Tremé, Seasons 1 & 2

HBO Miniseries, created by David Simon and Eric Overmeyer

Recipe for Disaster:

Take an old, multi-cultural city situated below sea level, with a mighty river running through it and a large river-fed lake lapping at its north side; add an antiquated flood control system and incompetent political leaders;  then mix with a category 3 hurricane and you have, in the words of Creighton Bernette (of the HBO series, Tremé), “a man-made disaster of epic proportions.” 

Hurricane Katrina occurred in late August of 2005.  The National Weather Service had a fairly accurate prediction of its path as well as its potential to leave a swath of ruin as it bent toward the northeast after having travelled west across the south Florida peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico.  There was plenty to time to stock emergency shelters with water and food, to order the evacuation of people from the most vulnerable areas, and to develop a plan for rescuing anyone who stayed behind.  Instead, New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, waited until 19 hours before the hurricane made landfall to order residents to evacuate.  Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco declined President George W. Bush’s offer to call up National Guard troops in advance of the storm to assist with the evacuation and recovery.  When it became apparent that Katrina was going to submerge large parts of New Orleans, last-minute evacuees crowded into the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, mistakenly thinking that there would be water, food, and buses to take them away from the disaster zone.  The failure of leadership from the local governments all the way up to the White House turned the New Orleans disaster into a national disgrace.  Approximately 1,836 people died of which 1,577 were from New Orleans.  Another 135 people were never found. 

As Katrina’s flood waters ebbed, bodies surfaced to reveal the enormity of the tragedy.  A state of lawlessness descended on the ruins of New Orleans and in response, some in the New Orleans Police Department abused their power, locking up and losing track of citizens and worse.  On the evening of September 4, 2005, a team of police in a rental truck responded to a call from a fellow officer citing gunshots being fired near the Danziger Bridge.  When the backup officers arrived on the scene, they opened fire on a group of unarmed citizens who were walking to a food store.  Two of these innocent citizens died and four were wounded by the assault rifles and shotgun deployed by police.  One of the victims – a mentally disabled man – was stomped on the back by one of the police officers shortly before he died.  The gunshots heard by the first officer, it turns out, were fired by people trapped in their flooded out house who were trying to get someone to help them.

As the steamy weeks wore on, FEMA came in and bagged bodies.  President George W. Bush praised FEMA’s chief, Michael Brown, for doing a great job of handling the disaster even though the disaster got worse by the day.  While, one of America’s great cities was dying a number of influential politicians thought that writing off the flooded parts of New Orleans might solve a number of urban ills.  It turns out that the lowest lying areas were populated by some of the most disadvantaged citizens and allowing a Diaspora to exist could allow the city to reduce its footprint.  Many New Orleanais evacuated to Houston where they ended up camping in the Astrodome and various city parks, languishing with no hope of going home.  After a few weeks, Houston had expended all the hospitality it had and was quite ready to send New Orleans’ refugees packing.  Former First Lady, Barbara Bush famously said, “…so many of the people in the [Houston Astrodome], you know, were underprivileged anyway so this is working very well for them."  Indeed.

By December, those with homes on higher ground began returning to pick up the pieces of their lives, hoping that the city they loved so well could recover.  Housing projects undamaged by Katrina, meanwhile, were condemned by the federal government, meaning that many of Houston’s guests had no homes to go home to.  Tulane University, New Orleans’ largest private employer, had evacuated all students in advance of the storm and then arranged for them to attend other universities for the Fall Semester.  When the school reopened for the Spring Semester, most of the students returned to complete their education in New Orleans.  Katrina had devastated the city but at the same time had ignited a passionate drive to bring it back.  New Orleans welcomes all comers but for those who stay it becomes a life-long love affair.

