A Very Cajun Mardi Gras

All photos: Artem Nazarov

“I am a strong partisan of second causes, and I believe firmly that the entire gallinaceous¹ order has been merely created to furnish our larders and our banquets.”
— Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste

I knew the chicken was mine the instant it touched the ground. Less than twenty feet away it cast a baleful eye at me but stood as still as a porcelain figurine as my brain began the laborious process of putting my feet in motion. As I embarked on a demonstration on why second base was never a sure thing for me even on a gap shot, the chicken watched me complacently, as one might a tree or a fencepost. My conscious mind strolled by in a leisurely fashion, pausing to point out that I was the only thing running after the bird, and with a ponderous flap I stopped a step and a lunge from the hen. Had I misread the situation? Was this an auxiliary chicken? A decorative chicken? Bunting in chicken form? Would I be committing a faux pas if I were to throw myself upon it? Was it even actually a chicken? Oh it looked like a chicken to me but what do I know from chickens? My stereotype called for white feathers and a red comb. This bird had a proper comb but the feathers were rust-colored. Perhaps it was some sort of pheasant or a “Rhode Island Red,” whatever that was. I needed counsel. Perhaps two seconds had passed since it had tumbled to the earth and I no longer knew whether the chicken was mine, or indeed what body of laws and definitions governed the situation.

The ball doesn’t get spiked but it does get stewed.

This crisis unfolded on the second stop of my first courir, in a rural field near the Cajun town of Church Point, Louisiana. I had arrived the day before with my sometime partner in the riding of trains and the hunt for mile markers—Artem, photographer extraordinaire—and his girlfriend Natalie. Natalie had spent some ungodly amount of time preparing three Cajun Mardi Gras costumes and larding her car with snacks and beverages for the two hour trip up from New Orleans, but she had opted to remain in the motel room in Crowley, twenty-five miles to the south, rather than attempting to tag along behind this men-only event, the Church Point Courir de Mardi Gras. Probably a good call. The Church Point Courir is the Super Bowl of Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations (in terms of both size and violence), and while it’s doubtless a rare and unique phantasmagoria, it does have the personal downside that as a middle-aged man staggering around muddy fields in the midst of six hundred drunken revelers all trying to tackle a chicken, I was abundantly likely to wind up on the injured list before the day was out. 

You’ve probably seen Mardi Gras celebrations on television or in movies or wherever it is that post-millennials see things, or, if you’re the sort that actively seeks out pandemonium, maybe you’ve actually been to New Orleans during magic season yourself, meter-long beverage container clutched like a quarter-staff in one hand, the other hand hiking up your University of Iowa sweatshirt, breasts wobbling akimbo while beads rain down from the balconies above the street. Cajun Mardi Gras is not that. 

The excess is present for sure, but this is an older, more primal sort of observance, with roots stretching back to medieval France. And don’t assume that’s a phrase lifted out of Wikipedia—Cajun Mardi Gras really feels medieval, though with cellphones. At least it felt medieval in the two celebrations we attended, Sunday at Church Point and Tuesday with the Faquetigue community just outside Mamou. We also visited Eunice and Mamou on Friday and Saturday nights, where we found street parties of the sort that are not uncommon in Atlanta when folks want to kick up their heels, but always there were those strangely costumed revelers two-stepping in front of the music stage, devils in human shape, an upside-down world as it might have been conceived by some fourteenth-century Norman peasant. But these were nothing next to the courirs.

Bedlam at Church Point

“I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”
— E. B. White.

Cajun country, or Acadiana, is the area from Baton Rouge west to the Texas border and south of, say, Alexandria around midstate, and nearly every one of the tiny towns in Acadiana has its own idea of what Mardi Gras should consist of, though the courir is at the heart of almost all of them. In brief, it’s a costumed processional. Everyone is attired in loose-fitting patchwork garments onto which are sewn strips of fringed cloth with often wildly clashing patterns—polka dots and plaid and flowers and paisley and for some reason lots of lobsters and occasionally brand logos, usually for beer or tobacco. Pajamas and handkerchiefs and flags—American and Confederate, the nationalistic fervor of both paling in the garish light of Fat Tuesday—were popular sources of material, as were feed sacks and rice bags. It’s a calculated chaos harkening to times and circumstances when creativity may have been enforced by poverty. 

Costumes are topped with a capuchon, a tall pointed cap. There are plenty of places in America where a large group of men wearing pointed caps would be a grim affair, but in many ways Cajun country is a foreign world, and the absence of that particular ilk of traditional American animosity that spoils many a holiday is tangibly absent. Not that there isn’t the intrinsic undercurrent of menace one traditionally senses in the presence of testosterone and alcohol, but the mood of even so drenched a celebration as the one at Church Point remained festive all day, and such violence as was perpetrated was channeled by tradition. Channeled mostly at chickens it must be said. 

Participants, often referred to simply as Mardi Gras, also wear masks composed of wire mesh dotted with flotsam—corks, bottlecaps, shotgun shells, and tubers—which comes together to form grotesques; leering, grinning faces that seemed equal parts children’s book characters and nightmares. At Church Point these were often pushed aside to facilitate the more or less continuous drinking that began as early as eight-thirty in the morning and continued straight through the afternoon, but many revelers had prepared for this departure from tradition by smudging their cheeks with what looked like eyeblack. One fellow I kept seeing throughout the day had painted crosses beneath his eyes, lest anyone forget that this bacchanal is still deeply rooted in Catholic practice. 

