- Photo by Jerry Moran
You Can Never Go Home Anymore
More than four years after the federal flood, Cyril Neville still can’t shake the nightmares. The ordinary ones are bad enough—images of his home and neighborhood before Katrina, happy memories lost over and over again in the recurrent dreams. But it’s the other nightmares that really give him the creeps, images not reflecting his own experience but based on stories others have told him about being trapped in New Orleans for a week, then herded like animals and sent to faraway destinations.
“I have nightmares about shit that people told me about,” he says. “We had a couple of young brothers that got trapped in New Orleans and they had to swim, walk, wade through all of this foul water, pushing dead bodies out of the way, all the way to the Superdome. They told me harrowing stories about the three nights that they stayed in the Superdome and the night they decided to break out because they’d rather take their chances out on the street than stay another night in the dome.
“Then they put a gun in your face and told you to put your ass on that bus. That ain’t no rescue. That’s an armed roundup. Basically, the scattering of the people of New Orleans after Katrina was the cleanup of a crime scene, getting rid of all the witnesses. They scattered people from New Orleans to 49 states. I ain’t heard no stories about people being moved to Hawaii. But I did hear about brothers getting forced to get on a bus, then got off a plane in Alaska wearing nothing but shorts, tank top and flip-flops with a plastic bag containing all of their possessions. We played in Oklahoma not that long ago. I didn’t know they had that many black people in Oklahoma. Everywhere we go, we can identify the enclaves of people exiled from New Orleans at our shows, standing on their chairs, waving their handkerchiefs at us. It brings tears to your eyes, even though they’re out there dancing. This is the only taste of New Orleans they can get.”
Neville, who will play Voodoo in a “Swampland Jam” along with his partners from the Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars, Tab Benoit, Monk Boudreaux, Johnny Sansone and Waylon Thibodeaux, is among the tens of thousands of New Orleans residents who were displaced by the flood and have been unable to make it back. Neville had some harsh words for the way people were treated after Hurricane Katrina. His charge that New Orleans was trying to systematically eliminate its black population (as well as his praise for how well he was accepted when he landed in Austin, Texas) led to some bad feelings back in New Orleans. Neville was shocked at the reaction to his charges because he’d been saying most of the same things before the flood. The difference was that nobody paid attention to him back then, but once the city was depopulated, Neville’s words were amplified by the national media.
Ironically, Neville’s career has blossomed in Austin as he’s worked to rally other displaced New Orleanians to keep their culture alive. He has been a charismatic front man in a variety of New Orleans all-star projects and supplements his Neville Brothers work with his own band, Tribe 13. His recently released Brand New Blues documents contemporary blues themes from post-Katrina stress to people losing their retirement savings.
Everywhere he goes around the country with the Neville Brothers, Cyril runs into pockets of New Orleans natives who have about as much chance of returning to the communities they one lived in as their ancestors who were brought to America as slaves did.
“I didn’t just wake up one morning and say I’m moving to Austin,” says Neville. “I got there the same way a lot of other people wound up in places that they never thought they would be in. It just so happened. I landed somewhere with people like Marcia Ball and Eddie Wilson from Threadgill’s and Papa Mali, people who reached out and helped.”
Neville is trying to maintain his identity as a New Orleans native in a new environment. Generations of intricate family ties are gone forever. Neville knows he’s not alone in this new diaspora—it’s a theme running through Brand New Blues.
“This is an ongoing agony for a lot of us,” he says. “In Austin, me and Big Chief Kevin Goodman have put together something called Project Chumbo. It’s what happens after the gumbo spills into the chili. It’s what happens when Austin musicians and New Orleans musicians start playing together. Now there’s a brass band called Austin Nights that didn’t exist before we got there. My band, Tribe 13, is made up of a combination of musicians from New Orleans and cats from Austin. Project Chumbo is an outgrowth of the culture that we brought to Austin and the thing that continues to develop between people from Austin and people from New Orleans. We even got people trying to figure out how to make chumbo. You’ve got to be able to taste both things. Some people you could never get to eat that.”
Neville envisions Project Chumbo as a way to transport New Orleans culture to new environments. “We’ve got a social aid and pleasure club in Austin and we’re going to have second lines. We’ve already had a couple of Mardi Gras there,” he says. “One in particular I’ll never forget. We were sitting outside playing drums and the cats were dancing and these Mexican brothers passed, two carloads of them. About 20 minutes later, those same two cars came back and the brothers got out of the car with their instruments and we jammed. It was a beautiful thing.”
