Hey y'all, I'm Robi. Y'all know me from the
voodoo video. We're Free Tours By Foot, and I'm with Andrew today, and today our journey is going
to take you to the Treme: the very first black, African-American neighborhood. You're going to
hear a whole lot about food, you're going to hear about culture; I get to show you all what
my family was, I get to show y'all a bunch of personal stuff that you don't get to see online
-- we're going to give that all to you right here. Yeah, we're going to see a lot of different
spots connected with us, I guess for starters we're right on the edge of the French Quarter.
Now, so the French Quarter is adjacent to the Treme, and in the distance actually you can see
from where we are: St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square. So a lot of the stuff that tourists give
their main attention to is really only a stone's throw away from all of this, but once you get
out here, you're in a whole different part of history that really flies under the radar when
you're in the French Quarter. So what we're gonna see is gonna begin with Armstrong Park, the park
that's right here next to us. This is dedicated to various pieces of music history, and it contains
a spot that really draws the connection between New Orleans and West Africa. And then we're gonna
get outside the park, on the way see some music venues, and then we'll see a church that is one
of the big community hubs for the Treme, we'll pass by a few different museums that you can check
out if you come to visit, that's going to include the Backstreet Cultural Museum which gets into
masking practices and parade traditions. We're also going to see the Treme Petit Jazz Museum,
which goes into the history of jazz music -- very important here -- and we will see a restaurant
that we can strongly recommend to you, some real classic New Orleans houses, and then we'll finish
with a kind of community gathering place turned highway overpass turned community gathering place
again. So a lot of stuff in the next little while, and for y'all who haven't heard of the Treme
before, the way people have a connection into it is either you sometimes just glimpse it from a
distance, and for some people the main reference is the TV show Treme that HBO made, which goes
real heavy on the music aspect. And then some people have like a really personal connection
with it even if they're not from New Orleans, and that's why even though I've led a lot of these
on my own, we wanted to make sure Robi was along because he's got the first hand expertise --
and the family ties. All three of us is from Louisiana, like all of us from Louisiana, and even
where we come from in mid-to-southern Louisiana, a lot of people don't know that still live there --
they don't know that the Treme is the very first black African-American neighborhood, and also most
importantly the birthplace of jazz, and the most important thing about it being the birthplace of
jazz? A lot of the music y'all listen to today? Some music that you don't even even realize is
connected to jazz all that started right here baby. Yeah. And we're gonna introduce y'all to
that, we're gonna get into some different names in music, also when Robi says all three of us,
he's including both of us, and--who are childhood friends, and uh the cameraman James. Yeah,
what y'all don't know is all three of us grew up together, we've been together since we were
like in -- some in elementary and high school, middle school too -- so y'all get the authentic
experience of true Louisiana people showing y'all like where we come from. So since you've got this
personal tie like as we're getting into the park, what like -- what as a kid coming here was was
your like overall impression of the Treme? What do you -- Let me tell you, it was so different.
One of my favorite things about coming here as a kid -- my grandma took us everywhere first
off, because she always wanted to know about our different family, um and also more importantly
where all of us Creoles come from: New Orleans! Biggest memory I have? music. Going to people's
backyards and just listening to jazz, just going to somebody house, an uncle, an auntie, could be
a cousin, and just hearing them play jazz in their backyard. That's a tradition that's been going on
for years and years and years, even in the early 1900s, like that's how old that tradition is, and
it's something that's still kind of done to this day. My family back in Bayou Sirius, we still do
that to this day; we just randomly come together in a yard, in a space, everybody bring their
instruments, we sing, we play, we jazz. And as--as we're gonna see, outdoor music is like the
history of this space, and we just passed through the gate and like -- being by the marching
band monument here -- worth pointing out like the connection with Louis Armstrong. Obviously
the music connection is strong and he's a--in some ways a really appropriate mascot for this
space, just because like I mean, single most famous New Orleanian of any kind, specifically a
musician -- and that is, as we've mentioned, some of what really matters in this space and certainly
an example of like New Orleans black excellence, but not the signature kind of person who would be
from this neighborhood in the 1800s, which would go more into the word Creole that you're using.
