Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 96)

guest commentary by Kevin McCaffrey It takes a village John Reader, in his excellent book Africa: Biography of A Continent, expounds the theory that the perfect size for human organization, in this case a village or tribe, is 150 people. He extrapolates that the human condition really allows for up to five very close friends, who have five of their own close friends, etc., and 150 is as many people as we can handle knowing well. Not to say our sense of community stops there. No, we are the stone dropped in still water, and the wavelets circle out forever to distant shores, crossed by other wavelets and the perturbation becomes a community of tides, affecting the shape of those shores. Or, until BOOM, a trout hits the line! (You know, like a big hurricane.) Then there’s time and its human function, memory. People come and go in waves but are nevertheless just as real in our communing moment whether alive or passed. In Louisiana, by African or Catholic infusion or not, we feel the circle: of our own struggle to seek great reward in the afterlife, and the struggle of the dearly remembered in the afterlife seeking to circle back and tell us maybe we better appreciate our reward of living this life! Knowing diaspora, knowing evacuation, knowing erosion, knowing murder, knowing drowning, knowing poverty, we surround ourselves with memory and moment, the tethers of which gather better joy, better rhythm, better flavor, better circles of friends and family. Pessimism sinks, optimism rises to the surface and we ride the wave. Not necessarily on level roads. Funerals in Louisiana are therefore not unappreciated. But even sitting at a memorial for a recently deceased friend in Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel on the edge of the French Quarter, superstition is not far removed. I muse that the Chapel is home to the image of St. Expedite, once supplicated for speedy solutions. Or maybe misnamed by the sisters who lost the shipping label. Wikipedia now lists him as a sometimes patron saint of computer hackers — how cool is that?! He was an Armenian centurion and after his influence waned as the patron of speedy legal settlements (lawyers be damned), the trickster saint’s got new duty in virtual reality. Long ago, a friend of mine, who’s still a friend, had appropriately named his sailboat after him, invoking speed in fickle winds. But the superstition that sat on me in that chapel that day was that “deaths come in threes.” The memorial was for beloved children’s book author Coleen Salley, and the chapel was filled to standing room only by at least three tribes worth of her friends and intimates. Her remains were on the altar in a grocery cart, her vehicle of choice on Mardi Gras Day, when she was Queen Coleen of her Carnival krewe that pushed her around the French Quarter chanting, singing and making hoo-hah and laughter for decades. Coleen first and foremost loved children. Then she loved people who loved children. Then she loved people who still had the child in them, and people she had to help see the child in themselves. She taught half the children’s librarians in this state, maybe. She supported the careers of all the children’s book authors and illustrators she knew or knew of. She became an author herself after retiring. Always uniquely flamboyant in character, approach and, um, volume, she was recognizable by everyone in an industry that celebrated uniqueness — or, if you will allow me to coin a word, in Coleen’s case, uniquity. As in unique iniquity. Her funeral gathered early friends and late, from publishing villages, university and school villages, neighbors from the French Quarter, needlepoint circle friends, storytellers, musicians and just plain lovers of childish fun. And everyone had a story, profound and profane; including, most markedly, the presiding priest (well, I think he was Jesuit). Thinking of her life and the warmth of the send-off, I began to reflect on the nature and meaning of communities and how we define them. Then two trout hit the line simultaneously. Photographer Michael P. Smith and French Quarter character Ruthie the Duck Lady. We had just learned a day before that Mike Smith had passed away after complications arising from his long fight with Parkinson’s. Ruthie had passed away a little earlier in the fall, but I thought of her because these things come in threes. There in the chapel that serves police and firemen officially for their funerals, I thought of this little triumvirate of ordinary heroes and how they, true to their own lives, rewarded us within our community of Louisiana. How does one become Ruthie the Duck Girl? Ruthie had never attended school past kindergarten. Her brother gave her ducks early on and her entire family nurtured the childlike eccentricity of her life, almost like a test of New Orleans’ tolerance for the offbeat and strange. When she grew up, she ran around on roller skates, bummed drinks and cigarettes and cursed like a sailor, then smiled sweetly. For awhile she sold postcards of herself. She named her ducks after her favorite street cop. Like a Buddhist monk, she was just simply provided for by a group of individuals and the public, all of whom got something from her — a sense that all was right with their personal village perhaps because an untethered bird dependably teetered through their world every day. Mike Smith documented the unseen African-American culture of New Orleans through his photographs and journals. His book, Spirit World, was window shattering when it was published. Mike attended private school but just after the civil rights upheaval of the 1960s, he crossed the boundaries of race to passionately and sensitively show the city what infused its vivid life. He was a true outsider-insider. His studio welcomed black and white musicians and cultural icons and he was truly their friend. We recognized him as the icon he thought he wasn’t because he dependably showed up to document whether we were too lazy to go or not. Mike’s images are burned into our collective retina. This holiday season I’ll toast the village past. Coleen had a houseful of crèches she displayed at Christmas; too many, so that she gave my wife and me a carved wooden Chinese one. We’ll set it up in our postflood reconstructed ranch house, the new loft floor plan inspired by our old loft from our Quarter days, when Ruthie once bummed a beer from me. I’ll put it next to Mike’s photograph that his daughter, Leslie, gave me, of an old black man next to his truck on which is painted, “Don’t honk at me, mister. If you want to go faster buy yo’self a helicopter.” I’m not going anywhere, as long as I have my village of Louisiana. Kevin McCaffrey is a filmmaker in New Orleans. 96 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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