Last week, the New Orleans Film Society wrapped up the 32nd annual New Orleans Film Festival, showcasing a diverse collection of 170 films selected from more than 3,000 entries. This was also the film society’s second festival of the Covid era; however unlike last year, when in-person screenings were moved entirely outdoors, moviegoers at this year’s festival were able to attend in showings at the Broad, the Orpheum, the Pryantia at Canal Place, and AMC Elmwood, as long as they were masked and could show proof of vaccination or test result status. The show, after all, must go on.
Thankfully, in this new landscape of film exhibition, the New Orleans Film Festival was presented virtually once more, through Eventive on-demand showtimes, well past theatrical showings.
The following review revue, featuring two shorts and two features, is my humble highlighting of the virtual presentation selections from the festival. Please do visit the official catalog here for information on these flicks, enjoy the following reviews, and keep local cinema culture thriving.
17 Year Locust
Lafayette native Logan LeBlanc drew from life and relationships for his film 17 Year Locust, which won the #CreateLouisiana French Film Culture grant in 2020. Now at the end of 2021, his directorial debut has been completed, and has left a kind impression on this critic’s heart.
In the movie, Rene, a young black immigrant from Haiti – who primarily speaks French – has moved to the Acadiana region of Louisiana. When introduced, he’s listening to English-speaking lessons while riding the bus and walking down idyllic streets. His home is specifically adorned with an American flag above his bed, though it is revealed in a phone call that he has one of Haiti too, likely still packed up from his initial move. He’s quiet and reserved, but absolutely willing to shed his former heritage for the sake of assimilation, if it’ll help his soon-to-arrive growing family.
Everything about the film is pretty and beautiful, from the setting and photography to the performances and the languages. But, while LeBlanc clearly has affection for the area and its people, and has a mastered eye for what must be focused on to appreciate all of its elements, his writing suffers a bit from some lacking in attention.
17 Year Locust is no tear-jerker, but it does tug on some important strings. Rene is a home health nurse, and one evening is tasked with assisting an elderly Cajun woman who prefers French speech. From here, the two strike up an immediate if perhaps short bond, as the woman’s stories provide Rene an example or two in holding on to what makes us all individuals and members of communities: culture. She goes deep for sure, and Rene follows along with generosity and respect.
The script is tight of course, if muddled here and there. Is this the expense of being a short narrative? Of not having enough time to run? Not at all. For its limited duration, 17 Year Locust does accomplish much with the main action being just two people in conversation, but maybe it’s all a bit too simple. Too standard, at least in those moments. The words on paper rarely match the strength of the actions and movements on-screen, which remain gorgeously rendered.
17 Year Locust, no matter my nitpick, is a positive standout movie for the region, acting as both a cultural bridge of sorts and as a prime sample of the kind of work that should be made here. That deserves to be. 3/5
Blue Country
A house in the bayou. A hurricane coming through. A wounded woman with a jacket of stolen cash. It’s a perfect storm.
Blue Country is a somewhat twisty and turny tale that asks the question, “What would you do?” of its leading duo. Indeed, when a dying thief arrives at your doorstep, bleeding out and carrying hard dollar bills, at the start of a heavy regional storm that’ll keep officials at bay for a while, morals, motives, and money are bound to come up. The film takes on the task of a pure-bred drama, despite the thrilling nature of its conflict. Very much, this isn’t what I would label as an action flick, as it’s more of a tragedy, where life dukes it out with greed, and all around the battle will suffer.
Dependent almost entirely on the performance of Dane Rhodes (Lost Bayou) – who plays a man willing to make the grandest of sacrifices – Blue Country is an eerily calm powder keg, almost living in the eye of a storm, where things go silent, but danger is everywhere. In an incredibly impressive and perfectly composed shot, we see greed and evil wash over a man, lit by candlelight. The storm has taken out the power, and the man goes to bed, playing with a single flame. He attempts to blow it out softly, only to fail. Quickly, he snuffs it directly with his hand, succumbing to the dark, waiting for the day to begin. Waiting for his opportunity. His once-in-a-lifetime chance.
Rhodes is light on his feet even when aggressive. He’s collected and cool, but oh so curious, creeping ever so close off of a perilous edge. And for all of his acting, we’re never without reading his expressions, as the camera is steady when in front of him, but careful not to overexpose him. It’s not purely the Dane Rhodes show, but he is the stellar standout.
Challenging and tragic, Blue Country aims and ranks high. It’s an easy premise, but not an easily told movie. It’s powerfully creative and staggeringly effective, never once settling for just action. For just good vs evil. Things get murky when cash is involved. Especially in the bayou. 4/5
100 Years From Mississippi
Environments all around us can hold memories, great and painful. For Mamie Kirkland, some places can be more difficult to set foot on than others. In 100 Years From Mississippi, Mamie’s story – stretching from when she was born in 1908 to when she passed in 2019 – is chronicled with a profound voice that must be listened to – one that isn’t afraid of anything, even places of horror.
At the opening of the film, Mamie talks over a montage of a century’s worth of history, from war to poverty to Civil Rights to hatred, coming and going like an ocean current. For her, the more things change, the more they indeed stay the same. The documentary matches Mamie’s story with the flow of time and thought, providing well-paced and well-researched archival footage and photography to detail her experiences. In some moments, when she goes over specific incidents in her hometown, drone footage will come up, hovering around and through the area, with a terrible feeling that just brings sad goosebumps to the surface.
Having been forced to leave Ellisville out of fear of her father being lynched, Mamie lived for a long time up north as an Avon saleswoman – something she continued to do in her later days. She’s incredibly articulate and quick with wit, and it’s an absolute blessing that her son Tarabu was able to document her incredible story at that stage of her life.
The crux of 100 Years From Mississippi is in Mamie’s potential return to Ellisville, to revisit a town that she had to escape in 1915. She’s not scared so much as she’s uncertain that the journey would accomplish anything. Her honesty and her bravery in the face of such emotional trauma, as depicted, are incredibly impactful, and have no peak in sight. Stunning, this trip into history is.
Memories live everywhere, and in the deep south, they live all the more strongly, almost as if they were ghosts. Of course, ghosts aren’t real, but the tension is. When Mamie came back to visit Mississippi, she drove by homes adorned with American and Confederate flags, and some Trump signs too. 100 Years From Mississippi treads into some uncomfortable territory, but it’s more than good that it does. It’s more than good that Mamie does. It’s needed. 5/5
The Laughing Man
Some films hit too close to home, while others strike like a bullet. Zack Godshall’s The Laughing Man is one such movie. Through filmmaking that’s styled like camcorder diaries, there’s this ever-sinking feeling of a past that will be repeating itself too often, and too badly. For sure, this is what happens. It’s not an entirely depressing film, but it does capture the state of health care and poverty in modern times with brutal truth and by simplistic means.
Here, Zack’s friend and often used actor Thomas Williamson is followed over the course of a year or two, as he battles his bipolar disorder and the pressure of living in a world that doesn’t seem to have space for you. Thomas comes off as very doofy and loving, first laughing very hard and for very long, almost in a forced manner. As the film progresses, the intense laughter becomes a new normal, even if abnormal in some ways. Shot primarily by Zack and Thomas, The Laughing Man goes from quirky character piece to family drama to sensitive study of the disabled and the poor, all in a comfortably told flash. There’s nothing rushed, and nothing that feels off-kilter in tone. Director Zack Godshall, while pretty close in relationship to his subject, holds steady and in control as a master craftsman.
Zack posits questions here and there, but gives the interviewees all the time they need to respond or not, sometimes just holding on them for enough time to almost see inside their hearts. Tricks like using audio from phone calls over such static footage bring about sensations of time slowing down in thought, breathing for longer than some can stand. The Laughing Man is not painful to watch, but I believe that it could make for some hard swallows.
Towards the end, after dropping Thomas off at yet another hospital, Zack films the rows upon rows of tents he passes by. It’s a lot to take in, as there could be a plethora of people like Thomas living in such conditions. Still, this is not how Thomas himself would want the story to end. Throughout, we see raw paper diaries he’s written, scribbled with passion, and with some pretty positive notes. An epilogue to the movie of Thomas filming squirrels and speaking on how he views life is but a continuation of those writings of his, only visually. It’s beautiful to view and to let in.
The Laughing Man rivals Big Charity in its depiction of social and health services, perhaps going further by being focused not on one institution, but on one individual. One excitable individual. One vulnerable individual. One of many. 5/5
CJ Hunt’s powerful new documentary The Neutral Ground chronicles the sound and the fury over the removal of four Lost Cause monuments in New Orleans and reminds us why that represented only a first step in reclaiming the city’s built environment from the vandalism of white supremacy.
A Black Lives Matter protest featured in the film The Neutral Ground superimposed on “The Norman Plan” a 1849 map of New Orleans that demarcates the boundaries of its three separate municipalities by publisher B.M. Norman. Courtesy of Louisiana Digital Archives. Image credit: Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief
In 1836, the federal government concocted a Solomonic scheme that split New Orleans into three separate municipalities: Two majority-Creole and Black cities and, sandwiched in between, a city for “Americans,” which was understood to mean the non-Gallic, primarily Irish and German, Anglos who surged into town after Napoleon sold the real estate to Thomas Jefferson. It was literally known as “the American Sector.”
The entire, 15-year experiment in urban master planning and racial reshuffling was preposterously inefficient, but in some respects, it achieved its objective.
But the brutalities and indignities of the city’s thriving slave trade, which largely served the economic interests of wealthy White planters from North and Central Louisiana, often obscured the complicated racial dynamics that were unique to New Orleans. The 1830 Census also revealed that one out of every four New Orleanian was a free person of color, known then as gens de couleur libres, a term that specifically applied to people of mixed-race ancestry, African and usually either French or Spanish. Combined, free and enslaved people of color comprised more than 57% of the city’s population.
“The free people of color had accumulated considerable wealth and were famous for their skilled labor throughout the city,” explained Amy R. Sumpter, then a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University and currently an Associate Professor of Geography at Georgia College, in a 2008 essay titled “Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans.” “Free people of color outnumbered whites in percentage of skilled labor and worked in many professions including carpentry, cigar making, masonry, shipping, embalming, hairdressing, nursing, and midwifery.” (You can download Sumpter’s essay here).
Some free people of color became prosperous enough to purchase slaves, often, it’s worth emphasizing, as a way of keeping families in tact and protecting relatives and children conceived out of wedlock.
An order from the mayor’s office to the treasury to reimburse Pierre Charles Marioux, a free man of color, for the work of his slave Lacroix, who is described as a negro. The document is signed by the mayor of New Orleans, Augustin Macarty. Nov. 7, 1818. Courtesy: Louisiana Digital Library
The upward mobility and social acceptability of free people of color (whose descendants are now defined, at least in Louisiana, as Creoles) were a consequence of French and Spanish colonial policies which “created an atmosphere of racial openness in Louisiana and particularly New Orleans that stood apart from much of the rest of the South,” according to Sumpter. It also was in stark contrast with the prevailing racial attitudes of Anglo-Americans, who now sought to reify their white supremacist beliefs into the legal, cultural, and physical structures of the Great Southern Babylon of New Orleans. As we now know, 1830 marked the end and not the apotheosis of the “Golden Age of the Free People of Color.”
A decade after splitting the city into three, delegates to the state constitutional convention voted to move the seat of Louisiana state government— “the hotbed of the aristocracy”— out of New Orleans, then the third-largest city in America, and upriver to the fledgling military outpost of Baton Rouge, a town of fewer than 3,000 people.
Today, the decision to relocate the state capital is often explained playfully as being based on a desire to leave the “sinful” New Orleans, but in truth, it is merely yet another example of the ways in which a comparatively small contingent of wealthy Anglo-Americans established legal and physical barriers to prevent the cultural and political influence of racial and ethnic minorities.
In her essay, Sumpter provided this helpful chronological table summarizing the “major legislation passed after 1803 affecting social and spatial segregation”:
Source: The Data Center, https://www.datacenterresearch.org/reports_analysis/prosperity-index/
During the Civil War, the swift surrender of New Orleans to Union forces on May 1, 1862 largely spared it of the kind of economic ruin and infrastructural devastation that befell other Southern cities, and Reconstruction saw Black and Creole New Orleanians begin to reclaim cultural influence and social prominence and gain political power for the first time.
Of course, these gains were promptly and cruelly reversed during the Jim Crow era. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, officials at every level and in every branch of government continually enacted policies and laws that exclusively benefited Whites— legally, politically, and financially— to the detriment of racial minorities.
There’s a reason, however, I wanted to emphasize the post-colonial, pre-Civil War era. If you’ve ever spent some time in New Orleans, particularly during Mardi Gras, you may have heard locals refer to “the neutral ground.” The term is a toponym for what the rest of the country calls a street median, and as Tulane’s Richard Campanella explains, its origins trace back to a colonial-era territorial dispute in between the Calcasieu and Sabine rivers, near the present-day Texas-Louisiana border.
In New Orleans, the term was adopted years later as a way of identifying a section of the city’s most prominent corridors. I’ll let Campanella elaborate, quoting from an essay he wrote for 64 Parishes:
In 1836, when Creole-American ethnic rivalry came to a head, authorities reached into the tool bag of political geography for a solution: by re-drawing jurisdictional lines to subdivide New Orleans into three semi-autonomous municipalities, each with its own council, police, services, schools and port, united under one mayor and a general council.
The drawing of municipality lines entailed an overlaying of ethnic geography upon urban geography. The Creole-dominated French Quarter and Faubourg Tremé would become the First Municipality, and would be divided from the poorer Creole and immigrant lower faubourgs (Third Municipality) by prominent Esplanade Avenue. Heading upriver, the First Municipality would be separated from the Anglo-dominated Second Municipality by 171-foot-wide Canal Street.
A system designed to ameliorate intra-urban antagonism, however, ended up only reifying it. Municipalities competed for scarce resources, and costly municipal services all had to be in triplicate. Most of the rivalry played out between the densely populated First (mostly Creole) and Second (mostly Anglo) municipalities, on either side of Canal Street and its spacious median.