So when we talk about Creoles of color or free people of color, like what is--what all does that
associate with for you? For me it's different, because y'all got to understand something, a lot
of this history -- which is the reason why we're doing this -- a lot of it is unwritten. So as
a Creole person, that word to me means someone who's part of the culture, born and raised in the
culture; whether you know the language or not, you know the different foods, you know where
the foods come from, the ties to West Africa, but also your French side as well, you know
how it got combined with the African stuff to create this pot of gumbo that they like to call us
Creole. And there's different meanings of Creole, at one point it meant that your parents came
from the old world and gave birth to you in the new world -- that made you Creole to that
location. Eventually that changed to just people mixed with African blood and they were Creole,
then it became a whole African-French cultural, big--just thing, it just became a big, huge
culture which involved food, music, dancing, clothing -- which we still wear to this day, um --
and for me Creole just means that that gumbo mix, yeah that that big old mix of music, religion
even, culture -- for me the food, like y'all know we can--we put our foot in y'all food, and for
those Southerners who ain't watching this right now, all that means? that's the good, the food is
good for real-real, not for play-play; you gonna hear that a lot, that is a Southern expression,
but we pride ourselves in our Creole food -- y'all come on down here get y'all something to eat!
We'll show you where, uh and to the so--mentioned the unwritten part of the history, and the
written part of the history where you do see those terms used. So--so Creole was ambiguously
some--originally would have meant like he said, the folks mostly in the French Quarter at first
who were going to be French and Spanish descended but lived over here, and then you get Creoles of
color which kind of rolls into being Creole as well, and then that term free people of color
-- I think a lot of folks associate people of color with being like a very modern PC term,
and in fact like you find that term in like 18th century legal records. Y'all we still
use that term today, because you can't just call somebody black nowadays, we mix with all
kinds of stuff, so you--it's the safest thing you can say to be honest with you, is a "person
of color." And that applies all across the board, and that involves Creole people, no matter how
dark or how light they are. And here in the Treme, so -- for example -- someone who grew up here
in the 19th century who identified themselves as Creole or free person of color might have
called someone like Louis Armstrong black as a way of distinguishing themselves from each other,
because so many of the people here were mixed; their families had been free for a long time,
they did not have last names like Armstrong, they spoke French, they were Catholic versus
Protestant, all these different things. And so you had real deep divides within that community
even between different people with different levels of mixture, like what at the time you would
have called Mulattos versus Quadroons versus -- all these ways of splitting people up. I think
it's safe to say now to just think of the word Creole as a way to say "come together," because
there's just a whole bunch of mix of just people just coming together, and we just eating and
dancing and drinking and having a good time. So Creole just means to come together honestly,
now -- like the definition keeps changing through time. Um, one of my favorite things about
being a Creole person is that I'm able to do these things like this and like show
y'all the truth behind this stuff, because there's a lot to see and honestly, I don't
think we're gonna have enough time to even cover it all. This is gonna be far from comprehensive
y'all, I mean the Treme contains so much that-- it's so rich -- we're inevitably gonna be
leaving some things out, so like if you've got an experience with, a personal connection with
the Treme, uh -- light or or heavy -- whatever it is like, please, comments are a great place to
chime in on the story, because we are not enough; we're far from enough to cover all of it. We do
read the comments, we want to see your responses, it's okay. You know, let us know what else you
want to see, too. I know, Robi, for you, you've told me that like Louis Armstrong was one of the
people who was held up for you as like a family story growing up. He was a big old family story
for us, just to make sure that we had our tie to New Orleans when we was kids. My grandmother used
to tell us stories about how he wasn't accepted in a bunch of white spaces that he was allowed
to perform in, how he kind of paved the way for a person of color from Louisiana just to go into
places that no person of color has ever been. Music! Big, big, big, big deal, because he
was a black person traveling across the United States -- and the world even -- playing music, our
music, it was ours, so he was a big fixture in our folklore and our just regular stories, his name
crossed our lips all the time, and you think about this like a name Armstrong; a lot of people always
want a--they think a Creole name has to be French or whatever -- Sydney Bechet, something like that?
Something like that, and some people will tell you yeah, Louis Armstrong was Creole because he was
from New Orleans, or some people say no he wasn't Creole, he was black. We don't care, to be honest
with y'all; the man was--was a big, major, major, major, major like -- I didn't have a lot of heroes
personally growing up, he was one of them. For me, Louie Armstrong was one of my biggest heroes
from the stories I used to hear from my family, and also more specifically my grandma. In terms
of going back to the root connection with all this stuff, you want to -- we can get on over
into Congo Square. I would love to--to hear, so y'all who have watched the voodoo tour, you'll
have seen this already. If you want to learn more about it than we're going to do today, the
voodoo tour is a great one to watch -- it's a great one to watch one way or another, but uh
Robi? Can you tell us just kind of from this uh, this performancy perspective, a little bit of
the basics of how Congo Square came to be and what it's all about? Woo, that's a history right
there, baby! Congo Square was where a lot of the uh, enslaved and ex-enslaved and also free
people of color who were of African descent, they were allowed to come out here to Congo
Square and keep a lot of their culture alive. A lot of the drumming that still happens
to this day every Sunday in Congo Square, some of my family, some of my extended family
still come out here and drum for the ancestors to this day. Also, those rhythms also were the
foundation of jazz -- those rhythms that you hear in the drumming, so this open area is still used
to this day by my family, other people's families, with those same rhythms that were created back
then now, which still points to jazz which gave birth to blues and other forms of music.
