Viewing Los Angeles Through a Creole Lens
The Migration of the black Creole to California from Louisiana
January 21, 2016
By Farai Chedya
The New York Times
The pulse of the train on the tracks sets a rhythm as its passenger cars seem to skim over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. These six miles of nothing but sky above and water below are the gateway into the city by rail. Next come the cemeteries at the edge of New Orleans, and all of a sudden, a day and a half of travel ends at the Amtrak terminal in the business district.
I had just completed the first leg of my cross-country journey by sleeper train, starting in New York, and was beginning the second: a foray into the cultural ties between the Crescent City and California.
This trip had been inspired partly by the travel writer and blogger Greg Gross, who grew up in New Orleans and California. “I had a great-uncle who ran away at 15 to become a Pullman porter,” he said. These black men served a predominately white customer base as sleeping-car porters, often simply called “George” by their customers.
Their union became a powerful force during the civil rights movement. Mr. Gross’s great-uncle Ellis Pearson worked on the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles.
He was something like an usher for Mr. Gross’s family, which is full of cross-country transplants, including his parents and a deceased uncle who played jazz trumpet. When black New Orleans families like his moved to California, “They brought their food with them, their music,” he said. “They brought an energy, an attitude with them. ‘We survived there; we can make it here.’ They brought it to their churches and their neighbors.” It’s a refrain I hear many times as I speak to members of this diaspora.
The Grosses weren’t the only ones. The migration of black and Creole families moving to California from Louisiana began as a trickle in 1927, in the wake of that year’s great flood, and grew to a mass migration from the 1930s to 1960, years that encompassed the Depression, World War II and the growth of employment opportunities for blacks, and Jim Crow. While many families went from the South to the North, the train lines led many in New Orleans to the West instead. The better part of a century after its start, some migrants resettled in California after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to follow the path that others had, to trace a thread of our cultural lineage, however faint. I wanted to see both cities through a black Bayou and Creole lens, to see if they’d drifted apart or were overlapping, remixing culture in the same way that Creoles originally had.
I would start my trip in New Orleans, among some of the families who made the westward migration. Kalaamu ya Salaam, an activist and writer, whose aunt moved to Los Angeles from the Lower Ninth Ward when he was young, took me to the artfully decorated Cafe Rose Nicaud on hip Frenchmen Street, filled with daytime revelers.
“Parts of this area remind me of SoHo,” he said. “You could be in Manhattan. That is what New Orleans has become.”
In the post-Katrina, post-recession era, a new New Orleans is experiencing a construction and real estate investment boom that has left out many locals, though it has plenty of charm. The night before my meeting with Mr. Salaam, I’d gone to the Frenchmen Art Market just down the street — an open-air bazaar strung with lights and filled with artisan wares, with music wafting through the warm air from street performers and nearby clubs. But like many thriving places, it seems geared more to new residents than to longtime locals.
To balance my picture of New Orleans, Mr. Salaam pointed me to a different kind of landmark nearby: the Tomb of the Unknown Slave at St. Augustine Catholic Church. “Enslaved Africans and free people of color, they paid for it and built it,” he said. “By the church there’s a cross made of chains, which marks the grave of the unknown enslaved person.” The sculpture of a cross made of marine chains is at a diagonal, like a man who’s propped himself up powerfully on one arm and refuses to fall.
The segregation that was a vestige of slavery caused many to leave. But why Los Angeles? “There ain’t nothing worth stopping for between New Orleans and Los Angeles,” Mr. Salaam said, half-joking.
I kept it in mind as I undertook the journey, as part of the Amtrak Residency for Writers. I would have a sleeper cabin or roomette of my own on the 48-hour trip.
The journey was a scenic one: The greens and browns of the bayou were gradually supplanted by the ocher of the Southwest. The Sunset Limited, unhampered by Eastern train tunnels, was a double-decker with a glass-walled viewing coach, perfect for watching the miles go by and meeting a mix of families, solo adventurers and train enthusiasts on the journey.
One night, I pulled into San Antonio late and stopped by the landmark restaurant Mi Tierra; then, on a whim, I paid my knowledgeable cabdriver to give me a tour of his city. He took me through the historic neighborhoods, with their grand Victorian and Italianate homes, and he taught me about the evolution of the city. What those homes could not reveal was that San Antonio, and other cities in Texas, had the same racial caste system many in New Orleans were fleeing. They kept their eyes fixed on Los Angeles, and black Texans joined the surge heading West.
Once in Los Angeles, I headed to the venerable Creole restaurant Harold and Belle’s on Jefferson Boulevard to meet up with Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor, writer and producer, and the actor and musician Mark Broyard. The dining room — scheduled to reopen next month after a renovation — was filled with locals wearing fleur-de-lis T-shirts or other symbols of their fealty to Louisiana. Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith have known each other since childhood, and collaborated on a play called “Inside the Creole Mafia,” staged several times over the course of two decades. I got a taste of their razor-sharp banter over my gumbo.
