*Spoilers Ahead*

Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still livin
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it – it’s all mathematics

—”Mathematics,” Mos Def, Black on Both Sides

STATE VIOLENCE

Near the beginning of the episode, Davis is in lock up after being harassed by the National Guard. Still, he yelled “Go the fuck back to Fallujah!” and got put in lock up as Toni tries to calm him down. Her grim reminder that the police and the guard are on edge serves as foreshadowing for later events – it is worthwhile to note that Davis is still more or less in one piece after the altercation.

Later on, Antoine is not so fortunate. After singing on the street with Annie and Sonny after his gig at the strip club, he drunkenly stumbles into a police car. The police react swiftly and brutally, kicking Antoine’s horn and punching him in the face. Horrified, Annie and Sonny look on, but cannot protest much for fear of retribution. The SMO squad is especially effective in this portrayal: at this point in the series, a police car in the background of a shot provides a sense of fear and foreboding. None of the characters as of yet have had a positive interaction with the police, which mimics the dynamics in a lot of communities of color – instead of a welcome sight, police presence means something horrible is about to happen -not crime prevention.

The concept of state violence extends further throughout the episode – Ladonna’s struggle to locate her brother within the criminal justice system, and being stymied at every turn also demonstrates the pernicious nature of state control over incarcerated citizens. Law enforcement appears to be unconcerned with who they have in custody and why – only that a prisoner is accounted for.

It’s understood that the police are under pressure – but what about the other citizens?

ECONOMIC VIOLENCE

Lorenzo: “I hear they got plans for the lower nine. They gonna bulldoze all of it, give the land to developers.”
Albert: “That’s why you need to come back – they can’t bulldoze nothing if the homeowners don’t allow it.”
Lorenzo: “Who gonna stop ‘em?”
Albert: “…Those motherfuckers think people won’t fight. Most won’t. But some will.”

The Times Picayune sheds some light on the entire scene that played out with Lorenzo and Albert’s search:

Albert and Lorenzo go in search of Albert’s Wild Man in the Lower 9th Ward, where floodwaters knocked many homes off their foundations. The devastation made the Lower 9th Ward officially closed to habitation until January 2006. Homeowners were allowed daylight “look and leave” visits until that time. The horrific phenomenon of residents finding dead loved ones upon returning to their homes was not uncommon, even in homes that had presumably been searched.
It was a widely held belief that the most floodwater-damaged portion of the Lower 9th Ward would be sold to developers. A frequent suspect in the stories was Donald Trump, supposedly eying the Industrial Canal-adjacent neighborhood for a luxury golf resort. One of the benefits of Brad Pitt’s Make it Right project in the neighborhood was its demonstration that homes would be rebuilt in the neighborhood, not tees and greens for Trump resort patrons.

The house Albert and Lorenzo visit is marked with a spray-painted X. The markings in the four quadrants designate (on top) the search squad that visited the site, (left side) the date of the visit, (right side) notations for hazards such as gas and water leaks, downed wires or dead animals. The bottom quadrant, in this case inaccurately marked with a 0, denotes bodies found at the site. The markings were made on all homes in the flood zone, and are still visible on many homes today.

As Colorlines has discussed before, there are massive race and class issues with the New Orleans citizens who want to return home. Tram Nguyen has been covering the situation, and explained in 2009:

Four years after Katrina, the city of New Orleans can still break your heart. Not with the raw suffering of the hurricane and its aftermath, but with the stark exposure of an economic apartheid that keeps poor people of color locked out of the city’s political process, as well as its prospects for restored housing and renewed economic growth.

By some accounts, New Orleans’s recovery has made progress. The city’s population level reached 73.7 percent of its pre-Katrina number by the end of 2008, according to the January 2009 New Orleans Index released by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. (Updated figures will be available in August.) Because the region had already been literally “under water,” New Orleans pretty much bypassed the foreclosure crisis that is engulfing many parts of the country. And compared to the national unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent in March, New Orleans unemployment has hovered at about 5 percent since November 2008.