This is so significant to me my family still comes out here and prays, we've been praying out
here for generations, since they were enslaved, my family. So Congo Square man, first it was
Native American territory of course that was taken away from them, then the West African slaves
came out here every Sunday they had off -- so they were allowed to hop the wall that used to be
there and come out here and keep their culture, see their children that-that were sold
to other families in the French Quarter, see some of their family that actually earned
their freedom but they were still not allowed to see because they were enslaved -- they were all
out here in Congo Square checking on each other, feeding each other, keeping their cultures alive,
something we still do to this day. Very important mural here which depicts like um, an artist's,
this is an artist's rendition of what have might been -- like what you might have seen back in the
1700s and 1800s when the West African slaves came out here. There's a lot of significance here,
but more importantly look at the drumming, look at the dancing -- and I love pointing
this out, I did this on the voodoo tour video, I'm about to do it again -- look at that woman
dead in the center. Remember, women are dominant in this culture, y'all need to understand that,
that's important -- ain't got nothing to do with voodoo just so y'all know -- but even to this day
we still like, we elevate our women. Y'all uh, worth mentioning, so as-as important as it
is and as clear as it is today that this is a culturally African neighborhood and really
like, maybe the most important neighborhood in black history in the US arguably, the
commemoration of it as such? Having things like this monument here? That's a pretty recent
phenomenon. So 2010 is when we have that go in, a lot of other monuments are just in the last
decade or so. Sorry, we--hey we're going to cut it out. Passerby: "oh I know you two!" what?
Passerby: "yes I do, I watch your videos." Well, you'll get to watch this one! You get--you might
see yourself--yourself, we're doing another! This is the French Quarter and thereabouts,
always feels more real when you have the people you recognize, we all cross paths a lot. That's
like family. We've been missing that. Everybody's family around here. So it's worth, I think y'all,
having a little bit of a historical picture for how this came to look the way it does, because
it's been through really, really different phases. So going back all the way to the beginning when
New Orleans is founded in 1718, this is outside the city limits. Rampart Street over there had
a wall and a fort right about where we started, and then as you go on you get -- as
we discussed -- the Congo Square space where gatherings could happen, and that was a
little public common along the edge of the Treme Plantation as it eventually came to be named, and
that was the property of a man named Claude Treme, and the neighborhood becomes his, it gets named
after him in 1810 when he sells it to the city, and so streets get laid through it, people start
to live out here, and the preponderance of people who do live out here are going to be your free
people of color, although a real solid mix; it's a white/black mixed neighborhood all
around. So you've got a lot of mix then, and it really gets to be heavily people who are moving
here from other places, especially from Haiti, because right during this time -- really big in
New Orleans history -- the Haitian Revolution sends a lot of folks across the water over
to here: free, enslaved, white/black mixed, you get all these cultural traditions. So when
we talk about somewhere like Congo Square, it's not just African and American, it's
also Caribbean that plays into all of that. We're gonna talk Creole language y'all, but
there's two Creole languages in this brain at least, maybe more maybe more developing
right now from the mixture of them. Yeah um, I get them mixed up all the time. Sure, I'm
sure people can pick out the differences and just get some some fun accent out of it. Uh, as time
is rolling on here y'all, so you get this this uh, this gradual growth of the neighborhood throughout
the 19th century, and then as you get close to the Civil War, the tradition of the gatherings in
Congo Square temporarily dies out -- probably because of the Civil War, though the-the history
is a little obscure -- and then in the late 19th century it's really kind of actively covered up
that this was what it was in the 1890s, the city names Congo Square "Beauregard Square" and plants
most of the trees that you see out there, so even that appearance that it has today somewhat dates
from that time, and then as you get into the early 20th century there's actually a playground and
pool only for white patrons on that site, so it is invisible as far as the African element that lived
there so powerfully just a few decades before. In the 1920s, you get this idea of building a
big theater out here which becomes the Municipal Auditorium; it's this big imposing presence in
the park, it ends up being a performance space for all kinds of different genres: there's you know
jazz performances, there's big conc--orchestra concerts, there's wrestling matches, like
everything happens in that space for a time -- Mardi Gras balls -- and originally that theater
was supposed to be built on top of Congo Square as we know it now, but that would have wiped out the
pool and the playground, so it ended up being put a little further back where it is today, covering
part of what used to be Congo Square. And then you have -- mid-century -- the neighborhood
shifting from being this very mixed neighborhood to being a mostly black neighborhood because
of white flight going on after World War II, and then the park finally starts to come to be
following that. So getting into the 60s, there's this idea that we're trying to boost tourism, the
city builds a lot of its big hotels at that time. The idea is for a big performance complex
in the vein of like Lincoln Center, but it ends up having to level a huge amount of
this neighborhood to the enormous protest of the people who live here at the time. That gets, you
know, ignored, and ultimately many blocks of the Treme -- residential blocks and old music venues
-- are torn down and the whole planned complex never really takes shape except for one theater
that opens up in the early 70s and which is today called the Mahalia Jackson Auditorium, but doesn't
even have that name at the time, so still kind of a covering up and actually a reduction of
African--African derived stuff here for a good long while. And when the park finally comes to be?
