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.
