City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Mardi Gras day was starting. Costumed riders, getting ready all over the city since before dawn, were mounting spectacularly decorated floats for Zulu and for the Rex parade, the final official parade that caps off the festivities. Canal Street was packed with people waiting for the parades behind police barriers, the crowd slightly thinner than in years past, but still vibrant, drums in the distance.

  Along St. Charles Avenue, heading uptown from Lee Circle, the morning light filtered through the giant oak trees that shaded the street and the houses, and here and there the light caught the smoke from hibachis and grills where people were cooking and the sunlight made the smoke glow blue as it rose. The night before, people had dragged couches and beach chairs out to the grassy neutral ground that divided the avenue and cradled the streetcar tracks, and now they sat out there, or stood behind grills cooking food, or on couches watching battery-powered televisions, drinking beer, under the canopy of giant oak trees with strings of beads dripping from the branches, caught there, and on power lines, like multicolored icicles, snagged from a wild throw during a week’s worth of parades. The people walking down the middle of the downtown-bound side of the avenue—individuals, couples, groups of free-lance celebrants dressed as Hawaiian dancers, or wrapped in blue tarpaulins in homage to the tarps that covered so many roofs, or dressed as chefs or nurses or nuns or as anything you could imagine—crunched strings of beads underfoot, the castoffs of the weekend’s parades, past the big houses that lined the avenue.

  Craig was one of them, having parked up on Prytania Street by the cemetery just beyond Washington Avenue. He made his way toward Igor’s, just off the corner of St. Charles and Jackson, to meet Bobby and Jen for their traditional Mardi Gras morning Bloody Marys. As he approached Jackson, where the Zulu parade would make its big turn onto St. Charles for its run toward downtown, the crowds thickened, pressing up against the police barricades, and police sat on horseback in the middle of the intersection, but Craig was able to walk across Jackson Avenue to the corner with the grocery store, and squeeze through the crowd along the barricade and make his way to Igor’s without much trouble. Off in the distance he could hear the sound of drums from some marching band.

  Inside Igor’s it was dark but not impossibly crowded. He looked around for Bobby and Jen and didn’t see them, ordered himself a Bloody Mary and brought it outside and stood on the sidewalk watching the people walking back and forth in the middle of St. Charles Avenue, under the electric wires hung with beads, people looking out from balconies on the ugly apartment building across the avenue. It was a miracle that this was happening again, he thought. The insistence on reasserting the spirit in the face of such pain and destruction. On Mardi Gras morning the world always felt new again; you could imagine yourself setting foot in the new world one more time, when everything was up for grabs…

  “What are you, a fucking zombie?”

  The familiar voice; he turned and there was Jen and, behind her, Bobby.

  “We’ve been standing right next to you for the last half hour,” she went on. “Drink that Bloody and get another one.”

  Greetings, happiness, taking stock. Bobby and Jen had not bothered to go see Pete Fountain and had in fact heard that he hadn’t even shown up this year. “Can’t blame him,” Bobby said. “His whole house got trashed. I’d be depressed, too.”

  “Your house did get trashed,” Craig said.

  “Yeah, but I have an upstairs.”

  “And also we’re not, like, a hundred and fifty years old like Pete Fountain.”

  They looked around the corner, at all the familiar press and jostle of people, the trees above, the clopping of the police horses, the people squeezing by. None of it had been guaranteed. Craig had promised Annie that he’d get her a Zulu coconut. Every year, the most prized throw at Mardi Gras was one of the coconuts that the members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the city’s largest and most prestigious African-American social club, spent weeks painting with their colors, black and gold, sometimes with a face painted at one end, and always with a big letter Z or the word ZULU, often spelled out in glitter. In the old days the members of the club threw them from the floats but the projectiles became a public health hazard, and finally they were forced to hand them down from the floats, which always created a big crush. Craig always carried Annie on his shoulders up to the floats, and invariably she would be handed at least one coconut by a smiling Zulu member smoking a giant plastic cigar.

