In The Flow of Time – July 5, 2024
There are so many threads… cholera and yellow fever. I had no idea what yellow fever was. Think Ebola. 19th century architecture. Street names, then and now. African music, Congo square, the birth of jazz, the synthesis of African and catholic religions, free people of color, a brilliant decade where integration ruled, where cosmopolitan multi-cultural streams blended into a new world.
Much more prosaic, daily details. Like, I found the street corner where Don Carlos Trudeau lived, it’s on an 1808 map of the city that has the names of all the landowners. Awesome. And, probably, where his mistress lived. Where Charles Laveau grew up. I’ll get my head around the gestalt and the details, eventually, and then I can write a story that sits on top of the facts.
When I started, I wondered if there was a story here. Sure, Marie Laveau is a fascinating character, but…
The answer is a resounding YES! Two levels, and both must be there. First, beyond the legend I can craft a life. Just one tidbit: she gave birth nine times. Two lived. Two. She had several more children, waifs off the street, grandchildren she raised. But imagine the power and pathos in a woman who rises above, for whom life and death, known intimately, are a part of who she is. If life takes her babies, she’ll find babies who need her. She visited prisoners, healed the sick… and when a massive yellow fever epidemic demolished the city, the white fathers came to her. Can you help us? They begged. And despite their hatred, their oppression, she did.
Second, it all happens on a backdrop of a golden age of tolerance, crushed by the Americans in the decades after the Louisiana purchase. I have my theme. It’s not happy warm, it’s really fucking grim. Rather like where we are in the US right now. The bad guys win, for a time. They drive this joie de vivre underground. We have jazz because of that.
I can’t blow the trumpet like Winton Marsalis, but I’ve got a story to tell.
