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Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
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From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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What To Do With The Negroes?
By
Kalamu ya
Salaam
There is a secret
hidden in the heart of New Orleans, a secret hidden in
plain sight but ignored by all but the secret citizens
themselves. Before Bienville arrived in this area in
1718, Native American scouts informed the adventurous
Frenchman that there were groups of Africans—they
probably said “blacks”—living over there in their own
communities and that these self-ruled women and men
would not talk to whites.
Although how the
Native Americans knew that the blacks would not talk to
whites remains unexplained, the report seems accurate on
the face of it. After all, close to three centuries
later in post-Katrina New Orleans there remains a number
of us who are reluctant to talk truthfully to
outsiders—not out of fear of repercussions or because of
an inability to speak English but rather we remain
reticent on the general principle that there’s no future
in such conversations.
Indeed, I am
probably breaking ranks simply by writing this although
what I have to say should be obvious. Whether
considering our 18th century ancestors who inhabited the
swamps of the North American southeast from Florida to
Louisiana, or unsuccessfully trying to question a
handful of staunch holdouts among the Mardi Gras
Indians, there have always been blacks who were both
proud of being black and determined to be
self-determining—not just constitutionally free as any
other 21st century U.S. citizen but independent of any
higher authority whether that authority be legal,
religious, or cultural; whether that authority be other
blacks, wealthy whites, politicians of any race or
economic status, or whatever, none of that mattered. We
recognized no higher earthly authority than ourselves.
Sometimes when it
looks like we are doing nothing but waiting on the
corners, sitting quietly on a well-worn kitchen chair
sipping a beer in the early afternoon shade, sometimes
those of us people pass by as we hold court on one of
the many neutral grounds, i.e., medians, separating the
lanes of major streets and avenues in Central City,
sometimes those blank stares you see at a bus stop,
sometimes what you are witnessing is not what you think
it is.
We are not waiting
for the arrival of a messiah or for a government
handout. We expect nothing from our immediate future but
more of the past.
Our talk will seem
either fatalistic or farcical, and certainly will not
make sense to you. The weary blues etched into our
cheeks and coal-coloring the sagging flesh beneath our
eyes; the mottled black, browns, greys, and streaks of
blond or red on our woolly heads and the aroma of anger
clinging to our clothes has nothing to do with our
failures or with failed expectations. We never
anticipated that we would be understood or loved in this
land ruled by men with guns, money, and god complexes.
No, what you see when you look at
us looking back at you is a resolve to keep on living
until we die or until someone kills us.
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The history of New
Orleans is replete with the inexplicable in terms of how
black people lived here. In the late 1700’s before the
Americans arrived as a governing force in 1804, a
nominally-enslaved black man could be seen walking to
his home, which he owned, carrying a rifle, which he
owned, with money of his own in his pockets—yes, I know
it seems impossible but the impossible is one of the
roots of New Orleans culture.
Under the Spanish
there were different laws and customs. We had been
offered freedom in exchange for joining the Spanish in
fighting the English. Join the army and get
emancipated—all you had to do was shoot white men . . .
and avoid getting shot.
The Black Codes
guaranteed Sundays were ours. All the food, handicrafts,
services or whatever we could sell, we could keep all
the proceeds. If you study the colonial administrative
records you will notice that our economy was so rich
that the city merchants petitioned the governor to be
able to sell on Sundays (like the slaves did).
Prior to the Civil
War the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that one man had
to pay back money he borrowed from a slave. Not to
mention, a shocked Mrs. Latrobe, the wife of the
architect who designed and built New Orleans
waterworks—imagine “. . . how shocked I was to see three
Mulatto children and their mother call upon me and say
they were the children of Henry.” Henry was the dearly
departed son of Mrs. Latrobe. He died of yellow fever
and was buried in New Orleans in 1817, three years
before his father who also died of yellow fever and was
buried next to his son in St. Louis Cemetery. Much like
many, many people today, Mrs. Latrobe had no idea about
what was really going on in New Orleans.
You can read the
papers all day and sit in front the TV all night and
never get the news about a significant and shocking
subculture in New Orleans. A subculture that not only is
unknown to you but a subculture that really does not
care to be known by most of you.
Our independently
produced subculture is responsible for the roux that
flavors New Orleans music, New Orleans cuisine, New
Orleans speech idioms, New Orleans architecture, the way
we walk down here and especially how we celebrate life
even in the face of death. From the African retentions
of VooDoo spiritual observances to the musical
extensions from Congo Square, this subculture has made
New Orleans world renown.
