New Orleans: Creolization and all that Jazz

By Berndt Ostendorf

Ralph Ellison once wrote that the rules of performance in American culture are jazz-shaped. This book explores the Afro-creole core culture of New Orleans as the mainspring of this energizing music. Much of the cultural capital of the city is buried in a complex, tripartite racial history, which threatens the binary logic of North American racism with all sorts of sensual transgressions.

Its jazz-derived culture combines elements of African, French, Spanish and Anglo-American cultural practices which in their fusion have created a unique propulsive energy: Second line parades, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians, Cajun and creole foodways, minstrelsy, dance, ragtime and jazz will be interpreted as the result of a set of historical circumstances unique to this Caribbean metropolis of the senses.

Including a preface by Günter Bischof and pictures by Michael P. Smith

• Language: English
• Publisher: StudienVerlag
• Release date: Mar 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9783706557214

Book preview

Credits

Günter Bischof

Preface

The essays in this volume are a tribute to and a showpiece of the ascendancy of the American Studies field in post-World War II Germany and Western Europe. Berndt Ostendorf has been a leading figure in that new field in postwar Europe. He does not shy away from making frequent references to his own intellectual autobiography in these essays. His chapter Growing up in the Fifties: Jazz, the Cold War and the Birth of American Studies represents a veritable showpiece of postwar intellectual formation of a young German escaping the burdens of German Nazi history by way of total immersion in American popular culture. He demonstrates how the new opportunities offered by student exchange programs – what today we call international student mobility – allowed young Germans (and young Austrians like myself) to embark on trajectories of Westernization and Americanization. Such escapes helped mastering difficult pasts and open new windows for post-Nazi intellectual formation. Clearly his visits of the United States as a high school pupil and later as a university student and lecturer offered personal and intellectual windows to a new life. Such a new world, both less stultifying and more inviting to foreigners, put Ostendorf on the path towards becoming a shaper of postwar German and Western European discourses about America.

Ostendorf held the chair of American Studies in Munich for more than 20 years (1981–2005) and produced a steady flow of essays and articles that defined many aspects of American cultural studies in the postwar European American Studies movement. He was a key translator and mediator of American academic discourses in Germany and Western Europe and in the process helped shape those debates on the continent. He was one of the first to venture into black studies in Europe, thus contributing to the formation of African-American cultural studies discourses in the 1980s. He was a key impresario in grounding the "multi-Kulti"-debate in Germany in the 1990s in the larger American context of that discourse. He contributed to a thorough understanding of American popular music and introduced it to the ethno-musicology discourses in Germany.

As chair of American Studies he regularly invited top-notch and cutting-edge American academics to come as Fulbright guest professor to his "Amerika-Institut" at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. These guests immersed the Munich students in their innovative research interests and thus contributed to uplift them to participate in those innovative discourses. Both Sidney Mintz and the late George McGovern, the 1972 nominee for President of the Democratic Party (who also held a PhD in American History), taught in Munich as Eric Voegelin guest professors. When I served as a visiting guest lecturer in Munich in 1993/1994, David Blight (then Amherst College, now Yale University) was involved in doing his path-breaking research on Civil War memory later published in the prize-winning book Race and Reunion. Through these prominent visitors the Munich students came to inhale and reflect these discourses, at times even before they came to dominate the American intellectual landscape. Munich students often knew about these academic debates before they became popular in the US. So it went with many superstars of American academia who came to the Ostendorf’s Amerika Institut in Munich.

Ostendorf’s New Orleans essays collected in this volume give a cross-section of his amazingly diverse yet idiosyncratic contributions to the field of American cultural studies as seen through the lens and mirror of the rich cultural history of the Crescent City. Ostendorf penned these essays over a period of 30 years and during many visits to New Orleans, years before cultural studies became a buzzword in academia. In that sense he was an innovator, precursor and trend-setter in the field of cultural studies and an icon of New Orleans studies in Europe. Berndt Ostendorf taught for a semester at the University of New Orleans in the spring of 1989, exchanging with his friend Joseph Logsdon, who taught in Munich as a visiting DAAD professor that semester. He took advantage of his stay in New Orleans to practise deep immersion – as a participant observer in a quasi-anthropological field study. This is when he encountered the photographer and ethnographer Michael Smith who became his friend and regularly took him along to Mardi Gras Indian parades. Smith introduced Ostendorf to second line parades and jazz funerals. Here he became interested in the Afro-Caribbean dance traditions in public spaces that fascinated him so much. The dance-driven musical culture of New Orleans and its many carnivalesque outrages during Mardi Gras and jazz funerals absorbed him as did the sensuous of the lively street scenes encountered every day in the libidinal economy of sin city USA.