One rainy morning in January 1837, a new newspaper hit the streets of New Orleans. It was named The Picayune, and it was published in English by Anglo-Americans from an office on the Anglo side of Canal Street. Apparently those rains continued all winter, rendering Canal Street one muddy mess—enough for The Picayune to gripe about the problem repeatedly. On March 11, 1837, it wrote, “ ‘The Neutral Ground’ — This fair portion of our beautiful city is becoming daily … an object of deep interest. A large number of emigrants from the neighborhood marshes have settled on this territory. We suppose they intend laying it off into lots, and giving it the name of Frog Town…. Canal street — it is to be called by the above name in the future.”
This is among the first clear published uses of “neutral ground” to refer to Canal Street’s median, and while a direct link to the circa-1806 usage might be difficult to make, it stands to reason that locals would reach into their local vocabulary and, with tongue in cheek and a fair dose of irony, pull out a familiar term which accommodated a comparable local situation. Note that the anonymous writer put the term in quotation marks, implying it was familiar enough to go unexplained, yet new enough to warrant conscientious punctuation.
The statue of Robert E. Lee, shortly after its removal. Courtesy of The Neutral Ground.
The Neutral Ground is also the name of a new documentary film by Cecil “CJ” Hunt, chronicling the two-year battle over removing four Lost Cause monuments in New Orleans and premiering in the city later today at the Orpheum Theater as part of this year’s New Orleans Film Festival.
C.J. Hunt.
The first thing you need to know about CJ Hunt is that he’s legitimately hilarious. For the past four years, he worked in New York as a Field Producer for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that he has a knack for figuring out how to make an audience laugh even when the story being told isn’t all that funny.
The Neutral Ground, believe it or not, is at least one-part comedy. Of course, it’s easy to to laugh at the absurdity of those passionately defending four New Orleans lawn ornaments. But this isn’t a mockumentary; its subject matter is deadly serious.
CJ spent nearly a decade in New Orleans, a pivotal decade, moving to the city in 2007, shortly after earning a degree from Brown University, the same year that another young Brown graduate traded his job on Capitol Hill for one on the fourth floor of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge.
But unlike Bobby Jindal, CJ Hunt came to serve those most in need.
He’d been recruited by Teach For America, one of 115 newly-minted college graduates who committed to a two-year teaching gig in a city that was only beginning to pick itself up after the devastation caused by the Federal Flood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He spent his first year teaching Language Arts at the Arthur Ashe Charter School in Gentilly and his second as a “reading specialist” at the Samuel J. Green Charter School in Uptown.
Although there are legitimate criticisms of the decisions that resulted in a surplus of job openings in schools all across Orleans Parish, there’s also no doubt that young people like CJ, in our time of need, heeded the words of President Kennedy and asked not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country.
Hunt decided to stay put in New Orleans, landing another gig in public service as the Assistant to the Chief Defender at the overstretched and woefully underfunded New Orleans Public Defender’s Office. He spent three years in the job, learning about the city through the experiences of its most marginalized and most vulnerable.
In his spare time, he dabbled in stand-up comedy, and it didn’t take too long before he became immersed into the city’s comedy scene. He started teaching improv classes through a local theater company (he left more than five years before the company imploded after a performer came forward with accusations that its owners mishandled her complaint about a sexual assault that occurred in their home). Eventually, he landed a fellowship with the New Orleans Film Society, and in 2013, he co-created and co-stared in “Sunken City,” an acclaimed comedy web series that “unlocks a hidden world of [New Orleans] gutter punks, old money aristocrats, wide-eyed transplants, pirate people and countless other schemers and dreamers.”
I mention CJ’s background not only because his personal experience, as a biracial American, informs his movie, but also because I recognize that in New Orleans there’s always been a tension between appropriating and documenting the stories of its people, its culture, and its history. Hunt approaches his film from an informed perspective, but he is earnest and honest about the questions to which he doesn’t know an answer and the perspectives he’d never previously considered.
In late June, only a few days after The Neutral Ground premiered in the Tribeca Film Festival, I spoke for more than an hour with Hunt via Zoom. Initially, I’d hoped to publish a review of the film in advance of its nationwide debut on July 5 on PBS, as a part of its POV series, but our conversation was far more expansive and illuminating than I had anticipated. (After all, I lived here during the whole fracas and covered the story extensively on the Bayou Brief).
Instead of writing a standard movie review (five stars, by the way), I decided to tackle some of the questions that the film provokes and leaves unanswered. No, I am not referring to questions from those concerned about the ultimate fate of the monuments to Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and the so-called “Battle of Liberty Place,” which, to the best of my knowledge continue to be housed inside of a city warehouse facility at an undisclosed location, nor am I referring to questions about the future of Lee Circle.
The Neutral Ground challenges us to contemplate the complicated task of not only reclaiming the built environment of New Orleans from the vandalism and the fascism of white supremacy but also reclaiming the historical narrative from Lost Cause apologists and political propagandists, bad actors who care more about stoking racial fear and maintaining privilege than about accepting historical truths or constructing a civil society that truly values equality and justice.
Hunt decided to make the film after attending (and recording) one of many public meetings in which residents were provided an opportunity to comment on Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s proposal to enforce Chapter 146 Art. VII Sec. 146-111(b)(1) of the City’s Code of Ordinances. This is where he begins the film as well, stitching together footage from the local government access television channel of the parade of supporters and opponents of the city’s four most notable and pernicious tributes to the cult of the Lost Cause.
CJ Hunt and co-producer Darcy McKinnon answer questions at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans, following the local preipeme of their documentary The Neutral Ground on Nov. 6, 2021. Photo and image credit: Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief
Landrieu’s administration outlined the process for the removal of the four monuments in a letter he sent to then-Council President Jason Williams and in a press release distributed by his office on July 9, 2015. “Landrieu today formally asked the City Council to begin the legal process outlined in City Code Section 146-611, which governs the procedure for removal of public property structures that are deemed to be a nuisance,” the press release stated. “In addition to soliciting public comments, the Code also requires the City to receive comments and recommendations from the Human Relations Commission, the Historic District Landmarks Commission, the chief administrative officer, the City attorney, the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, and the director of the Department of Property Management. Landrieu also asked that the City’s Welcome Table initiative to help facilitate discussion on the issue.”
For the most part, the people who showed up at City Hall to defend the monuments were, in both style and temperament, entirely different than the militant racists and Confederate fetishists who would later show up in the streets to protest against their removal, even if, ultimately, they were expressing the same opinions.
In the City Council meetings, we meet the local Lost Causers: Genteel, aristocratic, and jejune White people who buy antiques and either live in the same Uptown home their grandparents lived in or in a Jefferson Parish replica. They drink red wine, exclusively, and they’re not slurring their words; that’s just the way they talk. They went to good schools but don’t have a good education. A confederacy of dunces. Like Ignatius J. Reilly, they are more comfortable living in a different century, and like his New Orleans, they have “a certain apathy and stagnation” that most of us would “find inoffensive.” They weren’t there for the cameras though they would happily talk to the newspaper.
Their arguments in favor of the monuments, as documented in the movie and reported at the time in the local press, often centered around nostalgic memories from their childhoods and filial piety for their male ancestors. Sheer sentimentalism. Arguments that typically aren’t expressed as outright racism but as unapologetic entitlement.
There are still plenty of people like this in New Orleans. We meet them in Hunt’s film. But their numbers have been dwindling for decades. For some reason people seem to have a hard time remembering that today’s New Orleans is 60% Black and one of the most liberal cities in America. Every public review committee approved of removing the monuments. The City Council passed Mayor Landrieu’s ordinance 6-1. The City of New Orleans had a perfect record in court, winning more than a dozen decisions in state and federal court upholding that ordinance, including a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the staunchly conservative U.S. Fifth Circuit. Republican efforts in the state legislature to usurp the authority of local officials in New Orleans puttered out. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser’s love letters to Donald Trump were unrequited. For the first time in his life, Republican state Attorney General Jeff Landry acknowledged that “no viable legal remedy existed” for litigation that would have otherwise benefitted him politically.
The Lost Causers who showed up to protest on the streets were a different sort. They were there for the cameras. You already know these people. They are usually in one of two camps. There are the militant racists—neo-Nazis, klansmen, skinheads, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and, as we’re reminded in the film, even before they were galvanized by the ugly violence of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, people who showed up to support Donald Trump. And there are the Confederate LARPers. They’re more an older crowd, more laid back. Their costumes are more elaborate. This is an all-day affair for them, like a music festival or a Renaissance Fair.
Yes, a few of the faces we saw at City Hall also showed up in the streets, but the overwhelming majority of the public spectacle were out-of-towners and tourists.
Courtesy: The Neutral Ground
Courtesy: The Neutral Ground
In the 303-year history of the city of New Orleans, there are a few repeating themes: Floods and fires, public killings and jazz funerals, Mardi Gras and mob violence. Threaded through its history, from its past to its present, are outsiders who seek to impose their will on New Orleans, to force it to change in ways that better reflect their own cultural views than the culture of the city, or to prevent it from governing itself. Sometimes, particularly when it involved local corruption or public graft, the outsiders actually were acting the public’s best interest, but more often than not, they were ideologues. It’s carving out three different cities to concentrate white wealth and, more than a century later, carving directly through the city to facilitate white flight.
It was also what was on display in New Orleans in 2017, and we see it in Hunt’s film. If you had the impression that there was ever widespread opposition to removing the monuments among the actual residents of the city, then that’s because the national media followed this roving hodgepodge of alt-right performance artists and Trump supporters when they came to town on their protest tour. There wasn’t ever any legitimate or a half-organized movement locally. There were just a small handful of petulant rich people who couldn’t buy an audience, the guy who owns Rock ‘N Bowl, and folks from Jefferson Parish or the northshore.
It played out far longer than it should have, but the outrage was manufactured. Lost Causers never stood a chance. The city government had the law and the public on its side.
Nearly two years after Landrieu’s letter to Williams, in the mid-afternoon of May 19, 2017, Robert E. Lee was hoisted from his lofty perch and hauled off in ignominy, but CJ Hunt’s film doesn’t end there. Instead, on a whim, he hitches a ride with acclaimed local photojournalist Abdul Aziz to Charlottesville to document the “Unite the Right” rally. Very quickly, it becomes clear that this is an entirely different experience. The racist hate on the streets in New Orleans looked quaint and farcical when compared with the boiling rage on display in Charlottesville. Despite the differences in outcome, however, the protestors in both places were many of the same people, and the message they were expressing was essentially identical.
I asked Hunt about the juxtaposition between the two cities and why he thought Charlottesville became much more confrontational and violent and, ultimately, deadly. “The [law enforcement] authorities in New Orleans, if there’s one thing they know, it’s crowd control,” he noted.
“What I hope audiences will take away [from the film] is the characters in Charlottesville and New Orleans are the same,” he tells me. “If you are watching these folks who showed up [in New Orleans in May 2017 with shoulder pads, goggles, and helmets and hope to fight to protect Lee, you then see them ten minutes later in the same film showing up in Charlottesville. Even though we are laughing about how ridiculous they look in New Orleans, just waiting around, that was a dry run for what we saw with deadly consequences in Charlottesville. That’s a duality that I want audiences to sit with: That white supremacy is both dumb and deadly.”
Hunt’s film picks back up three years later in 2020 and finds reason for hope. Last year, in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, which galvanized between 15-26 million Americans to protest in nearly 550 different places and was arguably the “largest movement in U.S. history,” 168 other Confederate monuments and symbols were removed across the nation, a number that includes the renaming of Lee High in Baton Rouge and Lee Junior High in Monroe as well as the rededication of New Orleans’ Jefferson Davis Parkway in honor of the former longtime president of Xavier University and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Norman C. Francis, a change that former Mayor Landrieu first proposed in the same aforementioned letter to then-Councilman and now Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams back in 2015.
Earlier this year, the city of Lafayette, LA, a deeply conservative town led by a far-right Republican who won election by somehow framing the contest as a referendum in support of Trump, removed a monument to Confederate martyr Alfred Mouton that had stood for 99 years in the downtown square across from the Second City Hall building.
These are unmistakable signs of progress, and Hunt’s film ends on a buoyant note above a Black Lives Matter protest in Jackson Square in New Orleans (a place named for a man who ordered the forceable removal of 60,000 members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations from their ancestral lands and a reminder of the ubiquity of white supremacy in the built environment of the fourth largest majority-Black city in America).
As we saw during the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection, in which a violent mob of frenzied and furious Trump supporters attempted to overthrow the results of an election that officials in Trump’s own administration found to be “the most secure in American history,” the Lost Causers found another Lost Cause to champion and now another crusade to wage: A fight for control over American history itself, packaged as a ban against the teaching of “critical race theory.”
I asked Hunt what he made of the newly-found outrage over an academic discourse that its critics not only grossly misrepresent but are also defiantly proud of their ignorance on the subject.
“The terms of the debate changed,” he noted, “but the purpose is the same.”
It should be of little surprise that the first recorded use of the old adage “history is written by the victors” by a U.S. politician was from a former congressman from the Confederacy.
But it wasn’t in any speech he gave in support of the Civil War. He said it in 1891.
By then, George Graham Vest of Missouri had gotten himself elected to the U.S. Senate. But he was not acknowledging the North’s victory over the South 26 years before; no, he was arguing that the Confederacy had actually won the Civil War and therefore had also written its history.
Reports of Robert E. Lee surrendering to Ulysses S. Grant after the Battle of Appomattox Court House were apparently “fake news.” To some even today, it still is.
Entrance to “Headless” Cemetery. Photo by Sue Lincoln
Miller Cemetery, Eunice, LA Photo by Sue Lincoln
Tombstone of the “headless” haunter of Miller Cemetery. Photo by Sue Lincoln
Every region has legends of haunted locations; from the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California, to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, to the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Louisiana has more than a few notoriously ghostly locales, such as the Lalaurie Mansion in New Orleans’ French Quarter, the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, and the Hotel Bentley in Alexandria. Southwest Louisiana, too, has stories of sites occupied by (as the old Scottish prayer calls them) “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night.”
Just north of U.S. 190 in Eunice, along the Acadia/St. Landry Parish border, a rough gravel road halts visitors at a barred entry bearing a large warning sign. Past that gate, the road, heavily shaded by overhanging trees on either side, comes out onto a small open field. Off to the right, a life-sized concrete crucifix stands at the entrance to an even smaller plot of graves.
