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blackness and the politics of memory in the
New Orleans second line
HELEN A. REGIS
Louisiana State University
Popular memorial practices, including traditional jazz funeral processions,
are continually being refashioned and re-appropriated for devotional, commercial, and political purposes in New Orleans. Belying nostalgic representations of the jazz funeral as a "dying tradition," neighborhood-based parades produced by working-class African Americans continue to provide a
space for the articulation of local subjectivities, particularly for those most affected by the violence of contemporary urban life, [blackness, memory,
New Orleans, urban space, performance, violence, heritage]
Mimesis unto death [is] the political art form par excellence, repeated and worked over
continuously.
—Taussig 1997:78
Turning to the process of bereavement, both mine and that of my subjects, I try to get
closer to death, close enough so that death is no longer a spectacle.
—Behar 1996:84
An undercover agent watches as a jazz funeral passes by a quiet French Quarter
street. The paraders march to the Olympia Brass band playing the hymn "Just a Closer
Walk with Thee." The grand marshall leads the dirge and the mourners follow. The
camera zooms in on a grieving woman, presumably the widow, wiping tears from her
eyes with stately dignity. On the sidewalk, a silver-haired black man approaches the
agent, who appears moved by the procession. "Whose funeral is it?" the agent asks.
"Yours," the man answers, and stabs him. The agent crumples to the ground, and pallbearers carefully lower the coffin over the fresh body. When it is slowly raised again,
the body is nowhere in sight. Ta-da-taa-ta! The trumpet calls for everyone to begin
second lining. Fans and umbrellas decorated with ostrich plumes suddenly appear, as
the mourners break into joyful buck-jumping dance steps.
So begins the 1973 James Bond film, Live and Let Die (Hamilton 1973). This jazz
funeral in the New Orleans French Quarter is the scene for the second of three murders in the opening sequence of the film, the first taking place at the United Nations in
New York City, and the third in the fictitious island of San Monique during a grotesque voodoo ritual. From Harlem to New Orleans to San Monique, black spirituality
is consistently shown to be a mask for cynical heroin dealing criminals. At the same
time, black masses are depicted as dwelling on materialism and orgiastic sensuality or
as possessed by occult spirituality (see Bartkowski 1998; Murphy 1990). In Harlem,
blackness is characterized by seventies Afros, black power slogans, and a deeply segregated black metropolis. In New Orleans, the French Quarter is portrayed as a culturally
blackness and the politics of memory
753
black public sphere, enlivened by exotic funerary rituals and inexpertly policed by
redneck sheriffs. The only visible economic activity is a French Quarter franchise of
the Harlem-based Fillet of Soul nightclub, the backdrop for the jazz funeral. San
Monique—farthest from New York and signifying the most extreme forms of blackness as Otherness—is steeped in primitive, violent, and sexualized voodoo rituals,
dramatized in Broadwayesque stage shows for the tourist trade. All three are linked by
the underground narcotic trade of the Janus-faced high-rolling Harlem crime boss and
international diplomat Mr. Big/Dr. Kananga, played by actor Yaphet Kotto. Significantly, Dr. Kananga's Pan-Africanist rhetoric in the film is revealed to be a
smokescreen for his alter ego's (Mr. Big's) criminal entrepreneurial activities. Thus,
gangsterism trumps politics as a form of black activism. When Mr. Big peals off his
mask to reveal the face of Dr. Kananga, the viewer is confronted with the reality that
the two are one.
For many viewers of Live and Let Die in the early seventies, the film's jazz funeral
scene was their first introduction to the mourning practices of African Americans in
New Orleans. Alongside the staged voodoo performances and the outrageous Afros of
stylish Harlemites, the New Orleans jazz funerals probably appeared as another colorful, if somewhat perverse, black cultural practice, at least to those viewers who saw
celebration as being in contradiction with respectful mourning. The occasion of celebrating someone's death through music and dance is presented as particularly strange
since those performing the dance are complicit in the murder of the one they are
mourning and the normal order of events is reversed, with the funeral procession preceding (and facilitating) the death.
The making of this film coincides with the beginning of the era of blaxploitation
films (Bogle 1994; Turner 1994), which resulted from Hollywood's recognition that
black-interest films could generate significant revenue. The sixties produced increasing public awareness of black cultural politics as a result of the civil rights movement,
and the seventies showed that harnessing these interests in commercial productions
could be a highly profitable enterprise. In New Orleans, too, an increasing number of
progressive whites began to work with black cultural activists to recognize, promote,
and commodify black cultural expression, particularly in the sensual and pleasurable
consumption of food and music. The most salient expression of this movement is the
1969 founding of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which featured brass
bands playing in a distinctive New Orleans style (see Cantrell 1993). The appearance
of a traditional jazz funeral in this Bond film, therefore, is indicative of the increasing
visibility and commodification of black culture in New Orleans, as in the Americas
more generally (see Guss 1998; Herzing 1998; Negus 1999; Olwig 1999; Sheriff
1999; see also Bright 1998).
performance, production, and subjectivity
The shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society has produced dramatic
transformations in America's cities. Anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and
other scholars of urban life have increasingly written of cities as sites of cultural consumption not industrial production. Urban areas are the locus of symbolic economies
(Castells 1978; Gottdiener 1985; Soja 1997) that are defined by their performance
spaces and transformed into tourist destinations (Harvey 1990; Jacobs 1998; Zukin
1991, 1995). Promoting spectacle, performance, and historic preservation are increasingly seen as reasonable paths to economic development for urban areas. Inevitably, these concerns produce an environment ripe for highly politicized struggles
over space and the ownership of the cultural capital of the city (de Certeau et al.
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american ethnologist
1998; Kearns and Philo 1993; King 1997). Debates over the gentrification and "reconquest" (Castells 1978) of blighted neighborhoods are widely inflected by race and ethnicity (Bourgois 1995; Cresswell 1996; Gregory 1998; Sanjek 1998; Sibley 1996;
Smith 1996), as well as class. Urban underclasses who work in the entertainment and
hospitality trades are increasingly perceived by more privileged groups as the sources
of crime, which endanger the steady inflow of travelers, jeopardizing their pleasure
and business activities (see also Caldeira 1996; Davis 1992; Jackson 1993).
In a city like New Orleans, which never had much of an industrial base, the
struggles over urban space and the ownership of cultural capital have become particularly intense. In addition, the cultural productions of the urban black workingclass communities are increasingly featured as the principal asset distinguishing New
Orleans from other tourist destinations and conference centers. Creole cuisine, historic
architecture, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues (R&B), and, above all, jazz have long
drawn travelers from throughout the world to New Orleans. That the primary producers
of these sensual commodities are members of a low-income black population in a
black-majority city has rarely been examined from a critical perspective (see Roach 1996).
Public funerals and memorials produced in working-class black communities
emphasize communal admiration and respect for men and women who have successfully negotiated lives of integrity in a highly inequitable society and who have
demonstrated social leadership in inner-city communities that have been described as
lacking role models (Wilson 1987; see also Duneier 1992; Mullings 1997; and Regis
1999). As I will show, funerals also express a community's grief at losing those who
died too young. Many of the commercial representations of black spirituality, however, associate jazz funerals with voodoo and vampires—indiscriminately lumping
together beliefs and practices widely perceived as bizarre, exotic, or even perverse.1
In the pages that follow, I will consider how New Orleanians are currently re-appropriating and refashioning popular memorial practices, including traditional jazz funeral processions and the production and circulation of memorial T-shirts, and employing them for devotional, commercial, and political purposes. At the same time, a
rather static, canonical form of the traditional jazz funeral is being reified by documentarians, represented as timeless ritual or "dying tradition," and packaged as a nostalgic commodity.2 I consider the implications of such divergent processes as revealing the production of a dynamic, but increasingly bifurcated civil society.
After introducing the social context of second-line performance, I focus on ethnographic descriptions of two community-based jazz funerals that illustrate the malleability of local practice and the social agency of participants. These funerals are part
of a year-round repertoire of memorial practices, which, although distinctive to New
Orleans, appropriate key elements of national and transnational discourses of blackness. These public memorial gestures produce a space tor the articulation of local
subjectivities, particularly for those young men who are most vulnerable to the violence of contemporary urban life. Dirges, signs, and personalized memorial shirts create a collective space for reflection on the structures that impinge on inner-city lives,
often shaping the circumstances in which those lives, often too early, come to an end.
