Congo Square occupies a patch of ground where enslaved Africans transformed their one day of freedom into something extraordinary.

From 1744, hundreds gathered here each Sunday afternoon after morning mass, setting up markets where they sold handmade wares to earn money toward their freedom. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the drums emerged and the dancing began.

An early visitor in 1819 captured the scene perfectly: enslaved Africans would "meet on the green by the swamp, and rock the city with their Congo dances." That description marks the first time "rock" was used as a musical term. The rhythmic heartbeat of the bamboula and calinda dances, accompanied by narrow drums crafted in African styles, planted the seeds that would bloom into jazz.

But Congo Square wasn't solely African. Choctaw and Houmas Indians also ran markets here, adding feathers, headdresses, and their own rhythmic traditions to the exotic sounds. Voodoo gris-gris bags filled with bones, colored stones, and graveyard dust changed hands for protection and luck.

VoiceMap's Walking the Tremé tour uses Congo Square to reveal how "all things sacred to New Orleans bubbled up" from this neighborhood, tracing jazz's African roots through the very ground where enslaved people turned suffering into transcendent music.