But this more prosperous picture may be the result of cropping out many of the city’s poor former residents—most of whom are Black—who have been blocked from returning.

And in Nguyen’s follow up article from this month, things are no better:

The city’s housing crisis also reflects the disastrous impact of public housing demolitions and redevelopment policies. In New Orleans, many former public housing residents say that on top of losing their homes, they were shut out of participating in the redevelopment process. For many, it was clear that there was just too much money at stake to let the residents get in the way. In the wake of Katrina, Louisiana became a bonanza of federal subsidies for firms ready to take advantage of the opportunity to rebuild. The developers, as a former staffer for one private company put it, stood to “make money hand over fist” through a number of unusually generous bond deals.

That all the homes in the Big Four are gone is a stark reality in New Orleans. So now, after decades of government policies that put housing needs into the hands of private developers, local activists are looking beyond simply fighting for better and more affordable housing. They are joining with housing advocates throughout the nation to emerge from the national crisis with nothing less than the assertion of housing as a human right.

Alongside the commentary on destruction and displacement, episode three provides a glimpse at the tensions surrounding gentrification and displacement. An altercation begins between Davis and his two gay neighbors, with Davis asserting that they were soulless gentrifiers taking over the city.

However, the conversation doesn’t play to type – while Davis’ neighbors talks about what they are doing as historical preservation and not gentrification, the scene illuminates some of the more complicated dynamics at play in some of NOLA. Davis’ neighbor is well aware of the history and legacy of Treme, saying defiantly: “I’m from Uptown, Mr. Mackery is from mid-City – we’re as New Orleans as you.”

And, playing into the earlier theme of state sanctioned violence, the neighbors react with horror when Davis accuses them of calling the police on the second line celebrations “We have never once called the cops!” he replies indignantly, again showing an insider, us-against-them outlook that Davis actively tries to deny.

However, it is the final scene that is the most heartbreaking. Albert and the other Mardi Gras Indians gather together to both mourn the passing of their Wild Man and to recommit to their community, singing a song called “Indian Red” with the lyrics “won’t bow/don’t know how.” The chant almost becomes a metaphysical experience, uniting those assembled in the bleak environment and transporting them to another place. It is at that moment a Katrina tour bus full of tourists snapping photos of the destruction pulls up, shattering the reverie and exposing how many of these tours exploit the suffering of those still in NOLA in order to bank a profit. While the driver decides to decently leave the scene at Alberts urging, the mystified looks of the Mardi Gras Indian crew as the bus rolls off down the road is a haunting ending to a gripping episode.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

This week’s “Treme Explained” column shed some more insight into link between gang affiliations and the Mardi Gras Indians:

In an essay about Mardi Gras Indian history and traditions, including the role-call roll of the anthem “Indian Red,” historian Kalamu Ya Salaam quotes Allison “Tootie” Montana on the hierarchy of various Indian gang officers and their functions on the street.

“Your Spy Boy is way out front, three blocks in front the chief,” Montana said. “The Flag Boy is one block in front so he can see the Spy Boy up ahead and he can wave his flag to let the chief know what is going on. … The Wild Man wearing the horns in there to keep the crowd open and to keep it clear. He’s between the Flag Boy and the Chief.”

The hierarchy of Indian gangs and various members’ roles is further explained in this David Kunian essay, for which he visited a practice session presided over by Monk Boudreaux, Big Chief of the Golden Eagles.

The off-handed comment made by Delmond about New Orleans wearing musicians down is most evident in Antoine and Sonny’s respective trajectories. Antoine is losing himself in various carnal pleasures trying to escape his life – women, weed, alcohol. This episode put this in stark focus where things did not pan out for him – after Antonie gets left in NOLA while other band members headed up to New York, his ill-fated late night song session illuminates how many of his dreams are broken. Sonny suffers from a similar affliction, drowning his insecurity in drink, drugs (at least when they are available) and sarcasm. While it is still unclear how much of his time on the boat is true, he clearly longs for a different type of reality – and watching Annie receive more acclaim for her awesome fiddle skills drives him deeper and deeper into despondency.

