Meet The Culture Bearer: Cinnamon Black
Resa “Cinnamon Black” Bazile has many roles in New Orleans culture. She is a Baby Doll, Voodoo Priestess, and a Masking Indian Queen. Growing up in the Calliope Projects she remembers watching Dolls pass by her home wearing red satin dresses and feather boas, which scandalized her grandmother who made her promise not to wear a boa. In 74 at the age of 14 she wore a homemade raggedy doll costume with her friends that she credits as her first time coming out as a Baby Doll. “Being a Baby Doll was one of my first dreams, and is always my heart.”
“Being a Baby Doll was one of my first dreams, and is always my heart.”
In the 80s and 90s there weren’t many people practicing the tradition of masking as Baby Dolls, which led Cinnamon Black to connect with Merline Kimble and Antoinette K-Doe. The two wanted to bring back the tradition by starting their own groups. Kimble’s grandmother was one of the first Baby Dolls to walk the streets of New Orleans as a Treme Gold Digger, and Merline wanted to restart her family’s group. While K-Doe wanted to start the Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls, Cinnamon and her daughter sat on the sidelines during these discussions trying to decide what group they would join. In the end she joined both in the tradition, and eventually started her own group under the blessing of Uncle Lionel. “I was told by Uncle Lionel that you need to start your own group. So he and Mr. Al [Jackson] gave me the title called the Treme Million Dollar Baby Dolls. [Uncle Lionel] said, “I think you look like one of my Baby Dolls.” With Lionel’s blessing, Al Jackson gave Cinnamon the club’s 1924 chart to make it official. “That made my whole dream come true, but it wasn’t complete though. Cause we were just a few girls starting to be Baby Dolls, and then the storm came and then we had to struggle to try to get it to come back. Now today we are fortunate there’s fifteen or twenty more groups of Baby Dolls, and now my dream has come true that dolls are all over the city.”
“[Uncle Lionel] said, “I think you look like one of my Baby Dolls.” That made my whole dream come true.”
In 80 Cinnamon Black won a Marie Laveau look alike competition that started her down the road of becoming a Voodoo Priestess. “They say I look like [Marie Laveau], but I am me and she is she.” Because of the competition she began working at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum in the French Quarter at 724 Dumaine St. She started as a dancer doing rituals with snakes, and then trained under other Voodoo Priestesses of the time until she became one herself. This was a good fit for Cinnamon since she had grown up in a spiritual household where her grandfather taught ministers to be ministers. Today she still works at the museum.