My own love affair with New Orleans began in 1986 when my young husband took me there for the Jazz and Heritage Festival.  We stayed with friends, a couple of urban pioneers recently graduated from Tulane’s School of Architecture, who showed us the real New Orleans.  We biked through Audubon Park, strolled the Garden District, ate fried oysters at Casamento’s, and gave in to the “Big Easy” at Commander’s Palace where the strolling jazz musicians serenaded us as we sipped glasses of dry Champagne while enjoying several thousand calories of pure indulgence.  There was a romance to the place which seduced me but sadly it was only a weekend fling.  Twenty-five years later, when our youngest daughter decided that Tulane was the school for her, we visited the city – still recovering from Katrina – and I fell in love all over again.

The problem with passionate love affairs is that we get caught up in the romance and fail to get to know the person with whom we are smitten.  Being much older and somewhat wiser, I tried to resist New Orleans’ charms and almost succeeded until I tuned in to HBO’s miniseries, “Tremé,” which tells the story of Katrina’s aftermath by examining the lives of a cross-section of New Orleanais.  

New Orleans is most famous for Mardi Gras, the festival of overindulgence which requires 40 days of Lent to recover from.  To the uninitiated, Mardi Gras is a single day of drinking, drugging, and debauching on Bourbon Street.  To New Orleanais, however, Mardi Gras is a season during which neighborhood krewes meet to decide on parade themes and second-liners rehearse their marching bands.  In the spring of 2006, no one was sure if Mardi Gras would happen.  The vestiges of krewes who had returned built their floats and made costumes, hoping that they were not alone.  It was the second line that was most imperiled, and this is what “Tremé” illustrates so well.  

New Orleans is a city which, according to historian Lawrence Powell, came about as if by accident.  French settlers created a port city in a location which was prone to flooding, dredged a shipping channel, devised an elaborate system of canals and levees, and proceeded to trade with anyone and everyone with little regard for the King’s edicts.  Eventually, the Spanish took control of New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory, but failed to impose Spanish as the language of commerce.  In the end, it didn’t matter because the newly independent American States dominated trade in North America and English became the lingua franca.  

During colonial times, New Orleans was a major hub for the slave trade and as a result, many Africans came to reside there.  It was a fairly liberal place and an impressive number of slaves earned their freedom and were able to establish an autonomous community in an area to the north of the French Quarter.  This area came to be known as Tremé.  It was here that the fusion of African, Spanish, French, and Indian cultures produced a uniquely American form of music.  New Orleans style Jazz is joyful, lusty, and kinetic.  It demands movement on the part of musicians and listeners alike; and it is this life force in the form of music that, more than anything else, brought New Orleans back from the dead.  

New Orleans, because of its location straddling a mighty river, in the lowlands near the end of its run, has a history of rising from the ashes of destruction.  What is telling about the Katrina disaster is the degree of passivity on the part of all levels of political leaders which left the fate of thousands of the people to the whims of the storm.  Sure, some of the displaced and dead were living off welfare; but within this population were also great artists, poets, and musicians – keepers of the heart and soul of New Orleans.   Tremé takes us inside this precious, fragile, and endangered world and introduces us to the people who recognized that if New Orleans failed then America might be next.

Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

"Their Eyes were Watching God"

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Book Review by Teresa Friedlander (copyright 2007)

Books that challenge my views and beliefs earn a place on my required reading list, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, a beautiful work of fiction, is such a book. Growing up, I believed that I was “colorblind” and certainly tried to act that way. Reading this book helped me understand that racism is something we are all born with and must struggle against every day. With this work of masterful storytelling, Zora Neale Hurston opens a window into the history and culture of black Americans. After reading it, I felt a new appreciation for the creativity, courage, and spirituality that helped this nation’s slaves endure abuse, torture, and, after emancipation, abandonment by the only world they knew.

Their Eyes Were Watching God takes place in Georgia and Florida in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. After being freed, many former slaves were at loose ends and never emerged from poverty. Some of them, however, had the means and the knowledge to form towns and enjoy prosperity. Eatonville, Florida, (near Orlando) was one such town, and on August 15, 1887, became incorporated. Zora Neale Hurston’s father moved the family there in the early 1890s and was elected mayor for several terms. A keen observer of human behavior and recorder of speech, Ms. Hurston used her experience growing up in that town as the backdrop for her story of this time of great change for America’s newly freed slaves.

