Ashes

There is so much I want to say about this year's Mardi Gras. I had intended two or three posts to follow up on this one during the week. But, as is often the case, there was too much happening. So now there will have to be a long incoherent post with all of it at once. But later.

Fat Tuesday afternoon we took one last walk around the neighborhood before settling in to declare this difficult Carnival officially over. Within the space of the few blocks that we walked we passed by these two landmark sites.

This is Handa Wanda's on Dryades Street.




It hosts Mardi Gras Indian practices for Uptown tribes throughout the year and, along with the Sportsman's Corner on the same block, is a center of activity on Fat Tuesday. It sits next to a vacant lot where the famed H&R bar once stood before it burned down in 2001.  Here is a snapshot I took of the H&R's burnt out shell four years later on Mardi Gras Day 2005.



Just a few blocks away from Handa Wanda, we walked by a tent erected this season on the lot where the Morris-Downman house once stood on St. Charles Avenue. 




The tent was once again this year the site of Rex's annual toast to friends and club members gathered there. It's a tradition stretching back several decades right up until the Downman house burned down just prior to the parade season last year.  Here is a photo from last year of the Rex toast in front of the burnt out shell of the house.



Each of these sites had been an iconic headquarters of New Orleans Carnival tradition as practiced by different social classes.  Each site has been catastrophically reduced to ash. And still on this Tuesday the traditions and rituals practiced there continued to persist. This is no guarantee that either will go on forever, of course. Folkways are created, reshaped or destroyed by social and political influences in the same way that buildings are subject to burn, decay, or collapse under physical forces. Perhaps we'll explore some of that in more detail when we have time to look back at the social, political, and physical forces that shaped this year's season. But for now, I think the cycle of ashes to ashes and what might endure beyond it is a good thought to end it on. Some people might even say it is the whole point of the thing.