the great satchmo

I spent the weekend in New Orleans with my husband and friends. The last time I visited the Mardi Gras Museum in Jackson Square, I recall being absorbed all day after with just a handful of photos and captions displayed there. They pertained to the Zulu tradition within Mardi Gras, and when I went back this week to discover a whole exhibit on the subject, it was automatic that I should go. I have compared this compulsive interest to my affinity for flamenco music, which strikes me as having a similar role in Spanish culture as that of jazz in America. Arising from the marginalized, vilified classes of Moors, gyspies, and Jews, flamenco became part of a rich oral tradition that preserved their answer to the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Flamenco is achingly beautiful in a way that is kindred to the blues in my ear, and I linked the two almost from the first time I heard it, while in Spain. Growing up, my music teachers taught us the haunting antebellum spirituals, "Follow the Drinking Gourd" and "Wade in the Water," right along with the Americana of "Git Along Little Doggies," "Shenandoah," and "Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal." My husband, who is far more attuned to the latter collection, as he is to the plight of Bob Dylan's "poor white man," to the State's Rights argument of the Civil War, and to the dignity of all things Southern, obliged me and went along. We had very different but complimentary reactions, as I might have predicted. The photo above is one of three that I cannot shake from my mind, but which disturbed my husband in a way he would rather dismiss as counterproductive.

The photo is of “King Louie” Armstrong, honored with the title of Zulu King during the 1949 Mardi Gras festivities. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was born out of a dark, bitter parody of black stereotypes held by whites, as displayed in blackface shows. Black revellers known as the Tramps began painting their faces in the fashion of one famous vaudeville sketch, titled "There Never Was and Never Will Be a King Like Me." Mimicking its portrayal of the African Zulu tribe, the Tramps at once embraced and turned upside-down white fears of blacks as overly sensuous, violent, less civilized. They even began choosing and parading their own parody of Rex, the white king of Carnival, calling him King Zulu and giving him a lard-can crown and a banana-stalk scepter. When the group was officially founded, Zulu served as a social/civic club and Mardi Gras krewe for blacks. Because of its connection with the owners of Geddes and Moss Funeral Home, who were donors and members, the club also ensured that duespaying club members would receive a decent burial. The krewe's parade for many years was confined to the "black streets" of New Orleans. For a time after the Civil Rights movement it was boycotted by many blacks as a demeaning, backwards tradition too evocative of years under slavery and Jim Crow, and full of farcical customs that might reinforce white stereotypes of blacks. Nevertheless, the krewe was and has remained a beloved tradition and social network for many African-Americans whose love of their city, neighborhood, and traditions has weathered each uncertain decade of oppression, sociopolitical turmoil, or disaster with the spirit of laissez les bons temps rouler intact. This clip from TIME magazine on Feb. 21 of ‘49 sums up the glee on the face of the beloved “Satchmo” during his reign as Zulu king: “The brown-skinned man with the golden horn pursed his scarred lips, blew a short stream of incredibly high, shining notes and then carefully laid the trumpet down. "There's a thing I've dreamed of all my life," he graveled, "and I'll be damned if it don't look like it's about to come true--to be, King of the Zulus' Parade. After that, I'll be ready to die.“

(For the uninitiated, it is thought that Louie Armstrong's nickname, "Satchmo" is short for “Satchelmouth,” which, suggestively derogatory, actually evokes his ample cheeks and broad smile.) I think it appropriate to note here that the classic "King of the Jungle" jazz tribute by Disney in "The Jungle Book" is akin to the mixed bag of feelings we will get if we understand the significance of Louie Armstrong returning to his childhood neighborhood to become the Zulu King. Listen as an adult to the lyrics:

Oh, I'm the king of the swingers oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
and that's what's botherin' me--
I wanna be a man, mancub
and stroll right into town
and be just like the other men,
I'm a-tired of a-monkeyin' around!

These lines painfully remind of the racial epithets used to refer to blacks, to include "zoo ape," "gorilla," and "porch/ghetto monkey." Growing up in different times and places, it might be difficult to believe these words were used in this way, but a quick trip to the Racial Slur Database at www.rsdb.org may prove enlightening. Tell me you can hear your old favorite lines sung as a kid the same way in this light: "...I wanna be like you-ooh-ooh / I wanna walk like you choo / talk like you choo-choo-oo-oo / an ape like me-ee..." Like all things early Disney, this number is woven from the good, the bad, and the ugly of American culture and history, and sterilized-for-children. It draws from a set of stories not incompatible with a framework like Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The proverbial apple has fallen very near indeed, as many of the same intercultural and economic realities resident, latent, and subconscious in Kipling's portrayals of the British Empire have played out on the American continent.

While the photo above is full of unabated glee and revelry, King Louie's face suggests something else, too--a deep hurt, a sadness and a melancholy under wraps that may become ready, eventually, to burst into the streets with new rage and vengeance that would be entirely justified. Maybe it's the paint. Maybe it's the face under the paint. Whatever it is, it goes beyond the hurt of black entertainers who were often forbidden to patronize the same white clubs where they performed, and whose renowned talents were treated as "acceptions to the rule" of black inferiority. Beyond the resentment of black workers whose socioeconomic impoverishment first at the hands of slavery, then under the Jim Crow South, then in the "wage slavery" of industrial northern cities, this hurt is part hot tears of frustration, part laugh-out-loud disbelief. It is the desire to fulfill all the negative prophecies put on one man by another, in hopes that the absurdity of this act will shock the other into remorse. It is also the desire, in case this self-abasing parody of stereotypes should fail to communicate, to kick up one's heels in temporary, reckless abandon. This face seems to say, "If you're gonna put me in a box I can't crawl out of, I might as well enjoy it for a day."