By Brian Thevenot via The Times Picayune

In the January 30th, 2009 issue of the Time’s Picayune, Arthur Roger Gallery artist, Willie Birch, was featured in the front page article about the growing apprehension with the increase of violent crimes in New Orleans neighborhoods. Birch’s work, which is rooted in the daily life and celebratory rituals of New Orleans neighborhoods, addresses issues related to the survival and culture of those living in these areas.  After recent violent outbursts in his 7th Ward neighborhood, Birch has dedicated much of his art to the documentation of these events in the hope that his work will communicate the need to put an end to this violence.

A 7th Ward artist, pastor, principal and others wrestle with the violence that wracks their neighborhoods.

Willie Birch had talked to 20-year-old Corderro Davis less than an hour before his murder, on the corner of Pauger and North Villere streets, half a block from Birch’s 7th Ward home.

As a crowd gathered around Davis’ body, Birch unleashed his rage and grief.

“This could be you!” he yelled at a group of young men. “Is this all you want out of your life?

Later, he chided a police captain about what he saw as an undignified handling of the scene: the body exposed too long, blood and brain tissue left in the street. The next day, Birch and four other men brought brooms and buckets to the corner and scrubbed away the carnage. The act lifted them spiritually and today drives them to teach and counsel young men at The Porch, a 7th Ward cultural center they founded.

After Davis’ slaying in late 2007, the violence continued apace last year in the 7th Ward, with at least 19 people killed. The patterns of murder in the old neighborhood, once a fabled breeding ground for African-American artists, lawyers and teachers, mirrored those seen across the city, where 179 people were killed in 2008.

Most 7th Ward victims were young black men, many killed in daylight. Most deaths barely registered outside circles of friends and family. And the vast majority remain unsolved.

As an artist and native New Orleanian who lived in New York City for two decades, Birch, 66, says he has one foot in poverty, the other in aristocracy. He has tried, with difficulty, to imbue associates in both realms with appropriate outrage about the slaughter in downtrodden neighborhoods.

Since Davis’ shooting death, Birch has devoted much of his art to chronicling violence, including a piece depicting the cleansing of the Davis murder scene that was part of the international Prospect.1 exhibition. He draws a parallel between how people view his art and how they respond to the stubborn murder epidemic.

“To me, I’m making American art; to a lot of folks, I’m making black art,” he said. “It’s the same with the murder problem — people see it as a black issue. . . . How can we get people to see that we live in one world?”

— Moral awakening —

A few blocks from Birch’s house, the Rev. Bill Terry, a white, pony-tailed priest, has wrestled with the same vexing questions, within himself and among his relatively diverse but majority-white congregation at St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on Esplanade Avenue, the 7th Ward’s upriver edge.

Last year, after the church posted a simple tribute — a list of each 2008 murder victim’s name — survivors of violence sought out Terry. The encounters, he said, drove home the ache and isolation survivors endure in a city with, as Terry puts it, a unique and profound acceptance of bloodshed as routine and immutable.

A mourning mother visited, brimming with grief and moral dilemmas. She knew her murdered son had gone bad, lived a lifestyle that contributed to his death. He may even have shot someone previously.

But she needed somebody to know that she had tried, so hard, to raise him well. That she had taken him to church as a boy. She wanted the priest to affirm that, despite her son’s sins, his life and her grief still had value.

“I know he did all those things, but why did my baby have to die?” she asked.

When she left him, Terry went alone to his office and sobbed inconsolably. He continues to struggle with the quandary she presented.

“What do I tell a mother who lost a son who, by her own admission, was a miscreant?” he asked. “It’s a challenge every pastor in the city has to face.”

Terry and his congregation continue to memorialize all lost lives, and to direct much of their money and volunteer time to programs giving youths alternatives to the lure of crime. Yet he knows it will take a collective citywide effort to sustain real change. And that, he said, requires a moral awakening.

“Until everybody cries . . . because they can’t bear the grief of the slaughter, until Uptown residents decide they’re willing to double their property taxes, until downtown residents stop fighting about whether the Treme or the 7th Ward is the crown jewel of African-American culture and commit to . . . solutions, people will continue to die,” he said.

— ‘You can’t be nosy’ —

Deep in the 7th Ward, people separate themselves from the murder epidemic in their own ways.

Trenice Seymour, 29, lives with her three children in the 2500 block of Pauger Street, across from the house where the bodies of three men were discovered, fatally shot, in mid-December.

She still views her block as a relatively safe one, with mostly homeowners and people who watch out for each other.

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” she said. “The 7th Ward’s not all bad; there’s bad areas.”

Still, she keeps a tight rein on her 13-year-old daughter.

“She goes right there, or right there,” she said, pointing at two nearby houses, “or my sister’s on Elysian Fields. Anywhere else, no.”