Death haunts the living in New Orleans. The particular locations and manifestations
of these hauntings are profoundly determined by the racialized political and economic space of this city—what lean Rahier (1998, 1999a, 1999b) has called the racial/spatial order. The form and content of memorial discourse reveal the remarkable
creativity and ingenuity of persons living in times of crisis (see Mbembe and Roitman
1995). My central topic in this article is the ongoing adaptation, transformation, and
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re-appropriation of death rituals and memorial gestures by individuals, collectivities,
and commercial interests.
knowing a second line when you see one
Participation in funerals, in New Orleans as in many other cultures, is a profound
way of strengthening and repairing the social fabric, which in this city is severely
weakened by poverty, joblessness, violence, class- and race-based segregation, and
racism. The neighborhood-based funerals are often sponsored by African American
benevolent societies, usually known as "Social Clubs" or "Social and Pleasure Clubs."
These clubs are active in their communities throughout the year, organizing dances,
balls, birthday parties, fund raisers, and massive anniversary parades known as "second lines." These parades, sponsored by over fifty social organizations, take place
nearly every Sunday afternoon from August to April and routinely involve from twoto five-thousand people (see Jankowiak et al. 1989).
The term second line is ambiguous, pointing to multiple dimensions of the same
phenomenological reality. It refers to the dance steps, which are performed by club
members and their followers during parades. It also refers to a distinctive syncopated
rhythm (Riley and Vidacovich 1995) that is said to have originated in the streets of
New Orleans. More importantly, second line means the followers, or joiners, who fall
in behind the "first line," composed of the brass band and the social club, which typically sponsors the parade. Second liners are a massive and heterogeneous group of individuals drawn from all walks of life. The distinctive interaction between the club
members, musicians, and second liners produces a dynamic participatory event in
which there is no distinction between audience and performer. In fact, watching such
a parade is practically impossible, as the massive crowd surrounding club and band
obscures the view, and any bystanders are insistently urged to join in the parade. It is
only by plunging into the crowd that one can begin to apprehend the complex experiential reality of "the line." In local parlance, the term second line often is used to refer
to the overall parade, including club, band, and followers. Ultimately, second line
also has come to mean a kind of parade distinguishable from the processions of Mardi
Gras Krewes, St. Patrick's Day parades, and other performances in which one finds a
sharp distinction between performers and audience. In this sense, when jazz funerals
elicit mass participation, they too are second lines.
My own involvement with the second-line clubs began when I found myself interviewing Frank Charles, III, President of the Original Men Buck Jumpers Social and
Pleasure Club, for a class assignment. The overwhelming message communicated by
this community leader about the parades was the respectability of blackness. According to Mr. Charles, many members of the second-lining social clubs are from low-income families, but they work hard to organize these parades, which actualize key values of participants: respect, fiscal power, order, solidarity, peace, community uplift,
and beauty—in contrast to the negative images that circulate in the mainstream media
(Whitten and Torres 1998). Within a few months of this interview, I was spending
nearly every Sunday afternoon second lining behind a parade and getting invited to
weekend fundraisers, dances, fish fries, and fancy dress balls.
During the last ten years, I have attended hundreds of second-line parades and
countless fundraisers, birthday parties, and funerals. In 1995, I was asked to join a
club. In addition to participant observation as a member, guest, and second liner, I
have also conducted hundreds of informal interviews and several dozen formal interviews. I never imagined, during my initial interview with Mr. Charles, that our conversation would lead me to over a decade of involvement in the world of the social
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clubs. But the participants in these "back oi town" parades do not find such a development surprising, as they are well aware oi the transformative power of the second
line.3 They often expressed this to me in a bodily idiom, "it gets in your blood."
"back of town" neighborhoods, locality, and spatial practices
Unlike the funeral portrayed in the Bond movie, most second-line parades are
held in working-class "back of town" neighborhoods, beyond the gaze of the average
tourist. Most white residents of the city have never been to such a second-line parade
and have little or no awareness of the significance oi this black tradition, an
astonishing pattern I gradually came to recognize through numerous conversations
with friends, neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and students in New Orleans over a
period of ten years. Yet mock funerals in movies like Live and Let Die and staged performances put on for tourists have popularized another sort of second line—a rather
thin burlesque of the massive neighborhood-based events—produced for popular
consumption. Many visitors to New Orleans therefore think they have seen a second
line, although what they have witnessed is a cheerful (if not cheesy) minstrel show
performed for outsiders (Regis 1999).
Meanwhile, through their Sunday afternoon anniversary parades, social and
pleasure clubs celebrate the dynamism and longevity of their organizations. These
weekly parades re-claim urban streets, creating joyful experiences in the city's most
blighted neighborhoods—Central City, Treme, and Carrollton—neighborhoods marked
by deteriorating buildings, urban decay, and crime. As starting points and stops during the Sunday parades, bars become focal points in the second-line landscapes. Funeral parlors, too, are important as starting points for jazz funerals. The homes of wellknown figures are mapped into the lived landscapes of second lining as clubs make
ceremonial stops in front of their houses. The clubs have the band play a special tune
to mark the ceremonial stop and sometimes march right up onto a front porch, as if to
infuse the space with joyous energy. As people die, and social networks shift and
mend, the second-line parades serve as important collective gestures of memory in
the communities for which these individuals and networks were significant. In the
same way that ancestors in lineage-based societies bind the living into groups defined
by shared descent, so the memory of people and places defines communities in the
contemporary New Orleans second line.
The majority of participants in the second-line tradition are not owners of homes,
real estate, or large, public businesses.4 Yet through the transformative experience of
the parade, they become owners of the streets, at least for the duration of their performance. This collective ownership of the streets, that is experienced by participants
of the second line, has important political implications. It works against the numerous
forces that create atomization in urban neighborhoods and increase the difficulty of
building civil society across physical and social distance (Gottdiener 1985). Among
the most challenging of these forces are the entrenched patterns of police violence
and corruption for which the city of New Orleans has been notorious.
Following Arjun Appadurai's formulation, it is possible to say that social-club parades "produce locality" or that they in fact "produce neighborhoods" (Appadurai
1996:178-199; see also Duany 2000; Soja 1997). The social clubs achieve this
through their organizational structure. This structure links neighborhood-based membership with "honorary members" from throughout the city, links clubs to their constituencies and to each other through year-long cycles of fundraisers, and creates distinctive interaction between members and followers (the "second line") through
elements of the parade performance, such as each club's choice of band and its parade
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route—marking out paths between otherwise isolated neighborhoods and delineating
stops at the homes of friends and relatives (Regis 1999). This type of parade is not
meant to be taken in visually by spectators, passive observers standing outside its
movement. It is to be entered. Participants are like streams joining a river, flooding the
streets of the city with music and dancing bodies, engulfing all in their path.
Lyrics chanted by second liners underline the semantic reconquest of space.
Marchers improvise on the standard lyrics of the brass-band tunes with refrains that
are often repeated by others in the crowd. Paraders warn those who are not moved by
the spirit of the occasion: "If you ain't gonna dance, get the fuck on out the way." This
chant can be read as addressing those individuals within the parade who are moving
too slowly, stopping to talk to a friend or pose for a photograph, or the omnipresent
photographers who always seem to be in the way of club members and second liners
alike (ya Salaam 1999).5 Read at another level, the lyrics can speak to all those outside
of the second line who may resist its invitation to become participants. The emotional
impact of space-aggressive lyrics like this one are reiterated in the gestures ot the teenage boys in the second line who jump up to hit stop signs and other traffic signs on the
parade route. In my ten years of parade going, I have often been startled by the loud
"twang" of a sign being hit with a stick only inches from my ears. I have come to understand these gestures of defiance as musical appropriations of space. As tokens of
the law, signs mandate specific uses of space, regulating traffic with directions to
"stop," "yield," and obey "one-way" flow. Hitting the signs constitutes an essential
signifying practice for many young boys who participate in parades. The second line
does not stop or yield at intersections, but rather floods traffic lanes on major avenues,
blocking intersections and frustrating hurried motorists. "Bang!" The second line supersedes quotidian routines and traffic laws—it owns the streets.
