SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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New Orleans, 1910 Although every city contains its contradictions, as Louis Eric Elie notes in her 2013 book Unfathomable City, New Orleans is “in many ways a segregated city, its populations form blurry, complex checkerboards, whose inhabitants also intermarry, mingle in various ways, and don’t lend themselves readily to being mapped.”7 The city’s improvisational style has influenced every aspect of its life. To historian Lawrence Powell, for whom New Orleans is the Accidental City, the distinctive local cuisine contains the essential elements that have made New Orleans its own place. “The kitchens may have been French,” Powell writes, “but the cooks were slaves, tossing in the same kettle culinary
ingredients plucked from three continents. They received direction from the mistress of the house, but they were the ones who occupied the nexus between town and country. Not only did they cook the food but they purchased the groceries from petty tradesmen and footloose trappers, themselves slaves; and in the process, they skimmed off something extra— “lagniappe,” as later generations would describe it — in the form of income and victuals. . . . In other words, African slaves not only stirred the pot; they filled it too.”8 What was true in the pots and pans that hung over the stoves of this swamp metropolis proved equally true when New Orleanians put down their spoons and knives and picked up musical instruments,
The band, Jumbo Shrimp Jazz performing at the Spotted Cat in New Orleans. Photo: T. Tseng. March 2014. Flickr.com. CC license 2.0.
