was Storyville, the seedy red-light district where Louis Armstrong, a prostitute’s son, spent his youth listening to music in the local bars and brothels. Armstrong bought his first horn with money loaned to him by the Karnofsky family, Russian Jews who lived in the bustling neighborhood just across Canal. In tribute to the family, Armstrong wore a Star of David around his neck for the rest of his life.
Armstrong Park is just a few blocks down Rampart, with its giant statue of the famously smiling musician. The park feels desolate today, but inside these gates you reach one of New Orleans’ many hallowed spaces: Congo Square, the slave’s market that thrived during the French and Spanish periods of New Orleans. On Sundays, African slaves were allowed to gather here. They did business with one another, made some extra money; but, most importantly, this is where they were allowed to make music. Congo Square is steeped in myth and mystery, so we know relatively little about what happened there. The musician and historian Ned Sublette, who is interviewed in this issue, suggests that it was both a memorial and a laboratory for African culture in the New World. Where the past met the future, he says. Like New Orleans itself: always absorbed in history, but never static.
The slaves who gathered here brought many different cultures and languages. As each group interpreted its own traditions from memory, all the varied strands coalesced and coincided. “If you want to guess what music sounded like at Congo Square,” Sublette speculates, “take five or six different types of African music and play them all at once.” Today, the gates around Congo Square are locked most of the time. Remarkably, though, nothing has ever been built on this space; so the wide trees and dusty ground still echo a bit with the sounds that were created here—this place where, in a very real sense, American music was born.
The most peculiar signs of Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath are the coded messages spray-painted on houses around town. In the low and flat residential neighborhoods that make up most of this city, you start to see the cryptic stamps of the search-and-rescue missions. It’s become part of the iconography of New Orleans: a bold cross, with numbers and letters to indicate the date of inspection, the officials that checked it, and, in some cases, the number of bodies found inside.
It’s an eerie sight, but somehow a fitting one, too. The homes of New Orleanians are often decorated with private messages and symbols: beads, flags, Mardi Gras trinkets, stickers and handwritten signs, fleur-de-lis, statuettes of saints. The painted relics of the storm start to mix in with all the other teeming spiritual artifacts of the local character.
In some places, the devastation can be overwhelming. The Lower Ninth Ward, a low-lying neighborhood cut off from the city by the Industrial Canal, now has large swaths that only barely hint at the dense life that once existed there. Many houses, without deep foundations, were just washed away. The fences that surround each plot, or the concrete stairs leading up to each door, were often stronger than the houses themselves. They are still here: protecting nothing, leading nowhere. Most of the heavy debris is gone, and the grass and weeds have grown tall. Driving around can feel like passing through backcountry roads, looking out at wilderness. A cityscape without people: where nature has rebuffed the accumulated traces of a living neighborhood. Much of New Orleans is like this now, and many residents are trying to rescue their own histories from total obliteration.