Mr. Broyard explained how his family left Louisiana during the Jim Crow years because, “as my mother said many times,” he said, “she was not going to fight the civil rights movement with her children. We, the Creole kids, the light-skinned kids, we had been integrating schools for a lot longer because we weren’t dark. So we had been in and out of all these white institutions for years, with a tacit understanding that these people were colored, but it was O.K. that they were here because maybe they had half of one drop or something.”
Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith come from families who settled in Los Angeles during the 1950s, and soon found that aspects of Jim Crow had followed them. “L.A., although it’s the West, has been one of the most segregated cities in America,” Mr. Smith said. “There were restrictive covenants, and our parents integrated previously all-white neighborhoods.”
There were an estimated 212,000 black Angelenos in 1950, with 18 percent from Louisiana, according to Prof. Faustina DuCros of San José State University, who conducted oral histories with Creole families.
“These people came and brought their culture completely intact,” Mr. Broyard said at the restaurant. “They had Big Loaf Bakery; they had the Louisiana Seafood Market.
There was Pete’s Hot Sausage on the corner, here, and Aubrey’s barber shop. There was Ashton Shatto” (pronounced chateau). “That’s how they spelled it. Everyone had their wedding receptions there, their after-funeral receptions there. My dad was a contractor. Everybody went to Roger’s mother, who was a dentist and shared an office with my uncle, who was a physician.”
Not all of these places are in the past. Pete’s Hot Sausage still exists as a butcher shop and a brand that sells its sausage to supermarkets and restaurants. Shatto Banquet Hall is a low-slung building that hosts celebrations for any occasion.
These days, in addition to cuisine, Louisiana culture continues to influence California’s with the rising popularity of zydeco dancing. “It started with the church `la-las’ ” Professor DuCros said, using a Creole term for a house or church dance. “Now, it’s a more popular dance scene, and not everyone is from Louisiana.”
There are the festivals, including an annual Mardi Gras celebration at the Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles, near the Grove shopping complex. In May, there is a Cajun and Creole Zydeco festival in Simi Valley. And in June, there’s the Long Beach Bayou and Blues Festival. The restaurant La Louisianne serves up Creole food and jazz music nightly. The Zydeco Brad website also provides well-refreshed listings of Cajun and zydeco dances in Southern California, which could inspire another whole conversation on the difference between Cajun and Creole culture.
It was clear after just a day in Los Angeles that the waves of migration had brought together different strands of Louisiana culture once the communities reached California and had introduced newcomers to the Bayou State’s food, music and history. It survived the passage across the plains, took root and grew.
Farai Chideya is the author most recently of “The Episodic Career,” a journalism professor at New York University and a senior writer at FiveThirtyEight.com.
The Migration of the black Creole to California from Louisiana
January 21, 2016
By Farai Chedya
The New York Times
 |
| T-Lou Eaglin, an accordion player originally from Grand Coteau, LA., in Long Beach, California. Photo Credit Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times |
I had just completed the first leg of my cross-country journey by sleeper train, starting in New York, and was beginning the second: a foray into the cultural ties between the Crescent City and California.
This trip had been inspired partly by the travel writer and blogger Greg Gross, who grew up in New Orleans and California. “I had a great-uncle who ran away at 15 to become a Pullman porter,” he said. These black men served a predominately white customer base as sleeping-car porters, often simply called “George” by their customers.
Their union became a powerful force during the civil rights movement. Mr. Gross’s great-uncle Ellis Pearson worked on the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles.
 |
| The segregated waiting room for blacks only at a railroad depot in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1921. Photo Credit Woodward, courtesy of The State Archives of Florida |
The Grosses weren’t the only ones. The migration of black and Creole families moving to California from Louisiana began as a trickle in 1927, in the wake of that year’s great flood, and grew to a mass migration from the 1930s to 1960, years that encompassed the Depression, World War II and the growth of employment opportunities for blacks, and Jim Crow. While many families went from the South to the North, the train lines led many in New Orleans to the West instead. The better part of a century after its start, some migrants resettled in California after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to follow the path that others had, to trace a thread of our cultural lineage, however faint. I wanted to see both cities through a black Bayou and Creole lens, to see if they’d drifted apart or were overlapping, remixing culture in the same way that Creoles originally had.
