Skeletons of Mardi Gras: How the Walking Dead Are Keeping Traditions Alive in New Orleans

When I pulled onto Esplanade Avenue on Mardi Gras morning, the clouds over New Orleans were just losing their sunrise glow. I found a parking spot in the shadow of I-10, which sits right on top of Claiborne Avenue in the Fauborg Tremé neighborhood; one of the oldest predominantly black neighborhoods in the country. The famous Zulu parade would be be coming down Claiborne later, but that's not what I was here to see. On this most festive of days, I was in search of the walking dead.

Not long after leaving my car, I heard a faint crrrraww! sound to my left. Several blocks away, a handful of black-clad figures with huge white heads emerged into the street, and then vanished, followed by a small parade of brightly dressed onlookers. I pulled out my camera and ran after them.

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang were on the move.  Several African American men and boys were making their way down the street.  They wore black sweats with skeletons painted on them, and paper-mache skulls the size of beach balls. On their white butcher's aprons was a leering skull design. All of them carried big bones in their hands, which they used to bang on doors on either side of the street. One particularly scary looking Skull walked on stilts, making him at least nine feet tall. The leader, a big guy with antelope horns protruding from his skull mask, boomed in a deep voice “Skull and bones gang! Mardi Gras morning! Wake up!” Some of them shook tambourines and rattles, and one—I think the one on stilts, though it was hard to say with the masks--kept making the eerie crrrrawwwww!! call.

Doors cracked, and people peered out at the apparitions on the street. Most of the grown-ups smiled and said “Good morning”, or “Happy Mardi Gras!” Kids peeked around their parents, looking thunderstruck. “Get up outta that bed! It's Mardi Gras morning!” the bone men yelled, “You gotta get your life straight!”

The North Side Skull and Bones Gang are the best known of several “skeleton gangs” that roam the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning. They claim to be the oldest skeletons, tracing their history to 1819. If so, they've been waking people up on Mardi Gras morning for nearly 200 years. But they aren't just trying to get the party started. They have a serious message, too. As they walked down the street, they greeted people emerging from doorways, shaking hands, patting backs, and bending down to talk to kids. I couldn't hear most of what they were saying, but based on what I've read, they tell them to be good, stay away from drugs, and do their homework. If they don't, they say, the bone men will come back for them.

By appearing as the walking dead, the bone men remind people--young and old—to live well while they're alive. As the words on their aprons say, “You next!” Sometimes they dance in a circle and chant “You better get your...life together, next time you see us...it's too late to try!”

Not everybody welcomed the Skulls that morning, though. When they banged on one door, an irate white woman with a Midwestern accent appeared and said, “Why are you doing cop-knocking first thing in the morning? I had to stuff all my s**t under the couch, what the f**K!?”. The leader of the Skulls, somehow looking disgusted through a giant paper-mache skull mask, said “Then move outta the city.” All the onlookers nodded in agreement. Another woman, whose husband opened the door and shook hands with some of the Skulls, pointed at the leader and said, “Don't touch me.” I couldn't hear what she said next, but she seemed to think the Skulls represented black magic or devil worship. I heard the big Skull in the antelope horns saying, “No, no, that's not what we're about.”

It's hard to pinpoint the cultural origins of the skeleton gangs. Some sources vaguely suggest that the North Side Skull and Bones Gang was started by a merchant marine from New Orleans, who witnessed the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, and decided it would be perfect for Mardi Gras. If that's true, the tradition was borrowed from a combination of old Aztec celebrations (the Aztecs being big on skulls) and European traditions like the Danse Macabre motif in art, and the idea of the dead becoming restless during the three day period of Halloween, All Saint's Day, and All Souls Day (October 31-November 2). One of the Skulls I talked to later that day, however, said the tradition was related to Lent, and that skeletons are a reminder that the pleasures of the flesh—the carnal things celebrated at Carnival—are fleeting.

