If You Want To Be An Indian, You've Got To Sew
This story started as a draft I wrote soon after it happened in May 2006. Revisiting the story, remembering the details, and filling in the context this week has been fun. I hope you enjoy it, too.
Johann called me on Saturday morning. I assumed it was to check my head—we’d been sipping some Jameson after dinner the night before, learning a James Booker tune. We planned on heading to the Sam Ash music store in Hollywood in the afternoon. Instead, he announced that Big Chief Darryl Montana was coming over for Gumbo that night—he’d be burning all day.
To have a Big Chief coming to dinner was indeed a ceremony of royal entry for Johann. All I could think of was my grandmother scolding, “How would you act if the queen of England came to dinner?” The magic of Johann’s gumbo is that the result is always far greater than the sum of its parts. I had tasted and seen it happen many times before. Into this soup pot went significantly more than the ingredients he had chosen—this roux had to have the utmost integrity and authenticity and pay deep respect. For Johann, making gumbo, as his father taught him, means standing firmly on his roots and honoring the Cajun heritage that animates him. His family has been in Louisiana since before the American purchase, and he is the first generation native English speaker—his dad grew up speaking French until school. Hughie Stein, Johann’s father, passed away Easter weekend a month prior—this was the first gumbo he cooked since.
Big Chief Darryl Montana was the resident artist in May at the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica and part of the New Orleans diaspora flowing through California in the months following Hurricane Katrina. He was in a west-side hotel with his wife, Sabrina, and their grandson, Freddy, hosted by an arts grant, creating a doll with a miniature replica of one of his father’s suits. By May, Darryl should have been working hard on his suit for next year’s Mardi Gras. He begins every year after his birthday in April and sews the following ten months for thousands of hours up to Fat Tuesday. Each new suit requires thousands of dollars of beads and feathers and can weigh 75-100 pounds—needle and thread, baby!
Darryl Montana is the son of Allison “Tootie” Montana—the most renowned Big Chief in New Orleans’ Black Masking Indian tradition. Known for his geometrical beadwork, vibrant colors, and extravagant ostrich feathers, even other maskers looked forward to Tootie unveiling his latest color scheme and patches on Mardi Gras day. Darryl says, “[Part of the] challenge of it is creating your own. When you come from under somebody like my daddy, where he basically wrote the script, you got to get outside that and create your own identity.”
Darryl’s stunning design and craftsmanship have been featured in public collections and awarded prestigious fellowships. “I think I do pretty good myself,” he says of his work, “but I did not bring this to the table. My daddy did, and my grandfather did, so I stand on their shoulders.” Darryl’s tribute to his father and grandfather keeps their legacy alive—this practice of crafting elaborate, three-dimensional suits by hand has not been recorded. “There is not a book or a menu that instructs you on how to do it,” he says. “The only thing that I had to go by is what I saw my father do, and he did the same thing with his dad.”
New suits are designed around a theme and built from scratch annually by those who wear them. This involves hand-sewing elaborate patches using thousands of beads—usually with several additional sewers—and constructing the suit with feathers (also sewn) on a frame that secures its three-dimensional shape. It is a tremendous commitment of money, time, and specialized knowlege—without any financial incentive or reward. But there’s more to the Black Masking tradition than “Every year for Carnival time, we make a new suit.” An Indian “gang” or “tribe” is a fraternity acting as a spiritual secret society, social club, and mutual aid organization. Typically, six or more members have well-defined roles: Big Chief, Spy Boy, Flag Boy, Wild Man, Trail Chief, and Scouts, followed by tambourine players and other percussionists. “They are a product of black Carnival in black neighborhoods. They aren’t part of the big Mardi Gras parades that pass down St. Charles and don’t have anything to do with the “krewes” that put on those processions.” Their routes are secretive and stay in the backstreets. They have embodied resistance since their origin.
“In our neighborhood, it was always Carnival Indians or Black Indians. ‘Mardi Gras Indians’ folks put that title on us, but we didn’t call ourselves that. You’re not gonna say who I am. All of us that’s doing it are Black, you know? We telling you who we are, and no, we are not ‘Mardi Gras,’ we are Black. I call myself a Black Masking Indian,” Darryl says.
Big Chief Darryl Montana and his tribe host this last practice before hitting the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras day. This is how it goes down!
Johann and Jessica met Darryl, Sabrina, and Freddie at the 18th Street Arts Complex the Thursday night before the gumbo–Darryl was speaking about the process of his suit-making. Our friend Ulysses Jenkins, an old-school Venice mural painter and Cal Arts professor, moderated the event. He and his girlfriend, Sam, marched and played drums in our Venice Beach Mardi Gras parade. Ulysses and Sam also came for gumbo and brought Ulysses’ friend Edgar Heap of Birds and his teenage son. Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds is a magnificent multi-disciplinary artist from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in western Oklahoma. He travels and works internationally, often bringing his children with him. He had just led a workshop at Cal Arts the previous day.
