The World Inside Out — Sacred Trespasses

The World Inside Out: In Pursuit of Louisiana’s Cajun Mardi Gras
Words & Images by Kevin Rabalais

The following article originally appeared in 2020 in Revista Ñ, the cultural supplement of the Argentine newspaper Clarín. All photographs are from this year’s Courir de Mardi Gras de L’anse and the Outlaw Mardi Gras (the traditional Courir was cancelled due to the pandemic) in, respectively, Mermentau Cove and Church Point, Louisiana.

Three masked men round their prey. They howl, but there is no moon. In a foreign tongue, they chant and tug at my knees, trying to drag me to the ground. The struggle intensifies, and I’m not sure how much longer I can remain on my feet. One rubs his thumb against the tips of his fingers.

“Nobody gets out of this,” he says.

His voice slurs from drink despite the time, 8 a.m. on a Monday, or maybe because of it. After all, le Courir de Mardi Gras happens only once a year, and he and the dozens of other men in the distance are here to participate in an annual ritual that encourages them to abandon all rules.

“If we threw this party anywhere else in the world, we would all get arrested,” says Jesse Bertrand. As a capitaine, Bertrand must keep today’s revelers, or les Mardi Gras, in check. He rides a horse and carries a rope two inches thick. The question isn’t whether someone will test him but, rather, when and how often. Several Mardi Gras raise their costumes in pride to reveal the welts on their stomachs and backs. Another hangs upside down from a tree. Bertrand approaches. He swings the rope above his head, but a grin betrays the threat. Here, everything, whippings included, is in good fun.

This is carnival in its purest sense. It’s what M.M. Bakhtin deemed “the world inside out,” a ceremony that shatters all barriers between reveler and spectator and demands participation. See an old television, tire or toy in someone’s backyard, and the unwritten rule of the Courir requires that you steal it. Pass a crawfish pond, and Mardi Gras law dictates that you run through knee-deep water and pilfer at least one trap filled with Louisiana’s shellfish delicacy. Any car abandoned on these backcountry roads begs for someone to climb atop and add a few dents.

Often called Cajun Mardi Gras, various Courirs—runs, in French—take place each year throughout small towns in south and southwest Louisiana. The tradition dates back to Medieval France.

“In an ode to the peasants who used to mask themselves and parade through the more wealthy areas of the countryside, disguising both their looks and their voices in an attempt to be unrecognizable because of their pride, masked men traditionally parade on horseback from house to house in the community asking for ingredients for their gumbo,” says Mermentau Cove Capitaine Chance Henry. “They pray, sing and dance to persuade the homeowner to give them money and anything they can put in the pot—rice, sausage, or the ultimate prize, a chicken.” Consenting homeowners provide these chickens for the Mardi Gras to chase. Chaos ensues and, with it, plenty of laughter.

“It’s like being in a rugby scrum,” says one masked Mardi Gras who cradles a prized chicken against his torn costume. He’s winded from the chase, and he smells like cow dung, but in the world of the Courir, he is temporarily immortal.

Some of the towns in which this tradition thrives are so small that many Louisiana natives have never heard of them. They are villages, really, places such as Mermentau Cove and Church Point, Mamou and Elton, where I find myself on a country road that feels like the end of the world, struggling to stay erect while three men dressed in traditional Mardi Gras costume fringe tackle me as they beg for money. These costumes (typically colorful, occasionally sinister) are often sewn together from old work clothes. Some of the hats, or capuchons, are peaked in Medieval fashion, others shaped like mortarboards to mock the life of the mind, others, still, like the miter worn by bishops, a jeer at religious hierarchy.

Give me the GPS coordinates and I probably wouldn’t be able to find the curve in this road again. “It is not down on any map; true places never are,” as Melville writes in Moby-Dick. But even as I struggle for balance, a new awakening washes over me. These are, without a doubt, among the vintage moments of my life. On exhibit is a ritual so complex and authentic that I’ve already teared up twice behind the camera. The first time, worried that one of these Cajuns might laugh at me for crying at the party, I covered my face and walked away. Later, overwhelmed by the day and feeling less guarded, I admitted my emotions to a random Mardi Gras. Dressed in a chicken costume, he threw his arms around me in a bear hug.

“Be nice to a Cajun, and you have a friend for life.” I hear that phrase again and again on my travels to photograph the culture of Louisiana, home of more than 800,000 people who claim Cajun ancestry. In Bayou Farewell, his book about Louisiana, a region that loses more landmass per year than anywhere on earth due to coastal erosion, Mike Tidwell acknowledges a similar sentiment: “I was a cynical traveler convinced it was no longer possible to fall completely off the map, to get lost in an unfamiliar land among people barely recognizable as my countrymen.” Louisianans take pride in living in a land apart, one geographically attached to the United States but sovereign in temperament. A common refrain about this comes from New Orleans, birthplace of jazz, a city whose carnival traditions have little in common with Cajun Mardi Gras. To fully enjoy the culture here, the saying goes, you have to stop thinking of New Orleans as the least organized place in America and start considering it the most organized city in the Caribbean. Much of Louisiana resembles that island region more than it does the rest of the Deep South, much less New England or the Midwest. It is for me, as it is for many Cajuns, a beautiful country on the Gulf of Mexico.