In a city where proactive police patrols search young men for crack cocaine, and
suspects are arrested for loitering and obstructing the sidewalk (National Public Radio
1998b), the claims to public space made during neighborhood anniversary secondline parades and jazz funerals are particularly dramatic, carrying a subtext of resistance to routine "zero tolerance" strategies that flout the U.S. Constitution's Fourth
Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure (National Public Radio 1998b; see also Cresswell 1996; Jackson 1993; Pile 1997). In the mid-1990s, police corruption was "rampant, systemic, and pervasive [as] residents feared the police
as much as criminals" (National Public Radio 1998a). A highly publicized Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case involving a drug ring that included veteran police officers brought the national spotlight on a department described by civil rights attorney
Mary Howell as "brutal, corrupt, and incompetent" (National Public Radio 1998a).
The New Orleans Police Department has recently been praised for achieving one of
the most impressive turnarounds in police history. Significant reductions in reported
violent crime are widely applauded, but some observers question police tactics and
the practice of "cooking the crime books," creative crime counting in which crimes
are routinely downgraded in police reports. In one example, burglary was reported as
"criminal mischief to a door" (National Public Radio 1998a).
According to Howell, the implementation of the Comstat crime mapping program in 1996 has encouraged the use of unconstitutional tactics in the war on drugs.
She calls this type of tactic "the antithesis of community policing" and cites a 30 percent increase in complaints against police officers "since Comstat came to town" (National Public Radio 1998b). As one suspect protested to a police officer during a recent NPR report, "My auntie and my uncle stay right there. I just came out of their
house. I didn't do nothing officer. I don't deal no drugs." And then, in response to an
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inaudible comment from the police officer, the suspect said, "No, you don't know
me" (National Public Radio 1998b). Police officers face pressure to increase arrests
and reduce crime in their areas. The suspect quoted above expressed his disagreement with the officers' categorization of him as a drug offender. He was a suspect because he was there, in a place "known" for drug dealing. As one police officer put it,
"If we see people on the corner, we gonna stop 'em and check 'em out to see if they
have any contraband" (National Public Radio 1998b). In a context where merely occupying public space in a crime-ridden neighborhood is an act subject to police interrogation, second-lining's spatial practices can be seen as a direct commentary on
contemporary power grids governing the routine uses of space in this contested city.6
In addition to the disciplinary regime of the police, and complicit with it, is the
discourse about the city promulgated by conservative real estate and business interests. Neighborhood associations founded for purposes of crime prevention seem to
look at the physical presence of low-income black men and women on the street as a
threat, rather than as a sign of a living community that values conviviality. A member
of one such neighborhood organization in the Treme area distributed guidelines for
neighborhood improvement in which she enunciated ten "do's" and "don'ts" for her
neighbors. As a recent home buyer in the area, she became the "block captain" for
her association and enthusiastically took the lead in promoting her own understanding of neighborly civility. Her list included such items as "keep the area in front
of your house clean," "no indoor furniture on the porch," and "smile and wave at your
neighbor—it's so much nicer to be friendly."7 The presence of individuals on the
streets was explicitly proscribed in her list of "don'ts." Such details are not trivial. The
imposition of bourgeois norms on working-class neighbors revolves around the issues
of bodily and domestic boundaries and, specifically, on the marked separation of inside and outside, public and private (see Ainley 1998; Cresswell 1996; Munt 1998).
The emphasis on such a separation reflects class-based anxieties about sustaining the
distinction between "yours" and "mine." One resident protested the block captain's
patronizing manner. For him, her gesture (the handing out of educational flyers) embodied the colonizing practices of gentrification, which seeks to promote rising realestate values at the risk of eroding the neighborhood's distinctive culture. In his view,
her class and race biases blinded her to the ways in which her neighborhood activism
might be perceived negatively by long-term neighborhood residents. He pointed out
that the racist subtext of this type of neighborhood discourse would not be missed by
African American neighbors who, sitting on their front porches on their "indoor" furniture, read her rules criticizing the presence of (subtext: threatening, crime-generating) bodies (subtext: black) in public space on their own streets.
Taken together, these distinct but complicit discursive and disciplinary practices
are increasingly making themselves felt in second-lining neighborhoods, particularly
in areas such as Treme, where primarily black, low-income renters live just blocks
away from the French Quarter, an affluent district in which the safety of tourists and
conventioneers is considered essential to the economic prosperity of the city. In recent years, the historic value of many of the houses in Treme and the proximity to the
Quarter has attracted an increasing number of middle-class home buyers to the area,
generating new opportunities for the redefinition of the appropriate uses of public
space. The recent city council ruling making Treme a historic district can only intensify these trends toward gentrification, displacement, and conflict. The spatial practices of second-line parades and jazz funerals are to be understood in the context of
this ongoing struggle over the future of the city, in battles often fought over specitic
neighborhoods.
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death makes truth necessary
What some New Orleanians perceive as profane parades—because of the playful sensuality and ecstatic polyvocality of second liners' performances—actually encode and actualize many of the key values held by participants in the second-line
community (see Jankowiak et al. 1989; Regis 1999). This is best exemplified in the
way in which second liners talk about death and the passing of loved ones among
their friends and family. As one second liner proclaimed on her T-shirt memorializing
a deceased friend, "Life makes truth possible. Death makes truth necessary." The
truths proclaimed in New Orleans street performances often speak to individual and
communal identities, emphasizing accomplishments gained through strength and integrity. Funerals, or "homegoing celebrations," are a commentary on the values that
guided an individual in life, but they are also perceived as a communal and individual
achievement for the organizations that effectively produce them and for the individuals whose lives are commemorated (see Regis 1999). In this section, I will discuss two
funerals that reveal the tremendous power and vitality of this cultural form. The first
comes close to what many observers might see as the iconic jazz funeral (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:64), proclaiming and demonstrating the respectability of blackness, while the second, as I will show, is a more controversial adaptation of the tradition to a contemporary modality of grief.
When Alfred Lazard passed, his funeral procession was jointly sponsored by
many of the social organizations active in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.
Mr. Lazard, also known as "Dute," had been a member of the Money Wasters and the
Black Men of Labor, and he served as grand marshall for the original Dirty Dozen
Brass Band before he became ill and had to restrict his activities. At his Treme funeral,
his image was everywhere, photocopied onto handheld fans, on T-shirts, and on pins.
"We love you," his mourners proclaimed as they paraded his image throughout the
Sixth Ward of the city. It is common in New Orleans funerals to address the deceased
in the second person. The deceased's presence at the funeral is unquestioned. "We
love you, Dute!" Mr. Lazard's funeral was particularly dramatic because it happened
to take place on the Saturday before Mardi Gras and, as his procession went down
Orleans by the Iberville and Lafitte housing projects, the Mardi Gras floats for the
Krewe of Endymion (one of the five major Krewes) were heading toward City Park
where they were scheduled to line up to begin their annual procession through the
city later that evening. However, due to the voluminous crowd that comprised Mr.
Lazard's funeral procession, Endymion's passage was blocked. This huge carnival organization which, for many New Orleanians, represents the powerful white establishment, found its passage obstructed by a funeral procession honoring a workingclass black man, a member of the Money Wasters and the Black Men of Labor.
During the funeral for Mr. Lazard, I saw many members of the parade turn to look
at the frustrated convoy of Mardi Gras floats and smile gleefully. For once, a sacred
parade of black New Orleans had bested a powerful white parade, if only on one Saturday afternoon in front of a housing project on Orleans Avenue. In this way, Dute's
funeral, a community-based performance celebrating one man's life, managed to immobilize the cortege of floats representing the hegemonic cultural forms of Mardi
Gras and the tourism industry it serves. This particular jazz funeral, which was emphatically and self-consciously "owned" by the black community, claimed urban
space for its own distinctive celebration of life through death. The funeral for Mr. Lazard
emphasized the achievements and the strengths of his character, which enabled him
to live a life of dignity and respect in the interstices of a highly inequitable society.
And the community's homage to him thus became a collective .iccomplishment and
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an affirming declaration of membership in a noble lineage for all of those who,
through their gestures of commemoration, claim this man as their ancestor.