Our good friend Jamie Laboz was there. His partner and another close friend, Cristina, was in Florida spending Mother’s Day with her parents; she had lost her younger brother that winter in a tragic motorcycle accident. Jamie’s old friend Amy and her younger sister Jane, who she was visiting in LA, came with him. The discussion of culture and tradition, sewing, vision, and the smell of a bubbling gumbo kept my attention on Sabrina, the Big Chief, and Edgar Heap of Birds. The party was on. Greg Sonnier was there, too, excited by the spirit of Mardi Gras and the promise of a home-cooked Louisiana meal.
Darryl recounted the story of his father’s death the previous June—two months before Hurricane Katrina. Tootie masked as the Big Chief of The Yellow Pocahontas Tribe until 1998, when he passed leadership to Darryl. However, he continued to sew and join the tribe during Carnival. Tootie was the oldest continuously Black Masking Indian and, in 2005, announced that the St. Joseph’s Day parade on March 19th, known as “Super Sunday,” would be his final walk. "I am the oldest, I am the best, and I am the prettiest.”
The Super Sunday gathering on St. Joseph’s is second in importance only to Mardi Gras in Black Masking culture. It is the celebration of the Sicilian Catholic festival honoring St. Joseph, the patron saint of the poor. New Orleans is a historically Catholic city, but that’s not the only reason Black Masking Indians dawn their beaded suits and take to the streets on St. Joseph’s night. “According to Tootie, it is to honor the bonds of friendship and neighborliness that existed—even at the height of Jim Crow in New Orleans—between African Americans and Sicilian Americans. For Tootie, who grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in the 7th Ward, the dazzling and elaborate St. Joseph shrines that local Sicilian American shopkeepers created for the St. Joseph feast day provided an early source of inspiration for the design of his suits.” On this particular night, the police blocked off the road the Indians were using and dispersed the crowd, scattering people by firing shots.
On June 27, 2005, the eighty-two-year-old chief-of-chiefs reluctantly accompanied Darryl to a special city council meeting to address the unprofessional conduct and raw brutality of the New Orleans police response to the Super Sunday celebration. With chiefs of the other tribes standing resolutely behind him—he made an impassioned, unscripted plea for justice, recalling years of police harassment, ending with a clenched fist punctuating the words, “I want this to stop!” at which point he suffered a fatal heart attack, collapsing and dying in Darryl’s arms on the city council floor. “The largest and most elaborate funeral in recent New Orleans history was held in his honor.” On Saturday, July 9, a jazz funeral, proceeding out of St. Augustine’s, led him to his place of rest in St. Louis Cemetery #2. Weeks later, Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees devastated the city.
Johann Stein's “Yellow Pocahontas” tells the story of this same night. The Gumbo Brothers recorded it the following January in my studio in Venice for our Mardi Gras album—another Story for another time.
Johann was in no rush to serve the meal. This allowed plenty of time for the flavors of the social gumbo heating up in the sitting room to boil into fantastic tales of art, culture, and travel. I laughed, seeing the relief expressed by Darryl and Sabrina as the simmering aroma eased their skepticism toward a Mar Vista gumbo invitation. They were thrilled and paid Johann some down-home compliments even before the first bowl was served.
Johann went all out. There was potato salad, deep-fried catfish, rice, and the best damn chicken, sausage, and shrimp gumbo he had ever cooked. I made cornbread. As each person returned to their seat from the gumbo pot, their voice joined a chorus of praise for the meal. Darryl and Sabrina’s enthusiasm spoke directly to the authenticity of the flavor and the experience.
A while after dinner, the party thinned. With the remaining late-night posse safely inside, shakin’ some ass to James Brown, Johann, Greg, Jamie, Darryl, and I slipped outside for what became the most unforgettable music lesson of my life. Big Chief Darryl Montana taught us to clap the rhythms of his tribe. At the same time, he chanted over them, describing the events and chronology on a Mardi Gras day—complete with the history of his father and the Yellow Pocahontas tribe.
This clip is from the HBO series Treme. It features Darryl Montana and several other chiefs from Black Masking Indian tribes, depicting the devastation and uprooting of their tradition caused by Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans.
The traditional opening chant is called “My Indian Red,” dating from the early 1900s. It begins with a French-Creole call: “Madi cudi fiyo.” The song continues in English, introducing the tribe's procession:
We are the Indians, Indians, Indians of the nation
The wild, wild creation
Oh, We won’t bow down (We won’t bow down)
Down on the ground (On that dirty ground)
Oh, how I love to hear them call my Indian Red…
Eugene Honoré, 1892-1931, is credited as the original songwriter; he was the Big Chief of the Wildcats in 1919. “My Indian Red” was first recorded by the legendary banjoist from New Orleans, Danny Barker, in 1947. I knew it from the Wild Tchoupitoulas record and Dr. John. According to journalist Michael Pearlstein, on the night of his death, “after Tootie Montana fell. . . the chiefs and spy boys and flag boys and queens of the assembled tribes launched into a somber rendition of ‘Indian Red’” in the City Council chamber, with particular emphasis on the phrase ‘We won’t bow down.’
At the night's end, Sabrina led us in a ritual, standing in a circle, throwing water into the middle, and calling the names of those dear to us who had passed before to acknowledge their continued presence in our lives and connection with our history. With the lessons learned, the love and respect shared, and the feeling of community stewed in that meal, the night left an indelible mark of confidence and empowerment in my life. Thank you to all involved.
Excellently researched and written, most enjoyable piece, Jon!