It's after Louis Armstrong's death when that first project is petered out, the city decides honoring
Louis Armstrong where he came from makes sense, and so little by little -- finally finishing off
in 1980 -- you end up getting this park somewhat as it is; it hosts the first Jazz Fest in 1970 on
the way towards the park being built, so there are pieces of really important music history in
there, but the commemoration really comes late, and so when we talk about all the destruction
that the creation of this park entailed, it really complicates the place in the eyes of
the people who live here, and it's rare that you see any exceptions to it -- there's one right
over here which is a little complex of buildings that was saved by preservationists at their
request, because it does have a really close connection with music history. So this is an old
masonic lodge hall called Perseverance Lodge #4, and while this was a white masonic group, they
rented the space out to all kinds of groups, and you ended up having a lot of early jazz
performances happen here. But groups like masonic lodges, when you look at like what caused
social cohesion in this neighborhood, there were families, there were churches, and then there were
these mutual aid societies. After slavery came to an end when the people who were formerly enslaved
didn't get a lot of help to make their new life start, this was the stuff that held people
together -- was you joined a mutual aid society, you paid dues, those dues paid back if you got
sick, or when someone died it paid for the burial. And that's where our jazz funeral tradition comes
in, because these groups had a social calendar, they played bands all the time, and then once
it was time for a funeral, you wanted to have the band come out and show that this person
was part of something big and great and-and that you wanted to be a part of in turn. So a
place like this? We have all that history there, but today it's just sitting empty, so neglect is a
pretty big part of the theme in this neighborhood after oftentimes -- you know, change is
inevitable, of course -- but when change has happened here, especially coming from government,
it has tended to be a place where the changes are destruction for the benefit of somebody else.
Y'all can see we are now outside of a fence, so the park is kind of closed off from the Treme
itself; it's very welcoming from the side that faces the French Quarter -- big open gates -- but
on these sides, it's a little bit more forbidding, it suggests that this is a thing for visitors
and not so much for the people who live out here. And as a last note about those buildings
over there guys, one of the things that did go on there for a long time that's worth you
knowing about is our radio station WWOZ -- it broadcast out of there from its creation up until
Hurricane Katrina from the kitchen building for that whole complex. Anytime you need a New
Orleans soundtrack, that is your station, and you can also find -- when music is going on --
a full list of live music events on that station's website as well. And maybe the folks most likely
to be familiar with WWOZ are the people who watched that show Treme that we mentioned, one of
their main characters is a DJ on WWOZ: DJ Davis, and they actually start off his story in
the show with a mention of the studio moving from Armstrong Park where they originally were
to the French Market where they still are today, so while you only see that French Market
studio in the show, you actually get a mention of Armstrong Park at that point
from the very beginning of the first season. So did you have a sense , Robi, coming
up, about the park and how people in the neighborhood felt about it? Oh lord, they
hated the fence! Yeah. I can tell you that there because they--you know, a lot of people who are from the
Treme, including my family -- you know, there's a sense of family pride -- and this is theirs, this belonged
to them, like they feel like this is theirs. Most of the people have been--that like were people
of color, they got kicked out the French Quarter after a certain amount of time, they wasn't
welcome there because of racism, they landed here. A lot of those descendants still run around
here, and they're taught just like I was that this is yours, this is--this belongs to you. So you done
built a fence where we done grown up at to stop us from going up in there to dance, to sing, to feed
the homeless -- that's a big one right there, because you fed your community -- um, to pray, to keep all
these traditions alive that--they want us to die, they want this stuff to die, and here we are in the
Treme still keeping it alive to this day. I know for us, so like you and I have both for a long time
been giving in-person tours inside the park that would then move on into the French Quarter, so for
us being out here now means we are on a Treme tour. Right. This was the only one that we--and y'all,
if you visit New Orleans and come see us, Treme tours are something we do regularly,
although it's something slightly fewer people ask for, so they're a little less regular -- but it's
the one that gets outside the park and actually goes into the neighborhood. And y'all, of course
this company has been operating as an in-person tour company way, way longer than we've been doing
the video thing, and we still do. Uh, we've both been working with the company for a few years, and when
you see the "free" in the name, what that means -- Free Tours By Foot -- is that the tours we do are all
pay-what-you-will, so you have the option to take a tour either for free up front, or for a -- depending
on some of them -- a kind of minimal registration fee, and then at the end you pay whatever you feel
like it was worth, and you and I have both been making our living that way for a few years now.
