New Orleans in the 1920s
I bought a day pass to the Tennessee Williams Festival yesterday and I must say as conferences go, this one never disappoints. I saw four panels – ranging from New Orleans in the 1920s: Bohemia, Baby Dolls and Storyville, The Art of the Debut, Writers on their First Books, Creole Women and Free People of Color. I felt as if I had sat down and read 20 books after it was over. I learned more, or should I say I unlearned more yesterday than a lifetime could have offered. The history written of our city, of our culture, of our people have all been lies, the new history being written today is quite a complicated, richly textured, grey zone of humanity. God bless this city.
From Ayana Mathis telling the story of how one reader left her a card that read, “NEVER BE DISCOURAGED” and how these small acts and moments of beauty are what sustain us, to Creole actually being a feminine noun whose etymology of create go hand and hand with the fact that Creole happens when cultures intersect, tragically, and someone has to clean up the mess – women – who go on to tell the story and weave the culture into the fabric of a people. Creole as Sydney Bechet says about the long song, that he always feels a song comes up behind him out of nowhere and flows through and heads on with no beginning and no end – a fluidity that culture here knows everything about how to appropriate, sustain, contort, blend, create and preserve and destroy again a culture.
My favorite line from Mona Lisa Saloy was the response to what does it mean to be a Creole, “Being Creole means to live gloriously, to strive for excellence to keep the culture sacred.” It was not all benevolence, the functional passing of most Creoles is a reality that became more critical with the one drop law. But I love you once, I love you twice, I love you red beans and rice is going to be my jump rope song from here on out.
The last panel summed it up succinctly – everything that has been written about New Orleans in the 19th century is wrong but like Leonard Pitts said, “Americans have been very poor keepers of their history and even poorer at African American history.” Pitt is a fiction writer seeking emotional truth – a worthy goal in my mind.
Thank you Tennessee Williams for leaving us a living legacy.