"Keeping jazz funerals alive": Blackness and the politics of memory in New Orleans

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2003

Abstract

I heard a tourist couple ask a grand marshal at a funeral, "This dead man must have been quite a big figure to rate a big funeral like this, huh?" The answer was the usual one, "Oh, no, he was just an ordinary fellow, an old porter who worked at a bank for forty-five years. He was a paid-up member in the old society, and that's what the society does - turn out with music for all the members who wants it. If you was a member of the society, we would turn out for you" (Barker 1986, 53). When Alfred Lazard passed, his funeral procession was jointly sponsored by many of the social organizations active in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.1 Mr. Lazard, also known as "Dute," had been a member of the Money Wasters and the Black Men of Labor, and served as Grand Marshal 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, T-shirts, and pins. "We love you," his mourners proclaimed as they paraded his image throughout the Sixth Ward of the city. As is common in New Orleans black funerals, the deceased is addressed in the second person. His or her 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 Avenue by the Iberville and Lafitte housing projects, the Mardi Gras floats for the Krewe of Endymion (one of the major carnival 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, which composed Mr. Lazard's funeral procession, Endymion's passage was blocked. This huge carnival organization that for many New Orleanians represents the powerful white establishment had its passage obstructed by a funeral procession honoring a working-class black man. During the funeral 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 of the celebration of 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, a sacred funeral procession, which is emphatically and self-consciously "owned" by the black community, interrupted and even displaced a mainstream cultural institution, claiming urban space for its own distinctive celebration of life through death. The funeral for Mr. Lazard emphasized his achievements and strengths, 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 accomplishment and an affirming declaration of membership in a noble lineage for all those who, through their gestures of commemoration, claim this man as a departed "ancestor.". © 2003 by University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism

Number

643

First Page

38

Last Page

56

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