As his autobiographical essay Growing up in the Fifties: Jazz, the Cold War and the Birth of American Studies shows he had already deeply imbibed the sounds and rhythms of American jazz and popular music as a statement of personal liberation from the German past. Now in New Orleans attending the music clubs and jazz festivals of New Orleans allowed him to experience the amazingly colorful musical scene of the Crescent City that never sleeps. Living in the city with his wife Jutta and being a gourmet and excellent chef himself allowed him to enter the world of New Orleans food culture and cuisine, yet another variation of experiencing the rich gumbo of ethnic influences on New Orleans’ popular culture and food ways. He followed the complex heritages of the three principal food traditions of New Orleans – Creole, Cajun, and the down home fusion of N’Awlins. Ostendorf came to appreciate New Orleans as the El Dorado of eating and public drinking and taught seminars about it in Munich. New Orleans’ caloric temptation he sees as the counterpoint to the bland food culture of the rest of America and its obsessions with dieting.

Ostendorf immersed himself in New Orleans Creole cultures with such gusto that he would write and teach about the city and its fantastic cultural mix for the next 20 years. His seminars in Munich on New Orleans Music, or Race and Creole New Orleans, or The Cajuns became legend. His students came to New Orleans to research their Master’s thesis or doctoral dissertations in local archives; some received year-long scholarship at the University of New Orleans History Department for more thorough study. Ostendorf became a promoter of New Orleans – not a tourist one, but an academic one. Whereas most American Studies in Europe had followed the lead of the Northeastern Ivy League universities and its exclusive focus of studying Anglo-America, Ostendorf’s interests led his students to give equal attention to Franco-America and Hispano-America, both of which had a colonial presence in Louisiana. New Orleans is the place where the three European imperial contact zones rub against each other and interact. New Orleans, as Ostendorf likes to point out, is not the Southernmost North American city but the Northernmost city of the Caribbean. That makes the Crescent City such an extraordinary laboratory to study the "bricolage of American culture-mixing. In fact, since New Orleans is such a fascinating zone of culture formation, namely cultures clashing and assimilating, bricolage, metissage, hybridity, and fusion are Ostendorf’s favorite concepts to explain Creole New Orleans. One of the most extended essays in this collection is devoted to dissect and understand the term creole and its complex grammar and legacy. His struggle with the concept of creole is at the heart of understanding New Orleans culture. His favorite theoreticians of creolization are anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Melville Herskovits – and Ostendorf’s own star student Stephan Palmié, now a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. They provide this participant observer roaming of the streets of New Orleans with the lenses to understand the Afro-Caribbean complexity and quasi other-Americanness" of New Orleans culture.

Ostendorf is at his best when he maps out the outlandishness and quirkiness of American subcultures; his exuberant prose in many of these essays suggests that he had much fun researching and writing them. He penetrates with his sharp wit American fads such as the 1960s/1970s infatuation with Cajun culture, music and cuisine. With an even more cutting humor bordering onto the sarcastic he dissects a segment of the paranoid Far Right situated around the John Birch Society (the successors of McCarthyism) in 1960s America. It is a case study of anti-communist Angst in archconservative white American circles who feared that African rhythms and dance were about to undermine and threaten to destroy the American nation. The jungle noises of American jazz threatened to pervert the classical forms of music. Rock ’n’ Roll in this reading was sexual, un-Christian, mentally unsettling and riot-producing. Elvis Pressley and the Beatles (the vulgar anti-Christ) were communist sympathizers and/or agents undermining America. As Ostendorf relates he picked up this kind of outlandish literary production as a student in America and understood its meanings only 30 years later.

