Near the Intersection of N. Dorgenois & Flood Streets, New Orleans
by Emily Suzanne Clark
In 1972, Sister Gertrude Morgan performed and presented her work at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the third time. Her artwork was on display to view and purchase. She preached and sang to her audience from one of her painted megaphones, which she hung from above so her hands could play her tambourine. A few benches sat in front of her for passers-by. Her stand was her own mini stage and altar. What had been empty space, became an artist’s booth, became a church. Two years later, a tuba accompanied her.
About ten years ago I was working on a research project on Sister Gertrude Morgan. Though she died in 1980, Morgan’s home, near the corner of Flood Street and N. Dorgenois Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, stood until December 2008. I made my pilgrimage a few weeks later. I was writing my M.A. thesis on Morgan’s work and the role her memory played in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I met with some who knew her, photographed museum-owned and privately-owned examples of her artwork, and visited an empty residential lot.
The remaining lot at 5444 N. Dorgenois Street, the former home of Sister Gertrude Morgan. Image taken by author, 30 December 2008.
The message of Morgan’s paintings and songs centered on the coming end times. She put herself and her city in the apocalyptic story. Her paintings, which covered old doors, her guitar case, pieces of cardboard, old Styrofoam meat trays, and other readily available objects, took inspiration from local architecture and her life. She painted herself as the Bride of Christ in an interracial marriage with Jesus, and imagined a New Jerusalem where the buildings looked like shotgun houses stacked together like Legos. The New Jerusalem would be in her home, New Orleans.
In addition to her art, Morgan was known for the four-leaf clovers that grew in her yard. Everyone mentioned them, and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina this symbol of luck was sacred.
When the floodwaters crashed through her old neighborhood, Morgan’s former home was pushed off its foundation and into the neighboring building. It would have cost nearly six time the home’s value to move it back, let alone repair it. Though she had not lived there for decades and none of her artwork remained there, some local artists, musicians, and preservationists saw her home as a symbol of hope. After much deliberation and with some local protest, the city demolished the home. Three weeks later, I showed up to a mostly empty lot.
The only remains of her home were the front steps. Behind those, it was obvious that a house had been there. There was no grass, but small bits of brick and concrete on bare dirt. I could still make out a bulldozer’s recent tracks. All throughout the yard were large patches of the famous four leaf-clovers. And the clovers had spilled over into the neighboring lots and even across the street.
About two weeks after the demolition of her former home, the local newspaper ran a story about the four-leaf clovers in the Lower Ninth Ward. The epicenter of the magic: Flood and N. Dorgenois Streets. Unfortunately though, The Times-Picayune reported some bad botany news: “the four-leafed clover-like specimens, which indeed are spread far and wide across these Fields of Broken Dreams, are actually … ferns.” Everyone I talked to about Morgan and Katrina referenced the city’s need for powerful symbols of hope and luck. A local musician decided to stay in New Orleans and rebuild after re-finding the clovers in her yard. “I like to think that they’re four-leaf clovers,” a local art historian told me. “I don’t care if they’re called ferns.”
“Me either,” I thought, when I transcribed our conversation. While I was at the site of her former home, I spent a lot of time looking at the front steps, the small piles of concrete rubble and brick, and the large swaths of the fabled four-leaf clovers. At some point I reached down and picked a small bunch. I had never seen a four-leaf clover, but these looked as I imagined they would. Though Morgan preached extensively about the end times, most of her paintings did not center on the destruction. Rather, her work emphasized the New Jerusalem that would come after. It makes sense for there to be four-leaf clovers in her yard. It’s impossible not to recognize the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. However, Morgan’s work prompts us not to focus on what the apocalypse destroys. She emphasized the symbols of hope that come with the creation of God’s kingdom here in our world. I still have my four-leaf clovers and they’re just as green as they were when I picked them. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re from heaven on earth. How did I find heaven on earth? I looked for what was destroyed.
Emily Suzanne Clark is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University. Her award-winning first book, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), explores the racial and religious politics of talking to the dead.