Hereâs a new song called âAmerican City.â This song is about Ronald Lewis, who built and (after Hurricane Katrina) rebuilt the House of Dance and Feathers, a museum celebrating the culture of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The museum is a small building located in Mr. Lewisâ backyard, and it is filled with a large and unique collection of significant objects and photographs donated by his neighbors, as well as with the intricately beaded artwork Mr. Lewis has made himself. Photographs of friends and family in a century of Mardi Gras parades, faded Time Magazines filled with exploitative efforts to âcoverâ the damage of Hurricane Katrina, hand-beaded clothing that shows Native American warriors on horseback rising up to defend themselves against white invaders, memories from this year and from one hundred years ago. Heâs curated this collection over years and years the way a writer in the world collects symbols, each one imbued with a personal weight and a social meaning, to form a narrative that is at once his own and reflective of the world as he sees it. As you walk through the museum, there is no guide; you notice, you comment shyly or not, you eventually ask a question or two, and when youâre ready to really ask him, heâll tell you a story about each and every object you ask him about. But what he gives is not just the story or history of this feather or that magazine, but the stories that surround it; every object in the museum is connected by a web of cultural and often even familial threads--the way the beads, stitched together, in their many colors, make up that larger pattern of an uprising against the dominant narrative of âAmerican history.â Lewisâ stories are of complex, interconnected cultures, stories of how people with many differences, in living together over many years, create art and community despite being denied access to important resources, such as money, education, and representation in media. This is an important lesson for me--that culture has value outside of these factors, and in fact, the power of possessing these resources does not define real culture. I remember Mr. Lewis said something like, âA lot of people canât believe this complex culture is coming out of the Lower Ninth Ward because how could people without money keep on producing these things? How could they keep it going? But they do.â New Orleans, with its interconnected network of many cultures from African American to Native American to French and Spanish, and with its religions from Catholicism to Vodun (Voudou) to Southern Baptist, has arguably the richest and most distinctive culture of any American city, perhaps because it is irreducible to the sum of its many connected, and conflicting parts; it is, in many ways, the opposite of mass, corporate culture that homogenizes all of America into one alienated landscape--the way this highway could be here or anywhere, this chain store could be on any street, you could be anywhere speaking to anyone. But as the House of Dance & Feathers shows, there are ways for culture to achieve resilience that have nothing to do with money or capitalist expansion because culture exists in another kind of time, a time that is beyond the mere idea of getting big or getting small, beyond the events of today and tomorrow, beyond the struggles of who wins a certain amount of paper and who doesnât. Yes, these struggles and these forces do influence and affect culture, and culture can criticize and critique them, but culture exists in centuries and over spans of generations. It is what is preserved, and not what dies when the individual does. That is what I mean by culture being bigger than us, bigger than who wins or who loses today. It is literally what lasts, whatever is passed on after I no longer matter, whatever larger narrative (or lack thereof) the stories of all of our lives, together, are creating. And so culture lives in a kind of mythic time, a time that is always around us, that we can access through storytelling, through art, and through our (often collective) imagination. So how does it last, this culture thing? I donât know, but I think there are certain people who devote their lives to making sure it continues. After Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Lewis said he wanted to be âa sparkâ; this was when the Lower Ninth Ward was flooded, when a lot of people from the neighborhood, who had lost their homes and lost family members and were now being exploited by so-called âcharitiesâ and insurance companies and denied assistance by the government, felt there was not much left to come back to, Mr. Lewis started telling everyone, âCome back, thereâs something important here--which is what you all have built just by living your lives.â And then he rebuilt the old, flooded museum in his backyard and got everyone in the neighborhood to donate the items that were important to them to show everyone, and especially the young people, that they had something important. Culture survives not by the actions of governments or corporations but by small acts of everyday resilience. Culture is the necessary byproduct of people making the choice to survive. Now I realize that the people whose life stories make up the House of Dance and Feathers are the same people who were shown on the national news for the consumption of millions of eager white eyes, including mine, when I was a teenager living in my upper middle-class, white suburban fantasy. In watching media coverage of Hurricane Katrina, I was sold, and I think I believed, a false narrative of helpless black bodies--with the occasional arrival of a white rescue helicopter delivering food or supplies or evacuating the poor people in need. But that story was a lie. The portrayal of black people as helpless victims of abstract natural forces (the storm) to be conveniently rescued by the (white) government power was as far from the truth as any fiction could be. If the communities in New Orleans, while they may not have enough money for what they need to really thrive today, have bounced back, it is because they have rescued themselves. The villain in this story was never really the storm so much as it was the rising tide of white supremacy and late-stage capitalism that was always leaving millions of people to drown in America and calling this their own fault. I do not believe in the âAmerican Dream,â but I believe in culture, and in people like Mr. Lewis, these visionary folks who exist in every neighborhood and make the choice to honor what is beautiful and real in the middle of a very broken world. Many times, these people appear to be selfless, like Mr. Lewis does, and yet you can imagine that they have found so much meaning in their lives by passing on this thing, whatever it is, maybe just a unique perspective, a sense of integrity, and a desire to share that. Perhaps that meaning they feel is what enables them to, over and over, overcome any hardship that gets in the way of expressing that vision to the people it could benefit. As the Lakota medicine man Black Elk said, there are some roads you walk alone and some you walk with others, and the person who has a vision must go back and forth between the two. Next time you are in New Orleans, you can call Mr. Lewis and request a visit to his museum. The phone number is on his website. You can also order his book online. Itâs called The House of Dance & Feathers: A Museum.
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