Once Were Warriors, New Orleans Part 1

"Were you at Jacque-imo's Saturday night?" a man I didn't think I'd ever seen before asks me. Between acoustic Brazilian music from Riccardo Crespo at a stuffy French joint on Octavia and on my way to see Sunpie at a smoky cigar bar off Tchoupitoulas I suffered the hour long wait for the best meal of my trip. So I say, "Yeah, I was there, what'd you eat?" We drool a bit sharing tales of fried chicken, stuffed catfish, garlic butter cornbread and mashed sweet potatoes. Everything about Monday was magic, I mean Saturday, I mean Sunday...the days and all the souls who filled them kept literally overlapping. There was a Santiago de Cuba photo exhibit at the newly re-opened McKenna Museum of African American Art (www.themckennamuseum.com) but see, I found out about it 30 minutes after they closed on Saturday and weren't going to be open to the public again til after I was due to fly back home to Los Angeles. But luckily the dynamic new director, Shantrelle Lewis catches my pleading email and calls me on my cell saying she'll be at the museum Monday and call her and let her know when I want to come by. I come by right as New Orleans ABC news anchor Michael Hill is filming a live interview with her. He's the one saw me at Jacque-imo's. Our conversation with Shantrelle as well as her childhood classmate and close friend who now does PR for the museum, moves from cornbread to Catholic school to the most expansive and complex conversation about the city...but this is so normal now. Sunday night I'm at Fair Grinds, a cafe by the old Whole Foods (that tiny one used to be on Esplanade up near New Orleans Museum of Art, not that mega one on Magazine uptown), and I see three "hip and contemporary" (as Peter J Harris would likely describe them) brothers talking race and theology and I keep noticeably scooting my tea pot and IBook closer so I can eavesdrop. Too interested in the conversation, I just ask if I can join them, and find out I'm suddenly sitting with a priest (in fact, the chaplain of Xavier University), a Dominican Friar, and a young Pentacostal minister from Baton Rogue studying at the Baptist seminary in town. Out way too late Saturday night listening to Kermit Ruffins, I missed church Sunday morning, but that was remedied when Father Ott invited me to noon mass Monday on the Xavier campus. Father Ott is already interested in being the chaplain at the Duke Ellington Center for the study of Sacred Jazz (!), and his music minister at Xavier, jazz pianist Dwight Fitch just lit up when I shared my idea and he immediately wanted to start talking to me about jazz chordal this and gospel phrasing that...Glory be! I know this is a breathless list and I want to break it down and analyze some of the pieces next time, but this is just to let you know in case you don't that New Orleans is tooooo alive, and none of what I mentioned above even has anything really to do with any Mardi Gras Mambo, though I'll get to that...there is so much hallelujah and of course so much trouble, palpable melancholy, sometimes contempt...all of it alive and moving and shifting with such profound potential..."if we can be patient" Brother Herman Johnson stares past me meditating hard on his birthplace, the city he keeps returning to--that he can't stay away from--to minister and inspire, preach and listen.

Next time, I gotta try to describe the practice session I slipped into for the Wild Magnolia's in prep for the parade. If I had a video you wouldn't be sure where you were...Santiago de Cuba? Bahia? Mpumalanga? I remember when I saw the movie "Once Were Warriors" and I watched these Maori detention center boys in New Zealand initially forced to learn their ancestral dances to channel/refocus their passion, to create and inspire discipline and self love, love of culture, family, elders...I remember it came out not too long after April '92 in L.A., the riots, the attempts at gang truces--all that was fresh on my mind--back then I thought, our boys don't really have what those Maori boys have...not exactly...but what I saw a couple nights ago in New Orleans made me say, oh, okay, yep, here it is...here it's been...

More soon after a little re-entry rest...