  Zulu had lost more than a dozen members between drownings and health complications from being in hospital during evacuation, or going weeks without necessary medication or treatment. The decision to parade had been difficult, but ultimately those who saw it as necessary to their own part of the community, a reassertion of spirit, of defiance, won out, and Zulu was rolling again. As always in years past, the members—black doctors, businesspeople, lawyers, judges—donned big black Afro wigs and grass skirts, put on blackface, and hit the streets in a brazen caricature of the stereotypes projected on their community. It was a tradition going way back, a lampoon of the mask of primitivity assumed by the black doctors and lawyers and businessmen and merchants and skilled laborers of the city. Zulu was many New Orleanians’ favorite parade, and almost all of black New Orleans turned out to see it. It came down Jackson Avenue though the heart of one of the main black neighborhoods.

  The members, many of whom were now without a home, had come in from Houston, or Little Rock, or Atlanta, or Memphis, or any one of dozens of other places. It is one thing to celebrate when you have a house to go back to and a dinner waiting, when your world is in place, and you can look back to years before, and ahead to years to come, with something like a reasonable expectation of continuity. It is another thing to celebrate when you have lost everything—your house, your neighborhood, your possessions, your family members—and you are living in a strange place, cut off from everything familiar to you, amid the continuity of other people’s lives. To comport yourself with a defiant grace when your life has been pushed to the edge, and then over the edge.

  Craig, Jen and Bobby walked up Jackson on the uptown side. Several blocks from St. Charles the police barricades disappeared, and you could actually approach the floats when they came, which was necessary for getting a coconut. They ran into Ted from the bookstore, and Jason in the Zorro outfit that he wore every year. People, most of them black, lined the sidewalks, lined the curbs, stood on steps or porches of houses with roofs still covered with blue tarps. Police cars, the leading edge of the parade, inched their way toward St. Charles.

  Then the parade came, accompanied by the din of marching bands not quite out of earshot of one another. The floats loomed over the crowds as they approached, spewing beads and trinkets into the air from both sides, and the Zulu members looked down from above the heads of the screaming supplicants who pressed close to reach out for beads, for coconuts, for spears and tambourines and stuffed animals. Many of the floats had two levels, and the Zulus on the upper level would be busy untangling strings of beads from the bags and tape in which they came packaged, and others, next to them, would be taking aim and throwing balled-up strings of beads to people waving on balconies and porches, or to children on their parents’ shoulders. In between floats, marching bands passed, serious-faced, twirling their instruments or doing tricky choreographed steps, and drum majorettes with batons, and people along the route bounced in place, or stood looking up and down the street, or drank from plastic cups up on steps with friends and neighbors and family who, in many cases, they had not seen for months. The sun shone down on them all, and once again, as improbable as it seemed, Zulu was rolling through the streets of New Orleans.

  A contingent of actual Zulu tribesmen, from Africa, had been invited to march with the parade this year, and they passed, in tribal dress, dancing and leaping into the air barefoot.

  “Some orthopedist is gonna make a lot of money off of this,” Jen said.

  “Look at those guys,” Craig said.
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  As each float approached, Craig, along with much of the rest of the crowd, swarmed into the street to beg for a coconut. Finally, after half an hour of hollering “It’s for my daughter,” Craig was handed a coconut by an unsmiling black police officer who had been handed three himself. Craig thanked him abjectly and placed the prize in his backpack.

  Around ten, Bobby, Jen and Craig left Jackson Avenue and walked a few blocks uptown on Dryades Street to see the Wild Magnolias, Mardi Gras Indians who always came out near the old H&R Bar, which had burned a few years earlier but still served as a meeting point for the Indians on Mardi Gras morning. As soon as they were off of Jackson Avenue the day became quieter, individuals and groups of two or three here and there, walking through the beautiful morning in the ruined streets.

  Everyone who loved New Orleans street culture wondered about the fate of the Indians, and their elaborate costumes. The word had trickled back that members of the Wild Magnolias had been working on their costumes at Houston’s Astrodome during the evacuation, a vote of confidence in the future if ever there was one, but it was hard to confirm.