I don’t remember
the black sufferers ever receiving a thank you or a
blessing. Instead of recognizing our contributions, the
black poor and those who identify with them have been
demonized. When the waters came, those who were largely
affected and eventually washed away were overwhelmingly
black. Our saviors gave us one way tickets out of town.
Four years later there have been no provisions to bring
blacks “back here”—I say back here instead of back home
because “back here” is no longer “back home.” Post
Katrina New Orleans is not even a ghost of what our
beloved city was.
What is gone is not
just houses or pictures on the wall, not just the little
neighborhood store we used to frequent, or the tavern
where we hung out on warm nights; not just the small
church in the middle of the block or even the flower bed
alongside the house; not just the old landmarks or some
of the schools we used to attend, not just the jumble of
overcrowded habitations or the storied stacks of bricks
we called the ‘jects (aka projects), housing schemes we
knew by name and reputation. No, it is not just brick
and wood that is missing from the landscape. What is
gone, what we miss most of all is us.
We the people are
not here. What is left is an amputated city ignoring its
stumps. Moreover, even if it were possible, our city
does not desire to re-grow or replace what was
“disappeared.” Good riddance is what many of the new
majority says.
“Good riddance” is
sometimes proclaimed using the coded language of “a
smaller footprint” (reductively, smaller footprint means
fewer black butts). At other times, “good riddance” is
spewed forth as the uncut racist cant of “lock all those
savages up.”
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Although poor
blacks controlled none of the city’s major resources, we
were blamed for everything that was wrong—from a failing
school system to rising crime; from ineffective and
corrupt political leadership to an “immoral” street
culture of drugs, sagging pants and loud music; from a
rise in sexually transmitted diseases to deteriorating
neighborhoods. When responsible citizens wrote to the
Times Picayune daily newspaper suggesting what ought
be done do address these concerns, high on the list of
panaceas was our incarceration, as if so many—indeed,
far, far too many of us—were not already in prison.
How convenient to
ignore the glaring statistic: the largest concentration
of black women in New Orleans is located at Xavier
University and the largest concentration of their
age-compatible, male counterparts exists across the
expressway in the city jail—dorms for the women, cells
for the men. The truth is disorienting to most: what has
been tried thus far, whether education or jail, has not
worked.
The people who
complain the most about crime in the city, or should I
say the voices that we most often hear in the media
complaining about crime are from the people who are the
least affected.
However, worse than
the name-calling is the fact that New Orleans is now a
city that forgot to care. In the aftermath of the
greatest flood trauma ever suffered by a major American
city, New Orleans is devoid of public health in general
and mental health care in particular.
In the entire Gulf
South area that was directly affected by Katrina, only
in New Orleans were 7,000 educators fired. The Federal
Government guaranteed the salaries of teachers in all
other areas and guaranteed the same for New Orleans
teachers but the state of Louisiana made a decision to
decimate the largest block of college educated blacks,
the largest block of regular voters, the largest block
of black home owners.
The denouement was
that the entire middle class black strata was
disenfranchised. Black professionals, the majority of
whom lived in flooded areas in New Orleans East, whether
government employees or independent professionals
(doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants and the like),
black professionals no longer had a client base. Most
professionals could not re-establish themselves in New
Orleans. What was left of the black New Orleans social
infrastructure was nothing nice.
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How does anyone explain why in
post-racial America economic inequality gaps are
widening, not closing?
In a city that
prior to Katrina had one of the highest rates of native
residents, why are so many young adults leaving rather
than staying?
Why is spending
nearly twice as much per pupil to service half the
pre-storm population called a success in education
innovation, especially when the current status quo is
economically unsustainable, not to mention that
comparable pre-storm health care and retirement benefits
are no longer offered to teachers?
I don’t even know
how to identify what is happening to us without sounding
like a cliché of class warfare, without sounding bitter
about racial reconciliation or ungrateful for all the
charitable assistance New Orleans has received.
I know that my
voice is a minority voice. I know I don’t represent all
blacks, nor most blacks, nor educated blacks, nor your
black friend, nor Malia and Sasha, nor . . . I know it’s
just plain “stupid” to talk like I’m talking . . .
I know. I know we
blacks are not blameless. Indeed, we are often a
co-conspirator in our own debasement. Too often we act
out in ways for which there is no sensible
justification. Yes, I know about corrupt politicians and
a seeming endless line of street level drug dealers,
about rampant gun violence and an always for pleasure,
24/7 party attitude.