Yeah, it's been about four or five years now, um -- worth it. Yeah, and also like, we-we treat the
videos that way too, we invite anybody who finds these inspiring or informative, if you feel like
tipping your guide, you'll find Robi's information down below in the description and-and thank
you seriously, so much to those of you all who have done that already, it's-it's pretty--thank you, thank you, thank you, so important to us, especially with everything that's going on. But
we just love that y'all love these videos so much, like that's the most exciting thing for me,
so thank all of you for it, and continue to let us know what y'all want to see, that's important too!
Thanks, James. And of course, a like and a subscribe are very helpful ways to do it, too. Liking helps other
people find it, subscribe helps you find us again. Y'all as we make our way over towards the church
and the Backstreet Museum, we're passing by an intersection of two streets named Henriette Delisle
and Ursulines, and these are both named after nuns. Uh, Ursuline is named for the Ursuline Convent which
is located in the French Quarter on this street, and then Henriette Delisle is a specific nun; she was
a 19th century woman who, born into this class of free people of color, she didn't have a lot of
options in terms of what a woman could do outside of either marrying or being this kind of arranged
mistress -- this everything but marriage relationship with a white man -- but she wanted to become a nun,
and she ended up creating the first order of nuns that accepted women with African ancestry, and it
becomes the Sisters of the Holy Family -- which still exist -- and they operated schools, which tons of
people living in the Treme went to school with the Sisters of the Holy Family. You also
have a benefactor of hers, this guy Thomy Lafon, who was -- similarly to her -- mixed race guy who
could probably pass for white in his time, but lived in this very visible middle class,
and he was a wealthy philanthropist in the end who supported that and school integration
and a lot of stuff that was like cutting edge for early 19th century. So those are just a couple
of examples of what the lives of Creoles of color, free people of color might look like. These folks
were like professional musicians and poets and craftsmen and artisans of all different kinds,
and sometimes had, you know, international renown -- even if they're not huge names today necessarily.
And uh, speaking of the Catholic church, here we are at St. Augustine: this is the fixture of the
neighborhood. Was this a spot you ever spent time? No, I never spent time here at the Catholic
church, we were so voodoo we never -- hahahaha Slash Baptist? Yeah, slash Baptist, also
slash Catholic to the cousins and the aunties and uncles that was here though, but like
when I came down uh, that Baptist side of my family never wanted us to go to Catholic mass,
and the one time I did go to Catholic mass I got tired, and you know in Black Baptist
churches, you know it's all about the *claps* and Catholic mass is it's -- it is, it's the token
time when you, yeah -- you just listen and you don't do a whole lot else. And I just remember just
being--the one time I went, I was like I'll never do this again! Um, and I remember interacting with one of
my cousins who was like big in the Catholic church, she's from the Treme, and we had just got back
from the second line, because one of my friends their daddy passed away, and I remember coming
back and I just came in the house just -- I was ready, I was just still just feeling the
feeling of music coming in from dancing in the street, and she was standing there looking
at me and she said "y'all still do that stuff?" Oh wow! And I wasn't--I wasn't mad at her, I
wasn't, because you know to each his own, like I said. Everyone needs someone to condescend
to. Yes, and that's exactly what was happening. Now bless her little heart, she realized that was
her culture too. Sure! She just had left it behind. I can't blame them, that was a survival
tactic for a lot of people of color back then. There's a level of respect for that. This is an
example of that right here, sitting right now in the middle of the Treme is a Catholic church;
there's more than one Catholic church, but around the corner you'll find a Baptis-Baptist
church right around the corner -- ain't nobody fighting each other, ain't nobody hating each other,
everybody respects each other's wishes, they're not -- there's that word again, "Creole" -- all together. And
this like, there is--there's deep history here too, I mean the the Catholic church goes further
back here than the Baptist church does, this place uh, built by the same architect who did St. Louis
Cathedral as we see it now, so you know, as far as historical structures go, super important. And
two, so... when this was built, it was at the request of free people of color who lived in the
neighborhood who wanted their own church, and you end up getting white parishioners coming
in once the pews are for sale -- it used to be you paid pew fees -- so the pews were something of a
status marker, there were four rows of pews in here, and what happened was the free people of color
population in the neighborhood bought up three of them, the white population ended up with one