This is Miller Cemetery, which local legends have colloquially rechristened “Headless Cemetery.”
According to the stories, vehicles break down along the gravel road, or won’t restart after parking, while the graveyard itself is purportedly the haunting grounds of a headless apparition. The story says the unskulled spectre is a man, whose tombstone portrait has become unrecognizable so he cannot find his proper resting place.
I went to find out more.
Opening the gate into the waist high chainlink fencing that surrounds the burial plots, one of the first graves one sees bears a disembodied head of Jesus. The grave marker facing the sculpted head doesn’t match, as it bears no pictures, defaced or not.
Strolling through the tombs, I noticed graves so old, they bore no names, and others interred as recently as 2020. Then, there it was. The tomb of Faustin Fruge, born 15 August 1892; died 6 December 1947. The face of his picture, affixed to the gravestone, is obliterated. One might think it had been burned away, had it not been laser etched on a stone plaque.
What might have Mr. Fruge done in 55 years of life, so that his gravestone portrait became defaced, and he might be haunting this cemetery? Further research turned up his obituary, and the answer is…apparently nothing.
A native of Eunice, Fruge was a well-respected farmer in Mamou, married, with grown children. It wasn’t sudden, either, for according to the obituary he had been battling an illness for nine months.
***
DeRidder’s Gothic Jail. Photo by Sue Lincoln
Further west and north of the “Headless Cemetery,” you’ll find the “Hanging Jail.” Even the names for the architectural style of the DeRidder Jail— “gothic revival” or “collegiate gothic”— conjure up creepy impressions, as does the building itself. Built in 1914 and used to house prisoners until 1984, the building is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, due to the singularity of its design.
The building has three stories above ground, with a central spiral staircase, and a subterranean tunnel connecting the jail to the courthouse next door. The jailer stayed on the first floor, which also contained a single prison cell. The second and third floors each have four more cells, and, uniquely, every cell has its own toilet, shower, lavatory, and window. The walls of the entire building are solid concrete, a full foot thick, and while it could house up to 50 inmates at a time, none ever managed to escape.
The second floor, with windows visible from U.S. Highway 171 which passes by the jail, was used to house the less violent, as well as any female prisoners. The stone floor retains scars where a second set of bars was installed to prevent potential traffic accidents.
“Rumor has it that the women would try to hang out the windows, and even remove their tops to flash cars as they went by,” Beauregard Parish Tourism director Lori Darbonne explained.
However, it’s not the style of the building nor tales of the Mardi Gras-esque exhibitionism of some of its former tenants that brings visitors willing to pay for guided tours of the vacant structure. Instead, it’s the building’s alleged haunting by two convicted murderers whose tragic tale led to the gothic structure earning the “Hanging Jail” nickname.
Central staircase in old DeRidder Jail. Photo courtesy of Vernon Parish Tourism.
It was a steamy evening near the end of August 1926, when Molton Brasseaux and Joe Genna hired a taxi to take them from DeRidder, so they could visit their “girlfriends” in the LaSalle Parish sawmill village of Tullos. It was a trip of more than 100 miles, one way, but 45-year-old taxi driver J.J. “Joe” Brevelle never made it out of Vernon Parish. Some 13 miles into the trip, Genna and Brasseaux killed Brevelle by hitting him in the head with a hammer, then stabbing him to deliver the coup de grace. They robbed the body of $14 and dumped it in the mill pond in Pickering. Then the pair made off with Brevelle’s vehicle.
Boys fishing in the pond discovered the body two days later, and the burned-out chassis of the car was found well south of the scene, on the Louisiana side near the ferry that crossed the Sabine River into Orange, Texas. The taxi company’s dispatch records led to the arrests of Genna and Brasseaux, who subsequently confessed and, despite offering insanity pleas, were convicted and sentenced on Dec. 11, 1926 to death by hanging.
According to a newspaper report of the executions, Joe Genna tried to take matters into his own hands by ingesting poison the day before the scheduled hangings. But on March 9, 1928, the noose was tied to the grate of bars above the third floor section of the central stairs, and thence put over each man’s head. Each was, in turn, required to step off into the central open space of the spiral staircase. Joe Genna was pronounced dead at 1:08 p.m.. He was 25 years old. Molton Brasseaux, age 26, was pronounced dead of a broken neck at 1:29 p.m.
Genna is buried in Lake Charles. Brasseaux is interred in Erath.
Their restless spirits remain in Deridder’s gothic jail. Or so they say.
***
Calcasieu Courthouse. Photo by Sue Lincoln
The Calcasieu Courthouse in Lake Charles is also reputed to be haunted, by the ghost of the only woman ever executed in Louisiana’s electric chair.
Born in Shreveport on Jan. 3, 1916, Anna Beatrice McQuiston had a difficult childhood. Her mother had tuberculosis and Anna, at age 13, went to work at a macaroni factory to try and help. After her mother succumbed to the illness, Anna was fired because it became known there was TB in the family. Her dad beat her for losing that job, and Anna left home. Without other marketable skills, the girl became a prostitute and began using the name Toni Jo Hood. She knocked around Louisiana and Texas, following the oil boom, its men and their money.
While working in Austin, one of her customers, Claude “Cowboy” Henry, fell in love with her, and they got married November 25, 1939. Henry had at least one skeleton in his closet and after returning to Texas from their honeymoon in Southern California, the law caught up with him. Less than two months into their marriage, Toni Jo’s husband had been tried and found guilty of killing a former San Antonio policeman, Arthur Sinclair. “Cowboy” Henry was sentenced to 50 years in prison and sent to the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville.
It didn’t take Toni Jo long to decide to bust her husband out of prison. She hooked up with an Army deserter and ex-con, Harold “Arkie” Burks, who claimed to know the prison layout. On Valentine’s Day 1940, they initiated a less-than-foolproof plan.
They began by hitchiking. They caught a ride with 42-year-old Joseph P. Calloway, a car salesman who was delivering a Ford coupe to a friend. Before long, the pair pulled guns on Calloway and had him pull over. They robbed him and then stuffed him in the trunk. On a country lane among rice fields near Lake Charles, they stopped and had Calloway get out and strip (Toni Jo later reportedly said she wanted the man’s clothes for her husband to wear in the escape). She shot Calloway in the head, and they left his body, covered with rice straw, in the field.
Toni Jo Henry. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
With plans to rob a bank prior to executing the jailbreak, Toni Jo and “Arkie” drove north. By the time they reached Camden, Arkansas, Burks had worried himself into a panic over what else Toni Jo might do. He left her and took off in the car. She caught a bus and went to Shreveport to stay with an “aunt.”
Of course, she had to explain why she needed shelter, and the whole sordid tale came tumbling out. Unbeknownst to Toni Jo, that “aunt’s” brother was a Louisiana State Trooper, and she shared the story with him. Toni Jo was arrested by Shreveport police. She confessed to them too, telling them where Calloway’s body had been hidden.
Toni Jo Henry’s initial trial at the Calcasieu Courthouse in Lake Charles, held March 27-29, 1940, aroused a publicity frenzy that was highly unusual for that time and place. She was, after all, pretty and a female accused of murder. Plus, she faced the death penalty if convicted. During the trial, Toni Jo claimed Burks fired the shot that killed Calloway, but the jury convicted her and sentenced her to death by hanging.
Toni Jo’s lawyers appealed, citing the prejudicial nature of the publicity, and she was tried for the second time, in February 1941. This time Burks, her accomplice, took the stand and blamed it all on Toni Jo (He’d already been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death). Again the verdict against her was “guilty” with an accompanying death sentence. Again there was an appeal, and again a new trial was ordered.
Toni Jo Henry’s third and final trial at the Calcasieu Courthouse was held in January 1942, and the jury verdict and sentence did not waver from the previous two results. What did change was, however, denial of her appeal on this conviction. Likewise her clemency plea, tendered to then-Gov. Sam Houston Jones, was denied.
Toni Jo Henry’s grave in Lake Charles. Photo by Sue Lincoln
Four days before her scheduled execution on November 28, 1942, Claude “Cowboy” Henry escaped from prison, trying to come see her one last time. Like so much during their marriage, that didn’t work, as he was captured in Beaumont and returned to the prison at Huntsville.
Between Toni Jo’s second and third trials, the state Legislature had changed Louisiana’s mode of execution – from hanging to the electric chair. As state law also required that executions take place in the parish where the crime was committed, the state had a van to transport the electric chair and its supplemental generator around.
Two days after Thanksgiving, in the basement of the Calcasieu Courthouse, Toni Jo Henry was strapped into “Gruesome Gertie” (as the chair came to be called) and the switches were thrown, reportedly dimming the lights in downtown Lake Charles as Toni Jo died.
Now when items go missing or equipment in the building malfunctions, most who work there nervously laugh as they blame it on Toni Jo. But they say you can still smell her burning hair in the basement.
Big Woods Cemetery, Edgerly, LA. Photo by Sue Lincoln
Big Woods Cemetery, northeast of the Calcasieu Parish town of Vinton, has been in continuous use as a burial site since 1844, so it’s unsurprising that folklore of phantoms have been part of local legend for generations. Current stories include that of a shadowy figure at the gate, whose crossing the path ahead of you is an admonition to go no further, and generalized warnings that paranormal phenomena in the area can disrupt and/or damage electronic devices, including watches and cell phones.
The most persistent tales of supernatural manifestations, though, center on sightings of strange glowing orbs. That is actually the most Halloween-y thing of all these Southwest Louisiana spooky legends.
Known as “marsh lights” or “will-o’-the-wisps,” the ignis fatuus (Latin for “foolish fire”) has both a long history in folklore and a very real scientific explanation.
Tales that have come down to us from Europe tell of travelers wandering near the marsh at night and spotting a light in the distance would think it the glow from a candle in a home’s window.
Following the light deeper into the bog, they would become lost and either die of cold or drown. One of the legends says it’s the spirit of a man named Jack, who was denied entry to the afterlife, so he haunts the bogs and fens with a homemade light, made of a burning piece of coal inside a carved out turnip. Thus “Jack with the lantern” ultimately became “jack-o-lantern.”
The science involves gas bubbles produced by anaerobic bacteria feeding on dead plant material. These microorganisms produce methane, a flammable gas, as a by-product. Bubbles of methane can get trapped under the stagnant waters of a swamp, only to be released by any physical disturbance of the water.
But, in the absence of an applied flame, how does the methane in an uninhabited wetland ignite to form one of these glowing orbs of light? Recent studies indicate other organisms that thrive in the oxygen-deprived waters of bogs produce phospine gas. When it rises from the water and encounters ample oxygen in the air it reacts, forming phosphoric acid, which spontaneously combusts – igniting the methane bubbles and creating the mysterious-looking marsh lights.
So as you go a-haunting this Halloween, remember to beware the lure of jack-o-lanterns. You don’t want to lose your way…or your head.
The antidote, it seems, to our emotional meltdowns over New Orleans being broken is to be back in broken New Orleans. Cause really, once you’ve had a life full of sweet nothing exchanges with total strangers who call you ‘baby;’ spicy seafood feasts at every meal served with wine, rum and whiskey; cottages, cathedrals, and faded saloons with candles and lanterns lighting your way home at night; brilliantly beaded Mardi Gras Indian war-birds; your very own peculiar language filled with phrases like ‘spy boys,’ ‘king cakes,’ ‘Zulus,’ and ‘momma nems;’ brass bands dancing your dead to the other side and a town full of people who will cry with you through the bad times just as hard as they party with you during the good.
“When you’ve got all that, you realize that gutting and repairing 200,000-plus homes, fixing some levees, and rebooting the city’s power system is a hell of a lot easier than trying to recreate all our good stuff someplace else.
“Or worse, trying to do without it.”
The great Mark Twain famously declared that the United States had only three real cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. “Everywhere else,” he said, “is Cleveland.” He was only half-joking. There weren’t many of his contemporaries who had seen as much of the nation’s landscape as Twain had, and his enthusiasm for New Orleans has proven to be a gift that keeps on giving for generations of city tourism officials and political leaders. “An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” he once argued.
Like most visitors to the Big Easy, Twain was also particularly enchanted by the city’s distinctive cemeteries. “When one goes from the levee or the business streets… to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it,” he once wrote. “And besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.”
Limited edition broadside of The City of the Dead by Walker Percy, Illustrated by Lyn Hill. Lord John Press, 1984.
Decades later, another great Southern writer, Walker Percy, whose book The Moviegoer is alongside John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces as the most essential New Orleans novel of the 20th century, paraphrased Twain in an essay titled “The City of the Dead.” Twain, Percy claimed, “once said that New Orleans had no architecture to speak of except in the cemeteries,” which isn’t entirely precise, but regardless, both men were driving at similar points.
“The cemeteries, true cities of the dead, seem at once livelier and more exotic to the visitor newly arrived, say, from the upper Protestant South where cemeteries are sedate ‘memorial gardens,’ or from New York City, where mile after mile of Queens is strewn with gray stone, a vast gloomy moraine,” Percy wrote. “A New Orleans cemetery is a city in miniature, streets, curbs, iron fences, its tombs above ground—otherwise, the coffins would float out of the ground—little two-story dollhouses complete with doorstep and lintel.”
Of course, Twain and Percy aren’t the only two writers who have been intrigued by the juxtaposition between the banality of the city’s urban built environment (in Percy’s case, the buildings that define its skyline) and the spectacle and ethereal beauty of the world constructed for the dead. To be sure, the contrast isn’t as bright as they present it to be. By focusing on the forgettable architecture of its central business district, known in Twain’s era as the “American Sector,” both men fail to properly account for the vernacular architecture of the Vieux Carre and the vast majority of its residential neighborhoods.
Either way though, architecture only tells part of the story, and the vibrancy and charm of the city’s cemeteries beg larger questions.
According to Terry Teachout, drama critic at the Wall Street Journal and author of the book Pops, an award-winning biography on the life of Louis Armstrong, “the word ‘jazz’ didn’t appear in print with any frequency until March 1913.” Initially, jazz was a term “used by baseball players and sportswriters in California as a synonym for ‘enthusiasm,'” Teachout explained back in 2013. It only became associated with music in 1917 when “a five-piece ragtime combo from New Orleans cut a record whose label identified it as the ‘Original Dixieland Jass Band.'”
