Group Research Project – New Orleans Cluster Seminar, Fall 2023
Josie Checkett ’25, Olivia DePauli ’24, and Isabella Pimentel ’24
Fighting for Community: Ms. Gloria’s Garden in the Tremé Neighborhood
As students at Kalamazoo college, in December 2023 we were given the opportunity to spend a week in New Orleans conducting research under the Humanities Integrated Locational Learning (HILL) grant. Our research brought us to Ms. Gloria’s Garden, a community garden in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans.
When we entered Ms. Gloria’s garden the morning of December 3rd 2023, we found ourselves in a small, gated area in the middle of a grassy lot in front of an apartment building. Due to the season, the garden was not in full bloom, but the warm winters in Louisiana meant many of the plants were still green and there were plenty of projects for us to work on. We were greeted by Ms. Gloria herself, welcoming us in and passing around gloves so we could get to work weeding, planting, and repotting around the garden.
Eager to tell us about the ins and outs of her space, she explained to us that in addition to the flowers we could see, many of the plants growing in the garden were medicinal, while others were vegetables that she and other community members regularly eat. Ms. Gloria’s daughter Zada now uses these herbs and vegetables from the garden in her catering company. Aside from being an opportunity for the duo to uplift each other’s personal projects, part of Zada’s mission is to provide healthy, locally grown options to her community. To inform visitors who will be working with these plants themselves, the garden is adorned with various hand-painted signs that communicate the various health benefits of each plant. These signs are a representation of a hugely important component of the garden. It promotes a deeper engagement with food and the environment than buying produce, or casually engaging with an outdoor space. Ms. Gloria’s garden allows community members to learn more deeply what they can gain from engagement with the space, and in return, their engagement helps keep the space alive, which is the kind of reciprocal relationship that is the garden’s mission.
Ms. Gloria lives in the apartment building the garden is in front of, a renovated school that has been transformed into a living space for a community of artists. Although it is gated and locked when she’s not there, she explained that most residents of her building have keys and are free to use the garden whenever they like. She also confirmed that she winds up spending a significant portion of her time in the garden, even when she is not actively working, as the garden contains multiple covered areas for leisure. When we initially asked Ms. Gloria about who engages with the community gardening space, she expressed that the surrounding neighbors do not participate very often. Much of the support that she has received since they opened came from different universities (some international) who found out about the garden and came by to help, similar to us. Unfortunately, as stated by Tom Perkins in an article in the Guardian, while the population of New Orleans continues to grow, the actual community of the Treme is on the decline. Many homes in the area have become Airbnbs for tourists who want to stay near the French Quarter, and many actual residents now live elsewhere, dramatically changing the population of the Treme, the country’s oldest historically black neighborhood (Perkins, 2019).
An hour or two into our stay at the garden, a young woman and her 3 year old son wandered in, asking if the space was open, as this was their first time visiting. The woman talked with Ms. Gloria– about her life, the neighborhood, the garden–as her son ran around the garden, taking in the space. Some of us called him over to join our project: painting a wooden box to be used as a new planter. After some time, when half the box had been covered, it was time for them to leave, with the young woman promising they’d be back.
This anecdote serves mainly to show the importance of a space such as Ms. Gloria’s garden towards fostering community, and providing a space for children to learn, express creativity, and be outdoors safely. It also serves to show what is at stake in the current state of the garden, as unfortunately, Ms. Gloria is at risk of having to vacate her space. If the garden were to potentially be relocated, Ms. Gloria would be relying entirely on volunteer assistance that would need to be recruited, to move to a space away from her home that wouldn’t enable her to be there as often. Additionally, the relocation may make it harder for community members to discover the space by chance, like the mother and son duo. Herein lies the benefit and the struggle of a completely community owned and operated space, as opposed to a governmentally owned, tax-funded “public” area. The volunteer-operated, donation funded aspect of Ms. Gloria’s Garden means that the community has full control over the operation of the space, but it lacks any protection ensuring its longevity. Hopefully, with luck, willpower, and teamwork from the community, Ms. Gloria’s Garden will be able to remain in its space and stay open to the community of the Tremé.