Darnell Andrews, also known as D-Boy, died of a gunshot wound at the age of
17. His wake and funeral embodied all the grief and torment of a community losing its
young men under the conditions of late 20th-century capitalism. The descriptive
notes that follow illustrate how the idiom of the second line is transformed by those
who struggle with the loss of their young men to despair, chronic joblessness, the vagaries of the informal economy, and the street-based ethos of fierceness and honor
backed by guns (Anderson 1999). At the wake, family and friends gathered to talk
about his life and his death. His girlfriend came forward, struggling to speak as she
held back tears: "I was there with him when he died. . . . He held my hand. We said
our prayers together. He wouldn't let go until he let me know it was alright." Anita
("Lollypop") Bowers, a musician and friend of the family, played "Precious Lord, Take
My Hand" on the organ. Barbara Lacen, a community leader, whom I recognized as
an eloquent speaker at social club functions, reminded the mourners: "It was written
before he was even born. There is this book, and one page is for your life. And everything that'll ever happen is written in that book. That's destiny. God knows best." The
phrase, "We all loved him, but God loved him best," was repeated throughout the
ceremony and was printed in the program. "I'm gonna meet you on the other side,"
the preacher said. The formula "he's in a better place" was repeated so frequently and
with so much conviction that it implied the ubiquitous terror and hardship of life in
this place. No one proclaimed D-Boy's innocence in relation to the violent drug
economy and the "gangsta" ethos of respect that organizes the dealing (Anderson
1999). They talked instead about his youth, the politeness he had once shown to his
elders, and his love for music. But between the lines of these eulogies, his recent life's
trajectories were clearly drawn. This boy had gone astray, and he was now going
home. To a "better place."
In the midst of the restrained piety of the funeral home chapel, we suddenly
heard the promising brassy sound of an approaching band. Moments later, a group of
D-Boy's posse arrived, in sunglasses and T-shirts, sweating from their exertions, accompanied by the ReBirth Brass Band. The ReBirth is a hugely popular brass band
that, building on the innovations of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, has incorporated elements of funk, R&B, and hip-hop into their interpretations of the traditional brass band
repertoire, producing a hard-driving sound that consistently draws the biggest crowds
at weekly parades. As they came up the side entrance of the funeral home to enter the
chapel, the funeral director attempted to stave them off, waving his hands in front of
his face. The ReBirth marched right in, as the director stepped aside to let them pass. I
recognized many of the young men in the second line as members of parading organizations throughout the city. Joe Black from the Young Men Olympian "Furious Five"
division was among them, looking curiously anonymous in a plain white T-shirt, in
contrast to the dramatic style for which his club is known. Their manner challenged
the formality and pious respectability of the older generation, which had been dominating the wake thus far. D-Boy's friends wanted to say good-bye to him in their own
way, and even though they were dissing (disrespecting) the older generation with
their T-shirts, sunglasses, and attitudes, there was something genuinely moving about
the way each one came up in turn to the coffin to pay respects to a slain friend. The
band played a solemn hymn as all the assembled tiled past the body. Finally, the
viewing completed, the casket was closed. D-Boy's sister cried out in a powerful wail,
"Don't leave me! Darnell don't leave me now! I won't let you go!" and then, "Don't
take my Darnell from me. Don't take my brother away from me!"
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Here, the second liners completely took over the ceremony. They lifted the coffin
from its platform and marched it through the spacious rooms of the elegant funeral
home and out into the streets. The night air of New Orleans in early June is very hot
and humid, and we were all instantly wet with sweat as we followed the band, the
hearse, and Darnell's age-mates through the streets of the Treme neighborhood where
he had lived his life. When I left the procession at midnight, the second liners showed
no signs of tiring. They were heading for the Lafitte housing projects. There was no
one over the age of 40 among the two-hundred to three-hundred paraders, and no
sign of a police escort.8
The next day, after the dismissal service from the Seventh Ward church, the second line began again with a dirge but made a quick transition to the upbeat celebratory tunes that traditionally would have followed the burial, but are now frequently
played directly from the church (Jankowiak et al. 1989; Marsalis 1998; Osbey 1996).
The boy's father, James ("Twelve") Andrews, Sr., marched behind the hearse, apparently dazed and stunned. Beer and wine were poured in front of his feet, looking
strangely like blood. He was supplied with beer by well-wishing friends and relatives.
His oldest son, Lil Twelve, marched with the band, playing the trumpet at his own
brother's funeral. When the procession reached the family home on St. Ann Street, the
coffin was taken out of the hearse and brought into the house, with the band and chief
mourners following. D-Boy's younger brother, Trombone Shorty, played the trombone on the porch to the cheering crowd. After a time, the coffin was removed from
the house and the door was closed, revealing a large black wreath. We all stood
shoulder to shoulder, watching the mother who danced on the porch as if in protest
that the coffin was being carried from her house. She wavered and swooned, falling
into the crowd. "That's a mother that truly loves her son. She don't wanna let him go,"
commented a middle-aged woman in the crowd, shaking her head.
Moments later, the parade resumed, swelling in size to three- or four-thousand
people as we headed down Orleans Street toward the housing projects. Dozens of
men were emptying their bottles of beer over the hearse, to the dismay of the funeral
director, who was powerless to stop it. Boys shook and sprayed their beer over the
crowd, circling bottles above their heads. Twelve Senior had asked my friend Bret to
buy him some beer at the corner store. On receiving the beer, Twelve immediately
began pouring the contents of the 40-ounce bottles over the pavement. "I knew he
was just gonna pour it out," Bret turned to me, "but it's his day to get people to do stuff
for him." This procession was not just about Darnell and his age-mates (who might
have otherwise dominated the performance), but about his mother and father, whom
he had preceded to the other world. The crowd had assembled to bear witness to their
grief. The imminent reunion of family and friends in the other world was a certainty
evoked continuously by second liners as they promised D-Boy, "I'm 'ona meet you on
the other side."
The sun was bearing down hard on our handkerchiefed heads and on the asphalt
of the Sixth Ward streets. I stopped briefly to buy some bottles of water and beer from
vendors, and when I next looked up to the head of the parade, I saw Lois, Darnell's
mother dancing above the crowd, floating impossibly over the mass of second liners. I
made my way through the crowd, straining to see what was happening. "What is she
standing on?" I asked a fellow second liner. "She dancin' on his coffin," came the answer in a mixture of awe and dismay. Connie Holmes, leader of the Young Steppers
marching club, was standing near me: "I have never seen a mother dancing on her
son's coffin!" Connie was unambiguous in her disapproval, but Darnell's mother continued to dance to the driving sounds of the ReBirth Brass Band as I thought about the
762
other woman's commentary: "That's a woman that truly loves her son." Clearly for
Connie, the funeral's embodiment of respectability should not be traded for a
mother's ability to express her emotions in such trying circumstances. We followed
the mother and coffin into the courtyards of the Lafitte housing project where the
flower arrangements, which were carried in the procession, were being dismantled. A
young woman in spandex shorts and athletic top, whom I recognized as Darnell's
girlfriend from the wake, danced with the letter "O," a piece of the flower arrangement that had spelled D-Boy. She had affixed blue sunglasses two-thirds of the way up
the "O" so that the letter became a face, and she danced with her own piece of D-Boy,
who would never again dance through this project courtyard.
D-Boy's funeral, as described here from my field notes, evokes both the destructive social forces that promote community disintegration and the agency of ordinary
people in the face of these structural inequities. Poverty, substance abuse, an anemic
urban economy, increased juvenile crime, arrests, and imprisonment are among the
challenges faced by D-Boy's neighbors. His funeral also reveals how a traditional idiom is actively reinvented and re-deployed by people who are fighting to repair their
communities and to take back their streets (see New Birth Brass Band 1997; Original
Pin Stripe Brass Band 1994). As the above passage indicates, some disapproved of the
displays of grief shown for Darnell. Many prominent social club leaders were conspicuously absent from his funeral. Their physical absence seemed to indicate that
some honors should be reserved for only the most upstanding members of the community. Still, Darnell was loved and his loss was mourned, not only by close friends
and family, but by many of those in the greater Treme community who had also lost
someone in the murder epidemic that engulfed the city in the mid-1990s. Mr. Lazard's life was honored through a funeral that spoke of his accomplishments. In contrast, the message of D-Boy's funerals was that "there is something drastically wrong
here." And yet, despite so much grief, life persists. In the vitality of a woman in blue
spandex, dancing with the flower arrangements and in the passion of a mother's funeral dance on her son's coffin, I discern refusal to submit to the dehumanizing forces
at work in this blighted community, and, perhaps, hope for the future.