Ladonna’s venting about “that 7th ward creole shit” and her treatment by her husband’s family deserves its own post. “People like us, my mother, me, my brother? We just folks from around the way. We get shit done to us.” Stay tuned, I need to do a bit more research.

Albert gets more and more interesting as this show goes on. “Put your pants on – get your girl and go!” I think he is the character I am most curious about.

Creighton and his daughter discovering YouTube is hopefully a continuing plot point.

Some background:  for most of my adult life, I have been a fugitive from religion, the monotheistic “Big Three”, anyway. (Sorry, any faith doctrine that includes an interventionist, anthropomorphic, masculine god/godhead is prolly gonna earn some side-eye from me.)  Because my sociopolitical views and general life philosophy are widely regarded as “radical,” the decision to not participate in often conservative organized religion was a sensible and organic one.  The Bébé Fiqah trauma that led to my adult decision to be an unrepentant heathen/sinner/whateverthehell is all a very loooooong story that nobody wants to hear, so I’ll sum up by saying that until recently outside of weddings, baptisms, mitzvahs, and funerals, Grown-Up Fiqah rarely darkened the doorstep of any house of worship.

However, when one of my elderly neighbors, a  very dapper Georgia born-and-bred gentleman, invited me to come to his Southern Baptist church here in Harlem last fall, I accepted.  I was going through a particularly difficult time emotionally, and while the choir was sorta weak (sorry, I’m Southern, and we have standards for this kinda thing), I found the service overall to be very spiritually uplifting and healing. I was delighted by the sermon, as well as the inclusive spirit of the congregation. (”All are welcome”  is the credo of just about every Southern Baptist church, but in many places, certain”children of God” - non-Christians, LGBTIQ people - are most emphatically NOT welcomed.)  I decided that maybe dropping in to Church every now and again wouldn’t be so terrible.

This morning, I attended services at another Southern Baptist church here in Harlem with my buddy J. who never misses a Sunday.  In spite of the late summer swelter, I happily donned my Sunday best, pearls and good heels and headed  on over to Church.  In retrospect, I should have said some kinda prayer asking for patience and composure before I stepped out of the door. Because what awaited me at church would have tested even the most forgiving soul.

You see, J. and I were seated in one of the balcony pews, along with several Italian tourists. European and Asian tour groups and buses are a common sight on Sundays in Harlem.  As annoying and ubiquitous as they are, for the most part, church tourists are ignorable.  Well, this group must have been especially rude, because several members of the group spent much of the service talking. Talking. In spite of being shot admonishing looks by several parishioners and being approached by one of the ushers, the conversation, though lowered to murmuring, continued.  The only time it seemed to stop was when the choir led the church in a song, when the tourists watched the choir and the other attendees with that peculiar mixture of fascination, fear and envy that White people in spaces of color often seem to have. As they watched us, my friend and I watched them, swaying all wrong, clapping off beat and basically turning what was a joyful but sacred experience into a spectacle for their entertainment.

I did my very best to remain silent and non-responsive. And I was good. I really was.

Until devotional.

I had just bowed my head, closed my eyes, and was just about to connect one-on-One with the Lord…when the cell phone of the woman sitting behind me went off.

And she answered.

“Oh, I don’t even believe THIS shit!” I said. J.’s eyes flew open, and she covered her startled gasp with her hand.

“Fiqah. I know…but….God,” she whispered anxiously, waving her hand at the ceiling to indicate God’s presence. An elderly woman sitting right in front of me had turned around to glare at me for cussin’ in the Lord’s house. My friend’s a long-time member of her church, so embarrassing her (and myself) further was not an option, but I was pissed.

