Is America Really Prepared to Allow the Hoodoo Culture of New Orleans to be Destroyed by Hurricane Katrina

"Papa Man Deveaux" by James W. Bailey

Papa Man Devaux is a New Orleans Hoodoo man. The last time I saw him, in 2001, he was living in the Lower 9th Ward of the City of New Orleans, one of the hardest hit areas of Hurricane Katrina. This photograph was shot at the edge of the French Quarter in 1985. I met him by accident about a year after I moved to New Orleans from Mississippi. That meeting changed my life. Papa Man Deveaux is typical of many of the poorest of the poor of New Orleans - he is a native born African-American New Orleanian, he has never owned a car or even been able to afford a phone in his home. His last home was the ground level floor of a typical New Orleans Shotgun Double Camelback. I have no way of knowing his status. I pray that he is alive and well. I hope that I see him soon.

It has been very difficult for me to concentrate on posting. Lately, I'm not even sure I know what I should be blogging about, if anything at all.

Should I blog about art? It seems almost trivial to me at this time.

I emailed artist Eva Lake earlier this evening and told her that I'm not sure what art means to me right now in a world where I'm watching people on television I know in New Orleans begging for a $.50 bottle of water for their babies to drink. Just yesterday on CNN I saw another former co-worker from eight years ago, an African-American woman with her two children, at the New Orleans Convention Center. They looked like they were on the edge of death.

What is the meaning of art at this time? I honestly do not know.

I am appalled by what the government of the United States of America has let happend to its people. It is beyond me to understand how this can be happening in America, in New Orleans, a city that I lived in for most of my adult life.

I am very thankful for the many emails that I have received. I wish I had more information to offer, but have found it almost impossible to contact anyone in New Orleans or Mississippi.

I apologize for not returning your emails. That is not my habit. But right now I simply can not keep up with it. I'm spending much time attempting to reach family and friends in Mississippi and New Orleans.

I urge all of you who are reading this to please please contribute generously to the relief efforts for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Please see the list of organizations on my sidebar.

I also am extemely grateful to those members of the artist community of the metro Washington, D.C. area who have risen to the cause of helping to raise money for this effort. If you are an artist who wants to participate, please email F. Lennox Camepllo and Alexandra Silverthorne. I am grateful to them for keeping these important lists current.

Those of us from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast know how absolutely horrible and vast the bigger picture of destruction is that you are seeing in the media. I don't think most Americans, even those tourists who've been to New Orleans, really understand the reality of what has happened, especially in New Orleans. Most tourists never see neigborhoods where most New Orleanians, especially the poor, live. The reality of the flooding is beyond description.

A very close friend of mine in Reston, Virginia, has encouraged me to continue to write about what is most personal to me concerning this American nightmare - and, yes, I do consider it to be just that, an American nightmare.

I am angry as hell about what has happened. I am angry and horrified and disgusted at every level that in America, that in the City of New Orleans, the poorest of the poor, are being allowed by our government to literally die in the streets.

Part of me wants to post 24 hours a day slamming everyone that I believe is to blame for this sin. Another part of me wants to comment on all the news reporting and correct every stupid little thing that every misinformed reporter says, like the mispronuciation of New Orleans and Gulf Coast landmarks - I actually heard a CNN reporter repeatedly refer to Pass Christian, Mississippi (a place that has been removed from the map), as Christian Pass. It makes you laugh till you start crying - then you remember why you are cying and you start to get really pissed and angry over the insult.

I believe my friend's advice is sound - I will try to stay with posting about what is personal, about what I know and feel, about what touches my heart, my soul and my living memories about the places where I lived and loved.

New Orleans Hoodoo Culture - It Must Be Saved

One of the most original of America's cultural traditions faces possible extinction in the very city of its birth - a cultural practice called Hoodoo that was born in the magical city of New Orleans.

My recent Burnversions exhibition was conceived to pay homage to this profoundly unique cultural practice and tradition.

There are many who I personally know in New Orleans who practice and engage in the rituals, charms, spells, incantations and conjurings of Hoodoo. Many of these deeply spiritual Hoodoo men and women are African-Americans and are no doubt among those whose very lives are in jeopardy at this time (I know them and their circumstances and realize that many were probably unable to leave New Orleans prior the arrival of Hurricane Katrina.)

They are my friends. They are people who hold divinely touched souls within their physical bodies. They are spiritualists who deeply affected and positively influenced my soul, spirit, mind and body during my 20 years of life in New Orleans.

As of this moment, I don’t know the status or whereabouts of any of my friends. I don't know if they escaped the city and are ok. I don't know if they are still in the city and are alive, or God forbid, dead.

Tens of thousands of New Orleanians are being moved out of New Orleans to Texas and other camps in Louisiana. New Orleans will no doubt soon be emptied of its people - which means it will be emptied of its culture. No one knows when the people of New Orleans will be allowed to come home, or if they will ever even be allowed to return.

It rips my soul apart to contemplate the potential loss of culture that is a very real possibility if we lose these special people, these honored spiritualists, these New Orleans Hoodoo men and women.

If they are permanently exiled from the city of their birth, the city that gave birth to their culture, the results will be devastating. It will be a horrible travesty. It will be a cultural crime of unimaginable proportions not seen in the modern era in America.

America has a tragic record of actively participating in the destruction of native indigenous cultures. We must not repeat this sorry history. We must not allow such actions to ever take place again against the unique cultures, such as Hoodoo, that have somehow, against enormous struggles and hardships, managed to survive and continue to exist in our country.

I am absolutely dedicated to realizing the final act of my exhibition Burnversions - as promised more than a year ago, that final act being the spreading of the ashes from the burned project photographs across the Father Waters of the great Mississippi River on All Saints Day, November 1, 2005, from the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans.
I will move heaven and hell and walk across high water if I have to do so to make it happen. I owe it to the people who have given much to me, as well as so much to the broader culture of our country. If you listen to modern music, you are listening to the Blues, which means you've been exposed to, whether you know it or not, the culture of Hoodoo.

The culture of Hoodoo within the City of New Orleans must not be allowed to die. But the more important moral imperative for America at this very critical moment is this: we the people of the United States of America must not allow the government of this country to sanction the killing of this culture by permanently removing its devoted followers from its birthplace.

At this point in our nation's history, with all the ugly acts that have gone before us with Native Americans, African-American, and other, our complicity in such an act would be worse than a greivous moral crime - it would be a collective sin for which there is no forgiveness or redemption.

The people of America owe it to the people of New Orleans to help them through this tragedy. New Orleans, for generations now, has given freely of itself to the culture of this country. The culture of New Orleans has helped enrich the broader American culture with some its most unique and soulful attributes.

New Orleans has given to America far more than it has has ever taken. All Americans have benefited from the cultural contributions made by an endless list of writers, artists, poets, musicians, chefs, dancers, spiritualists and other creative people who have called New Orleans home.

Now is the time for America to repay its debt to this unique, special and most un-American of American cities. America must help the people of New Orleans save their city and preserve their culture. This culture represents the best attributes of what America can be if we want it to be so - a place where the art of life is a life of endless art, a life of endless joy.

James W. Bailey