row, and two of the rows that the free people of color had gotten went to enslaved people. So this
very, very specific piece of Civil Rights progress, but this was the first church at least in New
Orleans -- and maybe anywhere in the US -- where enslaved people got to sit down. Very specific, but
kind of a big deal for its place and time. For those of you who know your plantation history, all across
the South, for an enslaved person to sit down in the presence of someone who's of non-color is a
big deal. You know that happened here in the Treme, and so it's a big deal that it happened in the Treme
neighborhood. We talked about jazz funerals before, and these processions that have an African origin,
but took on their own special forms here, and we've mentioned second lines a couple of times, so as
we-we build towards getting into the religion, feels like a good time to hit up the subject of
second lines and all that via our museum across the street. Um, the Backstreet Cultural Museum is a
big one for me, because even though I wasn't like born here -- I'm born in Louisiana yeah, but not
born in the city of New Orleans, grew up here -- I had never been to the Backstreet Cultural Museum
until Andrew took me, and a lot of family elements, a lot of cultural things that I'm like -- oh that's
why we do this, that's why we do that, that's why a lot of black people like myself still do this
right here in the Treme. A second line tradition originated -- it wasn't called the second line
tradition, but it originated in West Africa -- and the idea is that whenever you die, we have either
God (depending on your tribe) or an ancestor spirit will safely guide your loved one's spirit to their
next resting place; in order for that spirit to be uh pleased to do so, you had to take the whole
family who lost a family member, and in the village all the family members would line up, and this is
done by age, so you have the uh, the oldest members of the family in the front and you have the
youngest in the back, and they would walk through the village mourning the death of whatever family
member passed away. Once they got to the area where they buried their dead -- depending on the tribe --
of course they put them in the ground and did whatever ceremony was done per tribe, but on the
way back -- this is done all across--all across the board -- you celebrated their life. That's when all
the crazy dances came out, that's when the rhythm picked up, that's when nobody was crying no more,
because now you're celebrating the fact that the spirit has helped that person's soul transition
to the next place safely. And these traditions we're talking about, that the museum features, are
a really big part of that show Treme from HBO. You see second lines, you see jazz funerals,
and one of the main characters is a Mardi Gras Indian -- the other tradition that this museum really
centers on -- and you get both the pageantry of those processions and also some of the nuts and bolts of
how they work. So there's a whole plot line about one of the second line groups getting a permit,
which was really difficult after Katrina, and you see the museum itself in some of their episodes as
well. Y'all we got into so many different stories and subjects during this tour that we actually
had to cut a lot of material out, so if you'd like to see more, we're going to have some additional
video from the Treme tour on our Facebook page and Instagram TV. In that respect, in terms of
like all that stuff we've talked about with the the stuff that's unseen, the stuff that isn't
recorded, the unknown pieces of history, we've got a great monument for that right over here on the
side of St. Augustine Church, which is the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, so we're gonna pay that a
visit--definitely gonna pay that a visit. We've had a lot of "to do" around monuments in New Orleans the
last few years, but I think what I've never heard anybody dispute is that there's not a lot devoted
to the African extracted side of our city's history, and that there always could stand to be
more, so this one gets specifically into--it points at a thing where--you know usually when you see
monuments, it's about someone we know a lot about; it's about heroes, individuals who somebody sees
as a hero, or just significant historical figures. The achievement here is that it really like, it
highlights how much unknown there is when we talk about slavery, that many people died enslaved
without their name ever having been written down in a way that lasts or that represents them
as anything other than an asset. It's like a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in that way, where we
we know that war can be so violent that it like severs the connection between a person's body and
their name, and slavery was that same kind of force. I know like, so we've been talking about the stuff
that's missing from the historical record and-and also specifically that there are these multiple
religions in the neighborhood, so I feel like I want to connect the dots for people that like,
when you go to plantations, you see the plantation church, you know there's--you have the baptismal
records, you have the the bible, which was the you know, that was read to the slaves on Sundays.