City of a Million Dreams, a new documentary directed and produced by the acclaimed writer Jason Berry, surveys the spiritual terrain of New Orleans through the lens of the jazz funeral, a term that refers to a Creole tradition combining the Catholic ritual of the burial procession with the performance of brass band music and celebratory dance.
The term “jazz funeral’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “second line,” a New Orleans colloquialism that distinguishes between a funeral procession’s contingent of mourners—that is, the family and close friends of the deceased who comprise the “mainline” of the cortège—and the revelers who follow in binary, symbolic opposition (hence, the “second line”). But recently, the two terms have acquired slightly different meanings. As Dr. Marc T. Gaspard Bolin, an ethnomusicologist who studied New Orleans musical traditions and culture as a graduate student at UCLA, pointed out in his 2021 dissertation “The Second Line: A (Re)Conceptualization of the New Orleans Brass Band Tradition,” the term “second line” is now used more broadly and is “often disembodied from the funeral rites ritual from which [it] originate[s].”
As the film quickly makes clear, the jazz funeral is much more than a quirky local tradition. Indeed, there is perhaps no better illustration of the dialectical tension between the sacred and the profane that has remained at the core of New Orleans identity for more than 300 years.
Increasingly, second lines have become both an instrument for political protest and a way for people to publicly grieve the deaths of famous actors and musicians, regardless of how tenuous their actual connection to New Orleans may be. When the iconic British musician David Bowie died in January of 2016, for example, a second line in the heart of the French Quarter was quickly organized in his honor by members of the band Arcade Fire. Three months later, thousands turned out in the Treme for a second line celebrating the life of the musical superstar Prince. At the tail end of December, a group of Star Wars fans in the Bywater organized a second line for the actress Carrie Fisher, better known for her role as Luke Skywalker’s sister Princess Leia.
City of a Million Dreams— the first documentary to kick off the 2021 New Orleans Film Festival, with a 7 p.m. outdoor screening at the Broadside Theater on Oct. 20 (tickets for the screening as well as for an online streaming version can be purchased here)— considers the questions that have escaped those approaching the subject as a visitor or from the ivory towers of academia. When, why, and how did we begin dancing for the dead?Who, if anyone, determines the authenticity or legitimacy of this ritual? What do jazz funerals tell us about the past, present, and future of New Orleans? Are we celebrating the dead at the expense of the living?
These are an immensely complicated and challenging set of issues, but they are also ones that Berry is uniquely qualified to tackle.
Allow me to briefly digress.
Even if you aren’t a jazz aficionado or a student of Louisiana history, you are almost certainly familiar with Berry’s work. Like Walker Percy, he is sometimes referred to as a “Catholic writer,” though unlike Percy, who wasn’t always comfortable with the label, Berry has approached the subject of the Roman Catholic Church as an investigative journalist. The stories he has told are all true.
Two months ago, the New York Times produced this poignant short documentary film about Berry’s life and career:
Although it may have taken more than a decade for the American and international media to understand the significance and the massive implications of his early investigative reporting on Rev. Gilbert Gauthe (reporting, by the way, that was first published by the then-independently-owned Lafayette alt-weekly The Times of Acadiana), Berry’s extensive research and relentless writing have proven to be critical in contextualizing the magnitude of abuse and demonstrating the existence of a conspiracy among powerful Catholic clergymen and church leaders in its cover-up.
With all of that being said, it’s worth mentioning that Berry’s work in documenting the history, the culture, and the music of New Orleans is every bit as rigorous as his reporting on the Catholic Church.
More than 40 years ago, Berry directed a different documentary on the musical history and culture of New Orleans, Up from the Cradle of Jazz, a title he subsequently appropriated for his 1986 book Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II, which he co-wrote with Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones. The L.A. Times praised the book, which was expanded and republished in 2009, as “a useful and convincing survey… [that] recharges one’s admiration for a community in which music, its performance and appreciation, is handed down from one generation to the next like a precious heirloom.”
Dr. Michael White in “City of a Million Dreams.” Courtesy Jason Berry.
Although Berry started formally working on his new documentary in 2015, he began contemplating and refining its concept way back in 1997, when, with the support of a grant from the Ford Foundation, he helped to develop a video oral history project on jazz funerals for Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive. Four years later, a Guggenheim Fellowship provided him the opportunity to invest a significant amount of time in research, but for various reasons, not the least of which being the catastrophic damage caused by the failure of the federal levee system after Hurricane Katrina and the disruption necessitated during the city’s recovery, Berry decided to put his concept for the film on the back-burner. Crucially though, he continued to collect interviews and video footage of jazz funerals. On a few occasions, when jazz funerals were held to honor someone of significance, he’d even pay out of pocket for a film crew to tag along.
By the time he decided to pick the project back up and begin a fundraising campaign, he was already well into writing a book about the history of New Orleans, which was slated for publication in 2018, right in time for the city’s tricentennial. He borrowed the book’s title from a song by New Orleans Style clarinetist Raymond Burke (to listen, click here), City of a Million Dreams. But his film isn’t exactly an adaptation of his book, which begins at a second line in 2015 celebrating the life of the recently departed musical legend Allen Toussaint and then pivots to present “a parade of vibrant personalities,” led by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the Montreal native, French colonial administrator, and warrior explorer credited with founding the city of New Orleans.
Deborah “Big Red” Cotton receives the Ashley Morris Award at Rising Tide X in New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2015. Photo credit: Bart Everson. Image by Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief
One of the “vibrant personalities” featured in the book is the influential jazz clarinetist and historian Dr. Michael White. In the film, Berry steps aside as the narrator and at various points hands the stage over to White, who allowed Berry to chronicle his return to New Orleans in 2006 following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, including the emotional and powerful moment White first re-enters his home and searches for anything still salvageable.
As superb as Berry’s written work on the subject is, the history of New Orleans is arguably best appreciated with the accompaniment of the music of New Orleans. And to best appreciate the music of New Orleans, one must also witness the way it is expressed through dance and publicly performed in parades.
Berry understands this. One of the reasons City of a Million Dreams took a few years to complete is that Berry believed any film about the history of New Orleans jazz funerals had to first immerse the audience in the experience of Congo Square during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For those unfamiliar, Congo Square refers to a swath of land across from the French Quarter in present-day Armstrong Park that once served as a gathering place, every Sunday, for the city’s slave population. It was a tricky proposition, and in the hands of someone oblivious to the inherited trauma of slavery, a re-enactment of Congo Square could easily seem exploitative and demeaning. But the Congo Square of City of a Million Dreams is mesmerizing and vivid.
Congo Square in “City of a Million Dreams.”
The most prominent voice in City of a Million Dreams belongs to the late writer, filmmaker, cultural chronicler, and New Orleans bon vivant Deborah “Big Red” Cotton. Her presence is immediately powerful. Cotton understands how to curate the revelry and guide us through the contradictions and tragedies that are the cause of far too many funerals.
Two years ago, I had the opportunity to watch an early version of Berry’s film at the home of a mutual friend in New Orleans. At the time, Berry and his daughter and co-producer Simonette had only just begun screening the film and only for folks vastly more qualified in the moviemaking business than I could ever pretend to be. I understood I couldn’t write about the movie; it wasn’t finished yet. But now that it is, I can finally share the two things that stood out in particular for me.
The film includes a portion of the acceptance speech that Deb Cotton gave after she received the Ashley Morris Award at Rising Tide X, an event that was held on the tenth anniversary of Katrina. I had actually been seated directly behind Cotton that afternoon (and directly in front of Jill Stein, yes that Jill Stein), and I can personally testify that Cotton’s speech, which awed everyone in the audience and moved many to tears, was entirely extemporaneous.
When I watched it again, this time within the context of a film about jazz funerals, I realized that Cotton was, in her own way, putting on a jazz performance. In the early version of the film, I wondered if her story and the example she set for others in the New Orleans community, which Berry later told me he considers to be what Pope Francis means when he refers to “radical mercy,” would be understood by the audience. In the finished version, Cotton is both a moral compass and an anchor of hope.
I imagine most New Orleanians are familiar with Cotton’s work and how she persevered in the wake of horrifying violence; three years ago, the Times-Picayune included her in their series “300 for 300” which honored the 300 most significant figures in the city’s 300-year history. But if you’ve never heard of her before, then I think it’s best to allow her to introduce herself in the film.
The other moment that stood out to me from the screening two years ago occurred a few minutes after the movie ended. A well-dressed, elderly Creole man stood up and began sharing the reasons he was so profoundly grateful for the film, and as he spoke, his eyes welled up with tears and his voice began to tremble. I confess that I had no idea who this man was, but a friend sitting next to me whispered the man’s name to me. “That’s Deacon John,” he told me, a name I recognized of course.
But that’s almost beside the point because he was expressing the same sentiments and emotions that an entire generation of New Orleans musicians would have after seeing City of a Million Dreams. The film was a “masterpiece,” Deacon John declared. Rewatching the funerals for so many of his contemporaries and friends obviously reminded him of the tragedies of so many incredibly talented people. But once he had exhausted his sadness, he began explaining and reminiscing about the music, and in almost an instant, his mood lifted back up.
There weren’t any second lines for Princess Leia or memorial parades for the “no-call” that prevented the New Orleans Saints from advancing to Super Bowl LIII in Berry’s film. These were the funerals for real human beings, people whose connections to the community were deep and profound and who too often were taken senselessly and far too young. When you try to inventory the scale of suffering, it can be overwhelming.
These peculiar traditions are not meant to trivialize death, nor are they intended to paper over grief. Their magic isn’t derived from the mere performance of spectacle but instead comes from our collective ability to conjure up joy and hope from the depths of despair. If there is one overarching lesson to be learned from City of a Million Dreams, it is that for joy and hope to be authentic and meaningful, then grief and despair must be as well.
What do a 12-year-old leukemia victim from rural Cajun country and an 80-year-old urban socialite from New Orleans, born nearly 150 years apart, have in common? Petitions and/or requests made at either of their tombs are reputed to be miraculously – or if you prefer, magically – answered.
It’s always seemed a curious thing to me, the veneration of graves. While I have felt or sensed the presence of departed loved ones, mostly visiting me in or at my home, there certainly are long-standing traditions in a myriad of cultures worldwide regarding visiting burial places to honor and remember deceased loved ones and ancestors. Japan’s Buddhist Obon Festival, held each August, is one example, as are the upcoming “Dia de Los Muertos” celebrations.
Catholicism has long embraced the idea of making anytime requests at the tombs of unrelated deceased strangers. It’s believed this practice began while the Roman Empire was persecuting early Christians. They would meet in burial caverns and catacombs for prayer and worship services, particularly seeking out the gravesites of fellow-believers and often using their coffins as altars for serving communion. Today, in south Louisiana, the practice of petitioning deceased strangers to intercede remains an acceptable and visible practice of folk catholicism and its offshoots.
As we’re nearing Halloween, let’s look first at the traditions surrounding the better known of the two females whose tombs attract unrelated visitors to present their needs and wants. Often referred to as the “Voodoo Queen of New Orleans,” Marie Catherine Laveau was born in the French Quarter on September 10, 1801. A free woman of color, she was the offspring of an intimate relationship between Marguerite Darcantel, a manumitted slave, and mulatto businessman Charles Laveaux.
Her marriage at the age of nearly 18, to the quadroon cabinetmaker and freeman from Haiti, Jacques Paris, did not last long, as he died in 1820. Both daughters from the relationship also disappeared from public records after their baptisms, and it’s believed they died in childhood. After 1824, Marie Laveau referred to herself as “the Widow Paris.”
In 1826, Laveau began a domestic partnership with Louis Christophe Duminy de Glapion, a scion of a prominent New Orleans family descended from French nobility. Although as an interracial couple they were prohibited from marrying, the relationship lasted nearly 30 years, until de Glapion’s death in 1855. The couple and their children (they had seven together, though only two daughters survived to adulthood) lived in the Vieux Carre, in a cottage on St. Ann Street. The home, between Burgundy and Rampart, had been built by Marie’s grandmother Catherine Henry.
This home became the center of social life for the multiracial community in pre-Civil War New Orleans, in particular for those who embraced the combined African-Haitian folk traditions known as Voudou. She hosted evening “salons”, a term which has led to some modern day confusion about Laveau’s activities. In the 19th century, it meant a regular gathering of eminent people, i.e., writers, artists and musicians, in the home of a society woman.
Yet most of today’s Crescent City tour guides tell the tale as follows. Laveau had a beauty salon business, styling hair for wealthy white society women. She also gathered information about those women from their black servants, and cultivated a reputation for mysteriously and magically knowing the society women’s troubles and secrets, and providing answers and solutions to their problems.
When mentioned (rarely, for she was a woman of color) in New Orleans newspapers, Laveau was described as “the head of the Voudou women,” “the Voudou priestess,” or “the celebrated Marie Laveau.” She was, however, a devout Catholic, having been baptized and married in St. Louis Cathedral, as well as baptizing all her children there, and attending mass there regularly. She is in diocesan records as being godmother to her nephew and granddaughter, plus she paid for the education of a boy from the Catholic Institution of Indigent Orphans. And an 1871 article in the local press tells of her visits to the Cabildo, to set up altars in the cells of condemned men, praying with them before they were hanged.
She was not quite 80 years old when she died, at home, on June 15, 1881. A priest from the cathedral presided over her funeral, and she was interred at St. Louis Cemetery #1. Her passing was noted in New Orleans papers, as well as the New York Times, which said, “lawyers, legislators, planters, and merchants all came to pay their respects and seek her offices.” Another obituary remembered Laveau as “a woman who nursed the sick, provided for those in need, ministered to prisoners, and dedicated herself to the Roman Catholic church.”
Not a saint, but by all accounts, a good woman, despite detractors of her day who referred to Laveau as “the prime mover and soul of the indecent orgies of the ignoble Voudous.” Of course, Laveau’s death came after the Civil War and Reconstruction, when women in the northern states were agitating for suffrage and white men in the southern states were writing and passing Jim Crow laws. Once dead, Laveau, as a non-white woman known for her influential leadership of an extensive social group, was the perfect target for a campaign of demonization.
