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Mardi Gras, Day 1--The Booker T Love Child 2.14.98
This is my fourth Mardi Gras and I have not been anticipating it with
quite the fervor that one would expect one to anticipate "the greatest
free show on earth." But no one escapes Mardi Gras. Even if you forego
the 12-14 days of parades and stay inside watching reruns of Family
Matters, you are effected by Carnival. The Dominoes pizza guy will be
late because he had to travel eight miles out of his way to circumvent
the parade route.
Metairie, where all the white people flew after six-year old Ruby Bridges
integrated the New Orleans school district in 1960, has its own parades.
Algiers, still in Orleans Parish, but on the Westbank across the river,
has its own parades. Gretna, also on the Westbank, has its own parades.
At work today I was Telling Nick about the one Metairie parade M and
I went to last year.
"I try not to get all that wrapped up in whether people say nigger or don't say
nigger but I do take it as a bad beginning if its the first thing some
white trash shithead from Metairie says to me in a pitiful attempt at
small talk. We were on this guy's parade turf and I guess he was a little
juiced and also upwardly prideful of his place in the cosmos. 'You won't
see no niggers anywheres along this stretch of ground.'"
"Wow," I said.
"That's not the best place to see a Metairie parade," Nick said.
"This isn't something that just came about since I moved to New Orleans,
and I don't really have any particularly specific love for black people,
but sometimes white people really scare me. I mean really scare me."
But I'm pushing the envelope of blah de blahness here and all I really
wanted to tell you was about this one young man from the Booker T
Washington High School Marching Band.
Broad and Canal is not an integrated stretch of parade route. Unless
those two skinny white people count towards any real integration. And
this particular parade is made up of all black people, which is rare.
Zulu is the only other all black parade krewe and has been parading for
eighty years on the last day, Fat Tuesday, which is the English
translation for Mardi Gras.
Ostensibly, we are all standing on the parade route, acting or being as
peasants, to receive throws (trinkets, beads, moon pies, Frisbees,
cassette tapes, cups, underwear) from the royalty up on the floats.
But this kid from Booker T was giving out laughter, with his hair coifed
high on his head, and his sexuality of an alternative nature, he shook
and shimmied to the music with an exaggerated femininity, and seemed
perfectly at ease with who he was and why people might find it amusing.
M to my left was laughing, and with the matronly heavy-set woman to
my right, I was sharing big teeth and crinkled eyes.
Esnard Revisited 2.5.98
The charred remains of Esnard Villa were visited today by owner Y, and her friend and protector, Kooleo, and D (9), and
C (6).
The century and a half year old peg jointed cypress framing timber is
broken and burnt to ashes at two places in the roof, the remaining
roofing timber is also badly burnt and occasionally pieces of this
crippled stucture fall in on itself. A crack and tumble in the night.
The stairs to the second floor are located in the back and to the left,
where the fire started. The stairs are still navigable by an adventurous
nine year old under the fool-hearted tutorage of his twenty-seven year
old mother who is standing down under a second story window accepting
lofted shoes and lofted memories from said son.
"Oh these shoes all right, " Y says, "D go back and get all
my shoes."
D disappears from the glassless window he had been leaning out of
and runs back into the blackened, gloomy interior to look for more.
Shoes start flying out the window, and photo albums, and a bible,
cassette tapes, a suede jacket.
C has found his way to the unstable second floor. Kooleo directs
grumbles of profanity at C. Y leans over to inspect her
salvageable memories and property, putting the keepers in a forty gallon
plastic trash can.
I had spoken to Kooleo earlier. The good news and bad news are the same:
"They gonna fix it."