But I suspect there's more to the story. New Orleans is often called the most unique city in the United States, and most people assume that's because of its French heritage. They're partly right, but New Orleans preserved more than French culture. It also preserved African culture; more so than nearly any other place in North America.  Under French (and Spanish) law, slaves had more extensive rights than in the Anglo-American south. One result was that they were allowed to gather on Sundays for dancing and drumming at the place now known as Congo Square. This would never have been allowed in Anglo-America. The Congo Square gatherings helped preserve rhythms that mostly disappeared in other parts of the United States; rhythms which reemerged in Mardi Gras Indian chants, jazz, and rock and roll. If New Orleans preserved this musical aspect of African culture, there's every reason to think it preserved other aspects, including African religion. After all, African music and African religion aren't easily separated. One of the functions of the drums was to call forth the spirits. Those drums certainly fill me with the spirit.  I don't happen to believe in the kinds of spirits the Congo Square drummers believed in, but I can see how they came to believe the drums allowed transcendent spirits to enter their bodies.  I mean, it's a pretty accurate description of what it feels like.

One of most important African religious traditions to be preserved in New Orleans was Voodoo. Just to be clear, I'm not falling for the Hollywood version of New Orleans Voodoo here. Most of the “Voodoo” you see in the city today is strictly tourist kitsch.  However, Voodoo (or Vodou, or Vodun) is a real religion, and it did play a role in New Orleans' history.  Voodoo originated in West Africa, and is still an important religion in some countries there, especially Benin.  It was blended with Catholicism and Native American religions to produce produce Santeria in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Voodoo in Haiti.  Voodoo came to New Orleans with slaves, soon after the city was founded. After the Haitian revolution, many white refugees fled to New Orleans, bringing slaves with them. The Voodoo tradition was even stronger in Haiti, of course, and remains the predominant religion there to this day. The 1800's were the heyday of influential Voodoo practitioners in New Orleans. The most famous was Marie Laveau, whose tomb is in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1, right next to Congo Square.

In Voodoo, there is a supreme god, who stays remote from human affairs. Lesser spirits known as Loa are the ones who deal with people. One group of Loa are the Ghede, who are simultaneously spirits of death and fertility. The Ghede are a sort of family, often pictured as skeletal figures wearing black and purple. They're a wild bunch; drinking spiced rum, dancing the suggestive Banda dance, and swearing profusely. They are the spirits of fertility, but they are dead, so nobody can punish them for their lewdness. They can do what they want. Interestingly, many of the Ghede, especially Papa Ghede, their patriarch, are very fond of children. The Ghede are closely associated with the more powerful Loa, Baron Samedi (Baron Saturday) and his wife, Maman Brigitte. These two resemble the Ghede (and are sometimes considered a part of them) with skeletal faces and black clothing.

When the Skulls finished their rounds on Mardi Gras morning, they returned to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé, just across Armstrong park from the cemeteries and Congo Square. Their leader, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, traded his giant skull and antelope horns for a skull mask and top hat with a cross in front. Now he clearly resembled Baron Samedi or Papa Ghede. Barnes seems to see the Northside Skull and Bones Gang in terms of the Ghede tradition. In interviews, he explicitly links the skeleton gangs to the Ghede tradition in Haitian Voodoo.

I don't know if the skeleton gangs really originated with the Ghede and Voodoo.  It's intriguing that both the Ghede and the skeleton gangs (or at least the North Side Skull and Bones) seem concerned with the welfare of children. But maybe the tradition originated from multiple sources: African, Catholic, and perhaps even Aztec (if the Day of the Dead connection is true). All these traditions were influencing each other well before New Orleans was founded. Besides, people tend to come up with similar ideas independently. If you believe the spirits of the dead remain after the body dies, you could easily conclude that the dead had lessons to teach us. One piece of advice they might offer is to live life fully, and not join them sooner than necessary. This sort of idea has surely occurred to people around the world.

Whatever its origins, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang today seems mostly concerned with maintaining the traditions and culture of black New Orleans, by encouraging young people to participate in that culture, and by warning them away from the drugs, guns, and violence that are all too common there. The people involved seem quite capable of making a difference. When I started reading about the Skulls after Mardi Gras, I realized how talented some of their members are. An older gentleman I spoke with turned out to be Ronald Lewis, the creator of the House of Dance and Feathers, a museum of black New Orleans culture in the 9^th ward. Another member is Royce Osborne, creator of an excellent documentary about Black Carnival traditions in New Orleans, called All On A Mardi Gras Day. Their leader, Bruce Barnes, is a park ranger at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park, a multi-instrumentalist who leads a Zydeco band called Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, a former professional football player, and an important community leader.