These two funerals illustrate how the funeral form provides a space for reflection
on experience, for the articulation of subjectivities, and for contesting and transforming mainstream images of blackness. By paying homage to the culturally salient values of honor and respect embodied by Mr. Alfred Lazard, participants in his funeral
produced a forceful tribute to his achievement. By producing a jazz funeral for DBoy, participants gave shape to a communal expression of mourning when things had
gone drastically wrong, providing a medium for the madness of a mother's grief. Jazz
funerals elude reifying forms yet inspire writing, photography, and music to document
and reproduce the historical subjectivities they enact (see also Rosaldo 1989).
tactics of memory
Pierre Nora (1994) has written about lieux de memoires, spaces actively transformed by popular action into places of memory that concretize popular historical
consciousness. If history is written by the victors, or those associated with powerful
institutions (mass media, publishing houses, academics), popular (subaltern) history is
inscribed by popular practices, both verbal and gestural, of those outside the corridors
of power (Nora 1994; see also Comaroff and Comaroft 1992; Halbwachs 1980; Stoller 1995). Whereas wealthy capitalists may be memorialized in endowed buildings,
working-class people in New Orleans are more likely to be remembered in handdrawn signs, T-shirts, and libations, poured out ceremoniously during a second-line
763
parade. Seemingly temporary, or fleeting, the memorials of second liners endure in
the collective memory of participants. The social clubs' anniversary parades, which
take place on Sunday afternoons, often include memorials of deceased members in
the form of hand-drawn signs, such as the one displayed in front of an apartment in
the Lafitte housing project during an anniversary parade in the fall of 1994: "Golden
Trumpets dedicates this parade to the memory of Dorothy ('Dot') V. Logwood." This
memorial calls to mind de Certeau's (1984) distinction between strategies and tactics.
Strategies belong to those who "own" or control the material landscape, whereas tactics are wielded by those who move on someone else's territory. Tactics in this usage
are comparable to Scott's "weapons of the weak" (1985) in the sense that they put the
spotlight on actions by people who seek to act effectively on a world in which they do
not hold the reigns of political or economic power.
Social clubs commonly design their parade routes in such a way that they include the home, workplace, or hangout of beloved club members, both deceased and
living. This practice makes the route itself a powerful tactic in that it inscribes the
landscape with the memory of someone whose life mattered to the community (see
Nora 1994; Roach 1996). Those who may not own the real estate in the neighborhoods through which they parade nonetheless come to claim specific paths through
the city in the name of their moral community. Several years ago, the Young Men
Olympian Benevolent society played a dirge as it passed under the balcony of a deceased club member's house while his son, visibly moved, watched from above. Club
members held their hats to their chests as they marched the solemn steps in unison,
moving as one body, and inscribing their memory of him onto the landscape. In 1994,
the Better Boys designed a wreath around an oversized color photocopy of their deceased club member Juan Surtain, placed it on back of a convertible, and paraded it
through the neighborhoods of Carrollton and Central City. The photograph had captured Surtain second lining during the Better Boys anniversary parade the previous
year. As the Better Boys neared their former club member's home, Wardell Lewis, Sr.,
the leader of the organization, directed the Pinstripes Brass Band to play a dirge for
their lost brother. He made a libation of champagne on the asphalt in front of Surtain's
home, after which each club member drank in turn from the bottle, and Lewis solemnly gave the wreath to Surtain's sister. Attached to his streamer (or sash), each club
member wore an embroidered patch that dedicated this parade to their deceased
member: "In Memory of Juan Surtain." In this way, his name, image, and memory
were integrated into the club's anniversary parade to the extent that he seemed to fill
up the lived landscape created by second-line performance.
Memorials do more than honor the deceased; they also are productive of realities
for the living. Thus, it is in part through the dramatization of Surtain's absence that the
Better Boys' parade produces its identity as a social club. As members of an organization, the Better Boys remember their dead in grace and style: with champagne, flowers, music, and dance. As Michael Roth has suggested, by bringing "the past to the
present, we allow ourselves to experience what we have lost and also what we are—
that we are—despite that loss" (Roth 1995:226). It is not uncommon for social clubs'
anniversary parades to begin with the traditional hymn "Just a Little While to Stay
Here," a reminder to us all—in our joy at the start of the dance—that we die.
Although these memorial practices are rarely explicitly political, they express a
critical moral consciousness the political relevance of which is evident to participants. The memorial to Kim Groves at the Double Nine High Steppers' anniversciry
parade in December of 1997 is an example. Among the convertibles, which are typically featured in the motorized portion of a procession to carry the queen and the
764
club's honorary members, the Double Nine included a car devoted to the memory of
Kim Groves. Large color Xeroxes of Groves decorated the car, and relatives wore Tshirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with her image. In this way, the club has memorialized Kim Groves every year since her murder by New Orleans police officer Len
Davis. Davis was well known to Ninth Ward residents who dubbed him "The Desire
Terrorist," for his patrolling of the Desire public housing development. Groves had
filed a police brutality complaint against Davis after she saw him pistol-whipping her
friend's son. Days later, she was shot dead, her killing ordered by Davis during a cellphone conversation recorded by the FBI, which was investigating a cocaine ring in
the New Orleans Police Department. "Kill that bitch," barked Davis, in a message
later published by the FBI (Codrescu 1998:24-36; Gambit 1995; Varney 1994). By
keeping the memory of Kim Groves alive during the course of their annual parade, the
Double Nine are claiming responsibility for keeping police brutality, gangsterism,
and corruption in the public eye, as well as saluting the bravery of a concerned
mother who would not bow down in the face of police violence.9
The tactics of memory deployed in the context of second-line performance are
richly varied and constantly evolving. Libations and routes, which trace individuals'
lives onto the streets of the city, are part of a complex cultural repertoire of memorial
discourse in New Orleans. Ribbons, banners, and laminated pins also memorialize
the names and faces of loved ones for paraders and second liners alike. But perhaps
the most intriguing practice of memory in the New Orleans second line is the wearing
of memorial T-shirts. Typically, these shirts are designed around a large color photograph of the deceased, complete with a caption including the nickname, birth date,
and death date of the deceased, invariably termed "sunrise" and "sunset." "RIP" (rest
in peace) and "Gone but not forgotten" are de rigueur phrases. In addition, the shirts
often display messages addressed in second person to the deceased, such as "Missing
you. Loving You" or "My nigger for life." These are poignant commentaries on the immediacy and continuation of the relationship with the person being remembered. It is
not uncommon, in the aftermath of a recent death, to see several people at an anniversary parade wearing shirts with photographs of the same person. Often, each of
these shirts is personalized with individual professions of love, friendship, and devotion or philosophical questions or statements. On one shirt, a young man may be
called "7th Ward Nigga" (presumably by a fellow Seventh Ward resident who is
therefore expressing kinship with him) while in another part of the parade, the same
photograph is framed with the slogan "Nothin but a soldier" (suggesting that the deceased remained true to his friends). Significantly, the shirts often join the commemoration of an individual life with a statement that seems addressed to others in the
streets who might identify with the deceased. The slogan might voice a warning to
those who deny their own mortality: "Real Niggas do die," or protest a wrongful
death, "Why did they steal Lil Jake? He never fuck with NOBODY!" This last shirt informs the reader that Jacob was born on 12-22-79 and died on 12-10-96, before his
1 7th birthday. Inside the frame of the photograph, the teenager is portrayed in a longsleeved black jersey and cream-colored vest. He looks at the camera with a seriousness of purpose that seems full of promise. "RIP Jake" is inscribed on his left and to his
right, "Only God Can Judge." The young man wearing this shirt laughed when I asked
if I could photograph him, apparently pleased to be asked. The shirt demands attention and each documentation of it extends its function, further reproducing its message.