In retrospect, before arriving at the garden, it would have been crucial to dive into the rich cultural history of the Tremé neighborhood where the garden resides. The Tremé neighborhood is just North of the French Quarter, and is recognized as the oldest African American neighborhood in the country of the United States. But what does it truly mean to be the oldest African American neighborhood in the country of the United States? When first reading through this statement, the imaginings of this narrative can seem a bit abstract. Does this mean that African Americans carved this neighborhood out for themselves in a context that we know to be strongly racialized, considering the fact that New Orleans is in the deep south, facing a brutal and violent history of enslavement? However, the African American culture in the neighborhood of Tremé transcends much more than what may be understood in the context of traditional American education, and what is typically spoken about or nationally acknowledged. While doing research on the Tremé neighborhood, some important pieces of information come up: it used to be the Morand Plantation and Brickyard, and near the end of the 18th century Claude Tremé bought the land from its original owner. According to NOLA.com, Claude Tremé was a “hat maker and real estate developer from France” (NOLA.com), but in the article His Name, But Our Power: Cierra Chenier reflects on the impact of Tremé on New Orleans Culture Cierra Chenier states that Tremé conveniently acquired the plantation through his marriage to Julie Moreau, a newly freedwoman (Chenier, 2019). However, Tremé not only owned slaves, but he also killed an enslaved man that he believed was going to rob him. She writes: “Much like many other places in the South, the Tremé neighborhood was named after a racist. However, it was the Black Tremé residents that monumentalized the neighborhood in history” (Chenier). Here we can see glimpses into how time and time again, history is not told from a perspective that fundamentally aims to illuminate the voices of those who were, and continue to be oppressed by racism. Instead, news articles and other mainstream recollections of history continue to be defined and understood through people who capitalized on racism, white supremacy, and enslavement. With that being said, the research that we are presenting here is an attempt to illuminate the inspirational history and culture of the black residents that constitute the Tremé neighborhood, understood through its incredibly resilient history, and aligned with the experiences that we had and were lucky enough to witness in Ms. Gloria’s garden.
The History of Gardens in New Orleans: Private vs. Public
The former popularity of pleasure gardens reflects a culture that valued wealth and exclusivity, which for the most part operates in direct opposition to the purpose of community gardens–that is, a culture that values accessibility and group contributions for the betterment of one’s community as a greater entity. The commodities found inside pleasure gardens varied from small bands playing music for patrons to hosting a variety of foreign flora for clients to indulge in that they could not bring home. In this sense, pleasure gardens feel highly transactional between clients paying for a service advertised to them as being beneficial towards their health and being passive consumers of something they could not give back.
On the other hand, the sense of community gardens is far more reciprocal. There is quite a bit of flexibility that community members have with what they want to see grow or create within the space. More often than not, the decision to plant certain flora over others takes into consideration the current needs of the community and what can be done to meet those needs. In this, we see the way that community grown efforts both actively give and take in a way that historical pleasure gardens did not. In establishing these spaces away from city centers and focusing them more on the neighborhoods in which the people live, it recenters the narrative to be about the people who maintain the garden and the history that has yet to be written by them.
Community gardens fulfill the important role of offering a social space, as pleasure gardens once did, that connects individuals together with the purpose of creating greater and grander things. Ultimately, the end goal of both these types of gardens is the same: to alleviate the needs of a client or community by offering resources that presently are not easily accessible.
Background on the Spanish, French, and American influence on New Orleans
The period of French colonial rule lasted between 1682-1763, with the first slave ship arriving in Louisiana in 1719 (Hall, 1992). During this time, the French created a series of laws known as the Code Noir. The Code’s sixty articles regulated the life, death, purchase, religion, and treatment of slaves by their masters in all French colonies. It provided that the slaves should be baptized and educated in the Catholic faith. It prohibited masters from making their slaves work on Sundays and religious holidays. It required that slaves be clothed and fed and taken care of when sick. It prohibited slaves from owning property and stated that they had no legal capacity (Sellers, 2010). It also governed their marriages, their burials, their punishments, and the conditions they had to meet in order to gain their freedom (which listed different ways that slaves could earn their freedom). Two examples were through defending the colony or teaching a master’s children (Sterkx, 1972, 17).