That denigration of the reputation of the original Marie Laveau was no doubt helped along by a self-proclaimed successor, who used the same name, was a hairdresser, gathered secrets of the wealthy, and used them to extract more money from her clients. Despite voluminous research, no one has been able to track down the records or real identity of this second Marie.
The blossoming of tourism as an industry in the mid 20th century gave rise to a “tradition” promoted by some tour guides and French Quarter shop clerks. One would be told, in a whispered voice, that Marie Laveau’s spirit was known to grant wishes. Simply visit her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery #1, and mark it with three Xs, turn around three times, knock on the tomb, and yell out the wish. Once the wish was granted, you had to return to the tomb, circle your Xs, and leave an offering.
By early 2015, unsupervised public access to the Laveau tomb and all the others in St. Louis Cemetery #1 was ended by the archdiocese, to halt vandalism such as the XXX markings. This came after a person or persons unknown covered the entire Laveau tomb with pink latex paint in December 2013, requiring pressure washing and re-plastering to restore it.
Now, some other method must be used to have requests granted by Madame Laveau, or supplication must be made to another intercessor.
Entrance to St. Edward Church graveyard. Photo: Sue Lincoln
The gate to the graveyard at St. Edward Roman Catholic Church in the Acadia Parish crossroads community of Richard stands wide open, with a snowy white Carrara marble bas-relief affixed to a brick arch next to the walkway. The more-than-four-times lifesize bust of a smiling girl in her early teens greets visitors, as do the sculpted words “Charlene Pray For Us,” which halo her image.
Inside the cemetery, the tombs and gravestones bear distinctively Cajun surnames: Richard, Doucet, Lejeune, Thibodeaux, Benoit, Savoy, Cormier, Melancon, Leger. There is also a Smith. It is quiet and peaceful here, with only sounds of the cicadas sewing up their cares, and flags, snapping in the breeze.
Charlene Richard grave. Photo: Sue Lincoln
This is the final resting place of Charlene Marie Richard, a 12 year-old girl who, in 1959, died of leukemia. Should the process formally begun in January 2020 succeed, Charlene Richard could officially become what many in Acadiana have taken to calling her – “the little Cajun Saint.”
Born January 13, 1947, Charlene was the second of Joseph Elvin and Mary Alice Richard’s ten children. By all accounts, she was typical of her generation’s girls growing up in rural Acadia Parish; interested in horses and sports, a good student in public school, and also a devout Catholic. Reportedly, she often played church with her siblings, pretending to serve mass rather than tea parties, and using a sweet potato crate as the make-believe altar.
It’s not included in any of the narratives of her life, but it is likely young Charlene was exposed to movies such as 1943’s “Song of Bernadette” and “Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima,” released in 1952. Both movies are credited with prompting surges in girls developing vocations for service within the Catholic church’s sisterhood orders. Charlene’s grandmother spoke of a question the girl asked her in late spring 1959. After reading a book about Therese of Lisieux, Charlene asked whether she could become a saint, also, by praying as Therese had.
(Beatified in 1925, Marie Francoise-Therese Martin was born in 1873 in Alencon, France, and – following the path of two of her sisters – entered the Carmelite order in 1888, at the age of 15. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 24, but is credited with efficacious prayers leading to the conversion of a notorious murderer just prior to his guillotining, and, as part of practicing “the little way of spiritual childhood,” prayed regularly and fervently for priests. Some biographies of the singer Edith Piaf say that she was blind until the age of seven, when she was cured following a 1922 pilgrimage to the grave of Therese of Lisieux, prior to the nun’s formal canonization.)
Charlene’s question for her grandmother came about the same time the little girl’s schoolteacher and family members started noticing something was not quite right with her. She was weak and feeling chronically fatigued, and had been reporting visitations by a tall woman in black, who then would vanish. Her mother took the little girl to the doctor. A series of tests resulted in her being diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. While research and improved treatments over the past 60 years now mean a 90% survival rate for children diagnosed with this blood and bone marrow cancer, at the time there was little hope or help for Charlene. She was admitted to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Lafayette.
The family had asked their parish priest and the hospital chaplain to be the ones to tell Charlene she was going to die. The hospital pastor, Father Joseph Brennan, was a newly-ordained priest from Philadelphia, and the girl’s calm acceptance impacted him deeply. Visiting her daily, he said she didn’t ask him to pray for her, but instead would eagerly inquire who they – together – were going to pray for that day. According to official statements later made by Father Brennan and the then-director of pediatrics at Our Lady of Lourdes hospital, Sister Teresita Crowley, everyone that Charlene Richard prayed for was either healed, or became a Catholic, or both.
Father Brennan recounted that, shortly before Charlene died on August 11, 1959, he told her that soon a beautiful lady would be coming to take her away. The girl reportedly replied, “You mean the Blessed Mother? I’ll be sure to tell her Father Brennan says hello.”
Father Brennan’s further testimony was that, following Charlene’s death 16 days after her admission to the hospital, he turned to her in prayer in the room she had occupied, asking for help with another terminally ill patient, a lapsed Catholic who refused any pastoral care. That very evening, the man requested a priest and the final sacraments.
Father Floyd Calais of Lafayette never met Charlene Richard during her leukemia-shortened life, but he became Father Brennan’s close friend. He found Father Brennan’s and Sister Teresita’s stories of the girl moving, and when Father Calais himself became ill in 1961, he asked Charlene’s spirit for help in getting well, and then for a posting to a new parish. In two weeks, he said, he was healthy and notified he’d be going to St. Edward’s in Acadia Parish, just north of Church Point. That was, of course, Charlene’s home church, and her burial site. Father Calais, too, began telling Charlene’s tale of offering up her own suffering to God, in order to alleviate the suffering of others, and took to referring to her as “my little girl friend.”
In the early years after Charlene’s death, her parents were discomfited by the attention. Mary Alice Richard, Charlene’s mother, and the girl’s siblings would generally respond to reporters and the curious public, “Why can’t you leave us alone?” Charlene’s father, Joseph Elvin Richard, steadfastly refused to participate in any inquiries made regarding his deceased daughter’s alleged saintliness. Neighbors in the Richard community said either, “she was just like all the other girls,” or “she weren’t no saint.”
Charlene Richard grave — prayer card. Photo: Sue Lincoln
In the intervening years, though, the Richard family, and Charlene’s mother in particular, became more involved in the campaign to have the girl officially recognized as a saint. A decade after the brown-eyed, brunette girl’s death, the traditional prayer card that had been issued at her funeral, was reprinted – still with Charlene’s photo, but now with the card including both a prayer to Charlene, and one for her beatification. Close to a million of those prayer cards have been distributed.
In the 60-plus years since Charlene Richard’s demise, healings and miracles attributed to praying for her intercession with the Virgin Mary have accumulated, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lafayette has been collecting testimonials about these things since 1991. They include:
– Angelique Marcantel, diagnosed with Down Syndrome at birth. Her mother, Jean Macantel of Lake Charles, devastated by the news, prayed to Charlene. The next day the pediatrician pronounced the baby “perfectly normal.”
– Alyse Graham, a preemie baby born to a Lafayette family was removed from life support. Her grandfather placed a prayer card to Charlene on the baby’s chest, and the graying infant turned a healthy pink, while her family and attending medical personnel saw the monitors indicate Alyse’s blood oxygen level rising from 20% to 95%.
– A woman from North Aurora, Illinois, who, in December 2017, stated she had visited Charlene Richard’s grave. While there, woman ran her fingers over the tombstone. Doing so, she told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, cured her of limbic encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder.
Testimonial on miraculous cure, posted at Richard’s gravesite. Photo: Sue Lincoln
On January 9, 2020, Bishop J. Douglas Deshotel of the Lafayette Diocese presided over a mass officially opening the cause of sainthood for Charlene Richard. Following the service, the girl was officially named “Servant of God”, which is the first formal step in the process of declaring her a saint.
Was or is she? I guess it all depends on your faith.
A newer model silver pickup drove past me as an older guy behind the wheel offered a friendly wave, which I returned with a smile. Three more steps into my daily walk along this country road, the incongruities struck me like an acorn lobbed by a chattering squirrel in the trees overhead.
“Who was that guy?” I asked aloud.
You see, he had a gray mustache and beard and had been wearing a John Deere-emblazoned ballcap. He had a gunrack barring his back window, along with the ubiquitous American flag decal on his tailgate and a Trump sticker on his bumper. But he’d also had a pair of oversized fuzzy red dice hanging from his rearview mirror. Why?
This was not some cholo cruising the streets of SoCal in his lowrider; nor was he some high school FFAer whose treasures were his hand-me down pickup, the parish fair blue ribbon earned by his Angus bull, and the fuzzy red dice won at the ring toss booth at that same parish fair. No, this dice-dangling driver appeared to be just another God-fearing, gun toting, red-white-and-blue bleeding good ol’ boy.
Although I am too much of a lady to elaborate on it here, I will confess the analogy of displaying a pair of red faux fur-covered squared balls gave me several moments of mental amusement. Yet perhaps the man in the silver pickup was a craps dealer or a craps player at the nearby tribal casino? That could explain the dice.
When I previously returned to southwest Louisiana late in the summer of 2020, just days before the arrival of Hurricane Laura, I thought of it as a homecoming of sorts. Some of my best memories were made here, and two of my adult children still live in the area. And while taking one of my regular hikes along the country lanes soon after that return, I discovered the fork in the road. Embedded in the asphalt at an intersection where one road t-bones the other, the visual play on the hackneyed phrase made me think “whoever did this – that’s my people!”
Photo credit: Sue Lincoln | Bayou Brief
While the fork in the road still delights me each time I cross it, I have since met a lady who lives down that lane, a consistent ambler of the avenues like myself. She takes her walks wearing camo printed t-shirt and shorts, overdraped with a neon orange vest – “for visibility,” she says – and she confessed she’d never noticed that tableware in the tarmac before.
Maybe not my kind of person after all…
It’s become clear that some of my neighbors, their friends and area visitors are certainly not my people. They are the ones that toss their plastic water bottles, as well as their beer, soda, and energy drink cans alongside both the paved and dirt roads in our area. For awhile it was the Bud Light contingent, though most recently it’s been the Miller Lite drinkers. Being that I view littering as an exhibition of antisocial behavior, I have no desire to discover anything more about the neighborhood beery boys who create random roadside reflectors from their trash.
There was one pathside disposer of metallic debris who piqued my curiosity this past spring. This individual was addicted to Altoids. Over the course of one weeks I encountered no less than six flip-top rectangular tins that had contained arctic-flavored (i.e., sugar free peppermint) Altoids. A couple of the tins were beginning to rust inside; three were intact and clean, and one was crushed into the shoulder along the dirt drive leading into the RV park where I presently abide. No other emptied containers of other flavors or other brands of breathmints could be discovered in this approximately mile-long stretch between the woods and pastures and ponds.
Photo credit: Sue Lincoln | Bayou Brief
So who was this regular consumer of peppermint pellets? My guess was a self-conscious teen, in his or her first flush of spring-fevered desires, fearing halitosis and hoping the arctic blast of Altoids would avoid his or her giving offense before receiving a yes date for the prom and a lengthy liplock from the object of their cravings.
There are houses where the dogs run free (many of those, actually) and bark at any and all passers-by, pedestrians and vehicles alike. There are other homes with ponds in the front yard, and guard geese that honk and wave their wings not to say hello and welcome, but to warn you of your urgent need to go away right now. Other places along my strolling routes have free range chickens and rowdy roosters, goats and Shetland ponies. There’s a large pasture nearby with a dozen or so Angus steers and another dozen Brahmas. And there are crawfish ponds that do double duty annually as rice fields, as well as providing habitats for egrets and herons, roseate spoonbills and even a flock of whooping cranes.
One place, adjacent to the cattle pasture, never has visible occupants other than the dogs, yet every few weeks there’s a red pen or its cap lying in the driveway gravel beside the trash barrel. A teacher, perhaps?
When I first spotted another shiny metallic object embedded in the asphalt a couple of weeks ago, I thought it might be a robotic toy, a la R2D2. Looking closer, I realized it’s the cylinder of a revolver. A toy? A warning?
Who does this and why?
Photo credit: Sue Lincoln | Bayou Brief
Along that street and others in the same tract, there are homes sporting flagpoles still proudly waving their now-tattered Trump flags, including one that flies its black flag declaring “Don’t Blame Me: I Voted for Trump” above the stars and stripes. But since 2020’s double whammy of Hurricanes Laura and Delta hitting the area, several houses seem to have permanently become former residences. One place retains its plywood window coverings, boldly sprayed with now-fading paint boasting “Trump 2020.” Waist high weeds and grasses obscure the lower half of what remains of some structures, while morning glories have woven their ways across the gaping holes created by last year’s storm-uprooted trees. Trumpet vines drop their withering orange flowers onto the shredding remains of a blue FEMA roof tarp.
Surrounded by suburban-style brick homes there’s a tract of woods covering what would be a square block in a town or city. About fifty feet in amongst the trees you can spy several blue tarps. They’re not storm debris, nor do they seem to be protecting some building from further rain damage. They appear to be hung over ropes, forming primitive tents, as a rural homeless encampment.
Was it the hurricanes, or COVID, or age and infirmities that kept these neighbors from returning to and repairing their homes? Are the campers in the woods former residents of the crushed buildings around the corner?
Who are these people?
Many of them are the people who won’t wear masks into the only grocery store in town, where even the manager keeps his mask perched below his nose, often dragging it below his mouth. There’s the bagger who wears his gaiter-style mask like it’s a turtleneck, and when asked to pull it up, insists he doesn’t have to, as “the governor’s order only requires you to wear a mask. I’m wearing it.” One young woman cashier wears her mask properly, saying as it’s her senior year of high school, she doesn’t want to get COVID and miss out on “all the things.” But she doesn’t intend to get vaccinated, because “my dad, who works offshore, says taking it might keep me from being able to have children later on.”
Only 31% of the fewer than 26,000 residents of the parish where I’m residing have been vaccinated. Testing and hospital admissions have confirmed that 15% of the parish population has contracted COVID, with more than nine cases per day being reported this week.
