“Can you see our heart?”

I was at Stanford as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow to study archives, not AI. That much was clear after the fall quarter. But I wasn’t sure where to begin. The answer came in my Stanford student inbox with an email from the Department of African & African American Studies advertising a class called AFRICAAM 136: New Orleans as Method: Time, Tradition, and the Art of Black Cultural Production. I applied, was accepted, and found myself on yet another unforeseen journey into a multidisciplinary class combining Black Studies, New Orleans Cultural Studies, and art practices.

Artist, course instructor, and New Orleans native Jessica Monette argues the city is a living archive, and this archive is continuously mined and expanded through the daily practices preserving the city’s African roots by the residents who understand that to live in New Orleans is a commitment to keeping its memory. And to keep its memory, one must not only live it, but teach it. The course modeled this approach first through reading and secondly through art exploration, preparing us to apply our knowledge in real time on a cultural immersion trip during Spring Break.

Similarly to how my time in the fellowship began with dancing, so did my time in New Orleans. It was one thing to read about Second Lines and how they came to be. About how Black mutual aid societies formed in the city (and across America) to pool together resources to cover healthcare and burial costs for the city’s underserved Black residents. However, now that I was bolstered with the knowledge of the Second Line’s history, this wasn´t just about dancing in the street and sweating through my t-shirt. My embodiment of this tradition was an offering to a historical practice that ensured the dead were laid to rest with more dignity than they likely had received in life.

As I two stepped on the asphalt past rainbow colored shotgun houses, the ancestral side I felt blazed hotter than the sun asking, “Can you really honor all the work we’ve put in and not waste our time?”

I did not know that my dance instructor was preparing for this moment. I did not need a drink to loosen my joints or a song I knew to get going because I had finally learned to trust my body and not care if the person in front of me was a better dancer. Spoiler — she was. In order to get the city’s buy-in, I had to do more than show up. I had to actively participate.

Because being a good dancer was not what mattered. But my willingness to do so, did. What mattered was we were continuing to form a second line behind the front line, the band, together, and regaining control of time through insistence upon dancing in the process.

“Okay, okay. You may be able to have fun,” the city acknowledged, “But can you proceed on your expedition while honoring our origins?” Once again, it was not words the city wanted to hear, but actions it wanted to see. So the class made a pilgrimage to Congo Square, not once, but thrice. And there, beneath a 500-year-old Oak tree we danced again to the drums our enslaved ancestors would have. The rhythms of hands pounding outstretched cowhide as the soundtrack to a moving image metaphysically projecting across the park. Africans on a Sunday. Their day “off.” Coming to hear news from elsewhere, to receive word about their loved ones, to carve self dignity out of the trading of wares, and to reclaim their identities through the act of communal gathering in public acknowledgement of a collective knowing — we are and have always been more.

I’ll be candid. By the third visit, I was a little annoyed. We had seen this place already and yet, as I hugged that old Oak yet again, I realized I was embodying the origin story of Black survival and perseverance of African culture in the city by doing exactly as the ancestors did both here in the square and in the Second Line — the passing down of an epigenetic compulsion to gather in public, be loud, and do as you please because time and this body and this place are all yours. We are returning because this is the place Africans, enslaved and free, repeatedly returned for connection and information. This was their gathering ground and is now ours. By us repeatedly returning, we were also participating in their, ours, and as a person with Lousiana roots, my own ancestral practice. Congo Square is ground zero and in order to know where to go next, one must return to the site of origin repeatedly.

The people of New Orleans aren’t asking us to do anything it doesn’t actively do. It was hearing from culture bearers who know the magic they were born into and that in order to preserve it, they must also pass it down. There is Mr. Trosclair, Mardi Gras Indian and docent of the Backstreet Cultural Museum who still found time to bead his suits year around, mask annually, teach his history during the museum’s operational hours to tourists all while working a full time job at Amazon.

And then, there is the newcomer, Isaiah Michael Joyner, who understands fully that living in New Orleans is about more than revelry, it’s about integrating yourself into the community and becoming a part of the interconnected root system of Oak trees. He did this, not by inserting himself, but by finding where he was needed — supporting the livelihoods of local artists by collecting their art. From him, I learned generosity means open hospitality as he gave myself and a dozen undergrads free reign to tour his private collection in his home. Through his vocation, he has found a way to plant his Oak tree alongside the locals’ longstanding ones, further strengthening the preservation of the city’s cultural ecosystem.

New Orleanians are all essentially asking the same thing — “Yeah, you can see our city and all that has flowered from it, but can you see the heart that went into it? Can you see our heart?” And in order to prove that I could, I had to show them mine. Showing the city my heart looked like crying in the Community Book Center on a strange man’s shoulder. While I thought we were there for a poetry workshop lead by Sunni Patterson, it ended up being something way more spiritual, as is almost always the case in New Orleans if you are fully present and authentically participating.

When we were first preparing for the trip, I told Jessica Monette, “I am so excited!”

“But you’ve been before,” she replied.

“Yes,” I said. “But, never like this.” And I’ll be back. Again and again and again.