The Spanish colonial rule lasted between 1763-1800, and the Spanish aimed to prevent insurrection among African slaves while also wanting to maintain favorability among people living in the colony (freed people of color), so they continued to expand the Code Noir. During the Spanish rule, the freed people of color doubled in size because they allowed for sexual relations between white europeans and people of African descent (Hall, 1992; Hangar, 1997). However, it must be acknowledged that women of African descent had to continuously work to secure their freedom, as this was a colony defined by forced labor, oppression, and exploitation. The Spanish and the French were said to have a fluid concept of race, however there were hierarchies that were created and defined by the Spanish: Spanish records distinguished between pardo (lighter skinned) and darker skinned (moreno) people. Distinctions were made between Creole (those born in the colony) and those with African descent (Sumpter, 2008). The period between 1813 and 1830 is called the ‘‘Golden Age’’ for the free people of color in Louisiana because free people of color had accumulated wealth and were famous for their skilled labor throughout the city. Here we circle back to the role that Claude Tremé played within the city of New Orleans: Tremé carved up his plantation and divided it into two suburban plots: the Faubourg (French for suburb) Tremé and Faubourg Marigny. Most black residents resided in Tremé, so the notion of the Tremé as being the oldest African American neighborhood in the history of the United States exhibits an absolutely radical notion: the homeowners of this neighborhood were 80% black, constituting a racially mixed community which was largely nonexistent in the majority of the United States. The Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny also consisted of recent immigrants to America, including whites, free people of color and former slaves fleeing the violence of revolution in Haiti during the 1790s (Crutcher, 2006). These neighborhoods remained rooted in French and creole culture and tradition in opposition to American culture.
The documentary Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans directed by Dawn Logsdon, tells the narrative of the Tremé neighborhood from a perspective that beautifully articulates the empowerment that African Americans fought for, as they developed the community of Free People of Color in New Orleans. Some of the earliest free Black inhabitants came to Louisiana as free people: Marie Baude, for example, traveled to New Orleans from Senegal in 1728 to reunite with her French husband. Yet most free people of color during the French colonial period experienced enslavement. Although the Code Noir did prohibit relationships between white and black people, these relations did occur (Neidenbach, 2022). This ensued primarily through immigration and manumission (when an enslaver legally freed an enslaved person—which required approval from the Superior Council, colonial Louisiana’s legislative body) which were two ways that largely contributed to the community of the Free People of Color. By the end of the French colonial rule there were anywhere from 400-800 Free People of Color, and this dramatically grew during the Spanish colonial rule which encouraged the development of a free Black population in the colony. Unlike the French, the Spanish also allowed enslaved men and women to own personal property, including money made from selling goods or services performed on their own time (Neidenbach, 2022). Between 1771 and 1803, 1,921 men, women, and children gained their freedom through voluntary manumissions and self-purchase in New Orleans. However, as Anglos (Americans) continued to move into New Orleans, there was an immediate separation in socio-economic relationships between Anglos and Creoles, because nowhere else in the deep south were Black people, as a majority, liberated. There was also a significant income gap between Americans and Creole residents, and white Americans (as well as white Creoles) who were increasingly threatened by the insurrections occurring through people of color in other areas of the country, such as the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831 (Sumpter, 2008). Furthermore, there was competition for jobs; the fear of slave insurrections modeled by Haiti, different language, mores, religion; and white immigrants’ unfamiliarity with non-enslaved people of color inhabiting a middle and even upper class created an Americanization of race that strictly polarized white and black people (Sumpter, 2008). By 1850, the freed population of color, beset by the hostility of white supremacy, was economically diminished and residentially segregated. Although the Americanization of Louisiana led to increased economic diminishment and segregation of Black communities in New Orleans, Logsdon’s documentary particularly highlights how Black communities resisted white supremacy leading up to and amid the civil war.
