Losing A Free School Legacy In Neo-Colonial Orleans

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Jose Torres Tama/ Performance Artist, still from solo show “The Cone of Uncertainty; New Orleans after Katrina” Photo by Javier de Pison, www.torrestama.com

ORIGINALLY POSTED 8/06
Introduction by M.Black, Essay by Jose Torres Tama

After a year of brazen wheelin’-n-’dealin’ by Government, Corporate and non-Profiteers, New Orleans harbors a grief that continues to compound and reverberate through the soul of this fragile metropolis. With the majority of the city’s former housing still uninhabitable, triple rents and increased utilities on what is left, and the drastic reduction or outright elimination of public services, including hospitals, schools, public housing, legal services for the poor & public transportation, New Orleans runs the risk of becoming an architectural minstral show in insult to one of the richest treasures of the United States’ own culturally complex cities.

As those of us here fight for a place once-called home and to redefine community in the shadowy abscenses of the once familiar, commonplace, and beloved, the fact is, the majority of residents simply cannot return. And in their abscences, a litany of loss continues to flood the city beneath the shiny devolopment plans of Ivy League urban planning experts and their corporate development counterparts. These losses are losses to the entire country - We are losing the opportunity to celebrate and see in our complex and conflicted pasts examples of freedom, compassion and resistence that could guide us into a future in which tolerance and courage are celebrated instead of fear, conformity and complicity with Corporate Uber-Amerikkka. Now it looks like shiny new condos are in the works on property held in trust by the Catholic Archdiocese of Louisiana for what was, until last month, home to Bishop Perry Middle School, one of the oldest schools for children of color in the entire country, founded by a free woman of color of African descent.

The following commentary is reprinted with permission by long-time resident of the New Orleans cultural resistence, the shamanistic street performer, revolutionary artist and committed educator Jose Torres Tama. Jose Torres Tama has been bringing a multi-lingual, revolutionary consciousness to the streets and arts scene of New Orleans and to stages, cultural centers and classrooms around the country and indeed the world for 20 years. I hope that he will not become another casuality of Katrina, forced to relocate by untenable housing, economic colonization of local culture, and attacks on civil liberties and Free Culture in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For more multi-lingual intersections of magic and political resistence, go to Jose’s site, www.torrestama.com -M.B.Black

IS IT CULTURAL CLEANSING, ANOTHER POST-KATRINA TRAGEDY, OR BOTH WHEN THE COUVENT SCHOOL LEGACY VANISHES? by Jose Torres-Tama

Since 1987, I have lived in the Fabourg Marigny of New Orleans, the first “suburb” that was founded by free people of color in the early 1800’s. Expanding downriver and east from the French Quarter, it has the unique historical distinction of being a neighborhood where free women of color owned property during the days of slavery, even when white women had not been accorded such privileges by their male counterparts. One of these women was Marie Couvent, a former slave from West Africa, and in 1837, her will and testament declared that her inherited lands at the corner of Dauphine Street and Touro be used to establish a free Catholic school for the “colored orphans of the Fabourg.”

In 1848, a school was finally founded at this site, and the most recent facility that was carrying out Madame Couvent’s wishes was Bishop Perry Middle School. It was offering a gratis education to some of the brightest African American boys from the Lower Ninth, Gentilly, and East New Orleans, whose parents might not have been able to afford such schooling otherwise.

But a few weeks ago on the Friday afternoon of July 21, 2006, the school closed its doors. Without anyone to protest its post-Katrina ill-fated destiny, and without any press conferences, or community gatherings to bring attention to its significance, another institution of African heritage has vanished before our weary eyes.

To offer further perspective on the profound nature of this loss, imagine having the first ever free Catholic school for the education of black children, erected during slavery when it was outlawed to educate colored people of any age in the South of these United States, become extinct without a single utterance from your mayor. For greater irony, imagine that mayor being of similar ethnicity and expected to, perhaps, be present and shed a tear or two, as the chain link fence was locked permanently and its sacred grounds never to hear the sound of students’ laughter during recess.

How can this be happening with Mr. “chocolate city” sugar Ray all awash in his re-elected skin color, who obviously used race to engage the support of African American voters? Was this just a political minstrel show? Because I am finding it difficult to laugh! Is this school not part of his “chocolate” vision? It was certainly offering bountiful opportunities to the children of his constituency. What are we to conclude when a legacy of this magnitude is eradicated on his watch while he remains silent and invisible?

The Couvent School represented a resistance to the extreme racial prejudices of pre-Civil war New Orleans back in 1848, and even now in the devastated environment of the public school system, Bishop Perry was a priceless jewel because “free” and “Catholic” are normally not associated terms.

Currently, the property is in the hands of the Catholic Archdiocese, and it is difficult to have any trust in this body. Only a few months ago their unholy and rather abhorrent decision to close St. Augustine Church, which was established in 1842 by free people of color and slaves in the historic Fabourg Treme, engaged the black community in a high profile cultural struggle. At a time, when we could all use more Christ-like compassion, the Archdiocese justified their decision to close this treasured spiritual center for financial reasons.

Apparently, Saint Augustine was not producing enough services such as communions, weddings, and funerals to satisfy the church’s coffers, yet its parishioner base had slowly been increasing after the storm. Faith in a greater spirit beyond the physical damages we have suffered is important to our hope of rising again. The community did win a reprieve, a stay of execution for the next year and half, but Saint Augustine’s reopening did not come without a substantial lengthy battle. Even Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton came to town and vocalized their support for this symbolic holy edifice.

We are left to speculate that the silence of Bishop Perry’s closing is a welcoming sound to the Archdiocese, and its desires to have the disappearance of this school go unnoticed.
In the process, we are bearing witness to a social nightmare of proportions that begin to resemble cultural cleansing, or is it just another tragedy of the “new” New Orleans after Katrina, or both?

I continue to mourn for this city as we approach the ominous anniversary of a natural disaster that has spawned an even greater man-made calamity, one that is washing away the heroic efforts of people like Marie Couvent, who envisioned a free education for children who were denied this basic right.

Jose Torres Tama & ArteFuturo Productions
www.torrestama.com
poetafuego@juno.com

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