It’s Carnival Time!

In New Orleans those three words tend to inspire either the expectation of unbridled joy or the desperate need to flee the craziness. I’m definitely in the former camp.

When I first came to this city, I viewed Carnival parades as tourist fodder, and I stayed well clear of the thing for nine years. Then a friend invited me to ride in the Zulu parade, a distinct honor. Zulu is a social aid and pleasure club, one of the organizations that sprang up to provide mutual assistance and grand entertainment to the city’s Black community. The parade started more than a century ago as an answer by the well-to-do Creoles to the strict whites-only policy of the Carnival organizations, known as krewes (pronounced “crews”).

It was an answer, with a satirical twist. Zulu riders, people of color, actually “blacked up”, donning blackface and fright wigs and grass skirts to parody white cliches of blackness. So it was that on a Mardi Gras morning, I was at the Hilton Hotel downtown at 5 a,m. to be blacked up and otherwise accoutred for my stint on the float. Weird enough. But the parade, through both white and black neighborhoods, occurred on a rainy morning, and the crowd was sparse. I recall my then-new wife chasing after our float, just to generate some sense of excitement. I handed out a few decorated coconuts—the trademark “throw” from this parade—and, after four hours, I was pooped. And hooked.

Carnival comes to us from the Catholic calendar, the Tuesday before Lent (the word literally means “meat goes away”. The French in New Orleans began referring to the day as Mardi Gras, literally Fat Tuesday. The occasion is celebrated not just in New Orleans, but in Mobile, AL, Brazil, Venice (the Italian one), the Caribbean, even Southern Germany. At one point I wanted to make a docuseries of all the places that observe the day, and all the different ways it looks and sounds, and the different relationships it has to the local cultures. Once, at my only visit to the British Museum, I saw a quintet of glass display cases featuring costumes worn by Carnival celebrants in the Bolivian Andes. They bore a striking resemblance to what you see on the streets of New Orleans, yet there’s no history of any contact between the two groups. And the legend beneath the display cases said that the Andeans celebrated on the Saturday before Fat Tuesday with a parade of…brass bands.

Today in the Crescent City there is the Mardi Gras beloved by tourists—the huge machine-towed floats, the—yes—brass bands, and on Bourbon Street balconies, the periodic revealing of female breasts. And there is the same day celebrated in dozens of different ways in the neighborhoods—the coming out of Mardi Gras Indians in the morning, marching in suits the participants hand-jeweled over the preceding months, the meticulously-designed humorous costumes of participants in the St. Ann’s parade in the Marigny neighborhood, and so much more.

No business is conducted on Mardi Gras day in New Orleans, and none is needed. But in this city, Carnival is a weeks-long eruption of semi-organized joy, beginning on January 6 with a beautiful parade celebrating the life of Joan of Arc! There are big scheduled parades, and spontaneous parades, even a dog parade. It’s hard to think of another occasion when so many dogs march, while so many other dogs watch, and there’s almost no barking and absolutely no fighting. Somehow the dogs get it. Or they’re sedated to the bone.

For perspective, on the same day in England, “Shrove Tuesday”, people eat pancakes.

Too much perspective.