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For one non-chocolate local krewe, the hour is nigh.
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With times once again auspicious for a return of repressed carnival “revelry,” Uptown-style, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, may discover that the city is once again ready for their boring brand of carnival non-hysteria. With the streets lined with insecure white people proclaiming “I’m not chocolate,” the hour is nigh.
In days of yore, the pink-dicked piglets of Uptown’s best families (in C. Ray’s words, “Some people Uptown”) have done what it takes to fight the chocolate tide, and managed their own top-down girly-man version of Mardi Gras partying as well. And, because their gilded bubble is at least as insulated from the scary multi-hued world as W.’s, they’ve even been known to claim authorship of everybody else’s rites of carnival. Ask a Confederate-loving son of Comus, Momus, or Proteus, and they’ll tell you the “first” Mardi Gras took place in 1857, the first time Comus got up the nerve to try to come out on the street and pretend to inhale with the cool kids.
Here is the true history of the old-line Uptown krewe’s contributions to New Orleans civilization:
1857: Frightened by the miscegenated multi-lingual Bacchic orgy in the street called New Orleans Mardi Gras (already a hundred years old), some crackers from Mobile, Alabama, feigning Euro accents, put on a pretentious parade and expected the French-kissing mob to stay out of the way. For the first time, parades gained “onlookers,” rather than participants. And they had no bands and no throws. The glory that was Comus. They did, however, give an artist a job (probably their wives put them up to it), so the floats were gorgeous. They also had boys in tights carry bad writing on plaques that everybody was supposed to dutifully read. The pseudo-literary Anglophiles (Francophobes?) misquoted Milton, so, to this day, people call carnival clubs “krewes.” The gist of carnival since ancient Rome had been the shattering of social barriers, every man a king, the mystic coupling of devil and angel. But the “mistick” squares from the American Quarter came up with this signal innovation: the mucky-mucks get to preen themselves and wave scepters and the regular people have to stand in the gutter and heed their proclamations.
1862: Comus cancels its parade—for the next four years—in order to devote its time and money to defending the sacred right to hold others in subjugation. To paraphrase slightly, “I’m not chocolate” became their battle-cry and raison d’etre.
1866-1877: To make a long story short, the Yankees approached, the Confederates ran away then snuck back into town in Comus masks. They watched in horror as white and black regular folks started to get along just fine. Creole neighborhoods like the Faubourg Marigny--full of Irish, German, French, and Italian immigrants who enjoyed co-habiting with their octoroon, quadroon, mulatto, griff and negro neighbors--had never liked their stupid war anyway. It wasn’t hard to figure out what Comus thought of this kind of carrying on. In 1877 their parade theme celebrated “The Aryan Race,” which was pretty scarce in their hometown, but remember, Comus was the original Bubble Boy, and he never got down off his dolled-up Confederate caisson to talk to the plebes. They were scared enough of the black folks to resort to arms, though, so they staged their famous coup called the “Battle” of Liberty Place (in which they opened fire on the backs of an unsuspecting, and integrated, New Orleans police detachment, killing eleven—the rest ran away). Their paper, the Picayune, said it had to be done, that, had it not been done, “the state would have been Africanized” and “nothing could have been darker, bleaker, and more hopeless” than that.
1891: In the 1993 movie True Romance, Dennis Hopper gets a rise out of Christopher Walken by averring that his Sicilian ancestors were in fact spawned by “niggers.” The Comus bunch was well ahead of the curve on that view. To demonstrate their conviction on the Aryan non-eligibility of the city’s “Italian Quarter” residents, they lynched a bunch of them (eleven, to be exact) after they had been acquitted of charges in the murder of a man the Comus crowd would never have passed a glass of watered-down wine with: Hard-boiled Irish police chief David Hennessy. At least Hennessy, a founder of the Red Light Social Club, had a much better idea of the true spirit of carnival than the wigged scepter-wavers. He is honored today by a giant phallus, worthy of the crudest of the Krewe du Vieux sub-krewes, rising from the desirable soil of Metairie cemetery, where the old-line Uptown corpses are careful to roll in the other direction, for fear of catching a “social” disease. The historian is left to ponder why a mob of thousands, none of them fit to drink from a Comus chamber pot, would do the dirty work of the prissy Uptown piglets. Well, back then, rich white folks “defined the terms of public debate” through their lopsided control of media outlets. Thus they were consistently able to play on white working people’s racial fears and cultural prejudices. In other words, they kept’em scared and played’em like a fiddle. Hmmm.
