Originally appearing at: Voices of New Orleans

Palmyra Street by Jana Dennis
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN 1-933368-30-6
87 pages

Located in the Mid-City section of New Orleans, Palmyra Street is “the street known for violence.� Author Jana Dennis hoped to broaden her block’s reputation with her book and show the tradition of support and kindness that is prevalent among her neighbors. What she ended up doing was writing a deep autobiography about life with her three siblings and mother, their church and their participation in The Golden Arrows Mardi Gras Indian Tribe. Unlike the other entries in The Neighborhood Story Project, Dennis focuses on the positive aspects of living on her street, and also provides a lot of insight into the origins of the Mardi Gras spirit among African Americans.

Dennis’ mother moved to Palmyra for the most prosaic of reasons – it was closer to work and closer to schools. In her interview with her daughter, she explained her battle to keep her oldest son out of gangs; something that became particularly hard when gang members were determined to initiate him, despite his protests.

“JD: Do you worry about violence in the neighborhood?�

“Yeah, I worry about it but I mean, it’s going to happen. I’ve been to the point where I had to get out on the street to keep my son out of a gang, because they were trying to initiate him in. They used to follow him and jump on him, and he used to go all out of his way.

"I called the police two or three times and they told me unless they can catch them in the act, there was nothing they could do. He never bothered nobody and they never thought he had back-up. I had to get on the phone and call some people. I had people from that block to that block. You hate to have to do things like that. But all those guys that were trying to initiate him in those gangs, they are either dead or incarcerated. All of them.�

Joseph Dennis didn’t join a gang, and through her vigilance, his mother scored another victory for Palmyra.

In an effort to keep her children involved in something other than trouble, Dennis’ mother had them all become Mardi Gras Indians in 2001. For outsiders, this activity seems to be more about partying then anything else, but being a Mardi Gras Indian is actually very serious business. Each costume takes about a year to design and sew due to the intricacy of the beadwork. To explain just what being a Mardi Gras Indian is all about, Dennis interviewed Rob Johnson, the second chief of the Golden Arrows. The Indians tradition goes back in his family to his grandfather, who was the Big Chief of Black Eagle. Johnson explained the history of “masking Indian� in his interview:

“People ask me, ‘Why do you mask Indian?’ There is a history of why we do this. Back in slavery time, when they had the Underground Railroad and a lot of the slaves ran away – they ran on the Indian [territory]. Well, the owners know they couldn’t go [there] because there was going to be trouble. The blacks that migrated with the Indians, they learned their culture. We mask Indian to show the homage and thanks to the Indians for letting our people stay with them and migrate on their land.�

Johnson spends all year working on his suit, sewing every day when he gets home from his job as an account manager. The suit is incredibly elaborate, with uniquely designed beadwork and ostrich feathers, which cost over $180 a pound and must be special ordered from New York. Because of the investment both in time and dollars, the Indians copyright their suits and file lawsuits against people who photograph them and sell their images for profit. Dennis has a picture of Johnson in his suit in her book and he looks amazing; her interview with him is also one of the first times that I have understood just what the Indian component to Mardi Gras was all about.

Along with talking to family and friends, Dennis also interviewed several residents on the block, from the Vietnamese owner of the local grocery store, to a Puerto Rican dishwasher and handyman at a French Quarter jazz club. Palmyra Street is a very ethnically and economically mixed block, with the long-term employed and desperately unemployed living side by side. In some cases this close proximity results in interesting relationships, as when Ms. Nora, who works and goes to school, adopted the daughter of a neighbor who has 12 children and was struggling to make ends meet. The little girl’s mother, Ms. Zelda, had her first child at the age of 20 and was 32 when Dennis interviewed her. She had 12 children in 12 years and did not graduate from high school because she had to stay home and take care of her younger siblings. What Zelda shared in her interview was somehow both sad and hopeful and shed a lot of light on how critical neighborhood support can be to someone’s personal success.

“I could have been somebody, but I got these children I got to worry about now. I had my first child when I was 20 years old. My mama tried to take her from me, but when we went before the judge, the judge couldn’t find nowhere that I was an unfit parent because I gave them my last and I still give them my last. I have 12 children. I buried one [who was stillborn] and I got the rest of them. Every last one of them has a different personality and sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s easy.�

Later she explains how Keniqua went to live with her neighbor, Nora.

“We used to go to Nora’s house and sit down for a little while. She just took to [my daughter] Keniqua for some reason. That’s my baby. We call her Moan. Nora saw what I was going through and that I was trying and she came and asked me if [she could adopt Keniqua]. I took her as a Good Samaritan and said, ‘Yeah.’ I knew that somebody was doin better than me.�

I can’t imagine how someone like Nora would have gotten out ahead of Katrina, and what’s so frustrating for the reader in Palmyra Street is that we will never find out what happened to her. I’m not going to know if she got all of her children back from her husband, if she found another job after being laid off from the Convention Center, or if she came up with a plan to “be somebody.� Her story is a heartbreaker, and reading it goes a long way towards explaining just how life can overwhelm someone when they are still young and make it unbearably hard for succeeding generations to find a way out of poverty.
Zelda’s story, and how it involves her neighbor Nora, is one of the most achingly transparent American stories I have come across in the Project books. It’s about how we help each other when we are falling; how we find ways to be the safety net that all too often is absent from the world we are living in now. It’s also another example of why these books are so important.

In a lot of ways, Jana Dennis humanizes her neighborhood in ways that the other books were not able to do. She spent time asking her neighbors about New Orleans and how they came to the city and also what they hoped for the future. It is clear that she knew these people and liked them and also liked Palmyra, even with the threats posed by the boys hanging out on the corner of Palmyra and Rendon. At one point as she walks by them and they heckle her, the police pull up. “The police,� she notes, “don’t scare them. They are hard. They stand like stones.�

Those boys do not represent the life on Palmyra Street that she wants to be part of, however, and so Jana Dennis walks away; just as her mother has taught all of her children to do, she sees trouble and walks away.