Through the practice of designing and wearing memorial shirts, second liners'
very bodies become living memorials to the dead, as the images of those who have
gone before are paraded through the streets of the city, traversing from five to seven
765
miles of cityscapes in embodied grief. Through the wearing of memorial shirts, the entire parade is transformed into a memorial, signifying a refusal to forget, to allow a single life to dissolve in the oblivion of anonymous statistics, sterile numbers published
in the aftermath of violence. Unlike the cool and stationary cement, glass, and stone
memorials of endowed buildings, the tactical memorials of New Orleans second liners are moving monuments made of flesh and blood.
More recently, a new wave of slogans has appeared on T-shirts, asking questions
of those who see their lives balanced between the alternatives of joblessness, poverty,
and humiliating low-paying labor and the more lucrative, but dangerous, possibilities
of engagement in the illegal economy of crack dealing (Bourgois 1995). Shirts displaying slogans such as "Does heaven have a ghetto?" and "Is there a heaven for a
gangsta?" are inspired by the work of internationally renowned rapper Tupac Shakur.
"Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto" appears on his posthumous album R U Still Down?
[remember me] (Shakur 1997). The song, which can be read as a glorification of gangsta life, also raises issues that are rarely addressed in the mainstream media, such as
the relationship between crime, violence, and economic justice: "We can't have
peace till the niggas get a piece too . . . I'm takin from them cause for years, they been
takin from me" (Shakur 1997, emphasis added). By quoting his lyrics on their memorial
shirts, the youth of New Orleans anchor their grief in a debate about the moral economy of the inner city. In so doing, they fashion their own generation's intervention in
the national discourse of blackness and appropriate the work of a national rapper into
their local practices of memory. Tupac embodies fierceness in his tough manner and
his raps that challenge listeners to question the current order of things. His lyrics
speak to the moral ambiguity of life in an unjust world. They ask: Is it wrong to steal
from a thief? To rob one's oppressors? To seek to have what others have? In a society
that celebrates materialism, should entire communities be resigned to being denied
access to the things that make life meaningful and pleasurable? Tupac and his fans
suggest that it is the passive acceptance of injustice that is reprehensible. "I'm takin
from them cause for years, they been takin from me," he sings. In the end, he holds
out the belief that the gangsta life will not prevent one from acceding to the other
world: "Cause in heaven there's no shortage of G's" (Shakur 1997, emphasis added).
The "G" is a counterculture hero, who embodies fierceness for youth all over
America. Although gangsta rap is widely decried as glorifying violence and the illegal
economy of drug dealing to American youth while deploying multiple tropes of misogyny, reducing women to "hoes" and "bitches," it is also a powerful vehicle for the
recognition of injustice and of the revolutionary potential of black strength in numbers (see Swedenburg 1992; Toure 1999; Venkatesh 1994). As Tupac says in his song
Black Starry Might, "there's a ghetto in every city and a nigga in every ghetto" (Shakur
1997). When young men and women quote Tupac's lyrics on memorial shirts in an
environment where many people perceive the war on drugs, AIDS, and crack itself as
part of a concerted effort to wipe out the black population, they seem to broadcast a
message of defiance: For every individual killed, there are dozens who survive to
mourn the loss. Friends, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and lovers—broadcasting
their connection to the dead through memorial shirts—cire all testaments to the failure
of genocidal forces to obliterate a people (see Turner 1993). Both Tupac's lyrics and
the embodied practices of the second line speak to the astonishing power oi black
populations and their capacity to organize on a large scale. Social clubs announce
and celebrate their ability to mobilize massive crowds, which can completely take
over whole neighborhoods. Poaching on Caesar's famous line, the Calliope High
Steppers' proclaimed, "We came. We saw. We conquered." Thus both Tupac's lyrics
766
and Caesar's statement are incorporated into local ritual practice, promoting the
fierce resilience of those who will not be defeated by the structural violence of the innercity economy.
The T-shirts memorializing Kim Groves would seem to praise another kind of
fierceness, the strength of a mother who would not submit to police violence and who
overcame her own fear in filing a complaint against a police officer known to be a
gangster. The caption on Groves's memorial shirt packs a powerful rhetorical punch
for those who know how she was killed: She is "gone, but not forgotten." Most residents of neighborhoods terrorized by gangsters, both in and out of police uniform, do
not have Groves's uncommon courage. In the words of one Ninth Ward resident interviewed by the local newspaper in the aftermath of the Groves shooting, "I'm afraid
to call the police department and say anything" (Varney 1994:9). Thus, the tactics of
memory deployed by second liners sacralize urban space by linking communal identities to the courage and defiance of those who have gone before them. Whether in
the very shape of the parade route itself, which keeps a deceased member on the
map, or in the laminated pins, or T-shirts worn by survivors, these inner-city communities express their refusal to succumb to the atomizing forces that impinge on their
lives—from numbing crime waves, to police brutality, to the dehumanizing routines
of the workplace.
For young men who, like D-Boy, have "gone astray" and whose precocious disappearance leaves family, friends, and neighbors with the too-familiar shock of loss,
the parades provide a communal space in which genuine grief can be articulated and
in which men and women of all ages can voice their questions about this life and the
possibility of a better place. They humanize the tragic personal and structural violence that pervade inner-city neighborhoods. In so doing, parades create a discursive
place for the articulation of a moral imagination, which, at the very least, keeps alive
the possibility of a critique of the current sociopolitical order (Coplan 1987). The
aforementioned T-shirt summarizes it best: "Life makes truth possible. Death makes
truth necessary."
It is not accidental that the sharpest critiques of the current state of affairs take
place around the deaths of loved ones. "Death-work," as Walter Benjamin suggested,
"provides the authority required by the storyteller" (Taussig 1997:78, in reference to
Benjamin 1969; see also Taussig 1987). "Summoning death to the stage of the living
human body" (Taussig 1997:78) inscribes memorial performances in mortality and,
thereby, in history. The T-shirts are a powerful medium for advancing a moral critique
of the social order for inner-city youth precisely because they are tied to particular
deaths. Second liners who insist that "real niggas do die," gain authority by affixing
their statements to the narration of a friend's death and, literally, printing it around the
friend's photograph. Tying this statement to a photograph, which, like a death mask,
is "stenciled off the real" (Berger 1980:54) gives it the moral power to question the social, political, and economic order.
But there is more to these shirts. They clothe in death the bodies of the youthful
people who wear them (see Nunley and Bettleheim 1988; Price and Price 1991;
Thompson 1988:26). The shirts, worn by living bodies, are made to stand for those
very bodies that are missing from the second line. They mark an empty space, a void
(Behar 1996), making present in the streets of the city the absence of the dead. They
clothe young, vibrant bodies so full of life that their mortality seems unthinkable. Yet
it is their extreme vulnerability to that same death that took their friends, relatives, and
lovers that these memorials represent.
767
The startling innovations on second-line performance traditions, which emerge
in funerals like D-Boy's, provoke controversy among traditionalists. The fundamental
message promulgated by social and pleasure clubs—the respectability of blackness—
is best illustrated in the funerals for those who lived to become upstanding elders in
the community. D-Boy's funeral is produced in tension with those parades that commemorate lives of dignity and defiance. Respectable working-class men, like Mr. Alfred Lazard, are invisible to the larger society (Duneier 1992), and their lives will
never make their way into the history books. Yet their accomplishments are forcefully
inscribed onto sacred landscapes in massive celebrations that keep alive the memory
of freedom, dignity, and community embodied by such men. The next generation of
second liners must sustain these qualities, even as they increasingly come under assault from external forces.
timeless sadness and dignity
Leo Touchet's recent book of photographs characterizes the jazz funeral as a dying tradition (Touchet and Bagneris 1998). In a press release issued by Louisiana State
University Press, the book's publisher clearly places jazz funerals in the past. "Rejoice
When You Die documents the end of the era of the traditional jazz funerals . . . a tribute to the timeless sadness and dignity . . . of this fascinating cultural ceremony" (The
New Orleans Jazz Funeral 1999). Touchet's book is only the latest in a long series of
photographic depictions of jazz funerals. Luke Fontana (1980), Lee Friedlander
(1992), Michael P. Smith (1994), Christopher Porche West (1993), and others have
published photographs, that vary widely in style and artistic technique, but all depict
essentially the same "timeless" funeral. They seem to be searching for some transcendent moment in this sacred ceremony—a moment that moves them and, as photographer L. J. Goldstein suggests, speaks to something "greater than the subject matter
itself" (personal communication, September 5, 1999). These photographs have circulated so widely that they seem to have produced a "reality" outside of the events
themselves. They have, in a sense, reified and essentialized the concept of the traditional jazz funeral (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
Although many documentary photographers use black and white film for artistic
as well as for practical and financial reasons, the cumulative effect of numerous books
and posters depicting New Orleans funerary processions in black and white is to create what I term antiquification of the cultural practices the photographs depict. The
pictures appear to be already in the past: retrospective, nostalgic, and ripe for cornmodification. Because what is scarce is often more avidly collected, the transposition
of contemporary performance into the past makes it exotic and valuable (Price 1989;
Steiner 1994; see also Stewart 1984). The deceit in this nostalgia for a lost tradition is
amply demonstrated by the two funerals described above. Not only is the tradition
surviving, but it is a dynamic form, constantly being reappropriated and revised for
new circumstances. The static or antiquated quality of the black and white photographs, however, suggests otherwise.