Janie, the main character, is a teenager being raised by her grandmother, a woman whose world view and beliefs were formed during her years of enslavement. Janie has an intuitive sense of the possibilities that life has to offer and yearns to find a way to live in harmony and happiness. Nanny, however, sees things differently. Out of a desperate need to protect young Janie and ensure her long-term security, Nanny arranges a marriage to a much older man with property and money. Janie is horrified but has no choice other than to submit. When the marriage becomes intolerable, Janie does the unthinkable: she runs off with a man who seems to offer the promise of romance and happiness that she craves.

Janie and Jody Starks travel to what will become Eatonville, Florida. When they arrive, it is clear that the settlers have no idea of how to form a town in a way that it will work to anyone’s benefit. Jody offers the vision and leadership which is sorely lacking and as a result becomes mayor. Janie, meanwhile, has married him and does his bidding by being well dressed and setting an example for the town. Behind closed doors, however, Jody can be a mean and abusive husband. Janie, like her slave ancestors, learns to take the abuse while protecting her heart and soul by not letting the hurt in. This is not to say she is meek, quite the contrary; when provoked, she has choice words for her husband.

After Jody’s death, Janie, now in her forties, meets a handsome, young stranger and the two fall in love. “Tea Cake” takes Janie away from Eatonville to the Glades just south of Lake Okeechobee. The two work as farm laborers and enjoy a lively social life until a deadly hurricane breaches the dikes holding back the lake. “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God”. Thousands perish, but Janie and Tea Cake manage to survive the flood at a terrible cost.

As a story, this book could stand on its own, however, Ms. Hurston wrote the dialog in southern black dialect which gives it richness and authenticity. I found that I had to read the characters’ words slowly in order to translate the “Black English” into English. In so doing, I felt transported into a new world and was delighted by the clever word play she recorded and beautiful ways the author had of describing her characters’ lives. Savoring the dialog in this way broke through my preconceived belief that Black English was silly nonsense. Black English enabled the slaves to communicate amongst themselves and create their own subculture which white people could not and would not penetrate. It helped them survive the horrors of life in chains.

Their Eyes Were Watching God did not enjoy much success when first published because it was not a “political” book, in that Ms. Hurston was not publishing as a means of communicating a message about the wrongs of social injustice. Ms. Hurston did explore the topic of racism in its most insidious form: between African Americans. Janie becomes acquainted with a woman, Mrs. Turner, who is light skinned and says “Ah can’t stand black niggers. Ah don’t blame de white folks from hating’ ‘em ‘cause Ah can’t stand ‘em mahself”. She goes on to say “Ah got white folks’ features in mah face. Still and all Ah got tuh be lumped in wid all de rest. It ain’t fair”. Ms. Hurston likened this type of racism to “the pecking order in a chicken yard. Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t”. This was not a message that early civil rights philosophers and activists were willing to hear.

During her working life, Zora Neale Hurston made her home in New York City and was part of the “Harlem Renaissance” which more militant African Americans rejected as bourgeois. In spite of being a highly educated anthropologist, receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, and publishing a number of works, Ms. Hurston fell into obscurity. She returned to Florida in mid-life and worked as a maid until suffering a stroke in the late 1950s. This brilliant American writer died unknown and penniless a few years later and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Like many great artists, Zora Neale Hurston was ahead of her time and was unwilling to cater to popular culture. She wrote what was in her heart and mind and lived as a woman of free will. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, discovered Zora Neale Hurston’s work in the 1960s and endeavored to learn more about this gifted and largely unknown writer. It is thanks to her that Ms. Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as other works resurfaced to be enjoyed by scholars and readers of American fiction. Ms. Walker’s research enabled her to locate Ms. Hurston’s grave and in 1973, she placed a marker on it which reads “A genius of the South”. An understatement if you ask me.