In Louisiana: a Mad, Mad Mardi Gras

By Gregory Jaynes

Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the commencement of Lent, which means 40 days of penitence, blurred bibulously by last week in preponderantly Roman Catholic Louisiana, where the excesses were so fulsome, the wassail so all embracing, that the effect upon a paragrapher who participated was the loss of the ability to construct a straight sentence, or so it feels.

One more time: the story is told that a Cajun was brought to trial for slaughtering 100 egrets, the snow-white fowl that are protected under Louisiana law. The judge, dumb struck by the senselessness of it all, demanded, "What did you do with them?"

"I ate them," the defendant said.

The judge then wondered whether his own culinary scholarship fell short of the mark. "What do they taste like?"

"Almost as good as owl."

Hit the reset button and start again: in Mamou, in Evangeline Parish, in Louisiana's Cajun country, they celebrated Mardi Gras last week on horseback, on the dance floor and belly up in the ditches. The celebration lacked the formality and the aristocracy, whatever that is, of the carnival in New Orleans, but it may have surpassed the Crescent City in madness (you may have the hang of it here).

Mamou is a dog-eared old town, with a not-quite-finished look about it, as though its builders knocked off a week or two early. It is a low town, with one main street full of bars, set in farming country where people raise soybeans one year, rice the next, winter rye the next, and then begin the cycle again. Over the years nothing much changes in Mamou. The boys in this culture are expected to mature into good providers and two-fisted drinkers, and the girls are expected to marry and swap obsequiousness for fidelity and adulation. The blacks are expected to know their place. (The night before Mardi Gras six or seven blacks fought it out with a throng of whites in the middle of town, and as the fists and beer cans flew, the police, including some black officers, had a rough time containing things. Nonetheless, when it was over, no guns had been drawn, no arrests had been made and nobody said a word about it. To go to Mamou, then, is not to seek modernity. And nobody said quaint ever had to be pretty.) Mardi Gras in Mamou is for white boys a rite of passage, and there is something very primal and sexual about it. A boy of 16 is allowed to join in if he is accompanied by an adult; a boy of 17 can come on his own. For an $8 entry fee, he is assured of up to $250 in bail bonding against crimes he might commit. He is required to be at the American Legion post at 7 a.m. with his horse, to be in costume and to wear a mask. One of the twelve rules he must obey is that he "shall not possess nor consume any beverage except as dispensed from the liquor wagon." All day he will ride through the country collecting chickens, rice and vegetables for a gumbo the womenfolk will cook back in town. The column will be halted frequently for beer and boiled eggs. A Cajun band on a wagon, relying heavily on fiddle, washboard, squeeze-box, guitar and triangle, will serenade him on the 15-mile ride. He will be accompanied by two "floats," unadorned flatbed trailers bearing 40 or so supportive drunks. Half a dozen adult men, charged with maintaining order, will remain sober. By noon the horses will be lathered, and many of the riders will be out of their minds.

Paul Tate Jr., of the Mamou law firm Tate, Tate & Tate, explained that it is a day to "do things out of character even if you don't drink. You pinch a pretty woman, or something. And then the next day you clean up your act."

Tate was speaking only of men, however. Women are not allowed to ride. "Cajuns are basically pretty chauvinistic," he said. "Women are pretty good all-year round. They don't have much of an act to clean up. We open doors for them. We would not put them on a horse. They basically don't have things they have to get out of their system." Tate is thinking of suing a Northern newspaper for having sketched him once as a little narrow-minded.

The lawyer, one of the men who would stay sober and supervise, made his comments the night before Mardi Gras. He said the route had to be kept secret. "If you let everybody know where the route is, they might leave home. After all, 150 horses are fairly traumatic on a lawn."

Fog, interior and exterior, enveloped the men of Mamou on the morning of the great ride. Breakfast was beer and boudin (pronounced boo-dan, a muscular local sausage of rice, pork and pork liver that can quickly become an addiction). The mounted Cajun corps made it half a mile down the road before it had to find a field to relieve itself.

In the foggy lowlands, wearing their bright costumes, they made a visual feast. Now and again you would catch sight of a peach-clad boy on an Appaloosa cutting through the Chinese tallow trees, or a scarlet lad standing on his saddle, dancing on a bay. Five young women gotten up as golden harlots were included in the tableau as an easy taunting symbol for the youths: do not touch, even if you are not yourself.

"See that boy dancing on that horse," a veteran observer said at one stop. "I never thought he'd be up this morning. Last night he was arrested for parking his horse in the wrong place. He thought he tied it to a parking meter but it was a fire hydrant."

Just then, that boy, Kirk DesHotels dismounted and ran for a chicken. The rules are that all chickens must be chased on foot. The chicken got away. A | tourist, a blond Tennessean with looks that beg a swoon, approached young Kirk to share a word. He gave her one of those long moist looks of love everlasting, as she read it. "I allllmost caught that chicken," he said, and it was then she realized it was the chase that held his passion.

Here and there it was hard to catch the drift of conversations, in particular those in Cajun French. In some phrasing and pronunciation, Cajun French has about as much in common with the French language as a claw hammer has with poetry; their English too is similarly disconnected, off the bead. For example, the unemployed might put the situation this way: "I told him for a job, he ask me no." Then again, a real live French photographer along for the ride said he would not attempt to speak like them because "I would never massacrate their language." And an organizer of the event said he liked it better this year than last because there were "more people and a better chance to conjugate." After awhile, the inebriated ear grows accustomed to tortured syntax, and all linguistic motor skills begin to dissipate. And the band plays on.

Some of the riders stood on their horses, while some could not stand at all. Some did flips off their mounts and into the mud, and nothing broke, a testament to the malleability of young bones. A middle-aged Texan named Dennis Jerkins broke his hand, however. The hand was already in a cast. "The way I broke it the first time," said Jerkins, "was my executive privilege to bang it against my desk. I'm a grain and sod-grass hauler. The way I broke it the second time was I was trying to get out of the way of a fistfight this morning."

By midafternoon the riders were listing seriously. All they had to do was make it back to Mamou still able to function minimally. There the girls would join them on the backs of their steeds, and they could have gumbo, and they could dance until midnight. The lesson seemed to be: get drunk, hunt chickens, eat well, kiss the dickens out of pretty girls, straighten your deportment the next day, assume your place among your fellow men.

There was only one casualty, a boy named Tim who lost the knack of sitting his horse. A police officer turned Tim over to a van full of out-of-town celebrants headed back to Mamou and turned his horse over to another rider. Tim said he had had eleven beers. In town the boy's mother saw her child slumped in a car packed with strangers. "Tim," she shouted with alarm, "what are you doing in there?"

Tim was unable to respond. Passing him into his mother's arms, the driver offered consolation: "Ma'am, I think you ought to know he was hell while he lasted."