LEJ's Blog

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LEJ's Louisiana,

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

Your comments and corrections

are welcome

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February 2023

LEJ's Mardi Gras Glossary

and History

BY Leonard Earl Johnson

www.LEJ.world

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LEJ dressed to ride,

Parc Sans Souci, Lafayette

photo credit Frank Parsley

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LEJ with Mardi Gras Maidens

Faubourg Marigny, NOLa

Photo credit: Anson Trahan

~ for high definition click image ~

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Dedicated to

William Kenneth Holditch

1933 ~ 2022

Professor Emeritus of English, and Tennessee Williams scholar at the University of New Orleans.

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The Following are Carnival terms used by everyone in Louisiana,

from Rex to thee.

Follow the revelry as you read them and become one with the Greatest Free Show on Earth.

There are many Carnival terms here, and a few historical mystical Louisiana stories sprinkled amongst them.

Take them with Communal wine and a pinch of Sadar salt.

Take them as needed.

Take them!

~ Carnival in Louisiana ~

www.LEJ.world
© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

Janis Turk and Karissa Kary photo Janis Turk

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Many the Yankee trader awakens after Mardi Gras with moss-stuffed voodoo dolls staring at them from atop their desks and computers

They come, sway with our musicians and dine with our chefs

They dance home with our rhythms in their ears, and a peptic re-flux in their stomach

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We show them our "dis and dats," and they fill our hotels;

we give them beads, and they pay our rent and laugh at our jokes.

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"Ever hear the one about the tourist who ate the paper bag at Antoine's?"

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Be Advised:

Carnival is like the Catholic Church,

the deeper you look the more there is to see.

Carnival celebrants / NOLa

Carnival Season
Begins every year on the Christian Holy Day of Epiphany, January 6. It ends at different days on the calendar ~ but always on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent ~ a day that, by Canon Law, changes location in the month.

This is done to keep Lent ever forty-suffering days long. To achieve this wrongheaded goal joyful-Carnival must

shrink some years.

It Swells Others.

2018 was one of Carnival's shortest seasons.

2019 one of its longest. 2020 was declared a COVID 19 'Super Spreader', and 2021's didn't exist at all, except as a state of mind.

Shrovetide (les Jours Gras) is the last three days of every Carnival Season. Sunday is for going to Mass; Monday and Tuesday are called Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras ~ Fat Monday and Fat Tuesday respectively ~ and they are for everything you probably think Carnival is about.

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LEJ and Alyse Morgan shopping for Mardi Gras

Rêve Coffee Roasters, Lafayette

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Mardi Gras dates

March 1, 2022

February 21, 2023

February 13, 2024

March 4, 2025

February 17, 2026

February 9, 2027
~ www.LEJ.world

"It moves,"
L. A. Norma says,
"it's alive!"

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Definitions

Ball (tableaux ball) ~ A masked party featuring performances of scenes in still-life representing a specific theme. Can be deadly dull. Can be uproariously funny.

Movable tableaux on Carnival Day (Mardi Gras) are the funniest. Who can forget the Westbank Big Hair Emergency Repair Krewe marching along, stopping to fix misshapen bouffants along parade routes of yore?

Boeuf Gras ~ The fatted bull or ox in the Rex parade ~ representing sweetly excessive death-to-the-fat, and the beginning of Lenten abstinence (true death). Said by New Orleans journalists-emeriti and Mardi Gras overseers Arthur Hardy, and Errol Laborde to be the most photographed sight of Carnival.

Boeuf Gras ~ Rex parade ~ Mardi Gras ~ NOLa

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Captain ~ Leader of each Mardi Gras organization.

Court ~ The king, queen, maids and dukes of each Mardi Gras organization. There is a hierarchy here culminating in Rex (Latin for King) However, no court or krewe is more important than the one you are in.

Rex Doubloon Wikipedia

Rex ~ One of the "Big Four" oldest krewes of New Orleans Carnival. Founded in 1872 and calling itself, The School of Design. Ponder such a krewe name ~ with its religious, mythological and historical resonance ~ and you will see dimly into the mysteries of Carnival.

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Doubloons ~ Coin-like objects bearing some

Krewe insignia on one side and the parade theme on the obverse. Doubloons were first introduced 1959-60 by New Orleans artist H. Alvin Sharpe. They were gold colored aluminum and first thrown by Rex in 1960. For a few years ~ even after being adopted by other krewes ~ they were generically called Rex Doubloons. Today doubloons are thrown by many krewes in various colors, themes and names.

Favor ~ This is a personalized souvenir. Given by organization members to friends. More precious than float throws.

Invitation ~ A non-transferable printed request for attendance at a Mardi Gras ball.

King Cake ~ This is an oval bread or cake gussied up (traditionally brioche but today anything).

