“Who Dat?! Who Dat?! Who Dat say ‘dey gon’ beat ‘dem Saints?!!” Like most grooves born in the bayou – and everything else born in the bayou – the “Who Dat!” chant just grabs a hold of your cool nerve, and will have you bouncing, smiling, and looking for a bowl of gumbo before you know it. It’s New Orleans. New Orleans is special. Haiti is special. And the two have much more in common than recent tragedy. They are primary key points of Freedom in the History of the Western Hemisphere.Through the centuries of the North American slave trade, New Orleans served as the principal port of commodity and business exchange. Ports often create a powerful confluence of cultures, and New Orleans was a beacon of that diversity, as well as, oddly, a beacon of freedom. One of the major reasons that New Orleans was such a beacon of freedom was due to the Haitian Revolution of 1804. To concisely summarize the Haitian Revolution (please read up on this Revolution for enlightenment, and perhaps inspiration) would be to say that: the African slaves revolted, took the island from the French slave owners, and whooped up on Napoleon’s army when he tried to do something about it. The result was the establishment of Haiti as the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent, Black-led nation in the World, and the first nation to gain independence through slave rebellion. Right on!
New found freedom has proven to be a difficult transition throughout history, and Haiti was no different. And so whether conflict, disease, contract, opportunity, or whatever, many people fled the island. Where did they go? New Orleans.
One of the unique elements created by the Haitian exodus to New Orleans was a much higher presence of free Africans in New Orleans. Obviously something is very powerful about the thought of bound African slaves coming into the New Orleans port and seeing free Africans striding about. Perhaps it was something like in the movie Roots: The Gift when Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) caught site of stately free Black man Cletus Moyer (Avery Brooks). Though desire for Freedom is inherent to all humans (and animals for that matter), the sight of a free man, for a slave, was like a gust of pure oxygen stoking a kindling fire. Free Haitians brought that metaphorical oxygen to the fire wrestling in the belly of bound slaves in the American South, and beyond that, they brought an example. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: All anybody needs is an example.
Fast forward to 2010, and you have another confluence of emotion and consciousness: the memory of Hurricane Katrina; a rebuilding New Orleans; an earthquake-devastated Haiti; the greatest American sports event (the Super Bowl) with star athletes representative of both Haiti and New Orleans; the first Black President of the United States, and the continued struggle for full, true equality, of all races in the United States at a tender point of success because of the sentiments generated by that President. There is a lot going on in this Super Bowl for the conscious mind. Some may say it’s all coincidence. But, I say, “Ain’t no damn coincidence. It’s called symbolism.” What is it symbolic of? I wouldn’t dare limit that response with this short column, nor clip the wings of the free flight of thought that the whole picture can conjure up.
What I will say is this: I have this thing about feeling that there is something to the soil that you stand on. Quietly, we constantly breathe the soil that we stand on. We breathe the water that we stand near. It’s all connected. My ancestors, from my grandmother on, breathed the soil and water of the New Orleans port and surrounding areas. Somehow I feel that. I felt that during Katrina. I cried.
To see the celebration of symbolic overcoming that the New Orleans Saints are delivering through their Super Bowl makes me think of New Orleans continuing to overcome…and that the people of Haiti are grasping that same spirit. It’s just like old times for that shared spirit of overcoming and Freedom between New Orleans and Haiti…and African descendent Americans all over.
Traditions are handed down through history. Somehow I’m thinking that the victorious Haitians of 1804 were stomping and celebrating on the sands of the island beaches shouting a familiar chant: “Who Dat?!!! Who Dat?!!! Who Dat say ‘dey gon’ beat WE SAINTS.”
