T-Shirts Honor Casualties of Mean Streets

A grieving mother leaned on the counter of the T-shirt shop as she placed an order for a dozen shirts printed with her murdered 24-year-old son’s smiling face.

Mothers and girlfriends are typical customers at Ricky Lewis’ store. When he opened his Video Images in 1994, Lewis envisioned congratulatory shirts for graduations and birthdays. Instead, he says, 90% of his business is in shirts honoring people who died unexpectedly.

His business is thriving, open six days a week, turning out “dead man shirts” printed with enlarged photographs of victims, usually young and poor and black. Emblazoned shirts, buttons, handkerchiefs and caps from past orders cover the shop’s walls.

A camouflage-clad youth holds an assault rifle in one T-shirt picture.

Another sports a bandanna and squeezes a cigar in his lips.

Still another is laid out in a coffin, his smile showcasing his “slugs,” a row of gold-covered teeth.

“My clients are mostly young people, people born in the ‘70s,” said Lewis as he processed the woman’s order. “Every now and then people will come in to buy memorials for older people, people who were probably not murdered.”

Mourners wear the shirts at wakes and funerals in this city better known for its unique jazz send-offs and elaborate aboveground graves.

“It’s a tribute to my son,” said the grieving mother when asked why she was putting his picture on a T-shirt. “It’s another way to remember him by.”

Beneath the faces of young men in their glory, the shirts may include images as varied as doves, marijuana leaves, “R.I.P.” headstones or dice depicting the number of the city ward where the victim lived.

Often there are epitaphs alluding to gritty undercurrents of the city’s street culture: “Don’t Weep and Mourn Over My Shoulder, I Died As a Back Bay Soldier” celebrates one young man’s life. Or: “Another Soldier Gone” and “Bury Me A G,” slang for gangster.

Silas Lee, an instructor of sociology at Xavier University of Louisiana, said the dead-man shirts are favored in areas with high incidence of violent crime.

“Funerals are a formalized ritual and memorial. This has the same application,” Lee said.

The rich create foundations or scholarships as memorials for their loved ones, he said. “The T-shirts represent that same thing for people in less affluent areas.”

Catina, a 25-year-old woman living in a violent New Orleans neighborhood, said it’s unfortunate but she has several of the shirts in her closet.

“We grew up with these people,” she said when asked why she buys them. “It’s just what we do to remember them by, you know. It lets others know that this is my boy, my friend, and I’ve got this much love for him to want to carry him with me. He’ll be with me even when he’s gone.”

Usually, she said, family and friends wear the shirts at “second lines,” informal parades that form behind the funeral procession and lead to an organized party or reception.

Catina, who spoke on condition her last name not be used, said people don’t buy or wear the shirts to turn the victims into heroes or martyrs.

“It’s to remember them as you knew them, no other reason,” she said.

Nicole Stripling, 22, said she bought a shirt after her friend was found shot to death in his car.

“I didn’t want my last memory of him to be of that,” she said. “It’s our way of showing love for him.”

The shirts are more than a one-time tribute. Survivors, from the very young to people in their 40s and 50s, wear them casually. It’s not uncommon to see them worn in grocery stores and shopping malls, by people getting off a bus or walking in a neighborhood.

“I still wear mine,” Stripling said. “When I first started seeing them, I asked, ‘What’s the big point?’ Now, I know. It’s like, you still have that person being a part of you.”

At the Video Images shop, Lewis said his business got a boost after rapper Master P, a New Orleans native, mentioned the dead-man shirts in his song “Is There a Heaven 4 a Gangsta,” which includes the lyrics:

Damn, now that he’s in the dirt,

Pourin’ out beer for my dead homey,

A bunch of rest-in-peace T-shirts,

With his [expletive] picture on it.

That kind of national exposure also helped spread the memorial T-shirt idea. Gang members as far away as California receive similar tributes.

Lewis’ shirts cost $15 to $30 apiece, depending on whether he prints words on the front and back. A typical order is 12 or more.

And death can bring repeat customers.

“They come back for birthdays or anniversaries,” Lewis said, “and bring a different picture and buy more shirts.”