King Cake with Baby

Sugared, like a 'Brioche Royal'
with Mardi Gras tri colored sugars, and baked with a plastic baby doll hidden inside.

It is called 'King Cake' because it commemorates the visit of the Three Kings to see the Baby Jesus, literally a Christian epiphany.

Epiphany means a first-appearance or manifestation of a divine being. In this case, the three Kings (representing the peoples of the world) seeing for the first time the Baby Jesus, a new God (at least a new branch of an old one).

The baby doll in the King Cake is loosely seen as the Epiphanous Baby Jesus, and concurrently all temporal joys-on-Earth.

Widely overlooked by brethren of the secular press, the 2021 U. S. Capitol Insurrection occurred on Epiphany ~ January 6 ~ symbolic timing for religious minded romantics and blood lusting revolutionaries.

"We live in curious times," L. A. Norma tells our pedicab driver.

Songwriter Al Johnson's beloved Carnival Time opens with the line, "The Green Room is smokin' and the Plaza's burnin' down / Throw my Baby out the window, let those joints burn down..." An act of rescue or callous disregard? Or, as we see it in Louisiana, both!

The person who finds the doll in their cake slice is crowned "King." A king without duties other than buying the next colorful cake and giving the next King Cake Party.

In New Orleans, the first Carnival parade each year is organized by a happily knit group of swells on January 6, also known as Twelfth Night, King's Day, King Cake Day. This krewe calls themselves the Phuny Phorty Phellows.

Phunny Phorty Phellows Street Car Parade / NOLA.com

They are made up of a 1981 incarnation of 1878 revelers ~ who neither looked nor acted much like anyone today.

Originally parading on foot on Mardi Gras Day, behind Rex. Today they ride the Saint Charles Streetcar in colorful costumes on Epiphany night. Sometimes with brassy music. Around street car stops and the Car Barn are good spots to see this first-of-season show.

Krewe ~ a generic term for all Carnival organizations and clubs. Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology are sources for half the krewe names. Some clubs are named after neighborhoods, while others are named after historical figures or places.

Photos courtesy of Krewe of Rio en Lafayette

Amid large parades in Acadiana's Hub City of Lafayette rolls the samba-swinging Krewe of Carnival en Rio.

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Krewes are chartered by cities as non-profit entities and are financed by dues, by sale of krewe-emblemed merchandise to members (who give them as favors to friends; not the same as the 'throws' tossed from parade floats) and by fund-raising projects.

Lundi Gras ~ French for Fat Monday (Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday). "Fat" is a broad term for prosperity and joy, the very things being done in Carnival-excess before somber Lent takes them all away.

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The Day before Mardi Gras from 1897 to 1917 was celebrated by arrival of Rex aboard a steamboat on the Mississippi River. In 1987, under the New Orleans Mayoralty of Sidney Barthelemy, a local book learned

Courtesy of Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club

Creole Catholic-seminarian turned Tulane trained master-of-sociology ~ with mild manners and movie star looks ~ revived the practice. Ultimately with the addition of King Zulu.

Each year since ~ aboard separate vessels and for a few years Rex came on the streetcar. (Alas, Louisiana kings and gods are, like the King Cake Baby Jesus, very much human.)

Eventually Zulu and Rex arrive at Spanish Plaza and greet each other, "There at the foot of Poydras Street."

"One River Two Boats!" ~ L. A. Norma wrote at the time in a letter to the old Times-Picayune daily.

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Comus ~ One of the oldest krewes. First paraded in 1857 ~ four years before the Confederate Secession ~ with the parade theme: The Past, The Present, The Future.

Comus does not currently parade ~ a bitter hangover from political battles with former City Council Woman, Dorothy Mae Taylor, over race restrictions in luncheon clubs and Carnival krewes.

Comus and Rex still hold an elaborate meeting-of-the-courts ball on Mardi Gras night. But only Rex parades.

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Lee Circle, Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans
from Confederate Memorial Hall Museum

Nineteen years after The War, in 1884, the first Queen of Comus was Mildred Lee, daughter of defeated Confederate General Robert E. Lee, subject of the Lee Monument once on Saint Charles Avenue at Lee Circle, by Alexander Doyle. Targeted in 2015 and removed by Mayor Mitch Landrieu

"You lose, you blues,"
a musician we know says.

New Orleans is a city built in a bend on The River, and organized around Mardi Gras.

Old line Louisiana comedians tempered with cheeky Carnival spirit have been seen feigning the Sign of The Cross while saying, "Comus, Momus, Proteus and Rex," the big four of the old line New Orleans krewes. Every Louisianan alive today understands this joke.

Zulu ~ A black krewe formed some forty years after the Civil War, and the post- War 'wars'.

click image to read caption

Battle of Liberty Place ~ a Reconstruction era battle that took place at the foot of Canal Street in front of today's Harrah's Casino. The battle's monument was in the news lately as it, too, was targeted by Mayor Landrieu for removal.

