On Mardi Gras Beads and Love
I like to say Mardi Gras is about love. It sounds trite but what else could it be? It’s history, yes. It’s tradition. It’s pageantry, nonsense, blasphemy and religion. It’s food, drink, art, music, dance, light, color, and, in spite of the police barricades, it’s freedom. It’s about the unique culture of a great city. It’s about things I will never be privileged to see, about things I may never fully understand – things particular and sacred to families and neighborhoods, to groups of friends and to Carnival krewes. And, it’s about things we are making up as we go.
For many Mardi Gras revelers, beads, somehow, have become the currency of this season, valuable for a few days, sometimes only for a night, and worthless the rest of the year. They are rings of color, shimmer and whimsy, handed from one person to another in often unspoken gestures of fellowship. They encircle our heads and, for brief moments, our hearts, as they pass from one person to another. The rewards of giving are equal to or greater than those of receiving. They connect us with people we never would have met and bring us smiles we never would have received.
What, exactly, are we saying when we toss one of these gifts to someone from a float, or stop on the street or in a restaurant and remove a set of our own white pearls or pirate medallions and place them into the hands of a stranger other than, “I love you and I want you to be happy?” Happy Mardi Gras, we say. I want you to be happy. Enjoy your time. Enjoy our city. Be not just a witness but join me and all of these people as participants in the ever-changing comedy, drama and tragedy of this silly interactive theater. Go and be happy with my blessing.
Ask float riders what they get out of tossing their children’s college funds overboard to strangers on the street and the answer will always be smiles and gratitude. Smiles. So many smiles. At 2 a.m. on the ride home after a night aboard a Mardi Gras float, your ears still ring with the screams of “coconut,” “shoooooooes” and “throw me something” rising above the drumbeats and horns of St. Aug and the drone of tractors and generators. All night your mind replays a river of faces glowing in the harsh night lights, swaying in the shadows of outstretched hands, and especially those lightning bolt moments when the beads you threw reach the fingers of someone who looks you in the eye and sends gratitude. In those moments you know you are the winner of that transaction.
On Fat Tuesday of 2010, around noon, someone mingling with the costumed revelers on Royal Street held a giant thank-you card for beloved New Orleans Saints running back Deuce McAllister, who had played his last game for us. We stopped to sign the card. As we wrote, a stunning young thing, opulent in her Marie Antoinette costume, asked if she could sign. She said she was a Saints cheerleader, a Saintsation. She was as nice and polite as could be. I had with me, as ever on Mardi Gras Day, a bag of my best beads. I fished out a set of large pearls. She allowed me to slip them over her foot-tall blonde Marie wig. The strand of beads was lightweight because they were hollow plastic, but they were pretty and were just the right length and look for her costume. She liked them and they made her whole appearance even more beautiful than before, which wouldn’t have seemed possible. The whole scene – the man with the giant card showing love for Deuce, we the Saints fans, the French-for-a-day cheerleading queen with our beads around her neck – was a perfect Mardi Gras moment. What was that all about?
Another fine Mardi Gras Day found us on Orleans Street. I had pulled from my bag a strand of what I was calling my African beads, because of the colors – gold hues, dark orange and rich chocolate browns. They were my favorites. I had a few of these and I wasn’t going to give them to just anyone. Then we recognized the perfect person way up on the balcony of a small apartment – a modest third-floor walk-up. She had cleaned our room at the Bourbon Orleans, which was just across the street. She was surveying the crowd below her. We got her attention and showed her our beads. She smiled broadly and stretched out both arms. Somehow, I lofted them all the way up and into her grasp. First try. She appeared thrilled. They were the only beads on her tiny balcony. As we were leaving that street, we looked back and watched as she held them up and showed them to a handsome young man she obviously knew, who was walking below. He held up a hand and she tossed them down with as much pleasure as she had received them. They looked good on him.
Later that afternoon, as we were thinking of heading out of the Quarter, we made a final pass through Jackson Square and happened upon a scene I had very much hoped to see that day. Queen Coleen Salley, a well known and much loved French Quarter denizen, regal in her crown and enthroned upon the shopping cart which served as her carriage each year, held court and lifted her royal beer can to her admirers. Admirers surrounded her as friends pushed her cart and led the crowds in rounds of “Hail, Queen Coleen.” I had one strand of African beads left, so I offered them to her as a token of my affection and she seemed genuinely surprised that I had given her something so nice, which surprised me. After all, she was draped in the finest falderal such a queen could desire. Her shopping cart then jostled down Chartres, past Muriels and on through the dusky canyon of brick, iron lace and fern and into our memories. That was the last time I was to see Queen Coleen.
Some time passed, and I read that Coleen, scholar, writer of children’s books, beloved storyteller and queen of the Krewe of Coleen, had died. For her, of course, there would be a jazz funeral after Mass. We attended her funeral, stood in the crowd outside the packed church, and fell in toward the rear of the second line. Leading the hundreds of mourners was her shopping cart. The procession ended at Coleen’s French Quarter home, where a party was just getting started. Out on the barricaded street, in front of her door, they parked her cart, still decorated for Mardi Gras and carrying her crown. There, among the purple, green and gold garland and collected Mardi Gras treasures, hung the African beads I had given her.
We didn’t know Coleen well when she appeared each year, but we grew to love her just the same. The love came from her; we just put it around our necks and carried it home.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.