“Life is short and carnival is long.”

In New Orleans, carnival festivities begin each year on Twelfth Night, but west of the city, just north of the gulf in Cajun Country, the Courirs take place closer to the day that serves as the exclamation point for carnival season—Mardi Gras, which always takes place forty-seven days before Easter Sunday. At these runs, the number of revelers ranges from a few dozen to several hundred. The main business of the day, as Henry notes, involves a dash of debauchery and an abundance of community.

On foot and horseback, with the occasional truck and trailer on which musicians ride, the trajectory of a Courir carries the charge of an epic. Shortly after sunrise, a priest prays over the capitaines, musicians and Mardi Gras. The procession then sets off into the countryside. Amidst the column of revelers, trucks pull small trailers on which musicians play fiddles, accordions, guitars and triangles, or, in local patois, ’tit-fers. On they move through the flat landscape of crawfish ponds that, in a different season, farmers transform into rice fields. All the while, they head toward homes where friends and family await.

“Before any Mardi Gras approach the property,” says Henry, “the capitaine rides up, dismounts, shakes the homeowner’s hand and asks for permission for les Mardi Gras to come onto the property.” The capitaines then free the revelers, who crawl around and leap at the spectators in “impromptu hell-raising,” as Harnett T. Kane describes it in The Bayous of Louisiana. They beg for food and money while the musicians play. And they dance. Men dance with women. Men dance with children. Men dance with men. Then they all gather around the musicians to sing “La chanson des Mardi Gras”:“Would you receive these Mardi Gras / This great bunch of big drunks / The Mardi Gras thank you very much / Of your good intentions.”

Three generations earlier, speaking Cajun French in Louisiana—much less singing in it at the top of your lungs—would have earned beatings at school and looks of disgust from les Américains, anyone of non-French descent who advocated assimilation. Today, however, members of this once-repressed group speak their language with great dignity.

Eventually, the procession moves on. There are more roads and homeowners who await with family and friends, also those coveted chickens. As the capitaines lead the Mardi Gras to the next stop, a horse brushes past me. Its rider tilts his cow-skull mask back on his head to inhale a full swig of beer. He removes his boots from the stirrups, crosses his legs over the horse’s mane before reclining while the horse clops on. Behind him, two Cajuns sit inside the blade of a moving bulldozer. The driver sees me lift my camera and then hoists the blade with the Cajuns high above the road, their beers raised to the Louisiana rain.

Besides visiting various homes along the route, most Courirs stop at the local cemetery. Outside the gates, capitaines remind the Mardi Gras to remove their capuchons. The mood grows somber.

“We carry this tradition for the Mardi Gras who are to come, the Mardi Gras who surround us now, and the Mardi Gras who we have lost,” says Briggs Brown, whose grandfather taught him these traditions. “Each time that I suit up and repeat what he taught me,” Brown says, “I am carrying the same love and respect that he held for his family, his friends, his community, and his culture.”

Accordionist Jarrett LeBlanc also remembers those who came before and the true reason he participates in this tradition. He sewed his costume from a quilt that his great-great grandmother hand stitched in the 1960s. After two runs, he plans to preserve this family heirloom. “She might not approve,” he says, grinning, “but this is how I’m paying my respect.”

From the cemetery, the journey continues. Laughter resumes, drinking, and with it dancing on lone roads and atop houses, sheds and barns, on the lean limbs of trees, trampolines and anything else the Mardi Gras can scale. Three revelers stop to swing on a seesaw before Bertrand raises his rope and runs them off.

After eight hours that pass like eight minutes, the Mardi Gras reach the end of the fourteen-mile run. To the community, they offer the chickens and other ingredients they have collected throughout the day. The smell of gumbo, with its roux and Holy Trinity of Cajun cuisine—onion, celery and bell pepper—permeates the air. A new celebration begins, and with it the definition of community.

“And they dance. Men dance with women. Men dance with children. Men dance with men.”

Life is short and carnival is long. But no matter how much I want it to go on forever, even this spectacle ends. After a day of rain, my car has sunk in mud. Two costumed Cajuns push while I steer the car onto dry land. Then they are gone. It happens in a flicker. One world fades into another. Hours pass, and I stop for gas and water in Baton Rouge. The checkout clerk stares at me. Until this moment, I had forgotten. I’m still soaked, covered in mud, and my shirt is stained red from the wine that Brown held above my head. “Open wide,” he said before moving on with his plastic pouch, asking, “Who’s ready for some more cow’s blood?”

The clerk’s eyes widen. “Are you OK?” she asks. All I can offer is a smile. I want to find the language for what I have experienced. I want to show her where I have been, this vibrant and improbable world that thrives deep inside her own country within a country. I want to take her there.

Here, I will say: Behold it for yourself.

To learn more, view images of Courir de Mardi Gras, 2020.

The World Inside Out: In Pursuit of Louisiana’s Cajun Mardi GrasWords & Images by Kevin Rabalais

The World Inside Out: In Pursuit of Louisiana’s Cajun Mardi Gras
Words & Images by Kevin Rabalais