Like what we know about enslaved people does not include what was in their hearts, and in the case
of religion it's pretty well understood that like that connection, in the case of enslaved people,
it's pretty clear that like, religiously there was something a lot more going on than is written down. Oh yeah,
I tell y'all, um there's a lot of history about, um slavery and the traditions and stuff that's
just not written down. Some of y'all already know like technically I don't exist. According to the
historical society and records, Louisiana Creole died out a long time ago, and guess what? It didn't.
Um so there's an example of things just not being written down. A lot of these West African slaves,
including my ancestors and my family, to this day if you ask them what their religion is,
they'll tell you flat-out they're Catholic. People come to the house, "what's your religion?"
"Oh, we're Catholic, we pray to the lord." And as soon as that person leaves, as soon as they step out
that door, they may look at each other and go *speaks Creole* which means "what did she just say?" and go
straight to that altar and light up that white candle for their ancestors, that's something
we still do to this day. And the survival of it is testament that it was there before, it hasn't been
reinvented. Um from the music subject we've been talking about too y'all, there's a Creole
element to that, so Creole music would be these songs that developed in rural
Louisiana that had like a French and Spanish dance element and West African rhythms at the
same time, and it's fusions like that that lead up to jazz, which is itself a fusion you could
say; the two main ingredients of jazz are gonna be your ragtime, which is piano dance music where the
harmony is pretty European traditional, but then you get West African beats in there -- and then blues,
which is probably a synthesis of West African and British folk music -- and jazz ends up becoming the
base of a whole lot more, like music education is a big part of this neighborhood's history.
You had this incredible school that we went pretty near just outside of the park called the
Joseph Craig School -- today it's a charter school but um, a lot of people went there, you've got um --
Doreen Ketchens is like the best-known street musician probably, this incredible jazz clarinetist
who plays in the French Quarter all the time and started in jazz because she wanted to get
out of a pop quiz, so she signed up for band. And uh, and then there's this guy Earl Palmer who
went there who -- like we've said that this place is the foundation of like why local music sounds the
way it does -- and Earl Palmer, after going to that school, becomes a jazz drummer, but he also plays
in the earliest rock and roll band. So he records with Fats Domino who does his very first studio
recordings in 1949 right across the street from the Treme at the edge of the French Quarter, and
those things sell massively and they're really the beginning of rock and roll, so he's a guy coming
from this second line tradition and he puts the kinds of rhythms you'd hear in that, and that you
would have heard all the way back into Congo Square into these rock and roll recordings. Oh we're right
now by the Treme Petit Jazz Museum, this place is a great -- I mean, there's a there's a Jazz Museum
in the French Quarter which is excellent in its way, it's a little bit more um, it doesn't tell the
overall story as much you're getting a little bit of local history, you're getting specific exhibits
that rotate -- this one goes through the whole thing, and the founders here really, really know their
stuff, and they're the ones usually giving you the walk through, so you got this -- you got the
African-American Museum on the next block which is going to get into the local history from a bit
more of a zoomed out lens, and that's built into some traditional uh, Treme and French Quarter
architecture as well, so you get to see one of those old houses from the inside. Within the past
year, we had the bad news of the restaurant that we're by right now, so this is a real institution
called Li'l Dizzy's, part of this series of restaurants owned by the Baquet family, we got
the bad news that during the Covid-19 shutdown they decided to put this place up for sale
because they couldn't keep it open anymore. So ultimately, good news came around that another
generation of the family is going to pick it up and do it, so thank goodness this one's still
around. Willie May's Scotch House, one of the other big institutions is hanging on, we've got Dooky
Chase also hanging on, all of those are still there. So so far the Treme, in terms of restaurant
survival? Doing okay, but just not very many here to that point. Not very many, and speaking
of Treme and food and stuff like that, let me throw y'all a little--a little tidbit
of information that all y'all need to know. Let me ask you a question: what do you call gumbo
that ain't got no okra up in it? You call it soup, that's what you call it. You call it soup, because
it ain't gumbo unless it got the okra up in there. Ain't no kale, ain't no carrots. It's called
soup. Ain't no okra and that's called soup, because gumbo means okra -- like literally the word, I say
literally often, but this is what it's for -- okra Louisiana Creole am I -- and-and the word for-for like
the actual plant for the okra, it's called gumbo. Yeah so it's -- I can attest to the generous okra
in the gumbo here. This place got the bes-in my, this is Robi's opinion, this is just Robi, because you know
how y'all -- look if you don't know me -- y'all know I love to eat, and I like good tasting food, and let me