Underneath their masks, the North Side Skull and Bones Gang are talented, influential people They're fighting for a worthy cause, and helping preserve a truly unique heritage. I hope they go on banging on doors and waking people up for years to come.

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Links

Backstreet Cultural Museum
 
All on a Mardi Gras Day 

House of Dance and Feathers

Sacred Ground (a good article about the North Side Skull and Bones Gang, and the Tremé neighborhood)

Signs of Life (a photo exhibit featuring the North Side Skull and Bones) 

Moi Egal à Toi

 This is just a short post to showcase this image.  I saw it in a documentary called Faubourg Treme - The Untold Story of Black New Orleans.  The woman in the image actually wasn't a New Orleanian.  She was Haitian, and the engraving was made around the time of the Haitian Revolution.  I think they chose to use it in a documentary about New Orleans because refugees from the revolution streamed into the city in 1809, more than doubling its population.  So there is a Haiti-New Orleans connection, but I imagine the real reason they used it is the caption, which translates as "I am your equal".  I don't know French, so I wouldn't have even noticed except that the documentary translated the main heading.  The rest of it says (if my amateurish translation can be trusted) "Color is nothing, the heart is everything; am I not your brother?"

I thought this was pretty moving.  Here's a young black woman, at a time when most black people in this hemisphere were enslaved, and commonly thought to be inferior beings, gazing straight ahead to meet anybody's eye. Her look seconds what the caption says.

But who was this woman?  What became of her?  The portrait doesn't say, and there doesn't even seem to be much written about the engraver, François Bonneville, even though he also did a portrait of Toussaint Louverture.  There's a lot of mystery here, and if I have time, I'll try to solve some of it. What's not mysterious, though, is what this image is saying, and how bold it was to say it at that time.  I don't know who that woman was, but she's got my respect.

From St. James Infirmary to the Streets of Laredo

In my last post, I talked about how interesting it can be to discover that seemingly unrelated things are really different branches of the same tree. Finding these connections can be intensely satisfying (at least if you're a geek like myself). I get an added jolt sometimes when I realize that the connection I've just recognized has unexpectedly old, deep roots. I got this double-jolt not long ago, after listening to Louis Armstrong's amazing version of St. James Infirmary. (All the songs mentioned in this post are linked to Rhapsody, a subscription music service. You should be able to listen to up to 25 songs for free).

Since I live near New Orleans, I started wondering if the infirmary he was talking about had been a hospital there. But when I looked into it, I was amazed. The original St. James Infirmary (actually called St. James Hospital) was leper colony in London. And get this--it was torn down in 1532, on the order of Henry VIII, to build the St. James Palace. The palace was the main home of the royal family during the 1700's, and is still standing today. This is astounding to me: when he recorded St. James Infirmary in 1928, Satchmo was singing about a place that hadn't existed in nearly 400 years.

Just as unexpectedly, I found that St. James Infirmary has a well-known cousin, which it doesn't resemble at all at first glance: the cowboy song Streets of Laredo. Most Americans with any exposure to folk music will recall the tune from the opening lines:

"As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
as I walked out in Laredo one day.
I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen,
wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay".

The dusty old ballad still packs a punch, but on the surface, it has about as much in common with St. James Infirmary as a west Texas cowboy has with an African-American jazz musician. But the fact is, the two are distant cousins, and their shared ancestor is an Irishman.

The common ancestor of the two songs, it turns out, is an Irish song called The Unfortunate Rake. This song, and its various versions and descendents, seems to be one of the best-documented of all folk songs. In 1960, the folklorist Kenneth Goldstein compiled several of its permutations into an album called The Unfortunate Rake (most of the information in this post comes from the albums excellent liner notes). The first song on the record, the only one called The Unfortunate Rake, is a recording based on the first documented version, which dates from 1790's Ireland. Just as in Streets of Laredo, the narrator walks down the street and comes across a dying man. Here, however, the unfortunate lies not outside of a saloon, but outside of St. James Hospital. He blames his troubles on a "handsome young maiden", and says:

"And had she but told me before she disordered me,
Had she but told me of it in time,
I might have got pills and salts of white mercury,
But now I'm cut down in the height of my prime."

