Filed by Chelsea at 11:05 am under Religion, The South

Tuesday, 5 February 2008, was Mardi Gras.
You know, the holiday where a million tourists descend upon New Orleans to drink themselves into oblivion and commit random acts of nudity for the price of crappy plastic necklaces? It’s all about decadence and exposure and making a fool out of yourself before the church-imposed wasteland of Lent, right?

Well, kind of. Not really.

The large-scale debauchery of the commercial Mardi Gras parades and balls of New Orleans is not the whole story. It’s not even really half of it. That’s more like the crazy explotative icing on an otherwise meaningful, centuries-old cake. And I’m not mocking New Orleans Mardi Gras; its pagentry and pomp and come-as-you-are-leave-shitfaced philosophy bring millions of tax dollars into the state every year, and it gives Louisiana an identity among the 50 states that promotes us as a carefree, sensual people full of joie de vivre (which we are). But I think it’s my duty, as self-important Southerner, to try to set the record straight about why we began to celebrate Shrove Tuesday and what it used to mean to have a Mardi Gras.

The history of the Cajun people can and does fill many books and websites. It’s a fascinating subject, one to which I have dedicated a substantial portion of my energy and time over the last decade of my life. But I won’t lay it all out right now. In a nutshell: French settlers began arriving in present-day Nova Scotia about 1604. They created a small, self-sufficient community based on hunting and fishing, entrenched in the French language and the Catholic faith. The colony’s area of Nova Scotia, Acadie changed hands many times between the British and French over the 150 years of the Acadian occupation; it was such a volatile political situation that the Acadians came to think of themselves as their own people, their own country, and they did not get involved in military skirmishs or side with either country. They just wanted to be left alone to raise their children, play their music, and worship their God.

Upon the Treaty of Paris, the Acadie region of Nova Scotia became a permanent British colony. After the Acadian people repeatedly refused to swear allegiance to the British crown and forfeit their language and religion, the British invaded their townships, loaded them all into boats (manufactored by the same companies that made slave ships), burned their villages, and shipped the survivors down to 13 other British colonies on what is now the east coast of America. The British/American colonists wanted nothing to do with the Acadians; several provisional governors did not even let the boat captains unload their human cargo. When the surviving Acadians were let ashored in the New England colonies, they were looked upon as trash and treated worse. They did not speak English and were Catholic; in addition, the labor skills they had honed for generations–fishing, trapping, hunting–were no good in the industrial cities in which they found themselves. In no time, they were living on the streets.

Half a generation later, the French government was having some trouble populating its newly aquired colony of Louisiane. It made a deal with the New England colony governors that the French would pay to have any willing Acadian immigrants shipped to Louisiana, where they would be granted homesteads. Most of the surviving Acadian families took this offer and moved to a new home full of mosquitos and 100-degree summers, but it was a home where they were able to own land, make use of their work skills, speak their language, and practice their religion. They came into a new national identity, and though they remained a poor, agrarian people, they were always fiercely proud of their heritage and the trials they had overcome as a nation.

What happened to us between the early 1800s and WWII, and between WWII and the present are two more long stories; the transition between my Paw-Paw’s Cajun identity and mine is a tragedy of assimilation and forgetfullness. But in addition to Cajun food and Cajun music, traditional Cajun celebrations refuse to be passed over. And the most famous of these is Le Mardi Gras.

Mid-winter’s festivals are as old as the Roman empire, and the Cajuns no doubt drew upon their cultural memories of 17th century France in the creation of their festival; however, the impetice for this particular fête is firmly grounded in the pride and socio-economic status of the displaced Cajuns in southern Louisiana.

And lo, it came to pass that the Cajun people were cold, and poor, and hungry in the Louisiana winter. The season of atonement, Lent, was fast approaching. It had been months since the harvest and animals were hard to trap in the cold. Food was scarce, but community was strong. While no one had abundance, everyone had something. So it came to pass that the women of the community would spend months creating elaborate masks and costumes from the scraps of daily life. On the day before Ash Wednesday, the men and boys would don these masks and costumes and ride upon their horses from house to house, singing songs of celebration and pride. They would be led by an unmasked Capitane who kept their revelry “in check.” At each house on their route, Les Mardi Gras would dance with the women and frighten the children, before begging for anything the family could spare in the way of food. They collected some rice here, some okra there. If the family decided to release a game bird for the feast, the animal would be thrown live into the fields, and the entire krewe would chase after the poor bird until one of them, victorious, captured it.

There was no shame in begging, because all were masked, and the secrets of their identities carefully guarded.

Every so often, a rider would leave the courrier and take the aquired foodstuffs back to the women of the community, who spent the whole day preparing a huge feast of gumbo and vegetable and sweets. At the end of the day, the men and boys would return to the site of the celebration, and the entire community would dance and sing and eat right up until midnight, when the Lenten season began abruptly.

Mardi Gras is about togetherness. It’s about generosity. It’s about coming together as a people and sharing what we have, though we are poor, so all may live well. It’s about breaking up the bleakness of winter with joy and revelry. It’s about the magic of a costume that gives power to the powerless and releases people from the confines of pride. It’s about family, and tradition, and not forgetting that a people can overcome anything as long as they remember who they are.

It’s easy to see how this parading from house to house and wearing costumes turned into a commercial bonanza in New Orleans. But the traditional courrier de Mardi Gras continues in places like Eunice and Elton and Ti Mamou, in the heart of Cajun country, in my hometowns. Sure, there have been changes. A hundred tourists now follow Les Mardi Gras from house to house, as does a beer truck and sometimes a flatbed trailer with musicians playing on it. But the costumes still take months for families to create, and it’s still a rite of passage for youngsters (now both boys and girls), and there is still a huge gumbo and fais do-do (dance) at the end of the day. And I know people who dance on the backs of their horses and regard plastic beads as the greatest heresy ever perpetrated upon our state.

I can appreciate both forms of my beloved holiday.
But on a freezing cold night in Chicago, with my poor, starving artist friends gathered in my apartment for gumbo and king cake, the Courrier de Mardi Gras of my ancestors just seems to have more soul. And I’ll be taking it with me wherever I venture.

Ou que je me retrouve, mon âme est Acadien.