tell you this place got some of the best gumbo in the whole entire city of New Orleans -- for real-real not for play-play -- so I say -- um y'all too, I mean, so we haven't addressed the TV
show Treme much so far, but like if you watch Treme the first season, one of the main characters
is a lawyer who is hounding the police to get some information out of them, and this is the
place where she has meetings non-stop, so like you see this restaurant in that show -- and
besides putting culinary culture on display like it was about drawing -- that show drew attention
to a lot of things at a time when of course like attention was a real dear currency in New Orleans
post-Katrina, the musicians who they hired to be on that show to play themselves a lot of the time,
like a Hollywood gig plays way better--pays way better than a bar gig in New Orleans, so it kept
those people afloat by employing them, so if you watch that show you're gonna see -- yeah a Hollywood
version of New Orleans story lines -- but one that took a lot of care to fold real New Orleans into
it to a point where it can be a bit confusing. Power through the first season and you'll get
a lot of treasures of local New Orleans culture and great music all throughout. So this show,
that show, one of the locations where you'd see regularly once you watch it. Y'all go get y'all
flavorful food and here's some flavorful music. Yeah, support this place when you come back, it's uh --
it was a near-death experience, but it worked out. We got one more thing to see y'all, so mentioned
that there was a uh, a little bit of an overpass project over here. So same time as the whole big
development of Armstrong Park was going on, or rather the development--the destruction of those
blocks, we had the same thing going on over here where you can see this wide treed street that
we're walking down, Esplanade Avenue; there was an even wider, much more treed one just ahead of
where we're going on North Claiborne Avenue. It was so wide that you had at one point a canal down it,
you had children playing sports in the middle of it -- this is outside of our lifetimes, but it's like
something people who remember this neighborhood from their youth mid-century -- it's a fixture, and
this really was like, it was like for us Magazine Street or St. Charles or any of these other big, often very
commercial gathering places, and tons of businesses along here, but when the interstate highway system
was developed -- which in large part was for the purpose of facilitating fast travel from place
to place and commuting from the suburbs once the suburbs were built, the whole kind of white flight
enclaves -- this facilitates people getting into and out of them, and it is built right over the kind of
pinnacle of black business success in the area. So this really crushes a lot of people's hard work
over decades and decades, and of course on its own it's pretty oppressive, but it gets turned around
to be this other thing -- like the street was a gathering point already, and so it is given even
more of that function after the fact where like Mardi Gras day and you come down here and you hang
out under this bridge right at the intersection with Orleans Avenue and everything is happening
under this bridge. From food to dancing to drinking to partying to kids learning how to dance, cultural
exchange, it all happened right here. You talk to Mardi Gras Indians and they actually kind of like
it, because it resonates -- they play their drums and you get this reverb underneath it -- it's like
you're amplified, like you're given a concert, so it's not ideal, but it's been adapted in a creative
way to be okay, and I feel like that if there's there's one kind of sum up thing about the whole
Treme? It's not ideal, but they've made it okay. It tends to be the story here where like, you
go from anti-slavery activism at one point -- so like after the Civil War you go into Homer Plessy
and all of the integration efforts to get equal access to resources, you go on into the mid-century
when this happens, and the Civil Rights Movement is ignoring this because it's concentrated
on other things like voting, and you get into the present day where there are more and more
stories like this still unfurling -- and like it makes you think like, my takeaway thinking about
all of it is like, what an incredible supply of energy and will people all through here
have, and what could be done with all of that if it wasn't people fighting just for
like essential recognition as human beings all the time. Perseverance is an important word as far as this
is concerned, because this was built due to racism; it was built to actually just
destroy black people being successful. We persevered and we're still successful. You
put up a highway we're gonna make it ours. That's what we did. I don't know that
I can say anything to that but amen. Well y'all, we've mentioned some other tours and
some other subjects during this and so if you want to get to know the voodoo subject more, like
we said Robi's got his video out there; we go much more into the nuts and bolts of the music history
with our music history video, so check that out as well, I'll see you over in that one; and food being
a really important subject here, we've got one of those coming up, so maybe by the time you see this
that's going to be available. So again remember, you've got down in the description the means to
drop your appreciation to Robi, go look for that please do the like and comment and
subscribe thing, all of that helps us, people find us, and so we can get your input,
their input, the world's input on what we should be doing going forward. Thank you all so
much for watching, thank you, thank you, thank you.