I would start my trip in New Orleans, among some of the families who made the westward migration. Kalaamu ya Salaam, an activist and writer, whose aunt moved to Los Angeles from the Lower Ninth Ward when he was young, took me to the artfully decorated Cafe Rose Nicaud on hip Frenchmen Street, filled with daytime revelers.
 |
| Tomb of the Unknown Slave at St. Augustine Church, in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Photo Credit Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times |
In the post-Katrina, post-recession era, a new New Orleans is experiencing a construction and real estate investment boom that has left out many locals, though it has plenty of charm. The night before my meeting with Mr. Salaam, I’d gone to the Frenchmen Art Market just down the street — an open-air bazaar strung with lights and filled with artisan wares, with music wafting through the warm air from street performers and nearby clubs. But like many thriving places, it seems geared more to new residents than to longtime locals.
To balance my picture of New Orleans, Mr. Salaam pointed me to a different kind of landmark nearby: the Tomb of the Unknown Slave at St. Augustine Catholic Church. “Enslaved Africans and free people of color, they paid for it and built it,” he said. “By the church there’s a cross made of chains, which marks the grave of the unknown enslaved person.” The sculpture of a cross made of marine chains is at a diagonal, like a man who’s propped himself up powerfully on one arm and refuses to fall.
 |
The Sunset Limited passes through a rural Louisiana town.
Photo Credit Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times
|
I kept it in mind as I undertook the journey, as part of the Amtrak Residency for Writers. I would have a sleeper cabin or roomette of my own on the 48-hour trip.
The journey was a scenic one: The greens and browns of the bayou were gradually supplanted by the ocher of the Southwest. The Sunset Limited, unhampered by Eastern train tunnels, was a double-decker with a glass-walled viewing coach, perfect for watching the miles go by and meeting a mix of families, solo adventurers and train enthusiasts on the journey.
 |
Riders enjoy the lounge car of the Sunset Limited, with its wrap-around windows.
Photo Credit Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times
|
Once in Los Angeles, I headed to the venerable Creole restaurant Harold and Belle’s on Jefferson Boulevard to meet up with Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor, writer and producer, and the actor and musician Mark Broyard. The dining room — scheduled to reopen next month after a renovation — was filled with locals wearing fleur-de-lis T-shirts or other symbols of their fealty to Louisiana. Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith have known each other since childhood, and collaborated on a play called “Inside the Creole Mafia,” staged several times over the course of two decades. I got a taste of their razor-sharp banter over my gumbo.
Mr. Broyard explained how his family left Louisiana during the Jim Crow years because, “as my mother said many times,” he said, “she was not going to fight the civil rights movement with her children. We, the Creole kids, the light-skinned kids, we had been integrating schools for a lot longer because we weren’t dark. So we had been in and out of all these white institutions for years, with a tacit understanding that these people were colored, but it was O.K. that they were here because maybe they had half of one drop or something.”
 |
The clock tower at Union Station in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times
|
There were an estimated 212,000 black Angelenos in 1950, with 18 percent from Louisiana, according to Prof. Faustina DuCros of San José State University, who conducted oral histories with Creole families.
“These people came and brought their culture completely intact,” Mr. Broyard said at the restaurant. “They had Big Loaf Bakery; they had the Louisiana Seafood Market.
There was Pete’s Hot Sausage on the corner, here, and Aubrey’s barber shop. There was Ashton Shatto” (pronounced chateau). “That’s how they spelled it. Everyone had their wedding receptions there, their after-funeral receptions there. My dad was a contractor. Everybody went to Roger’s mother, who was a dentist and shared an office with my uncle, who was a physician.”
Not all of these places are in the past. Pete’s Hot Sausage still exists as a butcher shop and a brand that sells its sausage to supermarkets and restaurants. Shatto Banquet Hall is a low-slung building that hosts celebrations for any occasion.
These days, in addition to cuisine, Louisiana culture continues to influence California’s with the rising popularity of zydeco dancing. “It started with the church `la-las’ ” Professor DuCros said, using a Creole term for a house or church dance. “Now, it’s a more popular dance scene, and not everyone is from Louisiana.”
There are the festivals, including an annual Mardi Gras celebration at the Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles, near the Grove shopping complex. In May, there is a Cajun and Creole Zydeco festival in Simi Valley. And in June, there’s the Long Beach Bayou and Blues Festival. The restaurant La Louisianne serves up Creole food and jazz music nightly. The Zydeco Brad website also provides well-refreshed listings of Cajun and zydeco dances in Southern California, which could inspire another whole conversation on the difference between Cajun and Creole culture.
It was clear after just a day in Los Angeles that the waves of migration had brought together different strands of Louisiana culture once the communities reached California and had introduced newcomers to the Bayou State’s food, music and history. It survived the passage across the plains, took root and grew.
Farai Chideya is the author most recently of “The Episodic Career,” a journalism professor at New York University and a senior writer at FiveThirtyEight.com.
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