"In this place, there's a custom for the funerals of jazz musicians. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, the band breaks into a joyful 'second line,' symbolizing the triumph of the spirit over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge, yet we will live to see the second line."  --George W. Bush, September 15, 2005

When the last man was through, we began to walk, en masse, down Saint Claude Avenue, a street that runs through the now famously devastated Ninth Ward. The parade turned up Saint Bernard Avenue, and the brown, chest-heigh waterline became evident on the facades of people's old wood-frame shotgun houses.

As the band finished up "Paul Barbarin's Second Line," the dancers quickly headed into Mickey's Next Stop Bar, followed by about fifty paraders, all wanting a quick beer. It was unclear whether the bar just happened to be open at 11:15 on the parade route or whether these were normal hours in this near-vacant, crumbling neighborhood. But certainly, the few late-morning drinkers inside must have been surprised at all the company.

As sometimes happens here, we got sidetracked at the bar. This time the delay was justified by the fact that two critical components of the second line--beer and hot sausage po' boys, typically sold from the beds of pickup trucks following the parade--were absent.

The band got going again with a slow dirge as the parade resumed slowly up Saint Bernard into Tremé, one of the oldest black neighborhoods in America, where free people of color built homes in the mid-eighteenth century. We passed the neighborhood grocery store, the old Circle Grocery, which had become an emblem of New Orleans' post-Katrina chaos and was shown beneath deep water with nauseating frequency on CNN from the elevated interstate that runs next to it. The sad music captured the feeling so many of us had as evacuees looking at elements of our everyday lives turned upside down and projected to a national audience to tell the story of this terrible natural disaster.

The band, however, refused to dwell on this mood for long and commenced a rousing "I'll Fly Away," just as it passed under the interstate. With the sound trapped beneath the highway, the acoustics exploded. The band stopped marching and played even harder, as everyone cheered ecstatically.

When the song ended, the parade turned onto Claiborne Avenue, which runs under the highway and which served for generations as the center of commerce and social life for Tremé. It had been a wide neutral ground and once had elegant oaks under which families often picnicked. But the oaks were cut down and the neutral ground was paved for parking when the highway was built above Claiborne Avenue in the 1960s as part of a backward "urban development" plan. Recently, the oaks have reappeared as murals on the massive, concrete cylinders that support the highway, providing imagined shade to the many persistent families who still picnic there on lawn chairs, just as their great-grandparents did.

On the corner of Claiborne and Columbus, the parade made a left and lingered for a moment under the interstate again before the band and the Second Liners scurried over to Antoinette K-Doe. She was sitting on the corner in front of the Mother-in-Law Lounge, which she opened with her late husband as a venue for New Orleans music and tradition. Even before K-Doe's death, in 2001, it was a museum of artifacts from his career--it even contained a life-size K-Doe in one of his old '60s outfits. Almost all of the many images that adorned the walls featured K-Doe--with rare exceptions, including a painting of Christ. Since K-Doe's passing, Antoinette has been more open about the fact that the lounge is, and always was, a shrine to her legendary spouse.

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