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Mardi Gras

Billie Louise Jones

    Mardi Gras parades began on impulse, with high-spirited Creole youths riding from house to house for a last celebration before the Lenten fast. Over time, the parades and balls grew into big festivities that possessed the French Quarter. Pagan, no doubt; but wonderful. New Orleans believes in parades and does them better than any other city and, showing its own perspective on value, shuts down business for a parade. The richest men spend lavishly on floats, dream for years of being King for a night, virtually taxing themselves to please the masses, and remain anonymous, merged in their role. And the throws – strings of bright colored beads bestowed and received as largess! These throws, treasures tonight, trash tomorrow, are the vanity of human wishes. The floats became more and more fantastic creations. The parades grew in number and grew literally – the gorgeous floats became too big for the narrow Vieux Carrè streets. So the parades were moved out of the French Quarter to St. Charles and Canal.
    Impulse took over the Quarter again. Neighborhoods and groups of all types, even Hari Krishna, took their own parades to the Quarter to have their day, their floats riding on flatbeds and pickups, their throws, their bands, their official police escort. Some of the groups exist only to celebrate Mardi Gras. There was a special French Quarter parade presided over by jazzman Pete Fountain, one of the exemplars of the Quarter, who rode in a French Quarter mule carriage. All these parades are just as real as the Rex and Comus parades.
    A day care school paraded around the French Quarter on tricycles. Everything stopped for them. It was as much a parade as any of them! They had a policeman to stop traffic for them. They had masks and costumes and throws. Crepe paper ribbons of purple, green, and gold, the Mardi Gras colors, wrapped their handlebars. They had a King, and he had a gold foil crown and a regal cape. And because he was as much a King as any Rex or Comus, he was entitled to the homage of a Mardi Gras crowd, the plea and demand.
    “Throw me something, mister!”

*

    Ghosts and goblins and clowns, studded leather and rhinestone monokinis, velvet and lace and blue jeans, Elizabethan princesses of any sex, women’s bare tits and men’s bare butts, faces painted humorously dramatically fantastically.
    A man stepped out of the random drift through the streets. He opened a folding chair on the street corner. He was a short, swarthy man with a full black moustache; he wore a battered black fedora and old khakis. He took an accordion out of its case and left the case open on the street. The accordion was not a little squeeze box. It was a big instrument with many keys and buttons, and it was lovingly polished. He pulled out some merry chords. He laughed while he played, and his good nature and the lively music snagged the flow of the crowd. Listeners formed a circle around the musician’s corner.
    His face changed into a sensitivity, almost sadness, that took people unawares. He drew “Begin the Beguin” out of the accordion. The instrument gave it a different sound than what people were used to, a rich sound, full of longing, that made it ring anew. The words sang in the mind.
    A couple stepped out of the crowd and began to dance in the cleared space. They were, maybe, fifty; very thin, very well kept, not finished yet. He was dressed in a top hat and tails, she in a feathered chiffon dress. They were more than graceful in the way they moved together; their bends and dips and changes showed the music, the longing people sang in the minds. As the music came to an end, they drew together in a final pose that distilled the lost illusions and undying hopes in the song. They held it an extra beat into silence.
    People applauded, and they walked away into the crowd.

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