Introduction: Ways inside the Circles of Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras, as "traditional" and "authentic" a festive event as can be found in this country, is at one and the same time the active site of all the contemporary forces-computer technology, mass marketing, film and video production, organized tourism, the self-conscious staging of social memory-that have made tradition and authenticity such quaintly troublesome terms. On the same Mardi Gras day, in the same town, there are those who intimately relive the times when everyone spoke French and when all participants, masked and unmasked, knew each other so well that they might as well have been relatives (and most often were); and there are also those who scan the celebration most immediately through the lens of a video camera, seeing and feeling in its theatrics more or less the same things that would be seen and felt by a million mutual strangers during a nationally televised broadcast.

The fact that Mardi Gras can be a distanced spectacle, even to the citizens of its own community, does nothing to lessen its extraordinary hold on the hearts of its core participants. Neither traditional nor authentic comes very close to describing the intensity of involvement in Mardi Gras apparent in Tee Mamou in 1998, when Capitaine Gerald Frugé died. Most of the outsiders-and there were many-who had seen him lead the annual Mardi Gras runs would have guessed him at least ten years younger than his 52 years, and yet, at his death, having captained 27 Mardi Gras, he was as permanent a fixture of the festival as any such protean celebration can possess.

Tee Mamou mounts two annual Mardi Gras runs. The first, involving as few as 20 or as many as 50 women, is often witnessed by more than 100 outsider onlookers and unfolds on the Saturday preceding Mardi Gras. The second, involving an all-male group, performs the following Tuesday, on Mardi Gras day.

After half a century of robust health, Gerald suddenly contracted cancer in the summer of 1997. He declined quickly, made several visits to hospitals, and by January 1998 was clearly gravely ill. As Mardi Gras approached, Gerald was in a hospital in Houston. He made it absolutely clear that he wanted Mardi Gras to be celebrated "the way we always do," no matter where, or if, he might be on that day.

On Saturday, or Samedi Gras, the masked women begged and clowned with characteristic gusto-to all appearances as they always had. The only outward sign that things were other than they should be was taped to the back windshield of the cab of the truck that Gerald always drove when leading the motorized festival procession: a life-sized photograph of his face, looking out over the Mardi Gras from his seat in the truck, as he was slipping into a coma 200 miles away in Houston.

As the Tee Mamou women continued playfully rearranging reality for friends and strangers, the men driving the processional trucks learned of Gerald's condition by cell phone. He underwent surgery that day and died the next. By Tuesday, Gerald was back in Tee Mamou, as he always had been on Mardi Gras. As he lay in Ardoin's funeral home in Iota, Tee Mamou's male maskers rode through the neighboring country, playing out their customary begging, whipping, and chicken-chasing games while wearing black armbands. Cars and pick-ups moved back and forth between the funeral home and the moving site of the masked procession, so friends and neighbors could visit both the Mardi Gras and its captain. Gerald, like Carnival itself, was buried on Ash Wednesday.

Nothing written about Cajun Country Mardi Gras could more clearly bring home the fact that Mardi Gras is, for its core participants, the primary Day of Obligation, a matter of life and death. There are those who claim to "live for Mardi Gras" (Lindahl 1996b:133) and who once a year play the game with such intensely focused wildness that they make good on that claim. These are also the people who, like Gerald Frugé and the heart of his Tee...