How do you preserve a history? What spin do you put on it to make it interesting? What tone do you take; story do you tell; character do you stay true to?
We’ve been in New Orleans for over a week: we’ve read a lot, seen a lot, learned a lot, and lived a whole lot more. So, when we’re in the present, enjoying these spaces or learning these things, how do you preserve a history so that people can learn? I knew nothing about Buddy Bolden – I didn’t even know he existed or was the predecessor of Louis Armstrong before reading Coming Through Slaughter. So what I read in the book became my reality of him: the artistry of the writing, the scandal, the musicality, everything I knew about Buddy Bolden stemmed out of this piece of writing. But it turns out some of the factual things we take for granted in the book were actually disproven after its release. Though it’s by no means Ondaatje’s fault, how do you create a history out of a single photograph and no documentation?
Much like the Voodoo Museum we visited, it’s an eclectic collection of rumors, interviews, and imagination. There is so much we’ve lost to time, and there’s no way to get it back than to rewrite by imagining, almost like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments where she reconstructs personal unknown histories through known sources of life at the time.
The only surviving document of Buddy Bolden is the picture that sits in our books, we have nothing of him, not even his music because he refused to be recorded. Did he not want to be preserved? Was his art and his soul not meant to be captured through a recording device, beautiful sounds compressed, scratched into and reproduced through a crackling Victrola?
Perhaps it’s better that way, to imagine the beauty of his music than to hear it in contemporary contexts. It’s more romantic. When we packed ourselves into preservation hall, hot and sweaty and tired from the day, the music brought life back into that room and into our bodies. In such close quarters, the room buzzed with sleepy calmness and the involuntary, primal reaction to dance to the music. It was like stepping into another world again, the back and forth between the high brass and low brass, gravelly singing, and conversational tradeoffs of melodies right next to all of us. What an incomplete thing it would be to experience something like that through a video, through audio; and what a blessing to be there in person.
And what of the Money Wasters’ Parade? I tried to record moments, tried to take pictures to remember, but what a moment; what a way to go! Just swept away by the crowd, by joy and dancing and laughter, with friends all around you, strangers, people that love life. How do you preserve that, how do you live it and understand it without being there? I was so happy; I feel some kind of inexplicable joy even now, just thinking about it. How could I write into words that experience, how could you do justice to it with a recording of the band that’s almost drowned out by the excitement of the crowd?
Who knows, there’s always a possibility that a recording could capture all of that, but perhaps it’s a choice, like Bellocq scratching out the faces of some of the women he took pictures of. At the cost of alienating your audience, what risks do you take in telling a story? Is it better to have mystery, to wonder what those women looked like or why he made them unrecognizable, or to expose all, to give everything to the world and hope people can find something to take away from it?
And what of difficult histories? Histories of cruelty and abuse and enslavement; how do we preserve those histories? Visiting the Whitney Plantation was the first time I had visited a preserved historic site and felt that it was inappropriate to take pictures; there was just something that didn’t feel right to me about taking pictures of anything other than scenery. Was this history so gruesome and unjust that I felt unconscious guilt in taking pictures like I would normally do? But everyone had a visceral reaction to visiting this site, would not taking pictures harm that history more by not preserving it?
And the fact that we were all given a lanyard with a child’s name and statue but not their history, it wasn’t something that we could follow throughout the tour and learn more about. All we received was a card with a body and a quote, something to keep as a souvenir after visiting and learning about a site where people were enslaved and treated like property not so long ago. Things like this begin to show the frayed edges that academia hasn’t completely worked through to present this history to non-academics visiting the site; which leads us to the question of who is allowed to frame histories?
One of the most shocking things I found when visiting the Tennessee Williams exhibit and talking to the exhibit curator, Winston, was that in the film version of Streetcar Named Desire, the filmmakers attempted to include the sexual assault scene, even with the Hayes’ Code still in full swing at that point in time. And it was interesting to read the room as well when watching the film with everyone; there was the understanding that this was obviously a bad thing, but getting the sense that with the gratuitousness of current cinema, the broken mirror scene didn’t seem like enough. But what is enough when sexual assault takes place? Must we see it to believe it? Must we believe something through concrete, visual evidence before we begin to trust a victim?
I wonder why people involved in the film production wanted to include that scene, but then again, it’s Hollywood so I don’t wonder. But then, who do we entrust with our histories?
Perhaps not so much auteur filmmakers, but those with a passion and compassion for these stories. The historian that dedicated her work to finding the names of people enslaved on the plantation and memorializing them throughout the tour with walls of honor as constant reminders. The couple that run Faulkner House books and know the everything in the shelves like the back of their hands. Even Ondaatje, who weaves a complex narrative and sparks an effort to make Buddy Bolden become known.
It takes a special love and conscious effort to keep history alive. It takes academics, curators, historians, authors, students, readers, and so many more to keep forgotten histories relevant and accessible. It takes a fictional biography, a Preservation Hall, a second line parade, a museum tucked away in the French Quarter, a plantation converted to a museum, and a hand-curated map of pins and notes tracking down where authors of the classics spent their waking hours. It takes all these things so that we can continue to live and experience life to our fullest.