These are also the people who’ve not been shy to express resentment for the attention and assistance southeast Louisiana is getting in order to recover from Hurricane Ida.
“New Orleans and Baton Rouge get all the attention and almost all the money!” griped one guy shopping in my town’s hardware store.
And while supplemental disaster aid was federally approved in well less than a year each after 2005’s Katrina and Rita, 2008’s Gustav and Ike, 2012’s Isaac, and 2016’s flooding, it has been nearly 400 days since Hurricane Laura hit, and federal supplemental disaster assistance has yet to be authorized.
It’s included in the White House’s current budget request, which – along with other spending bills – is being stonewalled by Republicans in Congress. In fact, the seven GOP members of Louisiana’s eight-person congressional delegation are staying loyal to party over populace, with U.S. Senators Cassidy and Kennedy voting earlier this week to block the U.S. House-approved bill that would prevent a government shutdown and default on loans taken out by the Trump administration. Of course, every House Republican, including Louisiana’s own congressmembers Scalise, Graves, Johnson, Letlow, and southwest Louisiana’s Higgins, voted against that same measure when it was considered in their chamber.
Along with the yard signs offering “Fresh Eggs” and “Home Grown Okra”, there are the crudely lettered rectangles of torn cardboard stuck on stakes, saying “F*CK Biden,” as many folks around here conveniently ignore the fact that their beloved (former) President “Trump looted $44 billion from FEMA’s disaster relief fund” (as Rolling Stone reported) less than three weeks before Hurricane Laura hit.
These are the same people who, last November, sent “Captain Clay” back to Congress with 68% of the vote.
In the meantime, Congressman Higgins has called COVID a “biological attack weaponized virus,” even as he opposed masks and pandemic restrictions and drafted legislation to make vaccine mandates a federal crime. In late July this year, he announced he, his wife, and son were all ill with the virus.
On Aug. 31, two days after Hurricane Ida made landfall (on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina), Congressman Higgins held a press conference, along with 25 Republican colleagues. They weren’t, however, calling for disaster assistance. Nope. Instead, Higgins was announcing the introduction of his resolutions calling for the resignation of the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “because of their failed Afghanistan withdrawal.”
When asked for the latest on hurricane damage in his home state, Higgins replied, “Let me tell ya’ what would be a good start for the people of Louisiana: $85 billion worth of equipment that was left behind in Afghanistan!”
(That claim, perpetrated by the former president and his loyalists, has been debunked.)
Who ARE these people?
Bless their hearts, they’re the folks who are getting the government (and government services) they’ve asked for with their actions, reactions, and their votes.
The only thing I am grateful for in this terrible thing is this: Thank God Senator Long was not killed. I thank God for that. My boy is dead, but I would never want to have that on his soul.”
On the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 9, 1935, in the boom town of Baton Rouge, nearly 2,000 people braved the blinding rain and padded across the soaking, somnolent grounds of Roselawn Memorial Park. Established in 1921, the cemetery’s landscaping conjured up an idyllic version of the Deep South during a bygone era, tranquil and lush, neatly preserved underneath a canopy of majestic oaks dripping with Spanish moss. The crowd had gathered in a section exclusively for Catholics in order to witness the burial commitment service for a 29-year-old physician named Carl Austin Weiss.
Three miles west, the crown jewel of downtown— Louisiana’s opulent new skyscraper capitol building— was meant to communicate a different message, of a state and a people soaring into the modern world.
Although he had been unknown to most of those in attendance that afternoon, the people of Baton Rouge and New Orleans were already acquainted with the other Carl Weisses in his family. His father, Dr. Carl Adam Weiss, was a prominent Baton Rouge doctor and in 1933 served as president of the Louisiana Medical Society. His grandfather, Prof. Carl Theodore Weiss, who immigrated from Germany in 1870 at the age of 26, became an acclaimed New Orleans music teacher, best known for serving as the music director of the Liedertafel, one of several local singing societies and the first in town to admit non-German-speaking members. Prof. Weiss played an important role in the planning and production of the North American Sängerbund Festival in 1890, which the New York Times praised as “the greatest success the city [New Orleans] has ever witnessed” and was arguably the first large-scale music festival ever held in the future birthplace of jazz.
The youngest Carl Weiss, Carl Austin, had only recently started planting his own roots, attempting, as best as he could, to distinguish himself independently from his family. When he joined his father Carl Adam’s medical practice, he asked to be listed in their building’s directory as “C. Austin Weiss.” And even still, after his death, the local paper continually misreported his name. He was introduced to the public as Carl Weiss, Jr., the name he had given to his three-month old son.
From left to right: Viola Maine Weiss, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Sr, and Dr. Carl Adam Weiss. Source: 61 Bullets
“Floral offerings were banked high in a room of the Rabenhorst funeral home,” the Associated Press reported the following day. “Automobiles lined the streets for blocks and traffic policemen were on duty directing the stream of cars…. From the funeral home, the procession moved to St. Joseph’s church, the spacious interior of which was filled before the body arrived. Dr. Weiss’ wife, dressed in white with a small black hat, followed the casket into the church. She was supported by her husband’s younger brother [Dr. Tom Ed Weiss] and mother. Other members of the family followed and sat directly in front of the altar during the brief ceremony.”
There were two people conspicuously absent: Weiss’ newborn son, who had been left in the care of a babysitter, and his father-in-law, Judge Benjamin Henry Pavy, who reportedly had fallen into a deep and all-consuming depression—blaming himself— after hearing the news of Carl being savagely killed by Huey P. Long’s bodyguards.
Whatever happened there between him and the Senator and those who killed him, I do not think I shall ever know. That is something we’ll never know. And what happened there, what brought him there, will always be between him and his Maker.”
It all seemed so inconceivable: That such a bright and promising young doctor, a devout and earnest Catholic, a loving husband, and a doting new father who never once complained about changing diapers and seemed to be joyously planning for the future would have ever decided to so recklessly, so impulsively throw his life away.
Of course the real reason so many people showed up at St. Joseph’s and then at Roselawn had little to do with any of the Carl Weisses. They weren’t there to observe a religious ceremony. Rather, they were participating in a political act, a way of granting legitimacy and signaling support for what Weiss was alleged to have done during his final seconds of life.
Across town, inside of a fortified hospital room at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, Sen. Huey P. Long mustered every last ounce of his prodigious reserves of energy battling to stay alive.
Hours before the burial service, Monsignor Leon Gassler convened a meeting with some of his subordinates in the sacristy of St. Joseph’s (which became St. Joseph’s Cathedral upon the establishment of the Diocese of Baton Rouge in 1961). They had to decide whether Weiss, a parishioner at the church, should be given a proper Catholic funeral mass and burial. Ordinarily, Monsignor Gassler would have consulted with the Archbishop in New Orleans, but Joseph Francis Rummel was new to the job and couldn’t be expected to understand the complicated politics of Huey P. Long’s Louisiana.
“Strictly, in case of doubt, the Archbishop should have been consulted,” Father Sam Hill Ray told the writer David Zinman. “However, it was not clearly proven that Carl Weiss shot Huey. We had no proof that he was the assassin, as stated in the press. Therefore, Monsignor Gassler gave him the benefit of the doubt, especially for the sake of the family.”
In an interview conducted the following month with the Catholic publication The Register, Archbishop Rummel made it clear that he agreed with the decision. Weiss, after all, had attended Sunday morning mass that very day. “It happened so suddenly, there was no certainty,” Rummel said, adding that if it was true that Weiss shot Long then it must’ve been the result of temporary insanity.
28 years later, when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald, the funeral home tasked with overseeing Oswald’s burial told gravediggers they were preparing a plot for an old cowboy named “Bobo.” There were so few people in attendance that members of the press were asked to serve as Oswald’s pallbearers.
In contrast, the funeral and burial services for Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Sr. are believed to be the largest ever held for an alleged American assassin.
Next page: A Story Set in Stone
Warning: The following pages contain images that some may find disturbing and inappropriate for childrenwithout parental guidance.
I often read memoirs for the unintentional comedy. Most memoirists make themselves the winner of every argument and the hero of every conflict. I’m pleased to report that Backrooms and Bayous: My Life in Louisiana Politics by Robert Mann avoids these traps. Mann fesses up to his mistakes and even apologizes to those he’s wronged. An impressive and rare accomplishment.
Before I was the 13th Ward Rambler, I was Bayou Brief’s listicle guy. My favorite was the movie list: Set In Louisiana. I have a cinematic image in mind for this book review, but I hesitate to use it because Bob Mann has only one thing in common with the title characters. He’s either the Zelig or Forrest Gump of Louisiana politics because whenever an important event took place Bob Mann was either there or nearby. I was reluctant to draw this analogy since everyone is mad at Woody Allen and Forrest Gump was an amiable dunce whereas Bob Mann is highly intelligent. Don’t trust me, read Backrooms and Bayous.
Mann opens his book with the most dramatic event of his career: Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood. Mann was then Governor Kathleen Blanco’s Communications Director and he provides an inside look into Blanco’s operation during the crisis. They did a better job than they were credited at the time. Mann blames himself for the erratic comms strategy but to be fair, everything was chaotic back then. Plus, Team Blanco had to deal with incoming fire from the Bush White House in the person of the dread Karl Rove.
I consider Bob Mann to be an online friend, which is why it’s a relief that his book is so damn good. He knew all the major players in Louisiana politics for three decades. He was lucky in his bosses: Russell Long, John Breaux, Bennett Johnston, and Kathleen Blanco all treated their staff with courtesy, respect, and kindness. John Breaux, in particular, comes off as a dream boss. The featured image is of Long, Breaux, and Mann at a book signing.
An alternate title for this marvelous book could be The Education of Robert Mann. Mann began his political and personal journey in a different place from where he is in 2021.
Bob Mann was born in Beaumont, Texas, which is almost like being a Gret Stet native. His parents were hard shell religious conservatives, so Bob took on their politics as a young man. He was even a youthful admirer of George Wallace, which will surprise everyone who follows him on Twitter where he’s a leading liberal. People grow and change. So did Bob Mann.
In addition to his interest in politics, Mann took a shine to broadcasting, working in radio while a student. After college, Mann became a newspaper reporter with the Monroe News-Star. His stories of working the small towns and back roads of the Gret Stet of Louisiana are a window into a lost world. A highlight of this section of the book is meeting then Winnfield Mayor Jack Henderson. Befitting the mayor of Huey and Earl Long’s hometown, Henderson was a colorful politician of the gallus-snapping variety.
In 1983 Mann became a reporter at the Shreveport Journal; just in time to cover both candidates in the 1983 Gret Stet governor’s race. It was my first Louisiana governor’s campaign as a resident. I was struck by the contrast between Edwin Edwards and incumbent Dave Treen. Edwards was born to campaign whereas Treen was reticent and tentative on the stump. Interestingly, Mann points out that Edwin Edwards and Dave Treen were different people offstage. Treen was warm and friendly whereas Edwards was aloof and distant in private.
In 1984 Mann changed sides and went to work for Senator Russell Long in what turned out to be Long’s final term in the Senate. Long was an avuncular boss who encouraged Mann to write his biography, Legacy to Power: Senator Russell Long of Louisiana. It was Mann’s first, and perhaps, most interesting of 8 books.
As with most memoirs, Backrooms and Bayous is episodic. I’ll try and hit the highlights.
Bob Mann was involved in two of the most interesting non-campaigns in Louisiana history. Senators Long and Breaux were begged to run for governor in 1987 and 2003 respectively. Long was not eager to run against Edwin Edwards and Breaux’s effort died because of a residency dispute. The details of the purt near campaigns provide a fascinating historical what if.
Mann was working for John Breaux when David Duke first metastasized as a political threat. Breaux loaned Mann to Senator J Bennett Johnston for his 1990 re-election effort. Johnston was a nice man and a good albeit conservative senator but a lackluster campaigner. Duke was a terrible man and an excellent campaigner. Mann’s description of that election night is gripping as the shockingly close results rolled in. It was a reminder that political racism in Louisiana was dormant, not dead.
One of Bob Mann’s greatest regrets was getting carried away with attacks against Buddy Roemer in the 1995 Governor’s race. Mann was the communications director for the Louisiana Democratic Party during that race. His mission was to take out the leading GOP contender, Buddy Roemer. He went too far and essentially compared Roemer to David Duke.
The Roemer incident reflects Mann’s harshest self-criticism: he had a win-at-all-costs mentality during campaigns, which led him to go too far in attacking the opposition. He subsequently apologized to Roemer for his overkill.
Mann’s last major political job was working with an historic yet still modest figure, Kathleen Blanco, the first woman governor of the Gret Stet of Louisiana. Blanco was a decided underdog in the 2003 race, which ended up in a runoff with Bobby Jindal. Jindal had a big lead, but his inexperience and arrogance led to his downfall and Blanco squeaked out a win.
One thing I did not know about the Blanco-Jindal race is that Team Blanco played on the traditional rivalry and enmity between Indians and Pakistanis by mobilizing the Louisiana Pakistani community against Jindal. This is another thing that Mann is not proud of in retrospect, but it was a brilliant strategic move by Team Blanco.
The Blanco governorship was a twofer: Blanco’s husband Raymond was a powerful force in her administration. He had been a football coach and had many of the characteristics of that breed. He was loud, boisterous, and good company. I suspect that Bob Mann has been dining out on his Coach Blanco stories for years before sharing them with his lucky readership.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Bob Mann, and Coach Raymond Blanco. Photo courtesy of Robert T. Mann
There were two things I learned about Governor Blanco from Mann’s book. First, she and Coach were night owls, which led to Mann receiving phone calls at odd hours. Second, she ferociously stood her ground in meetings with New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson. My mother taught me not to speak ill of the dead but it’s impossible in Benson’s case. He was a rude and selfish man who nearly moved the team to San Antonio. Blanco found him so difficult to deal with that as she left one meeting, she called Benson an asshole under her breath. Kathleen Blanco was an astute judge of character.
History has already been kinder to Governor Blanco than her contemporaries. Before the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita she was on her way to reelection. The combination of recovery problems and Bush administration smear tactics resulted in her withdrawal from the 2007 race. Another casualty of the storms was Bob Mann’s working relationship with the Blancos. He left the administration in 2006 and became a professor and resident irritant at LSU’s Manship School of Journalism.
