Bradshaw
There are at least two reasons to wear a mask at Mardi Gras. The first is that masking continues a long tradition. Masquerade balls were part of the Carnival season in Europe at least as early as the 1400s. They were held in Louisiana at least by 1755, when colonial administrator Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial, hosted what may have been the first one in New Orleans.
The bals masque were just beginning to flourish when Louisiana was ceded to Spain in 1763. Spanish governors did not like Mardi Gras and especially did not like masking. The high society balls were stopped, and people of color, who held celebrations in Congo Square in New Orleans, were banned from wearing masks, feathers, or attending nighttime balls.
The ban continued when New Orleans became an American city in 1803, but Governor Thomas B. Robertson finally relented to entreaties from the city’s French Creoles, and balls were allowed again after 1823. Four years later street masking was officially made legal, but only for Mardi Gras events. That still stands. The 1852 law that made Mardi Gras a legal holiday in Louisiana forbids wearing masks in public with exceptions for Mardi Gras, Halloween, and for medical reasons.
From its beginnings, street masking was something entirely different from the fancy-dress grand balls. It is done more for anonymity than for tradition. One modern Mardi Gras historian says masks “allow wearers to hide their identities, enabling freedom of expression.” Another thinks that they “enable wearers to fully immerse themselves in the spirit of Carnival.” Those are just fancy ways to say what another put more bluntly: “You wear them so that you can act as foolish as you want and nobody will know who you are.”
That seems to be the reason many people masked in smaller Louisiana communities once festivities spread from New Orleans. In 1870 in Franklin, for example, “the principal streets were thronged with people” and “there were large numbers of people disguised … [as] ludicrous … fun loving clowns.”
In Opelousas in 1878, “probably a hundred maskers paraded the streets, disguised in every imaginable costume – some quite elaborate and others not so much.” In Franklin that year, “beauty, odd taste, and ugliness were well represented.”
Our rowdy courirs de Mardi Gras, horseback runs through the countryside, have “striking” similarities to old midwinter begging quests in Europe, according to authorities such as anthropologist Rocky Sexton. (From France to Tee Mamou, Seven Hundred Years of Continuity and Change in a Traditional Begging Quest, 1990). That includes masking. During the fête de la quémande (“feast of begging”) in medieval France, disguised revelers would go through the countryside demanding food and money, Those celebrations, Sexton says, were “characterized by outrageous behavior.” The beggars wore colorful costumes and grotesque masks topped off with tall, peaked capuchons that spoofed hats worn by noblewomen in the Middle Ages. Some wore mortar boards like those we wore at graduation or pointed bishop’s miters to make fun of scholars and the clergy.
Wayne Phillips, Louisiana State Museum curator of costumes and textiles, said in a newspaper interview that “Cajun costumes are meant to be comical and colorful and allow the wearer to have fun and get away with gentle mischief.”
Once again, the mask is supposed to provide anonymity when the riders “act the fool” and get into mischief. But, especially in smaller communities, that probably doesn’t work. Even if small-town folk don’t recognize a Mardi Gras rider at first, many of them will recognize his horse.
As for the balls and celebrations in town, the editor of the Franklin newspaper made this observation after a masked ball in 1852: “In the course of the evening several ladies and gentlemen made their appearance in masks and by the etiquette of the company were supposed to escape recognition, while they enhanced the pleasure of the evening – a fiction, by the way, always to be maintained with great difficulty in small villages, where the size of one’s foot and every peculiarity of movement are matters of general notoriety.”
To paraphrase the old saying, “They can make a Mardi Gras run, but they can’t hide.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
