Second lines gone wrong

New Orleans is one of the all-time weird towns, but when you live here you get used to it and don’t notice it so much, until in the course of a normal day perhaps you’re stopped at an intersection, and a police car comes out to block traffic and then here comes a second line—complete with the Social Aid & Pleasure Club in loud, bright matching suits and hats and feathered fans and bobbing umbrellas and a brass band and the whole neighborhood following and dancing behind.

I suppose some people get annoyed by the interruption of their day, but a real, honest not-for-the-tourists ghetto second-line has never failed to make me feel happy and glad to be alive in New Orleans, and hopeful about the future of the city and all of humanity.

Starting in the fall and lasting until Carnival season, there’s usually a second line every weekend somewhere in the city. There have been seasons where I’d try to find out where they were and go to maybe one or two a month. But the only one I went to last year was one I encountered accidentally.

Going to a second line pretty much means going into the ghetto. The beautiful, amazing thing about it is the way it transforms the ghetto into a wonderful place to be. There will be a lady selling pieces of pecan pie, and a guy going around with a cooler of beer and someone selling grilled sausage off a cooker in the back of a pickup truck, and everyone’s out in the street or on the stoop, or dancing on their front porch. But you’re going into the ghetto and you know that there are risks—cars broken into, muggings on the quieter streets. If you live in New Orleans, those are the risks you take every time you leave your house, and I haven’t really worried about it too much.

But lately things seem to be getting worse. It’s not just that you might get robbed, but that you might get shot during the course of the robbery. Maybe I’m just more paranoid or more aware of it after having to put the beat-down on the kids who tried to steal my purse back in February, but I think the numbers will bear me out. Crime is getting worse and I feel less comfortable and confident of my ability to take care of myself in the city’s sketchier neighborhoods.

The cops are always at these things, and not just to clear traffic ahead. In my experience, they’ve always seemed pretty low-key and tolerant. I’ve seen people smoking joints almost right in front of their faces, for example, and they didn’t do anything about it.

I have a relatively positive attitude toward the NOPD, I guess—at least compared to other police departments I’d had encounters with. They usually don’t rattle during the insanity of Mardi Gras, they responded to my would-be purse-snatching quickly and efficiently, and that’s been more-or-less true of their reaction to other neighborhood incidents. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that crime is getting way out of control, and they’ve got to take some of the responsibility for that.

But lately it seems they’re being much more aggressive in handling second lines and street parties. I’ve heard about them busting up a couple of small second lines in Treme, but the big story is them making several arrests and stopping the Mardi Gras Indians from parading on St. Joseph’s Day this year. I won’t explain too much about the Indians, because you either know already or you know how to Google. But in a way, they’re kind of the SAPC’s big brother—more extravagantly beautiful and more rare. They come out on Mardi Gras day and on St. Joseph’s Day or the closest Sunday to it, as well as making some paid appearances at concerts and so forth.

I’m not going to pretend to have any deep understanding of the meaning of second lines or Mardi Gras Indian traditions or any aspect New Orleans’ homegrown black culture. It’s my privilege just to observe it from the outside. But I think I’d be fair in saying that this culture is not purely innocent and wholesome—nothing interesting ever is—but it is often clearly beautiful and profoundly valuable. It’s one of the main ingredients in New Orleans’ special flavor.

Anyway, the Indians are generally too busy sewing their costumes all year to be street criminals. Members of the SAPCs are generally mature and past any juvenile delinquency. The members of the brass bands are probably closest to the gang-bangers, but they’re more likely to be drug users than anything else—just like musicians everywhere.

The second lines and parades do bring a lot of people out into the city’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods—in a way that’s a good thing, preferable to everyone huddling behind locked doors. But it does create the opportunity for crime.

Still I can’t understand why, after all this time, someone at the NOPD decides to get all badass about it. They say they stopped the St. Joseph’s Day parade because the Indians didn’t have a parade permit, but they’ve been parading on St. Joseph’s Day for a hundred years without one.

What the hell good does it do, to kill the good things that make this city special? This being the Big Sleazy, one suspects there’s some kind of twisted political deal behind it, but I don’t understand who benefits.

On Monday, a big crowd of Indians and their supporters showed up at the city council meeting to discuss the incident. I can just imagine the big histrionic circus that it was. Right at the beginning, 80-something-year-old Big Chief Tootie Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas got up to speak, and then collapsed from a heart attack before he'd barely started. He was pronounced dead across the street at Charity Hospital.

New Orleans is a city of drama queens. I don’t want to imagine the hysteria that attended this event, and you don’t want to hear or read the self-important pontification that has been perpetrated by self-appointed pundits in its wake. That’s why I didn’t exactly want to write about this.

But I can’t help but see the incident of a manifestation of New Orleans’ core problem of how to survive—not just how to survive in this completely unsuitable physical environment, but how to survive as a distinct cultural entity. If you stamp out the “cultcha,” we’ll just be a smaller Houston—but without the Mexicans. The cultcha seems to require a degree of chaos and anarchy, but without a reasonable amount of law and order, everyone who has any means will get tired of dealing with the corruption and crime and disorder and will flee—as they have been doing for a long time now. Then the city will be left to the poor, the ignorant and the criminal and it’ll be a sweatier version of inner Detroit.