Another Confederate memory banished to the land of out-of-sight-dom. This one a particularly painful memory.

The obelisk ~ erected 1891 ~ commemorates the bloody post- Civil War battle of 14 September 1874. Part of a terrorist plot that hoped to remove the elected governor, William Pitt Kellogg. The inscription on the monument refers to the National Elections two years later ~ 1876 ~ as the moment that ended failed-Reconstruction, and united Louisiana White Supremacy with Yankee inspired Jim Crow Laws. Names of whites fallen in the battle were chiseled in the stone. Names of fallen blacks, though they were sworn and uniformed policemen, were not.

Heartless tradition? Yes, and prognosticator. The 2021 US Capitol Riot also attacked and killed uniformed police, while Republican members of the very chambers police died defending discounted their sacrifice.

"That is how they numb the masses, and set de facto wage-slavery into the constitutional law of the land," our pedicab driver says, passing Norma's Carnival Cigarette.

New Orleans Civil War Era
US Custom House and Post Office
free downloadable poster

"At best!" Norma chortles from inside her plume of Camel plus smoke.

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Some people think both insurrections should be sharply remembered.

In the words of William Faulkner, "Our past is not forgotten, it is not even passed."

Two out-of-town deconstruction companies hired to remove New Orleans' Confederate memorials asked out of their contracts because of death threats. One, H and O Investments owner, David Mahler, had his $200,000 Lamborghini torched in the company's Baton Rouge parking lot. Eventually down the statues came. They are being warehoused somewhere undisclosed.

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For three days, in September of 1874, Governor Kellogg and his cronies (krewe?) took refuge in the recently built U. S. Custom House and Post Office, a handsome Union thumbprint first opened in 1856 ~ as war clouds gathered ~ and serving through the Nineteenth Century (including all the years of War Between the States) as the U. S. Post Office and U. S. Custom House.

Remember NOLa spent The War occupied, having surrendered about one year to the day after New Orleanian, P. G. T. Beauregard fired The War's 'first shot' on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor (April 12, 1861). The first Yankee reached the steps of Gallier Hall (then NOLa's City Hall) on April 29, 1862. New Orleans surrendered without resistance.

The Old Custom House still stands, at 423 Canal Street, across North Peters Street from Brooks Brothers, and not more than a block away from the site of the Battle of Liberty Place. Today the crestfallen edifice is home to the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium.

"The Bug House," Norma calls it.

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The following is one of history's odder foot notes ~ a darkly shrouded background to Louisiana's Devil-may-care Carnival. It involves clueless white Louisianans sending a delegation to now President Ulysses S. Grant, offering help reopening the Port of New Orleans by establishment of a new confederacy.

The 1874 insurrection commemorated by the Liberty Place Obelisk, was drummed up by the Crescent City White League, a group of Confederate sympathizers, planters, and World traders who wanted what everyone wanted. At least everyone who was a World trader, planter, or Confederate sympathizer.

Hell, even President Grant wants this, they reckoned. Because, an ill-functioning Port of New Orleans makes for an ill-functioning Western Expansion of the United States.

If the Louisiana Purchase... Hell, the very War Between the States, itself, were for anything ~ more than evil slavery ~ it was for this Western Expansion, and the newly discovered California gold! Grant would be too! So felt the White League-rs, anyway.

It was, however, reestablishment of a Confederacy they were advocating, though this time allied more with Washington thinking, and less with London's. London?

"Yes, London England," Norma explains. Long in a tissy over Spain and Portugal getting all the New World gold, when all England ever got was stuffy Bostonians ~ and later T. S. Eliot."

London agitated for the war, built some of it, e. g., CSS Alabama, a sloop-of-war built in the River Mersey, opposite Liverpool. London supported the South's secession and would have been on the first train to the mine fields had things gone differently.

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Back to the Louisiana White League. These masterminds earlier sent a delegation to plead their case before Ulysses S. Grant, recently home from The War, and newly elected to steady the wheel of the U. S. ship of state.

They told President Grant their Big Swamp City, port of New Orleans would make a fine seat for a new confederacy.

Having personally just fought the Civil War to defeat Robert E. Lee and such a Confederacy, Grant reasoned he must now send in troops to free Governor Kellogg, imprisoned at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans. He said no to the boys from Louisiana, and sent them safely home to moan and groan over their grillades and grits for the next two centuries.

One wonders if Grant might have hanged them ~ it was surely treason they were preaching. Or were they civil and polite at a meeting that might have taken place at the Willard Hotel? Grant is known to have favored the Willard. Did they drink whiskey? We figure Grant did. Did any of the Louisiana boys visit the famous pleasure houses of the victorious capitol? We figure they did.

