Wicked Good Living : Spirits of Congo Square

Dispatches from the Crescent City: Spirits of Congo Square

After I showered I looked up “coffee” on Yelp. I found this place called Backatown Coffee Parlor. I saw photos of a crawfish quiche and the menu listing Vietnamese iced coffee, so I put on my Tuscan leather jacket and made haste. I was excited to try both.

The parlor was practically empty. A really sweet place though. Spacious and comfortable. Class decor.

I ordered my Vietnamese iced coffee and crawfish quiche. The barista asked how I liked it. I assumed he meant the coffee and had no idea, so I said down the middle. He seemed to approve.

The coffee was outstanding, even better than the French Truck Coffee. Down the middle is absolutely the way to go. The warm crawfish quiche was lovely. Of course I spilled too much Louisiana hot sauce on it and had to tilt it back and forth to redistribute the pools of hot sauce. Still, it was a terrific way to start the morning, sitting by the windows in the sunlight.

I chugged the last sip of my coffee, stepped back into the sunshine, and took a short walk northeast to Congo Square.

Congo Square sits inside what is now Louis Armstrong Park, a modern name for a place with much older roots. Long before New Orleans existed, Native peoples gathered on this sacred ground during the annual corn harvest, giving it a sense of meaning that predates the city itself. Even now, it feels different from a park.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enslaved Africans were allowed to gather here on Sundays, one of the few places in the city where they could move freely, speak openly, and hold on to pieces of cultures slavery was trying to erase. From those gatherings came the roots of Mardi Gras Indians, jazz, and the rhythms that define New Orleans, including Second Lines. Second Lines are neighborhood parades led by a brass band, where anyone can fall in behind the music and dance through the streets together.

On those Sundays drums were played here and dances took shape with rhythms carried from West Africa and the Caribbean. Songs were sung in languages that survived the crossing. This was not an attempt to forget what had been done to them. It was preservation.

Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis has said that jazz comes from “people who were denied freedom finding a way to express it anyway.” Congo Square is where that expression became something that could last. This is why it is so often called the birthplace of jazz, not because the music suddenly appeared here fully formed, but because the conditions that made it possible were protected here long enough to survive. Music did not make the suffering disappear. It gave it form. It gave it motion. It kept the pain from turning inward and destroying the people who carried it.

Historian Ned Sublette describes Congo Square as a place where culture survived by adapting. The music changed because it had to. It absorbed new sounds. It endured by becoming something else. That process did not diminish the past. It showed a path forward.

Standing here now, it is easy to miss how transformative that was. This was a city built on hierarchy, and yet this square became a space where people reclaimed a measure of ownership over their inner lives. They had almost nothing they could claim as their own. But they could create sound. They could create movement. They could create meaning. It was the beginning of something that lasted and it changed what was possible.

I keep coming back to that because transformation follows similar rules no matter the scale. Pain that is denied festers. Pain that is named and expressed changes form. What happened here was not healing as relief. It was healing as motion. As refusal. As endurance.

Jazz did not come from comfort. It rose from imposed limits, from grief, from people who were denied power but refused to surrender.

Congo Square is a reminder that history is not only decided from the top down. It is shaped by those who survive it. What happened here did not redeem the suffering. It answered it. And the answer did not come in words, but in sound, rhythm, and the resilience to keep going. That is what transformation sounds like.

After walking through Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park, I crossed North Rampart Street and stopped at the Voodoo Lounge a well-known landmark along one of New Orleans historic corridors. There were tour groups meeting there, but I mostly just chatted with the bartender. He was from Western New York and had been in New Orleans for twenty two years.

I grabbed a shrimp poboy for lunch at a local deli, and it fell apart on me in the hotel room. That was disappointing, though I guess that’s what happens when you carry it vertically with two bottles of water in a plastic bag.

After charging briefly in the hotel, I headed down to Decatur Street for the Sugar Bowl Parade. I had never been to a parade in New Orleans, but even before I got there, the New Year’s Eve energy felt different, louder and more charged, and I was ready for anything.

The parade was high energy. The people in it were having a blast, and the crowd was going wild, especially when the Ole Miss and Georgia groups marched by since they are playing in the Sugar Bowl tomorrow. My rule is that if the game is on January 1st or later and you can get a touchdown or more, you take the underdog, because big dogs eat after New Year’s Day.