New Orleans has a long and close relationship with its ghosts, its restless spirits reeling through the ether throughout eternity.
As anyone who has ever stood before the house of Madame LaLaurie can attest, even if you feel it nowhere else, even if you do not feel it in the slave market, you will feel it here, the suffering, the agony, the unspeakable testament of man’s inhumanity to man, and woman, and child.
Madame LaLaurie would be very much at home in Washington today. If she were alive, she would no doubt have a cabinet post. Attorney General maybe. Or Secretary of Defense. Even FEMA director. You can be sure that as she surveys the Ninth Ward, Madame LaLaurie is one happy ghost.
She smiles on the rich white folks as they prepare to remake the city in her image, the city they always wanted.
Most of the ghosts of New Orleans, however, are not so pleased. Oh sure they are glad to see the newcomers, their descendants, but they would have been gladder to see them later, as a result of a more natural process than slow suffocation, drowning, heat, thirst, not-exactly-cholera-just-a-cousin, neglect, hate.
People always want the generations that come after to have a better life, and we can assume that ghosts are no exception. They hoped things would get better before they got worse. Certainly before they got THIS worse. Again. There are those who still live who remember 1927, who know its ghosts.
There is perhaps no ghost more angry today, or more heartbroken, than that of the holy woman Marie Laveau.
If to stand before the monument to horror and inhumanity that is the house of Madame LaLaurie makes the flesh crawl and the soul recoil, to stand before the house, the tomb of Marie Laveau is to feel oneself bathed in the ancient power of Resistance, from another time in which survival itself was an act of Resistance, a tribute to ancestors, to Africa.
Marie Laveau, high priestess of she who is variously called Agwe, Yemaya, Nuestra Senora de Regla, La Balianne, Mama Watta, Mother of All Waters, knew better than anyone that the miracle of New Orleans was not merely one of mundane engineering, trivial tinkerings with the laws of the physical world.
The true miracle of New Orleans was that the existence of such a splendid city of unbridled joy, unfettered whimsy, such glorious beauty of spirit and laughter and song and such celebrations of food and drink, a city that was of no one nation, but of the world. Of France and Acadia and Portugal and Haiti, of Jamaica and VietNam and Mexico, and all the Americas, but most of all, of Africa, it grew, it thrived, and despite all the blood of innocents, unfathomable cruelty, all the terror that is the evil that men do, it grew in laughter, in love, in sheer beauty of spirit to become the Jewel of the West, this city that few would call west.
And always, in rhythm with the ancient drums of Mother Africa, nestled in the arms of Mama Watta, La Balianne, rocked her children and taught them that laughter, that harmony with the ghosts.
As the steaming, stultifying dog days of August drew to a close, La Balianne puffed her cheeks and blew at a strange storm, history will record its strangeness, but not even this oddity could resist the command of Mama Watta, though it tried, and it moved, just a little, just enough to spare the shining, garish, rollicking child of her heart.
But Yemaya, Mother of All Waters, sensed that something was wrong. She could puff her cheeks and move the winds, but she could not puff her cheeks and move Greed.
And so her shining rollicking garish child sat on the roof, festered in the shelterpits, roasted alive on the asphalt, its eyes bulging from its head, its tongue swollen in its mouth.
As she watched.
As the ghosts watched.
And Mama Watta wept, and that tears cloud what is in her eyes now, in the eyes of the spirits, in the eyes of Africa.
