I-Witness Central City

by Joanna Russo
Mondo Bizarro Company Member

I met the artist Jeffrey Cook on a windy day in early September 2008.  I was carrying a camera and a tripod, trotting alongside Mondo Bizarro co-founders Bruce France and Nick Slie and collaborator Melisa Cardona as Jeffrey led us to the corner of Carondolet and Felicity St., New Orleans.  “That’s the tree,” he said and pointed.  We started filming.  

Jeffrey was there that morning as the first official participant in the current incarnation of Mondo Bizarro’s I-Witness Central City project.  I-Witness Central City is a storymapping project based out of the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans.  While news broadcasts depict this area as a hot spot for drugs and violence, those who live or work here know it to be much more.  I-Witness Central City aids local residents in reclaiming their history and neighborhood through sharing personal, place-based stories.  We film the stories on location wherever they took place and then we tack up a sign with STORY SITE printed on it in big letters above a phone number.  Anyone walking down the street can see one of these signs, call the number and listen to a person’s voice narrating a story that happened right there.  The stories can also be seen on our website, www.mondobizarro.org, or heard at the public celebration which we hold periodically.  For these parties, we commission local artists to create pieces about specific locations within Central City and present their work alongside the stories themselves.  
 
The story Jeffrey told us was about a tree house he and some buddies built when he was a kid.  He talked about having to “put your little dukes up” and fight the neighborhood kids for the territory, but how eventually they all became friends.  An older gentleman helped them construct the tree house and nail some boards into the trunk to serve as steps.  When it rained, Jeffrey and his buddies would cover the holes in the roof with whatever came to hand, so that over time, the place became a collage, one of Jeffrey’s earliest works of art.  “It was sort of like our fortress, it was our space ship, our time traveler,” he said.  At the time of the filming, the treehouse was gone but the tree itself—with little bits of ladder still attached—stood within a fenced-off lot, sold to developers a couple years back.  And should they tear the tree down, Jeffrey vowed, he would “monitor that because when they do, I’m going to be over there and I definitely want to make sure that I get a piece of it.  What I’m going to do with it, I have no idea but trust me, if I have to spend the night . . . I will get me a piece of my history from that tree.”  

On April 7th 2009, Jeffrey Cook passed away.  His death was quick and unexpected, leaving a community of people—people whose lives he had touched as a teacher, an artist and a friend—grappling with how to honor his life, console his family and celebrate his legacy.  Suddenly the story we’d filmed took on a new purpose and meaning.  Many of those closest to Jeffrey knew nothing about his connection to that avenue and that pock-marked tree.  Listening to the I-Witness story in the wake of his passing, friends decided that recognizing the tree was something tangible they could do for him.  Jeffrey wouldn’t be around to save a piece of his childhood from demolition, but others could.  Members of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center—Jeffrey’s longtime artistic home—snuck through the wire fence at Felicity St., traipsed through the undergrowth and removed one of the small wooden planks Jeffrey and his friends had tacked up to use as steps.  The Ashe members presented the plank to Jeffrey’s mother, who’d just listened to the I-Witness story and learned something new about her son.  

Not all of the I-Witness stories have had such an impact as Jeffrey’s.  Many of them exist simply as an afternoon a Central City resident or friend shared with us and our cameras, recounting a specific memory that would later be heard by a stranger who passed by the sign and called the number.  One of the most gratifying aspects of the project for us has been getting to hear to the audio responses of people who’ve listened to a story on the street and left comments afterwards. “That was a heck of a story . . . I just can’t believe everything that happened there on that corner and how that little Café Reconcile got started,” said one person.  “I loved it.  This was a wonderful idea.  I found it very interesting and I was so happy when I dialed the number that it was a positive story, not something about somebody getting hurt or killed here but something about the history,” said another.  Even if the story goes no further than this, we feel the project has succeeded in its aims.  

And what happened with Jeffrey Cook underscores the fact that we never know where these stories might lead or how much they might mean to somebody at some point.  The lot where Jeffrey’s treehouse once stood is now home to a brand new condominium complex.  The tree is gone.  But Jeffrey’s mother still has the steps her son ascended.