Women and white people also gathered and hobnobbed and passed out political fliers, but the older black men emanated an aura of importance that captured my attention. I suspected many of these men had played active roles in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s, a graying crowd of heavy hitters whose achievements continue to command respect and admiration, lending the proceedings the revered atmosphere of an old-timers game. Many greeted each other for the first time since the flood, some maybe for the first time in years. It was difficult to tell the difference.

Everywhere I looked I saw people with digital cameras, film cameras, video cameras, busy capturing the moment, people carrying microphones and digital recording devices, wearing headsets and conducting interviews. The revolution might not be televised, but it would be heavily documented. A young man – baseball cap resting slightly askew on his head, slack jeans unwashed and hanging low – weaved through the crowd conspicuously carrying a twenty-four-ounce can of Miller High Life and a lit joint, standing out in contrast among the sober freedom fighters. A sizable contingent of what one of Trish’s coworkers at Loyola University referred to as the “anarchist youth” maneuvered through the gathering crowd dressed in thrift store rags, each emanating the same scent, a distinct and oddly pleasing body odor that I assumed must be the result of communal meals and sleeping outdoors. Many, if not all, of these D.I.Y. punk activists and hippies had bussed into New Orleans from up east and from out west under the auspices of a loosely defined group called the Common Ground. They had come to help with the recovery effort, lived in tent communities, and provided free, hot, vegan meals to anyone who was hungry. A man crossed the square with a Sousaphone slung over his shoulder.

I nudged Trish. “A tuba.” She nodded, smiled. Then I spotted a man carrying a trumpet. Another, a bass drum. I recognized the musicians as members of the Soul Rebels Brass Band. And Trish had scoffed.

A man wearing a kufi, one of the old-timers, a big man with a big beard, dressed in baggy pants and a loose sweatshirt bearing the red, black, and green of African solidarity, took up a microphone and called the assembled to attention. He began by outlining the day’s program, and as he ran down the list of scheduled events, our master of ceremonies mentioned something he called a “libation.”

I turned to Trish. “A libation?”

Trish shrugged. “I think that’s what he said.”

“Maybe we will have drinks.” I smiled at the notion and scanned the area for a beer truck or some kind of concession stand.

The third definition of “libation,” according to my Webster’s New World College Dictionary, is “An alcoholic drink or the act of drinking: used humorously.” I should have instantly nixed this definition as a plausible interpretation of our Muslim-capped emcee’s use of the word. The first definition, “the ritual of pouring out wine or oil upon the ground as a sacrifice to a god,” made far more sense. And were I a church-going man, perhaps I would have been more familiar with that definition. But since I am more of a bar-going man, I thought maybe the organizers had arranged to serve beverages.

The libation, as it transpired, involved the pouring of a clear liquid – water, I thought – from a plastic bottle onto the gray flagstones of Congo Square. The emcee, assuming the role of a priest, asked us to call out the names of those whose spirits we wished to summon into our presence, to join us on what he called “this holy ground.” At first no one said anything. Then someone, perhaps the emcee himself, called out, “Elijah Muhammad,” or some other such luminary. I thought the idea might have been to call out the names of family members or loved ones who had died, perhaps names of those lost in the flood, but that first name seemed to set a standard for the kind of company we intended to draw forth from the spirit world.

“Malcolm X,” somebody said.

“Martin Luther King.”

“Gandhi,” a voice called out, lest our guest list become too Afro-centric.

“Sojourner Truth,” said the emcee, and with each name he sprinkled a few drops from the bottle onto the ground.

“The nameless.” A young woman’s voice emerged, sounding small and distant. “All the people whose names we don’t know.”

I thought about summoning my grandparents, but I didn’t. I didn’t think they’d show. Maybe I should be less cynical.

The event felt less like a protest than like a demonstration. A demonstration of what was at stake. This wasn’t about housing; it was about culture, about community. The people who had lost their homes and their neighborhoods had lost far more than the roofs over their heads, more than furniture and family photographs. They’d lost their worlds, their lives. If the government decided not to allow them to rebuild their own homes on their own land, but to raze the remaining structures and turn neighborhoods into green spaces or flood zones, the people who had lived there would be out far more than property.

Some nominal market-value payoff wouldn’t come close to covering what the people of the Ninth Ward, for example, stood to lose. Talk of potential “housing solutions” to accommodate those who would be displaced sounded insulting and condescending. The people of New Orleans demanded more than houses. They demanded a voice in the shaping of their future communities. They demanded the right of self-determination, or at the very least to influence the decisions that would shape their lives, their communities, and their culture. But most of these people, because their homes had been destroyed, because they were poor, and because the government had thus far proven unable to provide alternative housing for them in New Orleans, were nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be heard. They waited, dispersed throughout the country, physically unable to unify, while others presumed to plan their futures for them.

The emcee asked us to form a circle and join hands, “In the name of Christ, Allah, Jehovah, Buddha.” He rattled off a litany of religious icons to accommodate the potential cornucopia of faiths in attendance. I took Trish’s hand and looked around for another to grab. Immediately to my right stood one of the stone-cold Nation of Islam guys, an imposing figure with his shaved head, squat, solid physique, and cell phone ear piece complete with wire running down beneath the collar of his black suit. I had the sudden urge to grab his hand even as I considered the juxtaposition: one of Louis Farrakhan’s million men holding hands with a guy who looks for a beer truck when someone mentions a libation. Our eyes met, and without hesitation he offered his hand, and so we stood, two men united in prayer on the holy ground of Congo Square.

As the emcee delivered his words of inspiration, I was distracted by several photographers busy scuttling and crouching inside of our circle, snapping away, capturing the moment. I imagined a photo of me and my man from the Nation of Islam, holding hands on the cover of a political Muslim newspaper. I assumed an expression of grave seriousness with maybe a tinge of restrained outrage. “That’s right,” I thought as I glowered at the cameras. “It’s me and the Nation of Islam and we are pissed off.”

After this opening ceremony, kind of a consecration of the event, a large woman wrapped in boldly colored African robes stepped forward and, to a steady rhythm set by the two drummers, began to sing a mournful, heavy-hearted rendition of the Mardi Gras Indian song “Indian Red”: 

                        Indians of the nation
                        The whole wide creation
                        We won’t bow down (we won’t bow down)
                        Not on this ground (this holy ground)
                        I love to hear you call my Indian Red.

She sang with reverence, with crisply enunciated resonance, churchier and cleaner than other versions of the song that I’d heard, and still deeply soulful. And as she sang through the verses, true to tradition, her tone became lighter, her steady rhythm began to swing a bit. She brought it home.

Unlike the protests in Austin, this event contained moments of genuine beauty, an immense improvement over the crass political desperation of the antiwar events. The protest at Congo Square would transcend demonstration and embody the threatened culture itself. It did more than “represent the interests.” The event became an expression of the very thing we had come to protect.

On the other side of the square, a Mardi Gras Indian Medicine Man, dressed in robes, had demarcated a circle on the gray stones with a line of white powder and laid flowers around the inside perimeter. A drummer had struck up a deep rhythm. A man with a tambourine slapped and tapped a jumping pitter-pat counter rhythm, as the Medicine Man danced and chanted a song in the call-and-response Indian style. Two young boys sang back the refrain. The Medicine Man flicked drops of scented oil onto the people gathered around his circle. A drop of what smelled like rose water hit me on the forehead. Had I been baptized?