As Fabian (1983) suggests in his much-cited work, Time and the Other, the denial of coevalness is inextricably linked to the denial of our common humanity and of
our shared struggles with those depicted as temporally Other. Building on Fabian's insight, Michael Hanchard's recent essay on Afro-Modernity (1999) suggests that the
denial of cotemporality between the white majority in the United States and the African American minority has consistently been used as a strategy to deny the latter civil
rights and full membership in the American body politic (see also Gupta 1994). Allochrony also involves the erasure of agency (Drewal 1991) of both the participants in
768
funerals and of the photographers, writers, and collectors involved in documenting them.
That is, representations that employ nostalgia and the denial of coevalness erase the
choices made by those who organize funerals and their efforts to act on the world. Organizers of jazz funerals and second liners are deprived of their temporally grounded
role as social actors—they are merely reproducing a timeless tradition (see Drewal
1991). Such representations also elide the agency of photographers and ethnographers—by inhibiting an awareness of how our appropriations, including acts of documentation, analysis, and interpretation, may have an impact on those we are depicting.
As Lutz and Collins (1993:87-117) have suggested, the significance of photographs comes into sharper relief when contrasted to images prevalent in other media,
such as news and film. In New Orleans, the artistic (photographic) depiction of blackness in jazz funerals contrasts sharply with the routine depiction of urban African
Americans as criminals, victims, welfare mothers, and, increasingly, corrupt politicians. Unlike other media, the art photographs generally emphasize the pathos,
grace, dignity, and spiritual depth of black funerary ritual. But one might also contrast
these art photographs of jazz funerals to the photographic memorial T-shirts discussed
above. For many of those who purchase the former, the images provide illusionary access to a world they would never otherwise be able to enter. In our increasingly segregated urban spaces, jazz funeral photography operates a fictive mediation. It creates a
virtual communion across boundaries of race, class, and culture (see also Ohlmann
1996). Most of the consumers of these representations are separated from those depicted in them by social class and by their positioning in the racial/spatial order (Rahier 1998; see also Wade 1993, 1995).10 Significantly, the mourners in these photographs (and often even the deceased) are anonymous.'1 They embody a
disarticulated, decontextualized ritual of mourning as "timeless sadness and dignity"
(The New Orleans Jazz Funeral 1999). The memorial T-shirts, on the other hand,
composed by grieving friends, family, and lovers, are typically based on color snapshots. In contrast to the nostalgia of the "fine art" photographs discussed above, these
shirts emphasize the temporal immediacy and intimacy of the death of specific individuals. The snapshots often depict personal moments shared between friends, club
members, and relatives. Worn on memorial shirts, these photographs tie together the
dead and the living. They insist that the dead are "gone, but not forgotten." The dead
in these photographs are captured by these snapshots in the vitality of their lives. As
several T-shirts proclaim, "I love you my nigga." The young men and women who
wear these memorial shirts affirm their specific kinship and love for those photographed. They are "our dead."
The shirts and the complex memorial practices of which they are a part are thus
involved not only in the irreducible emotional work of grieving and remembering, but
they also participate in a process that produces locality, which, in fact, "produces
neighborhoods" through its production of "local subjects" (Appadurai 1996:178-199).
As constituted through these memorial practices, New Orleans neighborhoods encompass the dead as well as the living. The ethical commentaries contained in the
memorial practices discussed in this article constitute an important register through
which local subjects are produced. New Orleanians appear to be laboring actively to
enunciate a shared moral vision through their grief.
live and let die
I began this article with the jazz funeral depicted in the James Bond film, which
signifies a turning point in the visibility of second lining in film. Since the early 1970s,
an increasing number of venues have emerged for the representation of New Orleans
769
African American culture in the form of jazz funeral photography, brass band music,
and even staged second lines (see Regis 1999), forming a fast-growing industry that
seeks to capture black performance traditions for various purposes. Staged second
lines and mock jazz funerals are increasingly used to promote various agendas: entertainment, tourism and promotion, political campaigning, advancement of consciousness
raising and educational agendas, HIV/AIDS awareness, and even the inauguration of
mayors.'2 But only certain elements of the neighborhood-based events can be reproduced in these staged processions. Missing are the dynamic interactions between club
members, sponsors, and neighborhood residents that characterize the Sunday afternoon
anniversary parades and the community-based jazz funerals. The staged shows—with
twirling umbrellas, white handkerchiefs waved in the air, a brass band, and a lone
grand marshall leading the procession (standing in for all the other club members and
second liners)—have become iconic representations that, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
(1998) has suggested, resemble each other more than they resemble the original events
on which they are based. Like the art photographs, staged shows are static, rigid, and
narrowly traditional. At the same time that such canonical performances proliferate,
however, African American youth in New Orleans continue to innovate on the basis
of what is for them a living practice.
At a recent Father's Day parade, organized and sponsored by the Perfect Gentlemen, I saw Shorty, a young man whom I recognized from the Young Men Olympian's
Fifth Division. His shirt immediately grabbed my attention. Its design was reminiscent
of a memorial shirt, with large color photographs and captions, but with an astonishing difference. The shirt announced, "My little brothers have a story to tell." Under the
photos, instead of the familiar birth and death dates, I read "I Satellite Camp, Lil Larry
Jr." and "Angola-Bound, Lil Duke." This shirt memorialized not the physical death of
these young men, but their social death, through incarceration. Their sentences were
displayed on the front of the shirt, which read: "20 years flat—25 years flat." Louisiana
has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the nation: 736 inmates for every
100,000 residents. Nationwide, African Americans constitute 50 percent of the prison
population but only 12 percent of the general population (Katz 2000; see also Mauer
1999). The memorial T-shirt gave Shorty a way to remember his absent brothers, making them present despite their physical absence. The wearer speaks to his brothers in
the second person: "Much love from your Big Bro. Second Line Shorty." But Lil Larry
and Lil Duke have their say, also. Shorty shows me the back of the T-shirt, which is
covered in a bold lettered statement from the imprisoned brothers:
$ This is our $tory
Our parents raised us the
Right way, but the streets
Took us the wrong way
Two troublesome niggas
From that U.P.T. Reprezeten
Pierce $t. Posse'
To our skags when we touch down
It ain't gonna be nuthing fucking nice
Niggas ya heard us
Yall check this $hitout
Everything we did was real
But we wasn't no $cll out ass niggas
So—Yall keep this $hit real.
Pierce $t. Posse'
770
Unlike the other young men represented in memorial T-shirts, Larry and Duke can talk
back. Their social death is only partial and, as they suggest, temporary: "To our skags,
when we touch down, it ain't gonna be nuthin tuckin nice." This dark message suggests, that they, like Tupac, will return from their exile.13 The shirt's message further
underscores the continuity between life in prison and on the streets (Venkatesh 1994).
Moreover, it constitutes a discursive link between the two worlds. Through their
brother's memorial shirt, Larry and Duke can speak from the other side, crafting a
moral tale from their experience.