  The Wild Magnolias always appeared from inside the H&R, hollering Indian patois, showing their feathers and plumes, and the beadwork on the suits that they had spent most of the year creating. Little by little, their Big Chief, Bo Dollis, would marshal them all together and they would start off down Dryades, with Chief Bo chanting one of the Indian songs accompanied by drums and tambourines, and the whole gang shouting back the antiphonal response. But since the H&R was a burned-out shell, and most of the nearby houses were presumed to be unlivable at the moment, how would they make their entrance onto the street?

  They had their answer not long afterward. Near the corner of Dryades and Second Street was a pretty good crowd of the faithful. The bar on the corner, which had taken over from the H&R, dispensed drinks and pork chop sandwiches and barbecued chicken, and there, parked along the curb, was a giant U-Haul truck, inside of which the Wild Magnolias were getting dressed. People black and white milled in the street, in and out of the bar, eating pork chop sandwiches and sausage sandwiches and drinking beer. Members of a brass band had gathered, and tambourines and drums kept up a background rhythm to it all, like a low flame under a chafing dish. Craig and Bobby and Jen stood with everyone else, greeting friends and enjoying the scene, when suddenly a cheer went up as the back of the U-Haul opened and Bo Dollis, Jr., son of Big Chief Bo, appeared in a bright pink suit, shrill feathers ballooning out the opening of the truck and catching the morning sunlight, hollering to the gathered crowd. Bo himself followed, in white, an explosion of white, feathers and plumes and beadwork and Mrs. Dollis came out in blue, carrying two large feathered fans with appliquéd letters reading WE ARE BACK! and I LOVE N.O. They greeted members of another gang, the Golden Comanche, who had appeared from way down Dryades Street.

  Slowly, after greetings, and homage, and picture taking, the Indians began readying themselves to head out through the streets, like a cruise ship casting off and beginning to maneuver slowly backward out of the dock, and they sang to the rhythm of the drums and beer bottles and tambourines, a variation on the traditional Indian songs, the Chief, or sometimes a designated temporary replacement, making up rhyming lines, and the rest of the gang and the people following responding with a repeated answering line, new ones for this year after they had come back against the stiffest of odds…

  An ace, a trey, a deuce and a jack

  Shallow water, yo mama

  Well I been in Atlanta but I made it back.

  Shallow water, yo mama…

  The hell with the wind, the hell with the rain,

  Shallow water, yo mama

  Indians dance in a hurricane.

  Shallow water, yo mama

  Jump up and down and run all around;

  Shallow water, yo mama

  We bad motherfuckers from way uptown

  Shallow water, yo mama

  Well I don’t know, but I been told

  Shallow water, yo mama

  Some like to rock, but I like to roll

  Shallow water, yo mama…

  I said way out in Houston all back o’town,

  Shallow water, yo mama

  The Wild Magnolias, they don’t bow down

  Shallow water, yo mama

  And they went off down the street, into the heart of Mardi Gras Day.

  SJ and his group had come in on Saturday in two rented minivans—SJ, Wesley, Leeshawn, Wesley’s girlfriend Coral and her father and brother, Lucy’s friend Jaynell and a couple other evacuees. They had spent Mardi Gras morning watching Zulu near the corner of Jackson and Dryades, in the yard of one of his crew members, Charles, who was back living in New Orleans. SJ had set up the big Weber grill he had brought from Houston (his oil drum was a casualty of the storm) and they had put out the call to everyone they knew; Lester and Ronald from his crew were coming, and Shawnetta, in from Atlanta, and SJ’s friend Alfred, whom he had last seen at the cookout for Little T. Jaynell had her two pretty little daughters with her, and Charles rigged up a butterfly net for them on a long pole so they could catch beads from the parade. SJ had pork chops, sausage, and hamburgers ready to go once the fire started rolling, and hotdogs for the kids.

