- Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 2020)
- Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
- Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2006); “Les Cenelles” translates in English to holly berries. Holly berries were of various shades and would thrive in harsh conditions, a metaphor for the racial strife that was rampant in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans. The name was lovingly borrowed from and inspired by a nineteenth-century group of African-descended Louisiana Creole writers and poets. The present-day Les Cenelles musical ensemble borrowed the name from this group in solidarity with their sociopolitical and artistic influence and pride in prismatic and intersectional identities from Louisiana. The original Les Cenelles was formed by Armand Lanusse and as a collective they wrote and published the first anthology of poetry by free people of color in 1845. The anthology, written in French, comprises eighty-five poems by seventeen Creole Louisianians, and features romantic poems with subtle revolutionary coding. Because of the strict laws prohibiting publications that could incite a racial insurrection, these poets and composers used love and Gulf South flora and fauna as metaphors for nativity, love of place, and resistance to white supremacy. Many of the poets of Les Cenelles were mixed race and were afforded more education than other people of African descent at the time. Despite this, their poetry was not considered by the white Creole elite of the time.
- James Broussard, Louisiana Creole Dialect (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1942).
- Gordon Plaza is a subdivision in the Desire neighborhood of New Orleans. African-descended New Orleanians were encouraged to purchase housing in neighborhoods that were contaminated with arsenic, lead, and other carcinogens; Mossville is a small town outside of Lake Charles, Louisiana, founded in 1790 by Jack Moss, a formerly enslaved person. The South African petrochemical company Sasol built an ethane cracker complex for $8.1 billion that absorbed the small community, spewing carcinogens and sickening its residents, and ultimately forcing them to leave their ancestral lands; Lydia Y. Nichols provided the research and narration for the Les Cenelles arrangement of the “Lizette Suite.” free feral, Sultana Isham, and Peter J. Bowling interviewed Nichols and primarily composed and recorded the ensemble’s version of the suite, with the support of ensemble members Joseph Darensbourg, mun, and Denise Frazier.
- “Earth Beneath Dump Site Offers Clues to Racial Massacre,” Tulanian, September 2018.
- Alexandra Eaton, Christoph Koettl, Quincy G. Ledbetter, Victoria Simpson, and Aaron Byrd, “Searching for the Lost Graces of Louisiana’s Enslaved People,” New York Times, June 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007778616/louisiana-cancer-alley-cemetery-african-americans-video.html.
- Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh, 226.
- Camille Nickerson, “Africo-Creole Music in Louisiana: A Thesis on the Plantation Songs Created by the Creole Negroes of Louisiana, Oberlin Conservatory of Music,” May 1832, 18.
- Nickerson, “Africo-Creole Music in Louisiana,” 18; Clara Gottschalk Peterson, “Zélim to quitté la plaine,” https://imslp.org/wiki/Creole_Songs_from_New_Orleans_in_the_Negro_Dialect_(Peterson%2C_Clara_Gottschalk).
- Mina Monroe, lyrics from the song “Suzanne, Suzanne Jolie Femme,” in Bayou Ballads: Twelve Songs from Louisiana (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1921).
- Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (New York: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 118.
- Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh, 230.
- “Suzanne” is described as a love song that traverses socioeconomic status and affirms Black desire, despite the clear perils, traumas, and boundaries in the colonial context. The description of the song in Mina Monroe’s Bayou Ballads: Twelve Folks-Songs From Louisiana de-centers Suzanne’s role in navigating the relationship and highlights the importance of the speaker in the song, a supposed masculine and African-descended voice who praises “the frugal tastes of his love [and] finds his lot more satisfying in its unbounded simplicity than that of the free white man with its complicated and inevitable demands.” This interpretation of the piece fits neatly into a heteronormative understanding and, perhaps, cliché view of the seductive mulâtresse whose value resides in her solidarity with men of African descent and her courage to eschew earthly pleasures for a more authentic and spiritual love. “Li pas mandé fauteuil bourré, Li pas mandé jipon la soie (She does not want a cushion chair. She does not want silk underwear).” The only thing in the song that makes Suzanne happy is gumbo. The speakers exclaim the following, “Li jist oulé gombo file! / With gumbo soup how happy she is!” Incorporating gastronomic pleasure as a possible metaphor for liberation through kinship and love of other possibly enslaved and/or free people of color, enforces the sense that what is “jolie” about Suzanne is her ability to revel in simple pleasure, and her courage in refusing to be further commodified and “bought” with possessions. This liberatory expression of black womanhood through the space and context of the antebellum labor conditions of nineteenth-century Louisiana melds perfectly with Les Cenelles’s overlay of bounce music at the end of their rendition of “Suzanne.” According to the Bayou Ballads description of the song, it was used as a plantation work song. Monroe states, “The melody of the song was thought particularly fitted to the task of sweeping, especially on summer mornings when the languid strokes of the broom lent themselves admirably to the musical lilt of its phrases. Scores of Southern courtyards have been swept to the tune of ‘Suzanne, Suzanne, jolie femme.’” Mixing the nineteenth-century lyrics of “Suzanne” with the infectious, unrelenting drum machine beat of Bounce music is one of the many fitting ways that work songs and werk songs call us to do their bidding. Whether sweeping or twerking, calling and responding, the objective of the sound was and is to keep everyone present and engaged with the task at hand; work and werk. The prominence of many queer New Orleans bounce artists and women bounce artists, like Cheeky Blakk, points to a possible reinterpretation of Les Cenelles’s “Suzanne” as transcending heteronormative boundaries. Whereas Monroe assumed the reader to be male, a re-reading of the lyrics indicates that the speaker could easily be Suzanne’s mother, or female lover. The incorporation of bounce music in the end opens the temporal limitations of African-descended kinship and sexuality and status to more complicated interpretations. Sound allows the listener to time travel, to question, and investigate more closely our own assumptions about the Gulf South colonial experience.In Ryan Clarke’s “Reverse Hallucinations in the Lower Delta,” he articulates the significance of bounce as a subversive genre that is rightly aligned with the human and robotic rhythmic pace with which we listen and live. He states, “Queerness, humanity, and technology, it’s all up in the air here. There are no boundaries between the thematic, the performer, and the identity that appears onstage or in the crowd. Already too fast for radio and its listenership, acceleration is inherent to bounce music as technology and humanity are in lockstep as a means to dismantle the limits of what we have previously perceived to be dance/southern rap or any kind of music at all.” The incorporation of bounce music with this particular song ushered in the queering and complicating of the heteronormative imagining of “Suzanne” as a “jolie femme” in full possession of her own understanding of happiness and pleasure and place. Bounce as a repetitive, sonic drum-induced trance music delightedly lulls the gyrating hips and butt cheeks to take respite in “catching a wall” or maybe sweeping a floor. The only mandate is that the ass-shaking must not stop, because your beautiful wiggly body is also who you are. You, alone, possess this corporal joy.