Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul

Introduction

Introduction When you get to New Orleans, then you'll know what Carnival's for! There is no more powerful symbol of life in New Orleans and the region around it than Mardi Gras. The annual festival along the central Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama is an emblem of the area's historical and cultural difference from the rest of the South. It also connects America's "Third Coast" to the Old Worlds of Mediterranean Europe, West Africa, and Native America. Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday"), or Carnival ("farewell to fleshly excess"), includes such events as costumed float parades, neighborhood marches or second -lines, street gatherings, informal parties, and formal balls in New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile, among other Gulf Coast cities and towns. In rural French southwest Louisiana, a Cajun and black Creole courir de Mardi Gras or Mardi Gras run is carried out by horseback-mounted revelers in more than a dozen communities. The city of New Orleans was once the nexus and cultural jewel of the French, and Spanish Caribbean, the North America colonies, and later the American South. The cultural and linguistic elements that interpenetrated and mixed in the city turned it into a center of creative cultural sources the likes of which the United States has never seen again-what folklorist Alan Lomax called the Athens of the New World. The best way to begin thinking about New Orleans as the rarified crossroads of artistic development in this hemisphere is to adjust our sense of geography, and visualize the city not as the bottom of the United States, but as the crown of the Caribbean. From this perspective , the entire city, its cultures, its musics, and its Mardi Gras, comes into intercontinental focus and takes on a new aura. 2 Introduction Although jazz from the city traveled north, east, and west just after the turn of the century, first in the hands of French Creole piano professorJelly Roll Morton and later in the singular trumpet solos ofAfrican American Louis Armstrong and the bluesy vibrato of Creole clarinetist Sidney Bechet, it is in Carnival that music must ultimately be celebrated as a totality in the city's nineteenth-century spider web grid of streets. This is the time when all classes and cultures animate the space both by asserting their turf and going where they shouldn't, sometimes to show what they are not supposed to in this special time and place. Carnival is New Orleans' most commanding symbol of culture as both organized and chaotic, individual and collective, accepted and licentious, sacredly situated on the calendar and profanely profound. Carnival-especially the black carnival of the Mardi Gras Indians, the Zulu Parades, the Baby Dolls and Bonesmen-has its home base in many of the neighborhoods that have been drowned by the recent natural disasters and political failings. In the wake of the flood and its sad aftermath, the Associated Press asked a poignant question, "As black New Orleanians regroup and put down roots elsewhere-some temporary, some not-many wonder : What will become of one of the nation's most complex AfricanAmerican cultures." The answer, alas, may come from bureaucrats who have never understood the complexity of the question-those who think in blunt racial terms of black and white without regard for culture, those who are hamstrung and mudslung by the disaster that every hydrologist, climatologist, and geologist in the region has predicted for three decades. In Louisiana there will be the traditional American upstate-downstate face-off, based here in the distinctions of the Anglo/Afro-Southern north and Afro-French Mediterranean south. Nationally, there is and will be sufficient finger pointing within the various private and government agencies that will bumble around wondering who's eligible for the moneys raised or allocated. If none of the neighborhoods built on the lowest grounds are left standing, or more significantly if few of their residents return, no carnival will Introduction 3 occur as we know it. No carnival, no New Orleans, and America's syncopated soul counterpoint to the increasingly acultural and monocultural mainstream will disappear. We recognize the complexity here. There are African Americans from inundated Gentilly to the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East who assert that no festivities can go forward when the dead are barely recovered, the housing about to be condemned, three-fourths of the city a dark and quiet carcass. There is a claim...