Bob Mann is no longer a participant in Louisiana politics, which enabled him to publish this candid and well-written memoir. The only nit I have to pick is Mann’s tendency to quote favorable reviews of his books. But who can blame him? He has a bibliography of which to be proud.
It’s time to grade Professor Mann’s book. I give Backrooms and Bayous: My Life in Louisiana Politics 4 stars and a 13th Ward Rambler grade of A. It’s a breezy and entertaining account of a life well lived.
Bob is selling signed copies at Backrooms and Bayous.com. It’s how I got mine. This is the first and only time I’ll suggest that you follow my example.
While I’m on the subject of excellent books by Louisiana authors, my friend Michael Tisserand has published a remarkable book of photographs taken by his late father, Jerry, My Father When Young. I reviewed it at First Draft and commend it to your attention.
The last word goes to Johnny Cash with a song that fits the Zelig-Gump aspect of Bob Mann’s life in Louisiana politics:
On the night of Sept. 8, 1935, Sen. Huey P. Long was a body in constant motion. Even though he hadn’t left the state Capitol in Baton Rouge since arriving at his 24th floor apartment the previous afternoon, Long had been working at a frenetic pace for more than a week, operating on very little sleep and with a stubbornly persistent case of hay fever.
“As long as he [Long] was in his apartment [at the state Capitol], there was no break in the stream of people who came to call on him,” Murphy Johnson Roden, his most trusted bodyguard who would later rise to prominence both as a lieutenant commander in the naval reserves and as the assistant superintendent of the state police, once recalled.
Known to his friends as “Murph,” he was just 30 years old that night, the night that would define his life, all within a span of less than a minute, the night that he shot and killed a 29-year-old1 ear, nose, and throat specialist named Carl Austin Weiss, Sr., the night Huey Long took a bullet in the gut.
Roden was from Arcadia, Louisiana, way up in Bienville Parish, a place that had become world-famous only a year before, when a posse of lawmen led by Texas highway patrol officer Frank Hamer ambushed Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker on the side of a dusty highway eight miles west of town, firing as many as 130 rounds into their 1934 Ford Deluxe V-8. Hours after the newswires first reported on the deaths of the couple known simply as Bonnie and Clyde, as many as 10,000 people flooded into tiny Arcadia, lining the sides of 2nd Street to watch as the bodies of the two gangsters were towed into town, still seated behind the wheel of their destroyed getaway car. At the time, Roden was already a seven-year veteran with the Louisiana Highway Patrol, appointed back in 1928 by then-Gov. O.H. Simpson, but he was watching a different circus, the one happening down in Baton Rouge.
On the first day of November 1934, at the direction of Gen. Louis F. Guerre (pronounced “gear”), Roden was transferred into the Louisiana State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, the agency sometimes derided as Huey Long’s secret police force. Less than three months after joining the bureau, he received his first assignment. “For some time,” Roden testified six days after Long’s death, “my assignment was to stay with Sen. Long and see that no one harmed him.”
Murphy J. Roden
For the next 42 years of his life, Murph Roden refused to discuss his “sacred” time with Huey P. Long or to say anything about the night of Sept. 8, 1935 beyond what he’d recalled at the coroner’s inquest. He had “been with [Long] constantly since the 15th of January,” he said, which wasn’t literally true, of course, but was close enough. Roden had a commission with the Metropolitan Police Force in D.C. so that he could protect the Senator when he was on Capitol Hill, and he was with Long on Aug. 29, when the Kingfish left Washington for the final time, escaping to New York for a whirlwind 36-hour celebration.
“We flew to New York from Washington and went straight to the New Yorker Hotel, where they always put the senator in a suite on the thirty-second floor,” Theophile Landry, another bodyguard, recalled years later. In addition to Landry and Roden, Long’s entourage also included a third bodyguard, Paul Voitier. The three men were considered the most valued members of Long’s security force, who were frequently derided in the press as “skull crushers” and “Cossacks.”
“We got there on Aug. 29. I remember that because the next day, a Friday, was his birthday, and Ralph Hitz, the owner of the hotel, sent up a big birthday cake,” Landry said. “Lila Lee, a New Orleans girl who was vocalist for Nick Lucas’ band that was playing the New Yorker’s supper room, came up to the suite with the cake to sing ‘Happy-birthday-dear-Huey.’ After the cake had been cut and we all had a taste of it, he gave the rest to Ms. Lee.”
A day after his 42nd birthday, after catching only two hours of sleep, Huey P. Long took an early morning train to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania so he could meet with newspaper executives at the Telegraph. They’d expressed a keen interest in printing Long’s next book, My First Days in the White House. But before he finalized a publishing deal, he first attended a Long “family picnic” about 35 miles west, in Long’s Grove, a tiny hamlet outside of Lebanon. The annual reunion typically drew as many as 500 members of the sprawling Long family, but that year, more than 2,000 people showed up for the chance to meet their famous distant cousin.
Huey was a hit with the crowd, but, as the New York Times reported, there was at least one distant relative, “Cousin Cleve,” a “member of the Socialist branch of the family,” who made it abundantly clear that he opposed “Cousin Huey.” Cleve’s entreaties for an on-stage debate were ignored, and when he asked permission to deliver a speech he had prepared, his request was promptly denied. It may seem somewhat ironic. After all, Huey, whose Share Our Wealth Society promoted redistributing the richest privately-held fortunes in America, was considered by his many of his opponents to be a dangerous socialist. But among actual card-carrying Socialists as well as the 6,000 or so members of the Soviet-funded Communist Party USA, Huey P. Long was often the subject of intense criticism, believed to be a charlatan and a sham who was espousing just another iteration of capitalism.
Murph Roden hadn’t accompanied the senator on the trip. Instead of taking the train to Harrisburg, Roden checked out of the Hotel New Yorker and returned to Washington D.C. He was tasked with retrieving Long’s bright blue Cadillac limousine, which was brandished with Louisiana License Plate Number One, and motoring down to New Orleans along with Earle Christenberry. The Cadillac should not be confused with Long’s candy apple red 1935 DeSoto Airflow SG Business Coupe, which was outfitted with a D.C. plate identifying its owner as a member of the 74th Congress (pictured below).
Huey P. Long poses next to his 1935 DeSoto Airflow SG Business Coupe. Left image credit: Lamar White Jr. | Bayou Brief. Photo credit: Library of Congress
From Harrisburg, Long climbed aboard an overnight train and headed to St. Louis. His final destination was Oklahoma City, where, on Monday, he was to deliver the keynote speech at the Oklahoma City Trades and Labor Council’s Labor Day celebration. When word spread that Long would be making a brief stop in St. Louis (a very brief stop, as the train to Oklahoma was scheduled to depart only 15 minutes after his arrival), “that old station there was packed and jammed like nobody ever saw before, with people that were not working, it being Sunday, so they just wanted to catch one glimpse of the man while he was passing through,” recalled Landry.
Whereas Long had been greeted by a delegation of elected officials during his short visit to America’s “Gateway to the West,” the reception he received in Oklahoma City wasn’t nearly as warm, even though Huey had himself once been an Okie. He lived briefly in nearby Norman after high school. Years before, an older brother, George, who was known by the nickname Shan, had moved to Oklahoma and established a dental practice. Shan Long also had managed to get himself elected to the Oklahoma state legislature back in 1920, stepping down after only a single term in what some have claimed was part of a deal he’d made to avoid corruption charges. (Eventually, he would return to Louisiana, where, 17 years after Huey’s death, he became the first member of the Long family to serve in the lower house of the United States Congress).
On Monday, after a last-minute decision to ride in the city’s Labor Day parade, Huey left Oklahoma as soon as he could, boarding the next train to Dallas. From Dallas, two bodyguards, Landry and Voitier, would drive their boss to Shreveport, where another bodyguard, George McQuiston, had been dispatched to bring him down to Baton Rouge the next morning in a state police car.
During the following three days, Tuesday through Thursday, Long plotted his next big move.
At Long’s behest, Gov. Allen would call for the legislature to convene in a streamlined special session on Saturday morning. Huey meanwhile made a last round of edits to the package of 42 bills he hoped to pass, 31 of which comprised a “final dossier of ‘dictatorship laws.'” They would be introduced all at once in the House late Saturday night, assigned to one of two committees, reported back favorably on Sunday night, passed along and rubber-stamped by the Senate on Monday, and then deposited on Gov. Allen’s desk for his signature.
Long had a few main priorities. If he was to challenge FDR in ’36, he wanted to ensure that he’d be at no risk of losing his seat in the Senate. To that end, he proposed moving the date of the next Democratic primary election for the Senate—the contest that would determine his re-election— from the fall up to January. He was also well-aware of how Roosevelt, who now believed Long to be one of the two most dangerous men in America, was intent on limiting his influence in Louisiana, planning, among other things, to use federal patronage to hire Long’s political opponents in the state for key positions in government. Hoping to return volley, Huey promoted a quixotic bill that would impose a $1,000 fine and jail time for any federal employee who violates the 10th Amendment, which designates to the states any powers not specifically provided otherwise to the federal government. He imagined the new law as a way of preventing interference with his “program” in Louisiana, though, admittedly, he recognized its constitutionality was subject to attack.
But at the very top of his wish list, House Bill Number One, was a proposal to gerrymander most of the 13th judicial district in the predominately anti-Long St. Landry Parish, then the fourth-most populated parish in the state, into the 15th judicial district, which included parts of pro-Long Acadia, Lafayette, and Vermillion Parishes. The intention was obvious. Long wanted to draw one of his fiercest and most prominent political enemies, seven-term incumbent Judge Benjamin Henry Pavy, out of office.
Huey P. Long. Image credit: Lamar White Jr. | Bayou Brief.
After two full days of work in Baton Rouge, on the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 5, 1935, Huey P. Long rushed down to the Roosevelt hotel in New Orleans, where he broadcasted a three-hour radio show for WDSU.
That night, for the first time in over a month, he finally managed to get a night of restive sleep at his home on 14 Audubon Boulevard in New Orleans, a 5,300 square-foot four bedroom “mansion” only a stone’s throw away from the Tulane campus, later described in an application to the National Register of Historic Places as a “pretentious example of a 1920s suburban residence in the Mediterranean mode.”
Long was up early the next morning, returning to the Roosevelt, where he would hold court with the aforementioned Seymour Weiss, the hotel’s proprietor and Long’s most loyal and most valued advisor. Before he headed back to Baton Rouge on Saturday for the special session, the two planned a round of golf at the course in Audubon Park. As such, instead of spending the night at home with his family, Huey decided to remain put in his suite at the Roosevelt.
Gov. Allen would issue the call for a special session at 10 a.m. Saturday, right around the time Huey and Seymour were barreling down St. Charles Avenue, en route to the golf course, in Seymour’s brand-new Cadillac. The car would be ruined only a day later after Seymour blew out the engine in his rush to Huey’s hospital bedside in Baton Rouge.
Murph parked Huey’s Cadillac— with License Plate Number One— outside of the golf course at Audubon Park. There was no need to hurry, for once. The legislature wasn’t set to convene until 10:00 p.m.
Huey P. Long tees off in front of a gallery of spectators. Original b&w photo: Leon Trice, color enhanced by Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief
“On Saturday evening, September 7—the session’s first night—Huey became enraged at the sight of elderly [journalist and adversary] Thomas O. Harris, who was sitting with friends at the press table in the House of Representatives,” writes William Ivy Hair in The Kingfish and His Realm. “Long cursed Harris, Harris cursed back, and the Kingfish’s bodyguard George McQuiston slapped the old man, who was then taken to jail and booked as drunk and disorderly. Otherwise, the evening was quiet.”
Most of Sunday was quiet as well. Passage of Huey’s legislation was a foregone conclusion.
At 7:00 p.m., an hour before the House was scheduled to gavel into session, Long claimed the seat behind Gov. Allen’s desk and began calling in his legislative leaders, individually, to ensure they would all be present the following morning for a caucus of his supporters. Afterward, he roamed in and out of the chamber and through the corridors and backrooms of the Capitol, his Capitol, for its very existence had been first constructed out of his imagination.
Journalist Hermann B. Deutsch retraced Long’s steps with precision for nearly the next two-and-a-half hours, up until sometime between 9:19 to 9:22 p.m. From his 1963 book The Huey Long Murder Case:
The stage is set for a violent climax. Huey Long has turned through the anteroom of the governor’s office, where Chick Frampton [reporter for the New Orleans Item], bending over the desk with his back to the door, is preparing once more to lay down the telephone without breaking the long-distance connection to New Orleans. He has told his editor, Coad, to hang on while he—Frampton—goes in search of the Senator, and does not see Huey just behind him. Intent on his conversation with Coad, he has heard neither the Senator’s question as to whether everyone has been notified about the morning’s early caucus, nor Joe Bates’s [special agent of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation] affirmative reply.
By the time he puts down the telephone and turns, Huey Long has already dashed out into the hallway where [Judge] John Fournet steps forward to greet him. The Senator stops momentarily to talk to A. P. White [Gov. Allen’s secretary] in the partly opened private doorway to the inner office. He has noticed, while looking over the House from the Speaker’s rostrum, that some of his legislative supporters are absent, and asks White where the hell this one, that one, and the other one are, adding: “Find them. If necessary, sober them up, and have them at that meeting because we just might need their votes tomorrow!” Then he turns, facing the direction of the House chamber.
For that one fractional moment every actor is motionless: Huey Long, with John Fournet at his left elbow and Murphy Roden just behind his right shoulder; Chick Frampton in the very act of stepping into the corridor from the double doors of the governor’s anteroom; Elliott Coleman [Long bodyguard and later Sheriff of Tensas Parish] down the hall in the direction of the House, near the door of the small private elevator reserved for the governor’s use; and among three or four individuals standing in the marble-paneled niche recessed into the wall opposite the double doors where Frampton is standing, a slim figure in a white suit.
Inside of the House chambers, members were wrapping up for the night when the room was jolted by rapid series of loud bangs.
“Fireworks,” joked Speaker Allen Ellender.