1936: Finally, the scions of the Uptown carnival krewes have their asses kicked—right out of Baton Rouge and City Hall—by a guy they continue to this day to love to hate: Huey Long. Huey wasn’t chocolate, but, given his nickname (the “Kingfish,” adopted from the Amos ‘n Andy radio show), one wonders. At any rate, he righteously pissed all over their dear Scarlett O’Hara mythology, even going so far as to bulldoze the pseudo plantation manor Governor’s Mansion. The last son of Comus to boss people around at City Hall was T. Semmes Walmsley (no, I didn’t make it up). But Huey called him “Turkey Head.” The next elected mayor of New Orleans was an old buddy of Huey’s, Bob Maestri. (Yep, a wop—see 1891, above). He’d made his fortune selling recycled mattresses to brothels. Carnival, too, reflected the working-class remaking of American identity that swept the country in the 1930s. Tired of the same old boring Uptown parades, the working-class wards started their own organizations. From the Comus paradigm they took the concept of a series of floats with riders. But that was it. Unlike the old-line Uptowners, these guys actually knew how to party.
1969: The figure of Comus, creaky-boned philologists know, is reputed to be a son of Bacchus. Well, in 1969, New Orleanians finally enthroned the true King of Mardi Gras. Not Rex, not Comus. Bacchus. Duh. The advent of the “superkrewes,” as opposed to the anti-discrimination ordinance some 25 years later, is what finally killed the old-line Uptown parades. New Orleanians had been bored to tears by the same-old, same-old drab affairs of the Uptowners for years, and they finally realized that the debutante/luncheon club set was never going burst the bubble and figure out how to put on a parade. The sons of the 1930s working-class krewes did figure it out, and in a big way. HUGE floats, movie stars, throws to drown Jupiter, and bands, bands, bands. This is the Mardi Gras that kids like me, who grew up in the 1970s (the true Golden Age) remember so fondly. Thanks, Bacchus, you are the granddaddy of the glitzy parade, what tourism officials call the “greatest free show on earth.” (Though the ultimate Mardi Gras experience, of course, is the one without a license).
1993: Comus had been dead for years by now, but they still stumbled along, inspiring a sublime yawn or two from their handful of dedicated fans. Finally Councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor got tired of the musty stench and ordered up a tombstone. She got all “School Board Meeting” on them and insisted that they either learn to get funky (mixing a little chocolate in their ranks was the recommended method) or, please, somebody bury those droopy things. Her big detractors were Jackie Clarkson—who’d later try to cleanse the Quarter of tapdancers, astrologers, and benches—and Peggy Wilson, Republican. Princess Peggy was of the Henican clan, big among the Uptown schmuckie-mucks. They were, of course, outraged at being asked to funk it up. Force them to consort with the rabble? Forsooth! So, rather than tracking down a couple of the whitest black men in New Orleans (like Rex did), Comus vanished from the public ways altogether, retreating to their private ball, where the cobwebs could grow unhindered by the ill social winds of modernity. To think, if Dorothy Mae had never picked up that shovel, there’d be no Orpheus, Muses, or Krewe d-Etat. But hark, whose grim chuckle do we detect behind that Krewe d’Etat mask?
2006: Big storm passed through and busted the cheaper-than-cheap-plastic-carnival-crap levees. It was an unprecedented disaster, but the Uptown champions of the “Aryan Race” saw a silver lining. They blamed the integrated local government and started harping about how we don’t look right to the rest of whitebread America. “I’m not chocolate” T-shirts have been spotted Uptown. Peggy Wilson announces for mayor. Gray ghosts from Metairie Cemetery descend on the city.
C.W. Cannon is the author of Soul Resin (FC 2002). He teaches English at the University of New Orleans.