“Unless that is God on the line she needs an ass-whooping. Jesus be an electrified fence,” I grumbled, frowning and closing my eyes as J. stifled her laughter.

Later at brunch, we talked about what had gone down. Both of us had attended church in Harlem, so we both knew that the tour groups were common. It wasn’t the first time we noticed tourists – whose presence alone is disruptive – acting out in Church.  We had both also noticed that the groups seemed to be getting larger, testimony to the appeal of these tours for Asian and European tourists as well as to the drawing power of good gospel music.  J. feels ambivalent about the gospel tours because as annoying as they are, no tour group member ever neglects the collection plate.  My own feelings about them were firmly in the negative category. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I have such a visceral dislike of these gospel tours until today, when I decided to gather some information about them so that I could better understand their appeal. Here, an excerpt from an account by a  White tourist from London**  who went to a Harlem church specifically for the music:

I meet Tim Rawlins at the Memorial Baptist church choir practise. He’s rare proof of the fact that white men can sing gospel. He says I’ve got to surrender to the music – feel it – and forget I’m English.

That statement, which positively reeks of cultural fetishizing, gave me a headache. Forget you’re “English” (read: White and proper) and “surrender” (is it attacking you?) to the wild, untamed Black Black Blackity Blackness of the music. Hallelujah, let the Othering begin.

Tim: “What I like about gospel music, is that it breaks from that old European tradition which separates intellect and reason from feeling and really in Gospel music you feel with great thought and you think with great feeling…”

Ummmm…as much as I love traditional gospel music, it has never teased an elliptical statement outta me, so I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.  Luckily, the author knew just what to infer from it.

That probably means loosening up physically too. When the elderly women start to practice I find myself entranced watching the soloist, Lonnie Gray. She’s 77 years old but she’s out there, her face enraptured, her hips swaying, moving with the rhythm – feeling it.

At this point, I’d had quite enough, so I ventured off to other parts of the interwebs to sift around for tour information and possible articles. I discovered that this issue was one that Black churches in Harlem had been facing for almost two decades. The tours,  while often disruptive, are revenue generators, with prices ranging from $45-$99 dollars per person, and many including an “authentic” (sigh) soul food brunch. It’s for this reason that the general consensus amongst many of Harlem’s  Black church clergy seems to be that the gospel tours are a necessary evil. 

Church attendance has dropped significantly across all denominations in the past half century in the United States. Churches are financially reliant upon the generosity of their donor base, which has historically been their congregation.  As tax-exempt entities, religious organizations are able to (presumably) expend their funds on capital expenses, such as building renovations.   This piece from 1996 gives an excellent overview of the tension.  Meanwhile, this quote from it sums up just about everything that I find objectionable about these tours:

“It’s something exotic,” says Nelson Motta, a Brazilian journalist who promotes visits to Mount Moriah in his native country. “Seeing the black people in the church, the feeling is warm.”

In other words, it’s Church Time at the Apollo. Good grief. I repeat: Jesus, be a fence.

Churches have been recognized for centuries as both places of worship and sanctuary in countries with substantial Christian populations. This was also true of Black churches in the U.S.  The roots of Black Southern Baptist churches in the United States can be traced all the way back to the earliest days of the slave era. The first Black churches were organized by free blacks in the North and Southeastern United States.  Gospel music’s call-and-response style, which is common in many different styles of music throughout the African diaspora, was often employed openly during worship and clandestinely by slaves as resistance. 

Organizers of slave rebellions and escapes often sang  gospel “work” songs in the field with double entendre lyrics in earshot of slave masters and overseers, whose presence was constant. (Following Nat Turner’s Rebellion the state of Virginia passed a law that required that a White minister be present at Black congregations.) The gospel work songs often included instructions, directions, and even times of day.  The genius employed in this “hiding in plain sight” method was more often than not missed by slave owners, most of whom did not consider the intellect of the Negro to be sophisticated enough to grasp anything beyond the most basic concepts. (As Dave Chappelle once famously stated in one of his early comic specials: “It doesn’t happen often, but when racism works in black people’s favor . . . it’s fucking sweet.”)