Particularly featured was the establishment of L’Union, which was the first African American newspaper in the United States, published on September 27th 1862. A group of African American and other creole men, including Louis Charles Roudanez and Paul Trévigne, started and edited the paper. L’Union started as a semi-weekly, Republican, two-page newspaper. The paper published the harmful impacts of slavery on American democracy and relevant information about the Civil War. The Declaration of Independence and its principles were at the foundation of the paper’s purpose and platform (Sellers 2010). It was through various publications in the newspaper African Americans came together to mobilize and implement demonstrations opposing segregation on various fronts. One of these demonstrations was in aims of integrating the streetcar transportation systems. Through various weeks of protesting, civilians ruthlessly banded together to force railroad officials to determine that resistance to integration was not going to succeed, and they ordered that all drivers allow travelers regardless of race to ride the cars (Perkins 2021). This was not the only political feat that African Americans achieved during this time. In November 1867, an interracial coalition of white, freeborn, and formerly enslaved political operatives convened another state constitutional convention in New Orleans. The election legislature was more than half black, and they wrote one of the most radical constitutions in the history of the nation. This constitution, which remained in force for just over a decade, guaranteed equal justice before the law, equal political and civil rights for men, and universal access to public transportation and public accommodations. It also mandated the creation of a state funded and racially integrated public education system (Bardes 2018). Understanding the resistance and resilience exhibited by the African American community in New Orleans, who primarily lived in and resided in the Tremé neighborhood, leads us to wonder why this narrative is not a foundational component of U.S. history. Fundamentally this speaks to the racism that African Americans and the black community as a whole faces to this day within New Orleans and beyond, as their stories and struggles are not presented as a model of radical rebellion and community collaboration in all senses of social justice.
It is through documentaries like Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans that people from all over the United States, and even the world, may gain a glimpse into the incredible history of black communities, and how they have deconstructed white supremacy amid the aftermath of colonialism.
Bibliography
Chenier, 2019. His Name, But Our Power: Cierra Chenier Reflects on the Impact of Tremé on New Orleans Culture | Antenna. https://www.antenna.works/his-name-but-our-power-cierra-chenier-reflects-on-the-impact-of-treme-on-new-orleans-culture/.
Crutcher, M. 2006. Historical geographies of race in a New Orleans Afro-Creole landscape. In R. Schein, ed. Landscape and Race in the United States. New York: Routledge
Hall, G.M. 1992. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Hangar, K.S. 1997. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803. Durham: Duke University Press.
“L’union (Nouvelle-Orléans [La.]) 1862-1864.” Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83026401/.
Neidenbach, 2022. “Free People of Color in Colonial Louisiana.” 64 Parishes, https://64parishes.org/entry/free-people-of-color-in-colonial-louisiana-adaptation.
Perkins, 2021. Protests, Politics, and a Police Chase: The Fight to Integrate Streetcars in 1867 | The Historic New Orleans Collection. https://www.hnoc.org/publications/first-draft/symposium-2021/protests-politics-and-police-chase-fight-integrate-streetcars-1867#:~:text=The%20streetcar%20protest%20of%201867%20is%20one%20of%20the%20few,law%20mandated%20segregation%20in%201902.
Perkins, Tom. 2019. “’Like a ghost town’: how short-term rentals dim New Orleans’ legacy.” The Guardian. ‘Like a ghost town’: how short-term rentals dim New Orleans’ legacy | New Orleans | The Guardian
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Sellers, Christine. “A Bill by Any Other Name | In Custodia Legis.” The Library of Congress, 15 Oct. 2010, https://doi.org/10/10/a-bill-by-any-other-name.
Sterkx, H.E. 1972. The Free Negro in Antebellum Louisiana. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc.
Sumpter, Amy R. 2008. “Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans.” Southeastern Geographer, vol. 48, no. 1, 2008, pp. 19–37. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26225504.
