- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K So you've purchased your Eurorail ticket. Now where do you go? Advise would-be travelers in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Looking for Kathmandu By Jeff Greenwald Gossip, chickens and sex in Nepal (02/26/98) Landing the Big One By D.T. Max Fishing and frolicking in Cabo San Lucas (02/25/98) Arigato, Nagano By Cintra Wilson Weird TV, naked hot springs and the big heart of Japan (02/24/98) Tara and Michelle are great and I am a worthless protozoa clinging to their skates By Cintra Wilson (02/23/98) Lost in Nagano By Cintra Wilson Our correspondent's innocent search for the men's slalom turns into an amazing half-day odyssey (02/20/98) Browse the Feature archives		__CAJUN MARDI GRAS _|_ page 2 of 2 Periodically, the national media parachute into Prairie Acadia, and the result is almost always a description of chaos and wild drunken rampages around the countryside. Time magazine did it a few years ago; the New York Times did it in January. At this year's Tee-Mamou run a squadron of news photographers from Chicago showed up in Scud Stud bush vests bearing enough gear and film to shoot Gulf War II. The Mardi Gras themselves feel bitterly caricatured. This year's Tee-Mamou Mardi Gras decided on a simple policy: no interviews. "We don't mind publicity," explains one of the capitaines. "But sometimes people write about what they come expecting, instead of about our traditions, our culture. Which is what this is." Truth be told, reporters are not the only outsiders who carry their preconceptions to Cajun Mardi Gras. Scholars, too, have sometimes parachuted in, squeezing the festival into their neat schemes of timeless cultural archetypes: a symbolic battle between winter and spring, or an equally symbolic class war. Such clinical anthropologic dissections were often undertaken, writes Carl Lindahl, a University of Houston folklorist who has spent the past 16 years talking with Basile's Mardi Gras, "as if simply by watching people we could determine their thoughts and feelings better than they themselves could express them." One result is that while Mardi Gras don't mind respectful visitors tagging along, the capitaine at Tee-Mamou's women's run took pains to emphasize that the performance is for the neighbors whose houses the Mardi Gras visits. Rider says that same thing about Basile: "We didn't do this just to have a good time, we didn't do this for us," historian Lindahl recorded Rider pronouncing over the gumbo two years ago. "We did it to feed the people of Basile." Though people no longer have to worry about tiny subsistence farms yielding enough food to get them through till spring, the memory of hunger on the prairie is as near as the grandparent who watches this year's spectacle from the front porch. This remains a community celebration, not a tourist event. If the national love affair with things Cajun hasn't yet grown to include this intense, exhausting Mardi Gras, perhaps it's because the Mardi Gras itself so clearly reflects the difficult history and conditions that produced modern Cajun life. That history is on display a few miles up the road from Basile in the larger town of Eunice, where the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center features a time line fed by many economic and ethnic tributaries. Cajun history begins with a great trauma: the expulsion by the British of thousands of Catholic French settlers in Nova Scotia in 1755 and 1758, just before and during the French and Indian War. "Le Grand Dérangement," Acadians call it. First transported to hostile British colonies on the Eastern seaboard, they finally resettled in the western reaches of French Louisiana, alongside several waves of enslaved Africans and freed slaves from the Caribbean, Coushatta Indians and, later, Germans and other immigrants. The Cajuns arrived in the mid-20th century with their language intact, and their old French tunes blended with country, blues and Texas swing; but they were living, for the most part, in an economy of impoverished subsistence agriculture alongside hard manual labor. And for generations they endured both economic exploitation and legal discrimination. The exploitation came from oil companies, which snookered illiterate farmers into signing away the oil rights beneath their land. Even today, the back-country oil wells that dot the Louisiana landscape return little to the local economy. The discrimination came in Louisiana's school system, which in the 1920s outlawed the teaching or speaking of French in public schools. Gilbert LeBlanc, a Basile capitaine born in 1921 whose clanging triangle still sets the beat for house-to-house dancing, recalls arriving at school speaking only French, and how for all his years in school students would be punished for speaking their language on school grounds. At Longfellow Evangeline State Commemorative Area in St. Martinville -- a painstakingly reconstructed 19th century plantation that provides a vivid introduction to the area's agricultural economy, along with displays of carefully assembled artifacts such as pre-Civil War