I rode into New Orleans just a week before the 20th anniversary of Katrina. I didn’t come for beads, Bourbon Street, or flashing lights. I came hunting for the sound under the skin of the city. That road carried me through Armstrong Park and into Congo Square—a place where the ground still remembers.
Congo Square and Tremé
Congo Square rests right by Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in America. Since the early 1800s, Tremé has been home to free Black folks, Creoles, and immigrants, a place where music, art, and activism grew side by side. Out of Tremé’s porches, churches, and streets came the roots of jazz and the fight for dignity.
And here in Congo Square, back in the 1700s and 1800s, both enslaved Africans and freemen gathered on Sundays. They danced, they prayed, and they drummed. That rhythm was freedom breaking through chains, a heartbeat louder than silence.
Even today, the ground holds the memory. At the base of one of the city’s oldest oaks, I saw orange peels, ashes, small offerings tucked into the roots. Not trash—testimony. Prayers left for the spirit of the place.
The Drum Circle
I showed up near the end of the drum session, but the sound was still rolling like thunder that don’t need no storm. Hands on skin, wood on air—each beat rising, falling, echoing off the trees. The rhythm stretched across strangers and neighbors alike.
In that circle, jobs didn’t matter. A teacher, a laborer, a wanderer—once the drums started, everybody stood on the same ground. The rhythm pulled us level, heartbeat to heartbeat.
At the center was Solomon, teaching with quiet fire. He showed how a tilt of the hand or snap of the wrist could make the drum sing bigger than you thought it could. His lesson was more than music—it was inheritance, passed down detail by detail, beat by beat.
The Beat Lives On
Twenty years after Katrina, Congo Square is still drumming. Every week, people gather—locals who’ve been here all their lives and newcomers who found a home after the storm. The circle is part schoolhouse, part prayer, part family reunion.
I came as a stranger, but even in those last beats I felt it—the weight of centuries, the strength of survival, the joy of sound that refuses to die. I left knowing the truth:
The drum don’t just make music.
The drum remembers.
The drum binds.
The drum heals.
It’s the drum that frees
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