Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 20) of the Indians is handed down to younger members by the older ones, and where all partake of the special spiritual bond generated by the complex of sounds and movement characteristic of them, and at the root of New Orleans culture. The Indians, like everything else in New Orleans, are not always what they might seem on the surface. The grand, mysterious figure leading his gang on Mardi Gras day might be a welder at a shipyard eating lunch next to his co-workers on any other given day of the year. Nor is the assumption of the mask of the Indian in any way a guarantee of primitivism. Here is an example of what I mean: Shortly after I moved to New Orleans I happened to meet Big Chief Donald Harrison, Sr. Chief Donald was the father of jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison, and a well-known figure in the city, Chief of the Guardians of the Flame gang. I remember seeing him at gatherings engaging in chanted verbal battle with other chiefs, but I no longer remember how we struck up our brief conversation. It was short but he recognized my interest — New Orleans is characterized above all by its generosity and its spirit of welcome — and invited me to attend an Indian practice the next Sunday night, to be held at the Treme Music Hall, a bar located in the historic black neighborhood that stretches from Rampart Street away from the river for blocks and blocks, the oldest continually occupied African American neighborhood in the United States. I showed up that Sunday not at all sure what to expect, but imagining it would involve a lot of percussion and singing. I was new to the city, and I had cruised around at daytime in all kinds of areas, but this was the first time I had gone alone, at night, into the heart of a black neighborhood in the Crescent City. In my New York days I had done it in Harlem, but this was still unfamiliar territory to me, and one with a less cosmopolitan surface than New York’s Harlem. I wasn’t afraid, but I was alert. I would go in and out of these neighborhoods plenty in the years that followed, and have learned that there were reasons to feel more comfortable than I did, as well as reasons to be less comfortable, but they were all under the surface, often inscrutable. It was an elaborate, coded language of behavior, one you had to learn. Nothing in New Orleans starts on time, and this practice was no exception. I stood at the bar alone for at least half an hour, listening to the jukebox in the nearly empty room, waiting for Big Chief Donald. People began to filter in slowly, no way to tell whether they were Indians or not. Nobody made me feel uncomfortable or out of place, and in fact nobody seemed to notice me at all, although I am sure they did. Eventually a thin figure in a stingybrim porkpie hat approached me through the gloomy half-light, and I recognized him as Chief Donald. The last time I had seen him he was decked out in powder blue plumes and feathers, engaged in a verbal duel with some other chief whose identity I Big Chief Norman Bell of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indians. 20 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006
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