Some of the men in the Louisiana delegation were from Grant Parish, founding site of the Louisiana White League.

Grant Parish is a 1869 "Reconstruction Parish." There were eleven such parishes created from what had been Winn and Rapides Parishes before The War.

It is in an English part of Louisiana ~ around Alexandria and Pineville ~ and where William Tecumseh Sherman once lived.

Here lies an even stranger story.

Sherman was from Ohio, and a recent graduate of West Point. He was not yet a Union general when he was hired, in 1859, as first president of the newly founded

Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, at Pineville.

Known as "The Little Seminary," in its day. Later it moved to Baton Rouge and changed its name to Louisiana State University.

Yes, boys and girls, the first president of L. S. U. was

William Tecumseh Sherman!

"It's like Governor Piyush 'Bobby' Jindal and his hired D. C. groomers ..." Norma giggled at herself through a cloud of cigarette smoke, and went on, "... thought they could starve L. S. U., during Jindal's foolhardy run against The Donald, for the White House!

"Thought he'd please both his heartless D. C. handlers and his headless hometown followers."

We all laughed, tippled, and tossed beads to laughing tourists.

"Sherman burned Atlanta,"
our pedicab driver said,
"Bobby Jindal burned Baton Rouge!

"Both of them Republicans, too!"
Norma laughed, from inside her cloud of smoke.

Courtesy of Louisiana State University Libraries

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Back at the Parade

Originally Zulu poked heavy-handed fun at the white krewes, and would neither publish their parade route nor apply for City parade permits. They prefered to catch up with Comus, Momus, Proteus, or Rex, and taunt them unannounced.

The old line krewes did not like this and had been working for some way to stop it ever since it started.

Courtesy of Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club

"You can imagine the indignity of a float full of white-faced blacks coming up behind your Fatted Ox throwing coconuts!" Norma says to visitors, as she blows Carnival smoke in their faces.

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Mayor Barthelemy's 1987 solution softened the satire and Zulu had earlier started obtaining parade permits and publishing their route ~ today following the Rex Parade.

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Rex

Members of Rex generally feel Carnival is built around their focal point. If not them alone, then the four Old Line Krewes of Comus, Momus, Proteus, and Rex. For some this is true. For most it is not. But for everyone they are one splashy part of the spectacle ~ as noted the greatest free show on Earth.
~

L. A. Norma says,
"Carnival is what you make of it."

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Celebrant, NOLa / Carlos Detres

Throws ~ These are inexpensive souvenirs tossed from floats (since around 1871) by costumed and masked Krewe members in response to traditional calls of "Throw me something, mister!" Sometimes heard in French Louisiana as, "Pour moi, m'sieur!"

Throws include doubloons, plastic cups and beads with and without krewe emblems.

Ash Wednesday ~ The day after Mardi Gras, and the beginning of the Lenten fasting season.

Hangover ~ This one you may already know. It is most appropriate for Ash Wednesday.

Carnival is celebrated in most towns in Coastal Louisiana. One town most famously not celebrating Carnival is Abbeville. I do not know why. When you ask locals they say it is because they host the yearly Louisiana Cattle Festival, a large effort.

"Don't forget the Giant Omelet Celebration," L. A. Norma adds, in a staccato of chortling smoke signals.

LEJ.world T-shirt

It should be noted that in New Orleans one often hears it said,

The City lacks civic energy to do anything but Carnival!

This is a typically self-deprecating humor spoken in Louisiana with love and open pride among the natives, Down in the Land of Dreamy Dreams.

You see, it is not unheard of in Louisiana to shepherd civic responsibilities and still entertain more than one festival. Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans have them almost weekly.

"Daily in Baton Rouge," Norma says, "when the legislature is in session."

The most notable Louisiana Carnivals outside of New Orleans massive effort are the Courir de Mardi Gras (Mardi Gras Run). These are events where participants ride horseback from house to house asking for contributions to a communal gumbo pot.

Among the items given will be a live chicken or two. A grand drunken chase ensues. Hardly anyone is injured ~ if you do not count the chicken.

Courir de Mardi Gras

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LEJ, Royal at Kerlerec, NOLa / photo Janis Turk

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This Saga of Carnival is a perfect example of a kind of Louisiana social studies practiced by those poorer souls who come to "watch Carnival."

We who know better know Carnival is a participatory thing, more better done than studied. So take another turn round the dancefloor, Louisiana, them smart folks are here watching us again.

Aimer la différence!

If you happen to be one of those 'smart and glum' watchers, perhaps you should consider Mobile, Alabama ~ New Orleans' founding Carnival Mother. Their Carnival is boredom-friendly.

Louisiana rode off on another horse, grew grander than hoped, and now parties harder than Mama Mobile ever expected.

"Until the Purple Vestments come out on Ash Wednesday," Norma says.