Ostendorf thrives and excels in pealing back the many layers of New Orleans and American culture. These essays can be read also as a tribute to New Orleans – one even more appreciated in post-Katrina New Orleans, a time and place when some of the prime features of the cultures he describes are more threatened than ever. Ostendorf points out that parasitic tourism exploits the richness of New Orleans cultural production on a daily basis without adding anything to it. The academic Ostendorf is fully engaged in the theory of and discourses in cultural studies to understand concepts like creolization while the New Orleans fan Ostendorf gives the reader of these essays a personal feel for his enthusiasm and sensuous engagement in understanding this most unusual of American cities. May these essays documenting a rich scholarly life, pulled together in this volume from many obscure academic publications, find many readers in Europe and the United States. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

New Orleans, November 2012

Introduction

The following chapters constitute a record of my involvement with New Orleans, both as a scholar and as a jazz fan. The book begins with the historical roots of New Orleans as the metropolis of the senses and ends on an autobiographical note, on how my interest in jazz led to a career in American Studies. The individual chapters represent an attempt to uncover and explore the various mysteries of New Orleans particularly the way new sounds have emerged from this remarkable city. New Orleans, I would submit, is the best location on the North American continent to observe the formation of African American traditions. These emerged in a contact zone where the cultures of France, Spain, England and Africa and their respective legacies of slavery entered into an unending dialogue. The culture formation processes involved may best be described as creolization, the end result of fusion, adaptation, and amalgamation of multiple traditions, culinary habits, languages and religions. Creolization as a descriptive metaphor for culture fusions in the triangle between Africa, America and the Caribbean has profoundly shaped the rules of performance of New Orleans musical life and these in turn have had an impact on the nation and the world.

It took some effort to penetrate the fog of misperceptions in which the history of this city is shrouded. New Orleans historiography is a hotbed for myth-making and conspiracy theories. It required a guide and cicerone, Michael P. Smith, to whom this book is dedicated, to learn to appreciate the complex social structures and the secret cultural springs of this unique urban archipelago. Location is destiny for New Orleans: The book starts by charting the historic layering of cultural practices owing to the cultural input from three empires: Spain, France, England and their involvement with and their management of race. Negotiating between North-America, Africa and the Caribbean, between Roman Catholicism and Puritan Protestantism, between the North American and Caribbean racial order, New Orleans, of all American cities has received the longest and strongest input from this energizing circumatlantic fusion. One consequence of the African life line has been that New Orleans developed a dance-driven culture that calls for a symbiotic interaction between musician and audience. In short, it is not a concert culture with the audience relegated to a passive sit-down role, but a street culture involving the second line and band performance. Musical practice is held in place by a strong networking of neighbourhood associations such as Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indian tribes, marching bands and a fanciful diversity of religious denominations. They provide the agents and scenarios that turn the streets during a jazz funeral into a communal stage for the mise en scene of a vibrant culture far away from the French quarter tourism. Though the historiography of New Orleans is full of death and decline imagery, its vibrant musical culture has survived all challenges – let us hope even Katrina.

In this musicoracial history the role that Afro-Creoles have played needs especial attention. Caught in the conflict zone between a three-tiered Caribbean racial order and a binary racial system imposed after the Louisiana purchase by North America, they compensated their gradual loss of social status and political power by carving out spaces of freedom and by withdrawing to their families and neighbourhoods. Jazz emerged in this communal space where Afro-Creole and African American traditions came together: Jazz is about freedom, says Thelonious Monk and Ned Sublette adds If you haven’t been on a second line, there’s something about jazz you don’t know. Though jazz-related types of music, such as ragtime, emerged in other places, it was in New Orleans where the notion of jazz as a way of life has profoundly shaped American culture and subsequently affected the entire world. This book follows Ralph Ellison’s aside that all American culture is jazz-shaped. If this is true then New Orleans would represent the key city in culture production processes not only for the United States, but for the entire world.

It is telling that the cultural capital of New Orleans remains largely invisible to the American public, but is admired throughout the world. Most of it (food, sex, music, religion, architecture) belongs to the world of the senses and is embedded in the popular expressive arts: therefore the city has acquired the role of the sensual other, the Big Easy, that lacks civic (and moral) legitimacy. New Orleans is both the cradle of jazz – as a music of freedom – and the most racialized metropolis. Also crime and corruption are rampant in its history. W. E. B. DuBois’ quip that the problem of the twentieth century is the color line is an apt description of New Orleans racialized politics. For many Americans New Orleans represents not only the sensuous other, but due to its Afro-Creole past also the threatening other. There is a long history of paranoid resistance to the culture of New Orleans, a history of fear and discrimination which reached its nadir in the Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson. It is telling that Homer Plessy was a passablanc Afro-Creole. African rhythms continue to loom large in racist fears, the paranoia is by no means over as the fundamentalist reactions African American popular music and, most recently, to the Obama presidency demonstrate. And yet, over time the city has shored up an ethno-nostalgic heritage and a contradictory cultural history of race relations that needs to be rescued from oblivion, for it treasures those sedimentations and resonances, which give New Orleans its mysterious, urban aura.