Neville kept running into people who had been trapped in the Convention Center or the Superdome and found themselves now living in Texas. He organized a concert for them.
“Even though I wasn’t trapped in the dome or the Convention Center, I felt the collective feeling of all of those people who had been in there who realized, ‘We have really been screwed over.’ That’s where I hooked up with Big Chief Kevin from the Flaming Arrows; he wound up coming up onstage and we played New Orleans music to a New Orleans crowd and I saw people in there in wheelchairs spinning around on the floor, happy for that moment to be back in New Orleans. Kevin wrote this song, ‘Boy We Come Out That Water.’ Like most Mardi Gras Indian songs, it’s about something that actually happened. He put a Mardi Gras Indian groove to a story about the agony that these people went through.”
Neville grew up during the 1960s when the civil rights and antiwar movements were intertwined and skepticism about the country’s political leadership was rampant. Groups ranging from Students for a Democratic Society to the Black Panthers offered alternatives to the traditional pathways of social organization, and Neville was clearly influenced by the times. The youngest member of the Neville Brothers wrote a number of politically-charged songs for the band—some of which were used, some of which weren’t—and his work always reflects his concerns about the way the poorest and most helpless people in New Orleans were treated. His thoughts in the wake of the flood are consistent with the message he’s been preaching his whole career. In fact, Neville had been arguing that the tradition-bearing conduits for African-American culture were in jeopardy years before the storm.
Neville has become a lightning rod for criticism from some who believe that his time away from the city has exacerbated his apocalyptic visions, and others who don’t want any negative information about New Orleans to find its way to potential tourists. Many well-meaning civic boosters argue that the city’s cultural traditions are no longer in danger of disappearing, an observation that is underscored by the city’s highest profile cultural organization, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The festival claimed that its 2009 programming featured more Mardi Gras Indians and brass bands than ever before, but Sweet Home New Orleans notes that many Indians have to commute from other cities to participate in the masking rituals, and those that are here live, on average, below the poverty line.
Whether you believe he’s right or wrong, or maybe even a little of both, Neville’s argument carries irrefutable anecdotal weight when you look at the still devastated blocks all over the city and wonder where the recovery went off the rails. Despite pockets of development in the Upper Ninth Ward (the Musician’s Village), the Lower Ninth (Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation) and Gentilly (Barnes and Noble founder Lennie Riggio’s Project Home Again), many of the city’s legendary African American communities are nothing like what they were before the flood. Neville is trying to rebuild his home in Gentilly but has been frustrated by what he calls “The Roadblock to Recovery” program.
“My neighborhood, Gentilly, it looks basically the same, some people have tried to come back and fix their houses,” Neville says. “But it’s not a neighborhood any more, and it probably never will be again. Somebody might live there, but what was there is gone. You can go into several different parts of the city and get that same feeling. In some places where I used to go visit people, now it’s just flat ground. Not just the Lower Ninth. I had friends in the Lafitte Project, in the St. Bernard Project, in the Magnolia Project. I was born and raised in the Calliope Project. A lot of it really could have been fixed.”
Neville frequently returns to New Orleans and visits his friend James Andrews. On a recent trip they visited Kermit Ruffins’ place, Sidney’s, in the Seventh Ward then took a walk through Treme.
“It was good to see that Kermit had something going in what was left of that neighborhood,” says Neville. “Then we took a walk to the Candlelight, and we walked the same route that we used to walk but it was all dark, all the places that used to be there are gone. It wasn’t just an idle stroll. We got to the Candlelight and the Treme Brass Band was playing. James told me, ‘This is what’s left of what we used to call Treme.’ It ain’t enough that it’s four years after the storm and a lot of people I knew and places I knew I’ll never see again. To know that one of the most beloved areas of the city, where I got a lot of who I am from—once that last place goes, that whole area of the city is lost forever, like Rampart Street, like a whole lot of other things that make up the culture of New Orleans that people come from all over the world to see.”
Cyril Neville knows he can never return to the New Orleans he knew and loved, but really, neither can anyone who lived here before the storm. And like any city, it was changing before Katrina, losing people and places that were once essential parts of the culture. That’s not going to stop Neville from talking about what we’re in danger of losing, though, and he’s likely to keep finding opposing points of view. But if he can no longer live here, Neville is certain that his New Orleans will always live in him.
“It’s beautiful to be from New Orleans,” he says. “Nothing like it on the planet. And whatever people say I say or don’t say, they can’t take that from me. I’m part of New Orleans history. I’m part of New Orleans culture. They can’t take that from me.”
