The Crescent City Absurdist: 2nd Lining after Mother's Day Shooting; Celebrating Life and Culture in New Orleans

The rescheduled Original Big 7's Mother Day Second-line at Frenchmen and Villere, sight of the shooting.
Photo courtesy of Alex Turvy.

The streets leading to Villere and Frenchmen are like many in the 7^th ward of New Orleans. Well-kept creole cottages mix with vacant lots and houses, boarded up since Katrina and swallowed by swaths of cat’s claw vine that overtake the roofs and kill native plant life. On the 1200 block of Frenchmen, though, a resident, Julius, who lives in a cream-yellow double-shotgun home had put 7 flags up on telephone poles, each adorned with a white and red star and the word, “Welcome.”

A block away, on May 12^th, 2013, 19 men and women were shot at Villere and Frenchmen by a teenager during The Original Big 7’s Mother Day second-line that started only a half hour earlier on Elysian Fields Avenue.

Two days later The New York Times ran the article, “Celebrating, In Spite of Risk,” and politely asked if second-lines invited violence, a question that’s been asked before.

A few hundred people gathered at the place of the shooting to hold vigil for the victims and to answer the question together—No. Mayor Landrieu led the vigil and told the Times, “The layers of this thing are really important, and that’s to understand what the origin of the violence is, what it’s connected to and what it’s not connected to.”

Second-lines are like parades and have not been affected by gun violence for a few years now, but they have long expressed a traditionally thin line between life and death in New Orleans, a line that every resident and native walks in their lives and understands, more so because of guns and hurricanes. A second-line is mobile, a people’s parade, a party. The first line is the band and the people that follow—drinking, smoking, dancing—are the second-line. The band, in essence, “rings the (cow)bells” through the narrow streets of poor neighborhoods and people come out of their homes and off their porches to join until the party swells the sidewalks, gaining momentum block by block.

The second-line evolved from the jazz funeral, where the band leads the funeral party and deceased to the graveyard. They play dirges, but also upbeat spirituals, and the family dances, shaking white cloths in the air, some say to keep the spirit of the dead from attaching itself to the living. More simply, New Orleanians respect the dead by celebrating life. 2^nd lines are celebrations of life without funereal ceremony. They happen every Sunday from September to June, put on by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs operating in primarily African-American neighborhoods. They are funky and fast and open to everyone, an expression of community in the Crescent City, but even they too respect the dead and slow the parade to play a dirge somewhere along the 4-hour route.

Many people wondered if there would be a second-line the week after the shooting. There were four. The morning began with a less traditional bicycle second-line that I followed, with another near-thousand bikers, to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Treme then abandoned to find the start of the Divine Ladies in Uptown.

A mass of people gathered on St. Charles and Washington and barbecue smoke pilfered the corridor of live oak branches shading us. A truck played bounce music and the streetcar rang its bell to let people off. A sousaphone player tuned his instrument on the corner.

A local reporter, Meg Gatto, interviewed me, asking me in a few different ways if I felt safe, and digging at the same question that went national after the shooting, trying to figure out what defines New Orleans culture, and is the violence inextricable from the way we celebrate life.

“The culture here we’re celebrating is one of peace and community and life,” I told her, “and the culture of violence is one we’re trying to discourage. They’re two separate things. I second-line a lot, and I always feel safe doing it.”

The Divine Ladies Social Aid and Pleasure Club

A double-decker City Sight-Seeing bus pulled up. On top the Stooges Brass Band hung their horns over the rails and showered notes at the shifting crowd, as if their trumpets were magnets gathering the people in, and the Divine Ladies, behind them, waved their fans and danced. They all filed off the bus. The tuba player left the corner and the barbecue trucks got ready to move. The first line marched on, and the second-line, us, followed, everyone dancing. We might never predict the next storm or gunshot, but the second-line, like a sunrise, we could count on. It was Sunday and it was going to happen, and like another lady interviewed said, "We ain't never going to stop!"