Larry and Duke (and their brother Shorty) are engaging in a creative dialogue
with a fluid and malleable cultural form of memory. Shorty can express his grief at losing his brothers to the penal system while simultaneously providing them with a platform from which to air their own grief and defiance of the system. They claim the right
to define their own trajectories, rejecting the societal pattern of blaming the parents
when they say, "Our parents raised us the right way, but the streets took us the wrong
way." Finally, they proclaim their resistance to the temptation to trade loyalty to
friends for the material benefits of "selling out," a complex concept referring generally
to betrayal of one's friends and perhaps specifically in this case to the legal bargaining
in which information is traded for a reduced sentence: "Everything we did was
real/But we wasn't no $ell out ass niggas." They broadcast their continuing allegiance
to their friends and peers, the Pierce $t. Posse'. As in the more common memorial Tshirts, this incarceration narrative employs the occasion of (social) death to articulate
a moral vision and to claim continuing affective ties between the human community
in the here and now, and those who have passed into another realm of existence. Like
many memorial shirts, which promise "I'm gonna see you on the other side," this shirt
promises that a reunion is forthcoming—in this case, the return of the incarcerated to
their urban communities.
The communal production of jazz funerals in New Orleans is part of a complex
and dynamic matrix of memorial practices.14 In spite of proliferating representations
that promote a nostalgic view of African American heritage in the city in terms of dying traditions, requiring documentation, curation, and commodification, my ethnographic findings suggest quite another process is underway. The jazz funeral tradition
itself is continually being revised and reappropriated by New Orleanians, who employ the ritual to make collective claims over the city while giving voice to their own
individual subjectivities. Funerals and other memorial practices provide a space for
the expression of individual and communal grief, while joining local histories with
contemporary experiences of blackness. These experiences and the notions of how
they ought to be expressed publicly are by no means homogenous. Whose life should
be celebrated with a jazz funeral? Whose memory should be publicly honored? What
constitutes a life of dignity and respect in the city's late capitalist economy? For the
moment, these questions continue to be asked in powerful performances where persistent nostalgia seems to coexist easily with robust ritual practice and where subjectivities emerge in the intimate proximity of life and death.
notes
Acknowledgments. Field research in New Orleans in 1988-89 was funded by the Jean
Lciffitte National Historical Park and the National Park Service and by the Tulane University
('enter for Research on Women. Additional support for ongoing field work between 1993 and
1999 was provided by Tulane University and Mississippi State University. Fieldwork in 2000
was supported by a Manship Research Fellowship at Louisiana State University. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1 <)9() Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
771
Association, Chicago, Illinois. I am grateful to Jean Muteba Rahier, Felipe Smith, Peter Sutherland, Dydia DeLyser, John White, and Jill Brody for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. I
would also like to thank Gregg Stafford, Clara Joseph, Ronald Lewis, Claudette Giles, Joe Stern,
Miriam Reed, Benny Jones, Loretta Lumar, and many other club members and second liners, including Judith Maxwell, Bret Blosser, James Charbonnet, Angie Mason, Rick Fifield, Ramesh
Vangal, and Ed Newman for their generosity, their insights, and their critical comments without
which this article would never have been written. The thoughtful critiques of Norman Whitten
and the anonymous reviewers at American Ethnologist are greatly appreciated.
1. Although a vast scholarly literature addresses voodoo, or vodun, as a legitimate religion, many New Orleanians who participate in jazz funerals would find such an association with
voodoo to be deeply offensive. In conversations with me, second liners identify strongly as
Christian and, whether Catholic, Baptist, or members of other faith communities, they tend to
speak of voodoo in terms of powders, hexes, and spells, rather than as spirit-filled religious practice (see Jacobs and Kaslow 1991).
2. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued in another context, "Performances can become like artifacts. They freeze. They become canonical. They take forms that are alien, if not
antithetical, to how they are produced and experienced in their local settings . . . . The result
may be events that have no clear analogue within the community from which they purportedly
derive and they come to resemble one another more than that which they are intended to represent" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:64).
3. "Back of town" means some distance from the river; reflecting historic settlement patterns, "back of town" neighborhoods are often low income, low lying, and prone to flooding.
4. A systematic study of the real economy of second-line neighborhoods is yet to be undertaken. It is my impression that a large number of social club members are self-employed and
many work two and three jobs to meet their expenses. Many individuals who would not appear
to be productively engaged in the formal economy are nonetheless active in the production and
distribution of goods and services.
5. There are perhaps a dozen serious photographers who are devoted second liners. Some
of these photographers live and work in the communities they photograph; others move in and
out primarily on ritual occasions. They read the obituaries and rely on a network of friends to
call them when a jazz funeral is being organized. I explore this pattern more fully in a paper on
the presence of white second liners, photographers, and ethnographers (Regis n.d.).
6. Second lining, as a form of occupying public space, can be read as a political act: "To
walk on the public street is becoming a sign of class in many cities, an activity that the elite is
abandoning. No longer using streets as spaces of sociability, the elite now want to prevent street
life from entering their enclaves" (Caldeira 1996:314).
7. I was given a copy of this set of guidelines from one of her neighbors, who was offended
by her colonizing gestures.
8. Nor was there any report of trouble related to the parade that night. I mention the absence of the police because, in theory, all parades through city streets are required to obtain a
police permit and police escorts. The Treme neighborhood, however, is known for its spontaneous parades, which flout this bureaucratic requirement. Several people have pointed this out to
me with obvious pride and satisfaction. Avoiding police surveillance, one parade veteran implied, is made possible by the neighborhood's reputation for cultural activism and by the actions of several forceful political activists, who routinely threaten the elected officials with
petitions and public demonstrations.
9. Here, I am borrowing an "Indian" phrase from the well-known Mardi Gras Indian
Chant, "Indian Red," which can be heard at Sunday evening Indian practices throughout the
city: "Big Chief, Big Chief. Indian of the nation. Wide, wide creation. He won't bow down,
down on that ground. That's why we love to hear you (<ill my Indian Red." African Americans
have been masquerading as Native Americans in New Orleans since at least the 1880s (Berry
1995; Blank 1978; Lipsitz 1990; Smith 1994). More than masking on Mardi Gms and St. Joseph's
night, black Indians work on their intricate hand sewn bead, ostrich plume and rhinestone costumes
throughout the year and participate in weekly ritual "rehearsals" in neighborhood barrooms in
the months preceding (arnival. Masking Indian has been interpreted (Lipsitz 1990; Smith 1994)
772
as memorializing alliances between African maroons and Native Americans during slavery and
as invoking the latter's courageous resistance to Euro-American conquest. Although I am quoting a live rendition, recorded versions of this traditional chant can be found on the Wild
Tchoupitoulas's 1976 recording of their self entitled Wild Tchoupituulas and the Golden
Eagles's 1988 Lightning and Thunder.
10. I would like to clarify that this analysis is in no way aimed at the personal engagement
of the dozens of photographers who have been documenting the jazz funeral tradition. I make
no assumption about their intentions. At issue in this article, rather, are the social relations in
which the consumption of their publications is embedded.
11. Many jazz funeral photographers are jazz fans, whose interest in photographing jazz
musicians has led them to follow jazz funerals. Thus, they often name the brass band featured in
a funeral, but not the name of the deceased or the social club sponsoring the funeral.
1 2. New alliances are emerging between hip-hop artists, promoters, producers, and second-line organizations. Master P and No Limit Records recently hired several social clubs to parade for the filming of a music video. According to the president of one participating group, the
marching clubs were each paid $1,000 for 45 minutes of parading.
13. The rap star prophesied that he would return after his death.
14. "Bubbling out of swamps and bogs, a thousand flashes at once scintillate and are extinguished all over the surface of a society. In the official imaginary, they are noted only as exceptions or marginal events. An ideology of property isolates the 'author,' the 'creator,' and the
'work.' In reality, creation is a disseminated proliferation. It swarms and throbs. A polymorphous carnival infiltrates everywhere, a celebration both in the streets and in the homes for
those who are unblinded by the aristocratic and museological model of durable production.
The origin for this model is a mourning and its effect is a lure" (deCerteau 1997:139-140).
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accepted October 26, 2000
final version submitted February 12, 2001
Helen Regis
Department of Geography and Anthropology
237 Howe-Russell Hall
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
hregis 7 @lsu. edu

- Wiley Online Library

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