  Around one in the afternoon, after Zulu had passed, they packed up and drove to Loyola Avenue and Poydras Street, like hundreds of others, to wait for Zulu to finish, dismount, and continue the parade on foot. SJ parked the van in a nearby lot. SJ, Wesley, Coral, Alfred, Lester, Jaynell, her two daughters and Leeshawn got out and quickly ran into people they knew, except for Leeshawn, who sipped her Crystal Mist and stayed close to SJ. With Wesley’s help, SJ set up the coolers and some folding chairs on the neutral ground, and he handed out cans of soda to people. All around he saw people he knew either from the Lower Nine or from work, other contractors, people he had done work for, old crew members. Everyone wanted to know how everyone else had made it through, where they were staying, whether they were returning.

  The first Zulu floats began to arrive near the Superdome not long afterward, and the riders dismounted and milled around near the corner of Loyola and Poydras. The area began to fill with the Zulu riders still in their makeup, and their families and friends and well-wishers. The plan was to continue the parade, on foot, across Basin Street and into the Treme neighborhood, the oldest black neighborhood in New Orleans, and one of the oldest in the United States. They would wait until the last float had arrived and the riders had disembarked, wearing black T-shirts and wigs and grass skirts. Many had the letter Z painted in gold or silver on their cheeks, in imitation of war paint, or tribal scars. Some wore leopard-print vests and top hats, and one rider wore a T-shirt that read KATRINA DIDN’T WASH AWAY OUR SPIRIT. Members of the various marching bands stuck around, as well, and the sound of drums and horns could be heard, nearby and at a distance.

  One of the brass bands, Cool Bone, was warming up, and the trumpeter began playing something funky, a repeated riff over a second-line beat, the New Orleans beat, and people started dancing in place, on the sidewalk, on the neutral ground, in the middle of Loyola Avenue. A Zulu member wearing a sash, white tie, and tails hollered for things to get started and the word got relayed to the members. Dignitaries were climbing into a series of convertibles. It was approaching two o’clock.

  SJ thought about his own father taking him to the Zulu parade when he was a boy, back when the parade route was utterly unpredictable. They didn’t have to have a mapped-out route in advance in those days, and the parade could go anywhere it wanted to. It seemed as if they were getting ready to have a throwback to that, now—Zulu on foot, with no map. So many gone. So many not able to be there, alone somewhere, or dead…And yet, yes, so many still here, too.

  He was still here. Next to him Leeshawn, Wesley, and the rest stood watching in respect, each thinking his or her own thoughts, as the band started playing in earnest, and the first of the red convertibles began moving slowly down Loyola in the direc
tion of the Treme, and all the members slowly started walking in that direction, as well. The band was playing “L’il Liza Jane,” and people were cutting great second-line steps as they passed by. “Hey pretty baby, can we go strolling? / You got me rocking when I ought to be rolling…” and wordlessly, with little more than a glance around, SJ and Wesley, Coral and Leeshawn and Albert and Jaynell and her daughters, all stepped off the curb and into the river as it moved, dancing, down the street, in the heartbreaking afternoon sun, some of them dancing and some of them just walking in time, shaking hands with a friend as they moved along, sometimes arm-in-arm with someone they found themselves next to, whether they had known them personally or not—hundreds of them, down Loyola toward Basin Street, concentrating on being alive, in that moment, while they could.

  Craig had made his way alone down to the French Quarter, across Canal Street and the tail end of the Rex parade. Bobby and Jen had cashed it in after walking with Craig behind the Wild Magnolias for about half an hour. Finally they decided to head home and Jen had given Craig a surprisingly emotional hug. Beyond that, they had kept it pretty short, as goodbyes went, agreeing that they would all see each other again before they knew it. Craig would be back within a month for a follow-up article. Still, after they parted the bottom dropped out of Craig’s mood, and he walked for blocks fighting back tears.

  In the Quarter, he went to an address that Doug had given him on Royal Street, but he knew nobody there, and he left. He then headed for Jackson Square to see if he could find the Krewe of St. Anne, one of the walking clubs. Along the way, he ran into half a dozen people he knew. Some were back in New Orleans, some were stuck someplace else but were rebuilding, some had left town but had made it back for Mardi Gras.