Chapter 1

New Orleans:

A Caribbean Metropolis of the Senses

When on August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of New Orleans prominent Americans suggested giving up the city for good, particularly the low-lying, mostly black neighborhoods. At the time forty-seven percent of Americans polled by CNN shared this view. Certain state legislators reasoned that God had finally intervened to eliminate the sores of poverty and crime in the Black projects. Religious leaders interpreted Katrina as God’s punishment for a sensuous, hedonistic, and homosexual city.¹ Sin City, America’s version of Sodom and Gomorrha,had it coming. It was pointed out to those who held this view that something must have gone wrong. For God destroyed the houses of church-going Blacks and of white Catholics in St. Bernard, but spared the houses of gay whites in the French quarter and the Garden District. This raises the serious question of whether God is just or, as one wag put it, whether she is gay. Mayor Ray Nagin came up with yet another topical explanation: Katrina was God’s punishment of George W. Bush for starting the Iraq war. But he also reminded his countrymen: Whenever anywhere in the world New Orleans is mentioned eyes light up. His boosterism was well taken: While the cultural heritage of New Orleans remains largely invisible to the North American public and sometimes even to local citizens, it is appreciated throughout the world. Most of it, food, sex, music, dance, and religion, belongs to the world of the senses and is embedded in the popular expressive arts. Hence it lacks moral legitimacy or prestige at home. New Yorkers and Bostonians of property and standing are falling over each other trying to save Venice, yet few of these would lift a finger to save New Orleans. This tacit habit of the heart is due to the negative role New Orleans had acquired in the nation’s libidinal economy. For many Americans (including George W. Bush) New Orleans had become the metropolis of transgressions: the Big Easy.² While before Katrina Americans loved to sow their wild oats in the city that care forgot, they did so clandestinely and always with a bad conscience. Admittedly New Orleans has over time also become a symbol of graft and corruption and it clearly lacks the civic tradition of say Seattle or Minneapolis. Long before Katrina the city had gone into economic decline. And in this coincidence of material neglect, civic decline and sensual attraction lies the problem of judging its merits. The cultural capital of the city that might help to compensate for the lack of a civic culture is deeply compromised; for it lies buried in a complex history of satisfying the senses. This conflict-ridden tradition needs to be rescued from benign neglect and defended against moral censure; for it treasures those sedimentations, which give New Orleans its spectacular urban aura, a synaesthesia of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch which is felt most keenly when it is gone. The anthem of New Orleans captures the sensory quality of this deprivation well:

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

And miss it each night and day

I know Im not wrong … this feelings gettin stronger

The longer, I stay away

Miss them moss covered vines … the tall sugar pines

Where mockin birds used to sing

And I’d like to see that lazy Mississippi … hurryin into spring

The moonlight on the bayou … a creole tune … that fills the air

I dream … about magnolias in bloom … and I’m wishin I was there

(Harry Connick with Dr. John. Harry Connick Jr. 20 CBS 1988.)

What would world culture be like without New Orleans? It would lack some of our best jazz-derived popular music, its joie de vivre and multi-sensory richness. Not only American culture, as Ralph Ellison suggested tongue in cheek, is jazz-shaped, but that of many other countries as well. And yet, the signs are multiplying that in the age of suburban malls and urban sprawl not only New Orleans, but many classic cities and their cosmopolitan centers are shrinking or disappearing.³ The collusion of the five senses which constitutes a functioning urban ecology is scattered with urban sprawl and is most certainly banished from the fastest growing real estate venture: gated communities. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch – all five senses tend to atrophy in the suburban desert. During the last two decades there has been a race among endangered cities to be included in the UNESCO world heritage list. Currently there are 1500 applicants waiting to be so protected from decline. Let us briefly look at the criteria for acceptance. Among these are an active oral tradition (including diverse dialects or languages), performing arts such as music, dance and theatre, the realm of public rituals, festivals and celebrations, social practices, specific foodways, knowledges and crafts. The ensemble of these traditions represents the source of urban cultural diversity and of continued creativity which deserve to be protected, in short, the urban cultural exchange with the senses. As will become abundantly clear in what follows, pre-Katrina New Orleans met all of the UNESCO qualifications. And yet, the question remains wide open whether post-Katrina New Orleans can be saved in an MBA-driven, neo-liberal, ecologically challenged United States. Seven years after Katrina the record is decidedly mixed.

