Letter from America Julia Reed
NEW ORLEANS: In New Orleans, the Mardi Gras season – whose city-wide bacchanalia include (but are by no means limited to) a string of public parades, private balls and raucous street parties – is officially upon us. Commencing on Twelfth Night (5th January) and reaching a spectacular end on Fat Tuesday, roughly seven weeks later, Carnival has been an inextricable part of the city’s identity from its earliest days and now contributes more than $500 million to the city’s economy.
In 1699, when French-canadian explorer Jean-baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville arrived at a spot sixty miles downriver from where New Orleans is today, he named it Point du Mardi Gras – his men reminded him they had landed on the eve of the holiday. America’s first Mardi Gras celebration was held in 1703 at the nearby Fort Louis de la Louisiane (now Mobile, Alabama), and when Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718 the settlers were eager to show up their neighbours’ customs.
An 1835 account by a visitor to the city provides vivid testimony to their success: ‘All of the mischief of the city is alive and wide awake… Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, white and black, yellow and brown, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads.’
During the second half of the 19th century, when the Anglo-americans had pretty much wrested economic and political power from the founding Creoles, those wild impromptu marches gave way to more organised official parades and balls, put on by private Carnival clubs, or ‘krewes’. In 1875 Mardi Gras was declared a legal state holiday and has been celebrated ever since, even (or especially) in the year following Hurricane Katrina, when it was deemed too crucial to the city’s economic (and emotional) recovery not to take place.
The closest I’ll ever be to a rock star was my stint three years ago as Honorary Muse in the all-female Krewe of Muses parade. I rode in a giant red shoe while thousands of people jumped up and down, frantically chanting my name in the hope that I might toss them one of the season’s most coveted prizes, a bejewelled shoe.
Still, though I’ve lived here part-time since 1991 and full-time since 2005, I will forever be an outsider in this city, especially to what continues to pass as society, those descendants of members of the city’s old-line krewes. To those insiders, Mardi Gras is an entirely different thing altogether, a Byzantine, literally sacred ritual (ancestor worship in New Orleans is its own religion) that also happens to be the world’s most elaborate debutante party.
The deb as we know her is more than 400 years old, a creation of Elizabeth I, who began the custom of presenting eligible young women at court, and of Queen Victoria, who included the daughters of the rising haute bourgeoisie along with those of the nobility and gentry. By the time Elizabeth II ended the practice in 1958, the custom was firmly entrenched on our side of the Atlantic. The first public presentation of debs took place in 1870 at New York’s Delmonico’s. Four years later in New Orleans, the king of the Rex krewe took his first debutante queen. Thus the debs of New Orleans (who make their official entrance into society prior to Mardi Gras at proper deb balls and private parties) were not just presented at court, they became the court.
The balls are hardly austere – a queen’s dress typically requires forty hours of beading and starts at around $20,000 – and they have a sort of touching quaintness to them; they just don’t have much to do with magic or mayhem or fun. It’s all about the ritual. Lately, however, the parties of the individual debs have begun to make up for this lack of frivolity, not to mention rather basic hospitality, but in increasingly alarming ways. Two years ago, just before the tenth anniversary of Katrina, three different sets of debutante parents gave three dances for their daughters that cost $5 million apiece. One of the parties had as its theme Versailles, complete with dozens of Marie Antoinette lookalikes wandering about among bewigged waiters passing platters of foie gras and tables populated by ‘trees’ of lobster tails. A couple of years earlier, a Snow White-themed party featured seven actual dwarves hired for the occasion.
Now I love a great party, excess is pretty much my middle name, and I am hardly a lefty. But New Orleans has the widest income gap of any city in the country after New York. We need more cops, we need better schools, we need streets that aren’t rubble. The city’s urgent needs are far too numerous to list, but suffice to say that if those recent hosts had made do with slightly more toned-down shindigs of, say, $2 million, there would have been all sorts of worthy places to send the surplus.
On the upside, all this baroque madness keeps a whole lot of businesses afloat that have no parallel anywhere else. There are the dressmakers and sceptre-makers and the team of people whose job it is to teach the royals the art of sceptre-wielding. There are choreographers, float-makers, carriage-repairers, musicians, mask-makers, beaders and hand-embroiderers. As part-time New Orleanian Frederick Starr wrote in his marvellous book New
Orleans Unmasqued: ‘When the Ancien Régime in France toppled in 1789, the infrastructure of baroque life died with it. When the Romanoffs lost their throne in Russia, the Fabergés did not last a week.’ I can take some solace then that, even as we continue to eat cake (specifically Mardi Gras king cake, which keeps hundreds of bakers working overtime during the season), at least it is for a good cause.