Following slavery’s abolishment, the Black church remained a vital part of the social fabric of African-American communities.  In addition to worship and religious ceremonies, church “socials”, dances, bake sales and other  informal gatherings were common in the American South during the Jim Crow era. The connections between Black-led civil rights movements and the organizations that grew from them and Black churches is well-established.  Civil Rights era protesters often sang gospel songs during rallies and marches, and rallies, marches and sit-ins were frequently planned in churches on non-worship days.

Outside of the South, many congregations remained largely divided along racial lines.  White members of Protestant churches often expressed concern over what they viewed as improper exuberance found in Black churches.  The notion that the style of worship found in Black American churches was somehow vulgar and inauthentic persisted long after the abolishment of slavery, and was far from confined to any denomination. Mahalia Jackson, arguably one of the best gospel singers ever recorded, was regarded by many of her upper and upper-middle class Black contemporaries as an embarrassment. (Yes. Mahalia. Jackson. I know…)

“Negro spirituals” were rarely included in hymn books outside of Black churches, and have only recently been recognized as acceptable expressions of faith through song by many denominations. In spite of the rich faith diversity within Black Chrisitan communities, Black worship and Black gospel were widely regarded as odd at best and sacrilegeous at worst. The fact that the only exclusively American musical forms – blues, jazz and rock-and-roll – emerged from traditional Black gospel music has lent it a sort of global validity. (Although I will note here that even the  stunning Gospel at Colonus, a gospel play based on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus that was considered for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, opened to an initially chilly reception a mere twenty years ago on Broadway.) The beauty and singularity of gospel music is openly praised by the contemporary mainstream. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who’s asking) this acceptance has meant an increasingly secular appreciation (or appropriation…once again, depends on who’s asking) of traditional gospel music.  It has also helped transform places of worship into stages, where both resident gospel choirs and congregation members are put on display for  (oft-times) White tourists:

“This is not a buck-and-dance show,”says the Rev. Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of Harlem’s most politically powerful ministers [whose]  church has resorted to passing out a flier to visitors, explaining how to behave during the service. Congregants complain that tourists annoyingly turn their cameras on the devout at prayer and snap away whenever a shout arises from the church’s “Amen” comer.

This manner of blatant disregard of church protocol and behavior evidences a lack of respect for the sacredness of the proceedings.  The offense here is multi-layered:  a.) the proceedings are not taken seriously, b.) the participants are regarded as exotic curiousities and c.) there is an underlying assumption that the presence of (often) White European tourists is “welcome.”  The unexamined sense of entitlement that accompanies the idea of White people being welcome in any space is the factor that makes these tours possible. (I’m fully convinced that if 100 casually-dressed and snap-happy Black Americans rolled up into a Lutheran church on a Sunday in Haarlem,  the ensuing outrage at their gall would cause an international incident…but I digress.)

Tourist groups in Black churches violate both outer (the church) and inner (the congregation members) spiritual space.  The concept of the church as a sanctuary, as a sweet, soul-sustaining  and necessary respite from earthly troubles and oppression, is blown to smithereens by the transgressive presence of these tourists, no matter how benignly they view themselves.  Never mind messy polemical discussions, ”Jesus and the money changers” versus “The Church is a business”   blah blah BLAHHH.  If the devout are prevented from fully connecting with the divine by disruptive interlopers,  then the spiritual imperatives must trump the financial ones.

*“Soul voyeurism” is a term I derived from the Newsweek article entitled “Soul Voyeurs Invade The House of God” by Gregory Beals and Kenneth L. Woodward.

** The author of this account first attended a Black Baptist church in Harlem as a “drop-in” – not a regular attendee – and then was invited to attend a choir rehearsal. Attending a rehearsal to enjoy the music, IMO, is fine. The tone of the piece is troubling nonetheless.