slave manifests -- curator Suzanne La Violette remembers that when she attended the local high school in the 1970s, French was not even offered as an academic subject. It's this historical combination of cultural suppression and economic privation that makes Mardi Gras, its combination of communal charity and wild cultural affirmation, so intensely moving, even at its wildest. The public face of the Cajun revival is thrillingly evident in Eunice, the region's economic nerve center, with a population of 11,000. Eunice boasts not only the Acadian Culture Center but the Liberty Theater, a restored movie palace that every Saturday night hosts "Rendez-vous des Cajuns," a live-broadcast, live-audience program of music and humor hosted by University of Southwestern Louisiana Professor Barry Ancelet, a key figure in the culture revival. It's sometimes called a Cajun "Prairie Home Companion," but imagine "PHC" performed by and for an audience that shares a history and a region. The town is an epicenter of traditional Cajun cooking; there's not a bad restaurant in town, and an unassuming storefront labeled "Mama's Fried Chicken" keeps winning the region's contests with a rich and subtle crawfish étouffé, which belies the stereotypical notion of fire-engine Cajun spicing. Eunice is also home to the music shop run by master accordion builder and Cajun music shaman Marc Savoy. While Cajun music has been absorbed into the river of American pop, Savoy and his wife, Ann, have devoted their lives to documenting and protecting the original wellspring -- a musical tradition that may be more imperiled by the pop music world's embrace than it was by neglect. Their shop is a gathering place for the area's traditional musicians and a magnet for visiting players; at a word-of-mouth session on Mardi Gras eve, Eunice Mayor Kenneth Peart -- who a few days earlier had appeared on the "Rendez-vous des Cajuns" stage in full Mardi Gras costume -- could be found keeping time on a triangle amid the fiddlers and guitarists and accordion players. But if Eunice represents the public promotion of all things Prairie Cajun, the smaller towns' Mardi Gras are the revival at its most personal -- even, paradoxically, for such a public event, its most private. For instance, it's not just for convenience that the Tee-Mamou Mardi Gras met and performed at DI's. While the food is unmoderated Cajun home-style and staggeringly inexpensive -- a massive tray of spiced, boiled crawfish for under $9 -- DI's is as much dance hall and community center as restaurant, and its owners, Daniel and Sherry Frugé, are intimately tied into the local Mardi Gras tradition. For years the Tee-Mamou run's capitaine and guiding spirit was Daniel's brother, Gerald Frugé -- until his death days before this year's Mardi Gras began. The Mardi Gras begins its run at the farm of yet a third brother, Roonie Frugé, the town's deputy sheriff, and returns there for gumbo at day's end. One of the younger-generation Frugés, Renee, is among the area's mask-makers. (The magnificent Mardi Gras designs of Renee Frugé, Potic Rider and other masters of the craft are the subject of a splendidly illustrated new University Press of Mississippi book by Carl Lindahl and fellow Louisiana folklorist Carolyn Ware, "Cajun Mardi Gras Masks.") For all the Cajun Mardi Gras tradition's vigor, it's nearly vanished twice. In the years after World War II, and again in the late 1960s, Mardi Gras in the area were down to a handful. At that point, says Carolyn Ware of the University of Mississippi, a folklorist who has worked with the Tee-Mamou Mardi Gras for more than a decade, "it was the women who stepped in," seeking to revive the tradition. Besides Tee-Mamou's women's run, women now run with the men in Basile and even serve there as capitaines, cracking their whips with gusto. Tramping across muddy lawns following the Mardi Gras, hearing them sing the Mardi Gras song at a dozen homes, watching them race after chickens or struggle with the capitaine until the final inevitable concession, it's easy to forget how fragile this tradition is, just how easily it might dry up and vanish from the earth. That it hasn't is a tribute to the almost ineffable motivation that every year leads Cajun Mardi Gras for one day to transform appearance, voice, demeanor. A few years ago, mask-maker Rider tried to explain to Carl Lindhal precisely why he has run every Basile Mardi Gras for four decades: "Mardi Gras doesn't come from the head; it comes from the heart. It's in you. You can take anyone off the street and make him a clown, but you can't make him a good clown. You can't make him a Mardi Gras. Where it comes from ... it's very deep. It's like Moses going to the mountaintop and seeing the burning bush. And the burning bush said, 'I am that I am.' Well, 'I am that I am': Potic. I run Mardi Gras." SALON | Feb. 27, 1998 Margaret Spillane writes frequently about politics and culture. Bruce Shapiro, a regular contributor to Salon, writes the column Law and Order for the Nation. Have you ever been to Mardi Gras, either in the country or in the city? Share your tales in Table Talk.