The next week Money Wasters began their annual 2^nd line in the parking lot of Charbonnet-Labat-Glapion Funeral Home, where the jazz funeral for famous musician Uncle Lionel Baptiste began almost a year ago, his brown oak coffin being led out slowly to “Take a Close Walk with Thee.” This time, the honored party emerged from the home wearing salmon-orange suits and waving ostrich-feather fans, unaccompanied by the dead, and To Be Continued Brass Band (TBC) lead the rest of us. We rounded the corner where three black men on horseback waited in Tuba Fats Square, a gun-free peace-zone on a vacant lot and house weathered by neglect, but celebrating the home of another famous and passed musician. We went by the Candlelight and a mural of Uncle Lionel with his bass drum looked out at us. The horses followed. Under the Claiborne Overpass, TBC, slowed down and played the first few notes of “Take a Closer Walk with Thee,” but it was a fake start, and they immediately switched tempos in music and pace, bringing the funk back and marching quickly under the highway and up Orleans. An older man in a white tee and army hat followed holding a beer bottle and a white sign, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," -God.

The Money Wasters Social Aid and Pleasure Club

The next Saturday I was scheduled to fly out of New Orleans for the summer to travel, but the Original Big 7 had rescheduled their Mother’s Day second-line to run the same route before the shooting disbanded it three weeks earlier. They changed nothing about the route sheet, except the date, and even excluding the common request, "Keep your guns at home."

But nobody worried. A swarm of people gathered on Elysian Fields Avenue, and food and drink vendors set up on the neutral ground between pink crate myrtles and an Oleander Bush, a beautiful but toxic shrub. Q93.3 gave out hand-fans with a printed message, “stop the violence.” The Big 7 came out of a green cottage home with orange and gold-trimmed shutters. An old, weathered live oak tree shaded the yard, its branches extending across three lanes and into the neutral round, where Bittles Wit’ the Vittles BBQ truck sent meaty plumes of smoke skyward.

We marched around the block to “I Got That Fire,” and soon turned on Villere Street towards the intersection of the shooting.

The setting was again familiar, colorful cottages offset by vacant lots, abandoned since Katrina or another storm. In a lot next to the intersection, a set of wet clothes dried in the weeds. A backyard lined with sunflowers fenced in a trampoline and a plastic kiddie-pool, next to a rotting yellow shotgun-home being strangled from the top-down by vines.

At Frenchmen and Villere, One Mind Brass Band stopped and began to play the popular spiritual, “I’ll Fly Away,” then moved quickly to make room for TBC Brass Band. I expected a dirge, something slow to remember the victims, but no one had died in the shooting—they remained with the living—and this is a city that celebrates its living and dead the same, by celebrating life itself, by dancing to keep bad juju from attaching to us, to feel alive and show off just alive we really are, no matter how many hurricanes and bullets strike out.

TBC did not play a dirge; they did not even fake its start, but instead stopped at the intersection to play “We’re Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone adapted for brass funk. They played for a hard minute, singing the chorus between blasts of trumpets and cowbells, then as quickly as they came, they marched on.

Behind us was a third line—a chorus of red and blue police lights from six patrol cars. More cops walked with us, and at the next corner an officer lifted his orange vest to show the pools of sweat collecting in his uniform.

At Henriette Delille Street the 2^nd line turned. I let it go. I had to fly out soon. After the red-and-blue tails of the parade passed me, I walked back along Frenchmen Street. Again, I noted the “Welcome” flags, the beautiful yellow house of Julius, and the vacant lots and homes of his neighbors who never came back, the unturned property sitting like visible ghosts of Katrina, and I knew the violence of man would never stop the 2^nd-lines, but the only thing that would return this city to nature would be nature itself, but even then…. even then, it is easy to imagine that if only a 100 people in a 100 homes remained, somewhere on a Sunday afternoon would be men and children with horns, and behind them an audience, a 2^nd line, dancing, celebrating every living moment, all the way down the line.