In order to appreciate the special qualities of New Orleans as an urban space of the senses it is essential to first comprehend the historical layering that went into the making of New Orleans culture and then grasp their continued dynamic synergy until Katrina destroyed its basis.⁴ To do this we must understand the historical fusion, or rather indigenization, of the city’s unique sets of multiple components that come together to form a rich cultural gumbo. With a nod to its principal agents, the New Orleans Creoles, I would call the overall process creolization, a process that is deeply rooted in the senses and in what one might call libidinal urban exchange. Many cities of this world may have any single one of the eleven characteristics mentioned below, but it is their collusion, their symbiosis and dogged rootedness over three centuries that makes New Orleans truly unique.

Three Colonial Empires

New Orleans was founded and grew in the contact zone of three major empires: France, Spain and Anglo-America. Founded by France in 1718, it was ceded to Spain in 1766. The town was Spanish during a crucial period of growth, the early charter period, when many cultural habits gelled. New Orleans burnt down twice, in 1788 and again in 1794, and was rebuilt under Spanish control. Therefore the so-called French Quarter may just as well be called Spanish Quarter. The three most impressive buildings, St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo and the Presbytère date from this period. Finally the territory was bought by the United States in the most spectacular real estate transaction in modern history: The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 engineered by Thomas Jefferson cost the United States a mere $ 15 million. For that sum the young republic received Louisiana territory, that is the Western part of the continent up to the Rockies. As a result of its history there are three layers of colonial practice that form a palimpsest of public space, customs, habits, and laws. By virtue of their coexistence a triple liminality is at work: For each of the three centers of colonial power, France, Spain, and England, the city served as a colonial outpost and as a periphery. Three systems of slavery, three racial (and sexual) etiquettes, three legal systems, three governmental bureaucracies, three traditions of architecture with specific traditions of public space and urban governance, three culinary and several religious traditions thrived at the periphery of three colonial empires and are now layered in a rich cultural memory.⁵ What we end up with is a typically Caribbean ensemble, a bricolage of contradictory cultural practices. Because of this tricultural genesis New Orleans is not so much the Southernmost North-American city, but the Northernmost city of the Caribbean oikumene. New Orleans is part of an urban archipelago that connects Veracruz, Havana, Port au Prince, Port of Spain and Kingston. And in that historical setting it is also one of the first cosmopolitan cities of early modernity.⁶

Economy: seaport and river port

New Orleans’ dual role as a seaport and a river port had important economic and cultural ramifications. The seaport served the Atlantic and made hemispheric networking with Europe, Africa and the Caribbean possible. The harbor connected the American colonies with the Atlantic rim and became the meeting place for multicultural sailors as carriers of culture. One example may suffice: Urban slaves in Havana had formed a system of cofradias for the purposes of mutual aid and for the protection of their cultural capital, one typical example being the Sociedad de Protección Mutua y Recreo del Cultura Africana Lucumí. The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans were inspired by this Cuban tradition, probably transported there by merchant marines. In Cuba the Buena Vista Social Club is a belated heir to this tradition. The economy of New Orleans harbor was always dominated by a single commodity: Sugar in the eighteenth, cotton in the nineteenth and oil in the twentieth centuries. Hence New Orleans began as an early captive of globalization. Each commodity created its attendant urban ecology and sensory spectrum. It is often forgotten, that before the Civil War New Orleans was the second largest port of the United States. The river port connected with the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Mid-Western hinterland, and Canada. A total of 41 percent of the continental United States is drained through the Mississippi and its tributaries. Immigrants who wanted to get to the Midwest sought out ships that went to New Orleans, not to New York. Ships brought manufactured goods or immigrants from Europe and returned with cotton. It is an indication of the importance of New Orleans that before the Civil War two Hanseatic ports, Bremen and Hamburg, maintained consular offices in the city. The bad news is that the Mississippi port had gone into a steep decline long before Katrina since its location on the Mississippi river made access for supertankers and container ships increasingly more difficult. The good news is that Katrina did not affect the port as badly as the city. Most of the business is back to pre-Katrina levels.

