New Orleans Cemeteries

  

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Dead End

Or

Six Feet Above

        For sure, there are forty-two cemeteries in the New Orleans area, and daily, people are dying to get into them; but, as you can imagine it’s still first come first served. Even considering the fact that death is such an inconvenience and, in my thoughts, a grave mistake, folks keep doin’ it and we keep burying them. Or we burn them into ashes and send them home in an urn or a box to be shelved with the canned tomatoes.

        Some will say: “In New Orleans we don’t just bury our dead, we send them off with a party, music, and dancing in the streets.” That’s kinda true. In a traditional Jazz Funeral here, the dearly departed are accompanied to their final rest with a brass band, the family in the front line and the well wishers in the second line; the music is at a slow cadence until the body is laid to rest and then the band breaks into celebratory music as the soul is set free of its earthly bonds and the party moves on to the proper ‘wake’. There’s dancing and drinking and so much carrying on that folks here almost look forward to Old Aunt Rose kicking the bucket. Or not.

        Cemeteries here are class conscious to be sure. The higher classes go to Metairie where there’s higher ground and they can be buried under it. The notorious and the famous prefer St. Louis Cemetery #1 where although they’re buried above ground at least they are among their peers. The indigent get kicked to the curb in another place and make due as they can; I have one friend that says that she’d rather be buried “in Holt cemetery with them hookers and homeless than there with them muckity-mucks in town!”

        Even with the fact that some people only rent tombs and some single burial plots can have upwards of twenty or more family members interred, it’s a tradition to dress someone in their finest so they can be laid out to rot. I can’t figure that one out. The rental plots are those iconic two level affairs where the casket is allowed to repose for a year and a day; after that time, a worker with a long pole pushes that which has not disintegrated with time and the tropic climate down a hole in the back of the second floor into the space below, giving rise to the adage of derision: “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole” (or so the story goes).

        You can’t swing a cat here without hitting a cemetery and all the best folk are spread around like gossip: Marie Laveau (the Voodoo Queen) and Doctor John are night trippin’ in Saint Louis Cemetery #1 outside the French Quarter along with Homer Plessy, Etienne de Bore (the sugar king)  and The-not-yet-dead–but-has-a–tomb Nicholas Cage. Saint Louis #2 has Ernie K. Doe (but not his mother in law) and Paul Prudhomme is buried largely in Saint Louis #3.

        Mount Olivet near Dillard University is swingin’ with Allen Toussaint, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair and rapper Soulja Slim; while Pete Fountain and Al Hirt are backing up Mahalia Jackson and Gram Parsons’ charred remains in Metairie along with the ‘Queen of the Storyville Madams’ Josie Arlington looking fondly on. If you’re into rather large prosthetic limbs, crutches, and eye glasses displayed visit the gothic revival chapel at Saint Roch Cemetery #1.

        Unlike at the more ornate ‘Cities of the Dead’, Holt Cemetery has most of their inhabitants buried underground; filled to capacity with New Orleans indigent, homeless and fringe society one-time denizens, it can be depressing and haunting until you consider the probable Devil-may-care lives led by those that wind up there; and among the wooden crosses, hand lettered planks and even unmarked mounds of earth Babe Stovall, Buddy Bolden, Jack Working, Jessie Hill, Robert Charles and countless Ladies of the Evening are cavorting with, at last count, at least 1,400 military veterans and don’t really give a rat’s whisker what you think of them. As a side note: Huey P. Long is buried in Baton Rouge and New Orleans favorite son Louis Armstrong decided he’d rather go underground in Queens, New York.

        We take an almost morbid fascination here with our cemeteries, films are shot in them, tours are given of them, rituals and macabre rites are performed in them and not one person I know doesn’t believe that spirits will rise in them at any given moment; when I read Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place, I considered it not so much as a piece of fiction but as a documentary.

        Dying isn’t enough for a person here; it’s never the end. Anyone that has ever ‘gotten’ New Orleans will believe that when it’s time to shuffle off this mortal coil their last thoughts will be “I ain’t goin’ nowhere!” and will find themselves as another of the myriad of ghosts, spirits and phantasmagoria here that share the spaces of those still weighed down with human flesh. Don’t believe it if you don’t want to, but come sit a spell in one of our ‘Cities of the Dead’ and bring a lunch; I guarantee that you’ll feel a tap on your shoulder, an unlikely bit of breeze or get the feeling of being watched, especially if that meal is some Brother’s fried chicken, and you can leave the bones for the myriad of felines that cohabitate with our dearly not so departed.

        I read the obituaries daily to see if I’m in them; it would just be like my friends not to let me know that I’ve gone over my own Rainbow Bridge; will I be united with all the people from my past? Maybe not. Could I possibly reconnect with all the critters that I’ve shared my life with? I’m counting on it.