Our love letter to New Orleans (Part 1)
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 12:47PM Dear New Orleans,
We felt that your heart would be open and generous, but how magnificently true that was has still taken us by surprise. Your people, your beautiful Congo Square, your artists and students, your businesses and organizations, even your weather; we couldn’t have asked for anything else.
Thank you New Orleans!
With love from One Million Bones
Every day we work on this project, we learn a little bit more about what we’re doing. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but really it’s true in a way. When Naomi came up with the idea to raise awareness of genocide and atrocities by laying 1,000,000 handmade bones on the National Mall, she envisioned the path needed to get there, but not the exact route that path would take.
This is part of the beauty of One Million Bones. We are building a partnership between individuals and groups and organizations and businesses across the world and asking them to become invested in the project. What that looks like is going to be different for each of them: One type of emphasis here, a different focus there, this kind of feeling, that kind of presentation.
The 50,000 Bones Preview in New Orleans was a beautiful event. We were sharing the area with the Crescent City Classic, a 10K road race, and all kinds of Easter celebrations. Where Albuquerque was almost silent as we were setting up, New Orleans was blasting the theme to Rocky and I Run So Far Away by Flock of Seagulls to get the runners motivated. But Congo Square is a magical place and somehow those songs were swallowed into the space to become a muted soundtrack for us as well.
We spent a couple hours emptying the boxes of bones into piles at five different stations around the plaza.
Congo Square, for those of you who’ve never seen it, is an asymmetrical circular plaza surrounded by 200-500 year old Live Oak trees and other beautiful plants. The floor of the plaza consists of stones arranged in half circles radiating out from a center point. Other than the motivational soundtrack in the background it was pretty quiet, with Naomi’s amazing core volunteers setting up registration tables, the reception area and the piles of bones.
A little later in the morning, the drummers started to arrive and the blessing of the space began. And at about 9:50 lines of volunteers in white started streaming into the Square, ready to help lay out the bones.
William, our filmmaker extraordinaire, started taking opening shots as the volunteers were getting oriented and into their stations, and shortly after 11am, the very first bone was laid down by Jamilah Peters-Muhammad.
Then we all got to work. We asked the volunteers to come one at a time from the five different points, carrying a few bones to the center of the circle.
Once they had laid them down, they walked back to the next point so they were zigzagging through the stations on each side of the square. It created a beautiful, almost melodic, flow of people through the area. It took a little longer than we anticipated but by 1:20 we laid the last bones down.
Super thanks to Jane McPherson, who runs the OMB-Tallahassee Chapter for taking such amazing photos!
Check back on Friday for part 2 including the reception, speakers, reclaiming the bones and thank yous!
Reader Comments (1)
The New Orleans installation truly was such a moving and magical day...thank you for writing such an wonderful post, Susan!! I am so honored to be a part of One Million Bones and all you are doing. With love...