![]() Memorials like Chase’s and Diki’s came about out of necessity. “It’s hard when you see them every birthday and every celebration, and then they all just get picked off.” “His funeral were right up the street from the shop, but I refused to go,” she says. When the last one, Sadiki “Diki” Navarre was shot in 2013 at age 24, McMillian printed four to five life-sizes of Diki and about 300 shirts. The friends kept bringing in that one picture to be printed on T-shirts and funeral programs when one of them was killed, “until they were all gone off of it.” McMillian recalled four friends who once brought her a picture of their group. cities, so she’s mostly printing memorial products. In the summer, when school is out, there tends to be a rise in shootings here, as in many U.S. In the spring it’s mostly for graduations. There are seasons to her business, she says. “The city itself, the humidity kind of hangs deep with the scream of our ancestors.” ![]() New Orleans’ murder rate is eight times the national average. McMillian’s business, Platinum Graphics, is in Central City, the neighborhood with the highest average of shootings per year in all of New Orleans, according to a 2015 crime analysis. Sometimes the deceased will show up in 2-D at their own repass. People bring what she calls “life-sizes” to family reunions and weddings, to dance and take pictures with. “But then somebody came and asked if we could do it for someone who had just passed away, and it just took off from there,” she says. ![]() The McMillians started doing it for birthdays. The couple also makes life-size printouts of people that can be propped up to make it look like the person is standing. This resonates with Trenice McMillian, who for 13 years has been making T-shirts with her husband-much like the memorial ones at Chase’s second line. Peter Claver Catholic Church before making its way through the Treme neighborhood in New Orleans June 10. Zulu members hold their hats as the celebrated Creole chef Leah Chases coffin is carried out of St. “It’s another thing when you’re 16 years old and your friend is killed suddenly because of some dispute-being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” It’s one thing when an elder dies, he says, someone who has lived a long, full life, like Chase. ![]() “The majority of people in New Orleans-especially Black folks-have had to encounter death and mortality in very specific ways, and it’s all around us,” he explains. Walker is a chaplain and adjunct professor at New York University who has written on the theology of jazz funerals he was also born in the New Orleans area. There may be an extra pinch of fanfare because of Chase’s legacy, but fundamentally this is how New Orleans deals with death. Today, people are here to honor Chase’s memory and to celebrate her life. More technically, she says in the article, “ second line means the followers, or joiners, who fall in behind the ‘first line,’ composed of the brass band and the social club, which typically sponsors the parade.” It’s become an umbrella term for many kinds of parading in New Orleans. The term refers to dance steps as much as to a syncopated rhythm that originated on the streets of New Orleans, says Helen Regis, associate professor of geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University, in a 2001 article. But people aren’t here because 96-year-old Chase made it once more around the sun. To an outsider it might look like some kind of spirited birthday party for somebody’s grandmother. He drops down and spins his chair, keeping pace with the beat of the song.Īmid the crowd is a sprinkling of matching T-shirts, red and black, with a pastel portrait of civil rights icon Leah Chase, the “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” printed front and center. The group makes it around the block and stops in front of a tan shotgun house where a man in a wheelchair uses his arms to raise his body in the air. Handkerchiefs swing proudly in the air, doubling as sweat rags. Men in white T-shirts drenched in sweat women in hospital scrubs and housekeeping uniforms having just come from work an 8-year-old with a bright orange shirt and a bleached blond flattop, armed with a tuba twice his height, move in tight steps to the rhythm of the brass band. When the trumpets, tubas, and trombones lift up and wail, people start marching. ![]() On a sweltering June evening, a crowd forms on the corner of Orleans Avenue and North Miro Street in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. ![]()
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