The Final Days of Huey P. Long
Aug. 29-Sept. 10, 1935
Thursday, Aug. 29: Depart Washington D.C. for New York, NY
Friday, Aug. 30: Huey’s 42nd birthday: Hotel New Yorker, New York, NY
Saturday, Aug. 31: Depart New York for Harrisburg, PA, Depart Harrisburg for St. Louis, MO
Sunday, Sep. 1: 15-minute layover in St. Louis. Depart St. Louis for Oklahoma City, OK
Monday, Sept. 2: Depart Oklahoma City for Dallas, TX, Depart Dallas for 305 Forest Avenue, Shreveport, LA
Tuesday, Sept. 3: Depart Shreveport for Baton Rouge, LA
Wednesday, Sept. 4: All day in Baton Rouge, LA
Thursday, Sept. 5: Depart Baton Rouge for the Roosevelt Hotel, New Orleans, LA
Friday, Sept. 6: Home at 14 Audubon Boulevard in New Orleans, LA
Saturday, Sept. 7: Golf with Seymour Weiss, Depart New Orleans for Baton Rouge, LA
Sunday, Sept. 8: Louisiana State Capitol, Our Lady of the Lake Sanatarium, Baton Rouge, LA
Monday, Sept. 9: Our Lady of the Lake Sanatarium, Baton Rouge, LA
Tuesday, Sept. 10: Huey Pierce Long, Jr. dies at 4:06 a.m.
Next page: Rage Against the (Long) Machine
Warning: The following pages contain images that some may find disturbing and inappropriate for childrenwithout parental guidance.
Five weeks ago, on a bright Sunday afternoon, eight Louisiana state troopers, immaculately outfitted in their deep blue formals and round-brimmed Stratton hats polished to a shine, hoisted a simple wooden coffin bearing the body of former four-term Louisiana Gov. Edwin W. Edwards down the front steps of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge and then onto a horse-drawn hearse. As the hearse began its route down the mile-long stretch of North 4th Street to the Old State Capitol, there was a strikingly symbolic moment that would be impossible for any student of Louisiana history to miss.
The penultimate journey of the Cajun Prince, a country boy who emerged from the fertile prairies of Avoyelles Parish—Prairie des Avoyelles—and defined Louisiana during the final three decades of the 20th century, passed under the gaze of the Kingfish, Huey Pierce Long, Jr., a man whose claim on power had been comparatively brief, less than seven years, but whose myth persists even today.
The funeral procession for former four-term Louisiana Gov. Edwin W. Edwards. July 14, 2021. Whereas Edwin W. Edwards was buried in a simple wooden coffin constructed by an inmate at Angola, Huey P. Long’s coffin was reportedly worth $5,000 (the equivalent of $99,000 in 2021). Credit: Philip Gould
Nearly 86 years ago at the same exact location, a funeral cortege estimated to number some 200,000 people, more than six times the entire population of Baton Rouge at the time, packed the steps and the lawn outside of the new skyscraper state house to bury another former governor. LSU’s bandmaster, Castro Carrazo, led the procession out of the Capitol’s bronze doors as the National Guard Band marched behind him, playing a solemn, minor-key version of “Every Man a King,” which Carrazo had reworked the night before into a dirge.
A blimp floated above the river town, documenting the “largest gathering in Louisiana history” and the state’s most elaborate funeral since the death of Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard in 1893, the year Long was born.
“Beginning with daybreak on Thursday, mourners began to stream into Baton Rouge from all sections of the state; by special train from the cities, by chartered bus, by glossy limousine and mud-spattered farm pickup. Looking westward from the observation gallery atop the capitol’s thirty-one-story central section, it is possible to see for nearly seven miles along one of the state’s principal highways,” wrote Hermann B. Deutsch, the legendary columnist for The New Orleans States-Item in his 1963 book The Huey Long Murder Case. “No bridge had yet been built to span the Mississippi at this point. Consequently, as far as the eye could see from this lofty lookout platform, a solid line of vehicles was stalled. They moved forward only a bit at a time, as the Port Allen ferries, doing double duty, picked up deckload after deckload for transfer to the east bank.”
Words and music to Long’s signature song. Credit: Louisiana Digital Library.
During the previous two days, 80,000 mourners made the pilgrimage to Baton Rouge to see their beloved Kingfish lay in state, carrying with them a library’s worth of school books and flowers that would cover acres and acres of land surrounding the Capitol.
11 days before his death, Huey P. Long celebrated his 42nd birthday by escaping for a quick getaway to Manhattan, where he stayed in one of his favorite digs, a suite on the 32nd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, Room 3200. The hotel’s owner, Ralph Hitz, surprised him by carrying up an enormous birthday cake and having Lila Lee, a singer from New Orleans who accompanied jazz guitarist Nick Lucas every night in the supper club downstairs, serenade him with a rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
Huey was in the prime of his career and at the height of his power. According to at least one account, he’d amassed a personal fortune of at least $2.5 million ($50 million in 2021 dollars). His political organization, the Share Our Wealth Society, boasted more than 27,000 clubs and 7.5 million members nationwide. In the late summer of 1935, he was the second-most photographed person in the entire country, exceeded only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the aristocratic first-term president who promised the country a “square deal” and who considered Long to be “one of the two most dangerous men in America” (the other being Gen. Douglas MacArthur).
Officially, Long served as Louisiana’s senior United States Senator, seniority he claimed after helping to engineer Congressman John H. Overton’s victory over two-term incumbent Sen. Edwin Broussard. Broussard had committed the unforgivable sin of criticizing Long for refusing to relinquish the governor’s office and allowing his seat in the Senate to remain vacant for more than a year.
Images from Huey P. Long’s funeral, Sept. 12, 1935
From left to right: Color-enhanced still frames of the funeral cortege, Credit: Smithsonian Channel, America in Color. | A crew of gravediggers prepares the area known as the “sunken garden” for Long’s burial, Credit: Louisiana State Archives. | Color-enhanced rendering of pallbearers carrying Long’s casket into the state Capitol on Sept. 11, 1935, Image credit: Lamar White, Jr., Bayou Brief. Photo credit: Louisiana State Archives. | Two aerial photos, one taken from the Capitol during Long’s funeral procession on Sept. 12, and the other taken from a blimp (likely the day prior) of the line outside the Capitol of those waiting to pay their respects to Long while his body lay in state.
But even after he left Baton Rouge for Washington, D.C., Long was still very much in charge. His successor as governor was a childhood friend named Oscar Kelly “O.K.” Allen, a man who surrendered practically all of his decision-making authority—and even the chair behind his desk in the Capitol—to the Kingfish.
“Oscar was sitting in his office, and a leaf blew in through the open window and landed on his desk,” Huey’s younger brother Earl once joked. “He thought Huey must have sent it, so he signed it.”
Long’s near-complete control over Louisiana and his considerable skills as a political performer—on the floor of the United States Senate, on the radio, and on the campaign trail—made him the subject of endless speculation, intrigue, and trepidation.
The Kingfish was a name he’d given himself, taken from the character George ‘Kingfish’ Stevens, leader of ‘the Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge’ on the syndicated radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy, known for coaxing the duo into all sorts of dubious schemes and for coining the catchphrase “Holy mackerel!”
Today, although the body of Huey P. Long rests 16 feet below the ground, his presence towers over the place, literally. For the first five years after his death, a spotlight illuminated the night sky above his gravesite until, on what would have been his 47th birthday, state officials unveiled a 12-foot bronze statue, designed by New York sculptor Charles Keck and perched atop an 18-foot marble pillar.
The legislature had set aside $50,000 for the statue (about $1 million in today’s dollars) “after a plea for funds by popular subscription brought only a $75 check from a Shreveport ‘Share the Wealth’ club,” according to the Shreveport Times. (In 1938, the legislature also purchased Long’s home in New Orleans for $75,000, with the intention of turning it into a museum. 41 years later, however, the State of Louisiana sold the home, and today, it’s owned by a married couple who purchased the property in 2011 for $949,000).
Left: The towering tombstone of Huey P. Long facing the state Capitol in Baton Rouge. Middle: “Here lies Louisiana’s greatest son Huey Pierce Long,” the inscription reads, “an unconquered friend of the poor who dreamed of the day when the wealth of the land would be spread among all the people. ‘I know the hearts of the people because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I have one language. Its’ simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters. Fear will not change it. It cannot be changed while people suffer.’ Huey P. Long U. S. Senate Mar 5, 1935 Erected by State of La. 1940.” Right: The open casket of Huey P. Long lay in state at the Capitol from 2:35 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 11 to 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 12, 1935.
Is the nostalgia for this man well-earned, or does he continue to symbolically stand watch over the Capitol in Baton Rouge because we otherwise would not know where to put him? Prior to the murder of this nation’s handsome young president on a sunny afternoon in Dallas, Huey P. Long’s death had been the 20th century’s great American assassination conspiracy.
Indeed, two high-profile books about Long’s death had been published earlier that same year, including one that was sent to press on Oct. 31, 1963. The renewed interest had nothing to do with the disclosure of additional information; there were no deathbed confessions or mea culpas, no missing evidence that had suddenly been found, nothing more than the mere passage of time.
It should be said, however, that it is also possible the Kingfish was due for a reassessment in the 1960s for other reasons. For one, the death of his younger brother Earl on Sept. 5, 1960 marked at least the symbolic end of the Long era in Louisiana. But more generally, it’s easy to recognize in hindsight that the 1950s weren’t entirely fair to Huey Long the historical figure, as America increasingly retreated into a sort of paranoiac conservatism and began to view social liberals and those preaching the virtues of wealth redistribution as seditious allies of nefarious Soviet communism.
Perhaps today, in the diminuendo of Donald Trump’s cantata, as we begin our first attempts at figuring out what exactly we should make out of his nativistic, baroque presidency and whether it’s appropriate to define a man who lost the popular vote both times he stood as a candidate in a general election (and who never once mustered the approval of more than 50% of Americans) as a populist, Huey Long is worth another gander.
Whereas Donald Trump got elected on the unfulfilled promise of building a wall on the southern border and making Mexico pay for it, Huey Long promised to build roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools throughout the entire state. He took out bonds and taxed the rich to pay for all of it, and in so doing, he catapulted Louisiana into at least some semblance of 20th century modernity.
“Outside of God, [Huey Long] was probably the greatest builder this state has ever known,” the late Louisiana superlobbyist Ted Jones once argued.
“If a man really has a purpose in life, the ambition and the dream that he has become pretty much the same thing. Huey Long was a populist, very much of a populist,” Russell Long said of his father. “In my judgment, he was the best of all of the populists that came along, and he wanted to implement the idea that none should be too rich and none too poor. He wasn’t against people being rich, except that he felt by permitting the few to have so much, there wasn’t much left for the many. And he wanted to spread some of that wealth around.”
There was nothing unconstitutional or even illegal with Gov. Allen’s absurd deference to Sen. Long. Louisiana didn’t have a statute that could prevent Huey from commandeering Allen’s office at the Capitol or the apartment he’d set up on the 24th floor, believing the altitude was an effective remedy against seasonal allergies. Indeed, what was masterful about Huey P. Long, what scared his opponents more than anything, was that there was no reason for him to break the law when he could just as easily change it. Another terrifying fact about Huey—terrifying to his adversaries, at least, and a fact that neither he nor his critics cared to mention—was that he’d become wealthy as a lawyer before he was elected governor; a single case netted him the equivalent of a million bucks in today’s dollars, and business was easy come to by. If anything, Huey’s meteoric success as an attorney provided him with the autonomy and the professional respect needed not only to launch a campaign but to start a movement.
100 years ago in the hinterlands of Winn Parish and outside the parish courthouses in Caddo and Rapides, where widowed women had constructed mail-order monuments to honor the seditious white men who lost and died in a war over slavery, Huey P. Long began asking people to dream again—for fairness, for a respect, for a slice of the American pie, for a chicken in every pot, for a share of that wealth that Mr. Rockefeller had been amassing in the elixirs of electricity and the lifeblood of a new American economy extracted below the same land that Southerners called home. Huey P. Long was, in fact, selling somewhat of a fairytale, except that he was right: The oil underneath Louisiana could make a handful of East Coast American aristocratic families, families with Dutch or Welsh or Scottish surnames, a pair of palatial addresses in Manhattan and on the beach in Newport or maybe even Sands Point, a little lagniappe, or it would stay in Louisiana—just a portion of it, really, nothing more than 5%—and transform a banana republic into the most ambitious social democracy in the nation’s history.
“Who were the people that opposed Huey Long?” Ted Jones asked in 2010. “It was people who had wealth or vested interests and who felt threatened by the things that he wanted to do, because they either felt like they would have to pay some taxes or somebody else would come up and say, ‘Well, I want so and so, and I’m entitled to that. And we don’t think you are entitled to it.’ So the people that opposed Huey Long were not people who saw progress for the average person, but the Longs use their intellect to recover for the average citizen of this state to be able to enjoy some of the natural resources that were being taken away from them, and in which they had no participation or couldn’t enjoy any part of those benefits.
“The people that control[led] the government in those days were the wealthy and the vested interests, and you always heard Huey talking about the Wall Street crowd and how they control things and how the set up the gates to capital by Moody’s and everything and the only way you could get through that was J.P. Morgan and his crowd; [they] had the gates to the rating on your bonds, and there was a demand for better facility services, education, highways, bridges, and hospitals and things of that type here. That’s what propelled Huey Long: The need.
“He was a man of his time. His rule was necessity knows no law, and he went after it, and they can say he was corrupt. But Huey Long wasn’t nearly as corrupt as the fortunes that fault him.”
Not long before he died, Huey had invited a few out-of-state reporters, including Raymond Daniell of the New York Times, to accompany him on the ride from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. (Daniell also helped Long’s personal secretary, Earle Christenberry, in editing the manuscript of Long’s second book, a follow-up to his political autobiography Every Man a King titled My First Days in the White House). While driving by the ostentatious Metairie Cemetery, “Huey remarked that of all forms of human vanity, the building of monuments over graves seemed to him the silliest,” recalled Daniell.
“One of the reporters, who had been nursing a whiskey bottle all the way from Baton Rouge, looked at the Kingfish and predicted that ‘one day Huey would have a finer one than any in that cemetery,'” wrote William Ivy Hair in The Kingfish and His Realm. “For once, Huey Long seemed unable to think of a reply.”