Rule of Law: Three revolutions

New Orleans was deeply affected by three world revolutions: the French, the Haitian and the American. First, there were material after-effects of these revolutions. The French revolution drove a number of Foreign French to New Orleans and the Haitian revolution caused the population to double between 1810 and 1820. Both augmented a francophone professional class at the very moment when the Americans were trying to improve and modernize the city (Lachance). As the city governance became more Americanized, French or Creole cultural traditions were stubbornly and defensively reaffirmed. This accounts for the edge of resentment in Creole identity. Second, the cultural impact of Saint Domingue on New Orleans needs to be studied in greater detail. The Haitian and French revolutionary utopias are alive in the population and continue to affect voting behavior. To this day New Orleans’ Black Creoles cherish the radical universalism of the Haitian and French revolutions. The recognition that the Haitian revolution was the only successful one by slaves has made Toussaint L’ Overtoure a revered figure of New Orleans folklore. Each of the three revolutions introduced a different spin on civil rights. The American Revolution and its Constitution on the other hand held a promise only in theory for the gens de couleur libres. In practice civil rights were displaced by the protection of property and chattel slavery, and as a consequence New Orleans became the most important entrepôt of the American slave trade. Homer Plessy, who gave his name to Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), was a New Orleans Creole committed to the universalism of the Haitian and French revolutions. With his legal action Plessy put the American constitution to a test – which it lost. Many of the lawyers and journalists supporting the legal action had a Saint Domingue background. For Creoles Plessy vs. Ferguson was a disastrous step back in terms of racial practice. In place of the complicated and porous tripartite social etiquette dominant in the francophone Caribbean, a binary color line was rudely introduced which discriminated against all people with a drop of black blood regardless of social or professional status. To this day the integrative politics of Creoles rubs against the black cultural nationalism of former American slaves that had developed in reaction to such politics of exclusion. Third, it is in the area of music that New Orleans owes most to the Haitian revolution which entered New Orleans via Cuba. The first serious American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whose mother was from Saint Domingue, learned his music from his black Haitian wet-nurse. Throughout his life he remained committed to a Caribbean style of music as is demonstrated in his Bamboula: Danse Nègre.⁷ Many jazz musicians including the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, have ancestors from Saint Domingue which accounts for a musical quality known as funky. Morton spoke of a noticeable latintinge and others call it the habanera roll which adds a propulsive, Latin energy to the New Orleans style.

Slavery and Race: Creoles and African Americans

There has always been a powerful African connection active in New Orleans. Its strength is due to a homogeneous African charter generation from Senegambia. Some scholars argue that in 1760 black culture was more coherent than the white demimonde. Whereas the white population consisted of drifters, prostitutes, deported galley slaves, trappers, gold-hunters, adventurers and foreign legionaries from many different nations, all slaves imported to New Orleans between the years 1720 and 1732 came from one cultural region. They belonged to what was then known as the Bambara Empire in what today is Senegambia. Later a sprinkling of slaves from the Congo were added (Hall, 1992). Normally slave traders would mix their slaves in order to prevent communication that would lead to plotting or insurrection. Most importantly the Bambara slaves brought with them a small market economy and plenty of crafts – hence there is a strong African baseline due to an early synthesis. Traditions such as the market on Congo Square, Vodun, Mardi Gras Indians drumming practices, Second Line Parades, Jazz, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs are evidence of this fact. In the early period the plantation economy of Louisiana was lagging behind other colonial enterprises. In order to save on expenses slave owners allowed slaves to plant their own provisions and develop small markets or to hire themselves out as craftsmen. This practice not only resulted in a Monday-to-Friday slavery with weekends off, but it also gave slaves and free blacks enormous leverage and opened the door to material independence. Particularly during Spanish rule many slaves earned their own money to buy their freedom. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase this practice of self-purchase, called coartación, had resulted in the largest community of free blacks on the continent. Congo Square began in the late eighteenth