Let’s Go on Down to the Second Line

Like an artery through the city of New Orleans, you can hop on the streetcar named ‘cemeteries’ along Canal Street in the bustling French Quarter, full of life, and in a short time be surrounded by a variety of above ground mausoleums. The same streetcar line will take passengers almost like the river Styx to the quiet solemnity of the cemeteries and then return the passengers to the bright livelihood of the French Quarter. The duality of a life lived and the inevitability of death is a thread in the fabric that is New Orleans.

Between the second lines that mark the beginnings of weddings and lives lived together to the second lines that mark the lives lived in the afterlife, the co-mingling is ever-present. This book is an ethnographic attempt to explore New Orleans death practices and examine its rich culture. New Orleans appears to capture people’s interests – either for its ‘spooky’ aura, cultural importance, or its race, class and gender issues – and readers can get a simultaneous sense of how importantly and ‘normally’ New Orleans thinks of, handles, and discusses death.