In other words, he caught a venereal disease from her. Given his condition, it makes sense that he was near a hospital. However, when this song was first documented in the 1700's, the hospital was long gone, and the English royal family was living on the site. So, we have an Irish narrator relating how his friend is dying of a venereal disease on the site of the English royal palace. This is politically touchy stuff, so it may be that the song was more than just a morality tale. An Irishman in 1790 would have been ill-advised to stand outside of St. James Palace and sing it. In any case, this song has none of the bluesy groove of St. James Infirmary. It's one of those Anglo-Celtic dirge-ballads, which sounds sludgy and morose to most modern ears. But the dying man is a rake, after all, and a typically flashy one (some things never change). He wants his friend to help him go out in style with a grand funeral:

"Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don't smell me as they bear me along."

"Don't muffle your drums and play your fifes merrily,
Play a quick march as you carry me along,
And fire your bright muskets all over my coffin,
Saying: There goes an unfortunate lad to his home."

As the song evolved over time, the dying man kept on dying, but he turned into a soldier, or a sailor, depending on the version. He even changed sex, turning into a young woman whose wild living has caught up with her. In the version often called One Morning In May, the dying woman is singing the song herself, saying "When I was a young girl, I used to seek pleasure". This version has a more driving, haunting rhythm: when I WAS, a YOUNG GIRL, i USED To, seek PLEA-SURE. It's a lot more interesting to listen to than the older dirge, especially if you listen to this version by Feist.

Sometime during its journey from the British Isles to the American west, the song picked up a different (and also more interesting) waltz-like rhythm. The rake/soldier/sailor became a cowboy, and Streets of Laredo was born. Streets of Laredo retains the narrator who finds the dying man in the street. In most versions, the young cowboy is dying of gunshot wounds, although he's been hanging out in places where he could have caught the other afflictions of the sporting life. As in The Unfortunate Rake, he asks a passing stranger for a big funeral:

"Get sixteen cowboys to carry my coffin,
Get sixteen pretty ladies to bear up my pall,"

Streets of Laredo doesn't mention the St. James Hospital, but there is a separate cowboy adaptation of The Unfortunate Rake which does, and is actually called St. James Hospital. This song keeps the dirge tone of the ancestral tune, and, in some versions it calls for a more mournful funeral than the Irish rake's, asking friends to "Beat the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly".

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a song called The Gambler's Blues (sung here by the blessedly un-dorky folk singer Dave Van Ronk) took elements from St. James Hospital, including the hospital, the dying person, the descriptive words white and cold, the call for a grand funeral, and the rakish character. But this is a very different song. The blues had come along by now, and the song sounds more Mississippi River juke joint than old west saloon. The dying person, now a woman again, has finally died, and is laying on the "cold, white table". The rakish character is her old beau, who has gone down to St. James Infirmary pay his respects. Yes, he's sad to see her go, but he's basically unrepentant about his own lifestyle (this is the twentieth century, and you no longer have to talk about tragic ends and repentance when singing about the wild life). Actually, he's a real cad. Standing there looking at his "baby", he reflects that "she'll never find a sweet man like me", and then he starts imagining his funeral, and what he should be wearing to impress his buddies:

"When I die please bury me
In my high topped Stetson hat,
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain,
My gang will know I died standing pat."

This guy isn't just a rake. He's close to being a sociopath. Though this version of the song is more blues than jazz, he also requests that his friends:

"Put a jazz band on my hearse wagon,
Raise hell as I stroll along."

This suggests that this version of the song, or at least this verse, came from New Orleans, which is where Louis Armstrong would have heard it. In Armstrong's version, he drops the first two lines of Gambler's Blues, and starts with "I went down to St. James Infirmary". When he first recorded this song in the late twenties, Louis Armstrong was moving beyond early jazz (which, to my amateur ears, sounds like ragtime played by a brass band). Along with other brilliant innovators, such as Sidney Bechet, he was adding more improvisation and solos, as well as toning down the frenetic feel of early jazz with more bluesy elements.

Louis Armstrong's version of St. James Infirmary is an amazing recording. I would be floored by it even if I had never wonder where St. James Infirmary was. But, by digging into its history, I discovered deeper layers of the song; extending back across centuries, and linking it to Streets of Laredo, another song I find endless fascinating. Even though they sound almost nothing alike, they can both be traced to a song from another continent; a song about a building that hasn't existed since the time of the Tudors. Those are some deep, rich roots.