But amidst all our
acknowledged shortcomings, I ask one simple question:
who else in this city has contributed so much for so
long to this unique gumbo we call New Orleans culture?
Like the state of
Texas finally admitting that “abstinence only” sex
education has led to higher, not lower, rates of teen
pregnancy, unless we materially address the realities of
our social situation, we may find that the short-sighted
solutions we have put in place will, in the long run,
worsen rather than solve our problems.
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Most days I am
resolved to soldier on, to suck it up and keep on
keeping on, but sometimes, sometimes I feel like Che
Guevara facing a summary execution squad of
counter-insurgency soldiers.
Sometimes after
working all day in the public schools or after hearing
Recovery School District administrators refusing to
allow us to teach an Advanced Placement English Class
because “we don’t have any students capable of that kind
of work”; or sometimes after finding out that a teacher
we worked with last year is no longer employed not
because she was not a great teacher but rather because
(as they told her without a note of shame or chagrin in
their voices): you are being surplused (i.e.,
terminated) because we can get two, young,
straight-out-of-college, Teach-For-America instructors
for the same price we paid your old, experienced ass;
sometimes when the city accidentally on purpose
bulldozes a house that the same city issued a building
permit to the couple that is struggling to rehabilitate
that property and this happens while this insane city
administration that, four years after the flood, has yet
to come up with a coherent plan to address the 40,000 or
so blighted properties that dominate the Ninth Ward
(Upper Nine, Lower Nine and New Orleans East) landscape;
sometimes, I just want to calmly recite Che’s command:
go ahead, shoot!
Just kill us and get it over with.
Source:
WordUp
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Buddy Bolden was a lover of music /
The Great Buddy Bolden—Buddy
Bolden Blues
Part of a recording of an interview of Jelly Roll Morton
by Alan Lomax in 1938. Jazz history archive material.
Jelly sings and plays Buddy Bolden Blues, and tells of
his experiences watching Buddy in New Orleans, and talks
about the great Buddy Bolden. "Buddy was the blowinest
man since Gabriel!".
Buddy Bolden Story with Wynton Marsalis /
Jelly Roll Morton—Buddy Bolden's Blues
Jelly Roll Morton playing and singing his composition of
"Buddy Bolden's Blues"
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Buddy
Bolden’s Blues
Lyrics by Jelly Roll
Morton.
I thought I heard Buddy
Bolden say
You nasty, you dirty—take
it away
You terrible, you awful—take
it away
I thought I heard him say
I thought I heard Buddy
Bolden shout
Open up that window and let that bad air out
Open up that window, and let the foul air
out
I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say
I thought I heard Judge Fogarty say
Thirty days in the market—take
him away
Get him a good broom to sweep with—take
him away
I thought I heard him say
I thought I heard Frankie Dusen shout
Gal, give me that money—I’m
gonna beat it out
I mean give me that money, like I explain
you, or I’m gonna beat it out
I thought I heard
Frankie Dusen say |
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Let That Bad Air Out: Buddy Bolden's Last
Parade
A
Novel in Linocut by Stefan Rerg
In Search Of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz
By
Donald M. Marquis
Guarding the Flame of Life
New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
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Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain (2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
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music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
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The Eyes of Willie McGee
A
Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim
Crow South
By
Alex Heard
An
iconic criminal case—a black man sentenced
to death for raping a white woman in
Mississippi in 1945—exposes the roiling
tensions of the early civil rights era in
this provocative study. McGee's prosecution
garnered international protests—he was
championed by the Communist Party and
defended by a young lawyer named Bella Abzug
(later a New York City congresswoman and
cofounder of the National Women's Political
Caucus), while luminaries from William
Faulkner to Albert Einstein spoke out for
him—but journalist Heard (Apocalypse Pretty
Soon) finds the saga rife with enigmas. The
case against McGee, hinging on a possibly
coerced confession, was weak and the legal
proceedings marred by racial bias and
intimidation. (During one of his trials, his
lawyers fled for their lives without
delivering summations.) But Heard contends
that McGee's story—that he and the victim,
Willette Hawkins, were having an affair—is
equally shaky. The author's extensive
research delves into the documentation of
the case, the public debate surrounding it,
and the recollections of McGee and Hawkins's
family members. Heard finds no easy answers,
but his nuanced, evocative portrait of the
passions enveloping McGee's case is plenty
revealing.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Browse all issues
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 1 July 2010
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