Besides, the girl likes to stay in the house, she said. The mother, too, prefers keeping to herself. “If I’m in my house, I hear no evil, see no evil,” she said. “And I’m not coming out for nothing.”

The triple killing shocked and angered her. “It was a hurting feeling, even though I didn’t know them,” she said, adding that the victims had lived in the house only about three weeks.

Seymour sees the killing as an aberration in a good area.

“Now, past Roman Street, that’s a bad area. The only time I’m there, I’m driving through. I don’t even look at them,” she said of the men hanging out there. “You can’t be nosy around here.”

The bad area, past Roman Street, is less than two blocks from her home.

— Surrounded by danger —

Two people on St. Anna Episcopal’s murder list were relatives of students at nearby McDonogh 35 Senior High School, where veteran Principal Philip White knocks on wood as he notes that none of his charges have become victims.

“But we can’t be naive,” he said, standing in front of the school as band and dance teams practiced inside the high fence that separates the school from the neighborhood. Groups of men with red eyes sat outside sipping booze as uniformed students piled onto buses.

“We know them,” White said, referring to potentially dangerous men in the neighborhood. “It’s a survival skill, learning how to live in an environment where, at any given time, something dangerous can happen very quickly. (Students) have to know when to keep their mouths shut, when to turn and run, when to stand up and fight.”

At the same time, White refuses to fill his school with legions of security guards or metal detectors, saying “you can’t make schools jails” or live in fear.

Safeguarding students requires keeping the school open late, both for extracurricular activities and in case someone simply needs a safe place. The faculty forges close relationships with students, White said, so they know when a student loses a friend or relative to gunfire, or if a neighborhood beef is brewing. And they can keep the students from getting sucked into the city’s myriad cycles of retaliation.

“We provide an outlet for them to breathe,” White said.

— Trying to forgive —

Ed Buckner stood up at his son’s funeral last spring and told a lie.

He said he had forgiven whoever shot the 26-year-old five times in the head outside a Gretna club. In truth, he still yearned to hunt down and kill the killer.

Detectives could not identify a suspect. They rarely called the victim’s family. Buckner wallowed in helplessness and self-doubt, wondering whether he truly had been the good father he had always considered himself.

Buckner, director of the 7th Ward cultural center The Porch and a friend of Birch’s, had spent 25 years coaching football at Willie Hall Playground, near the St. Bernard public housing development. He tried to save those boys, make them into men.

“And I couldn’t save my own son?” he asks himself.

A few months before the death of his son, Brandon, Buckner had helped Birch mop up the blood on Pauger Street. Yet now, in his grief, he had to fight the urge to spill the blood of his son’s killer.

Usually when someone he knows dies, street chatter brings Buckner likely suspects quickly, long before the police know, if they ever find out. But, he discovered, the chatter never reaches you when it is your son that dies.

“People feel they shouldn’t tell you,” Buckner said. “They have a fear of you retaliating, and they don’t want it known that they told you” out of fear for their own safety.

Months passed, with more tears, more questions every morning when Buckner woke up. Eventually, he turned to the Scriptures for solace and for the strength to forgive and soothe the pain of his family. He pondered how God had given Jesus to the world to die in payment for others’ sins.

“I wasn’t ready to give my son to the world,” he said.

But he knew he needed to let go of his anger, to set an example for the younger men in his extended family. He did not want them walking through life bent on avenging Brandon’s death.

Buckner finally allowed himself to empathize with his son’s killer. He must be suffering, he thought, condemned to a life of hiding from police and people who want him dead.

Buckner was not about to let himself or anyone in his family suffer the same fate.

— Value of a life —

Just after Buckner, Birch and the others finished cleaning the Corderro Davis murder scene, gunfire just a block away startled them as a hail of bullets wounded another man.

Three weeks later, police arrested or issued warrants for five young men in connection with the Davis murder. But in March, prosecutors refused the cases against all of them, citing a lack of evidence.

Now, one of the few records of the Davis murder is the art Birch created from the crime scene.

Birch continues to ponder why the young men in his neighborhood suffer an alienation so deep that it can obliterate the value of their neighbors’ lives. Like so many older African-Americans, he yearns for the tight-knit community of his youth. He wonders whether, when many African-Americans bought into the ‘I-am-somebody’ notion during the civil rights era, they traded a collectivist culture that protected its own for a get-mine culture that kills its own.

“I worry about anybody who’s been oppressed moving into the position of being the oppressor,” he said. “You devalue that which looks like you. You hate that which looks like you. And the violence is getting more heinous. To shoot somebody 10 times in the face, you really must hate yourself.”

For a while longer, Birch’s painting will hang in the front gallery of the New Orleans Museum of Art, a portrait of the beauty and horror of the 7th Ward. It will be viewed mostly by art patrons who will never visit his neighborhood, and missed by most who live there.

And Birch, for a while longer, will be left to wonder if his message got through.