Once everyone is suitably attired—and in most cases proper attire is not optional—the courir can begin. Courir literally means “run,” and is basically a cortège. Mardi Gras in their hundreds set out on the long, dusty rural roads, in wagons, on horseback, sometimes on foot. At Church Point there were a dozen flatbed trailers towed by tractors, each with a pair of portable toilets lashed to the back, each trailer packed with several dozen costumed revelers already a fair ways toward drunk by the time we left the starting gate at nine in the morning. Two trailers were covered and one of these carried a band blaring Cajun music out of a PA powered by a generator mounted on the back. There were also perhaps a hundred riders on horseback, among whom are the capitanes wearing gold and purple capes. The capitanes keep the Mardi Gras in line, though in the spirit of the holiday the Mardi Gras never miss an opportunity to sneak behind the back of a capitane to engage in whatever foolish shenanigans they can think up—shimmying up trees or crawling through drain pipes or clambering onto roofs for instance.

At prearranged locations the procession stops and the capitanes sweep into the yard of a farm house or perhaps a fallow field, trailing Mardi Gras in their wake. Traditionally the capitanes ask the homeowner to allow their charges to beg for food to be collected for a communal gumbo, but this is a pro forma request. Everyone knows why they are there. After a period spent milling around and admonishing the Mardi Gras with burlap whips, one of the capitanes throws a chicken and the whole crowd descends upon it like iron filings being sucked into a magnetic field. It’s a flurry of fabric and pointy hats and wild faces like a demented rugby scrum until suddenly someone pops up with a chicken in hand, though on occasion one of the birds gets lucky. It’s false, by the way, that chickens can’t fly. They can, sort of, awkwardly and for fairly short distances. But the more capable among them, probably the forerunners of a race of super chickens that will one day inherit dominion over the earth, these uber-chickens could occasionally marshal enough chicken power for a fighting chance, and indeed I saw two escape, one into nearby woods and the other right clean over a house. They’re probably out there now, plotting revenge.

People were puking gallons of undigested beer off the sides of the wagons before we reached the third house, but at every stop they still found the wherewithal to pour themselves off the trailers and into the fields to pile on top of the hapless hens. Often they would chase the same chicken three or four times, like a cat playing with a stunned mouse, and at the fifth stop a trio of greased pigs were added to the orgy of bestial terror, squealing in a frantic stretto. Of course, I recognize that there are those inclined to call this behavior cruel, and I suppose if you were a chicken or one of those desperate pigs Mardi Gras is a bad time. There’s something about being there, though, that inclines one to just shut up and go with the flow. These are, by and large, farmers after all, and they know more about animals than one to whom chicken is a tan substance wrapped in styrofoam and plastic that you get at the grocery store and throw into a casserole before gingerly depositing the fluid soaked packaging in the trash.

And besides which, I’d tackled one myself.

I stood for an instant, hypnotized by my apparently hypnotized chicken. I didn’t so much as breathe and neither did she. There seemed surprisingly little attention being paid to our little standoff, in light of the fact that ordinarily every chicken toss produced a swirl of people much like someone had just flushed a giant toilet filled with pointy-headed cartoon characters.

And then a flicker of motion in front of me. Two or three Mardi Gras were sprinting… sprinting towards my chicken. I took a step and dived forward. As I descended to the cold earth she finally bestirred herself and dashed to my left, but in a feat of athleticism not much seen from my body since I quit softball perhaps six years ago, I shot my arm out and grabbed.

Stretched out upon the mud and patchy grass I was stunned to find I was holding the bird by the tail.

Interlude

Hey mama, (hey mama)
Hey papa, (hey papa)
You better get your gun,
They got a chicken on the run
— Geno Delafose

After the greased pig stop the processional transformed into a parade as we passed big crowds of people who had come to Church Point to watch us roll back into town. I can’t imagine the sight of a flatbed trailer covered with crushed beer cans and nothing else (most of the Mardi Gras had hopped off by this point, having either made a shortcut to gumbo or possibly just home) could have been compelling viewing, but everyone cheered Artem and me, providing an answer to the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes? These people.

We ate our share of gumbo, which was just far too good for something cooked in a pot that looked suspiciously like the bottom half of an oil drum, and headed back to the motel. The next day began sluggishly—we were both exhausted in spite of the early conclusion to Sunday’s festivities. In the late afternoon we gathered the wherewithal to get back in the car and drive up to Mamou, where we planned to have a chat with a fiddle player by the name of Joel Savoy.²

I joked to Joel a while later—to his consternation I might add—that it was just a matter of time until people started referring to him by the moniker “The King of Cajun Music,” but the man’s biography suggests the crowning may be overdue. I reckon the sheer density of musical talent in this region precludes any one person from claiming lordship, but Joel is like a force of nature: 

• Grammy winner

• Ten-time Grammy nominee

• Artistic director of the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, Port Townsend, Washington

• Curator of the Louisana Crossroads concert series at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, Louisiana

• ICON Award honoree for contributions to art, business, and culture in Lafayette, Louisiana

• Founder of Valcour Records, an independent label with a catalog of over fifty albums

• Founder of Red Stick Ramblers, a really good Cajun-adjacent band

• Founder of the Faquetigue Courir, which we would be attending the following day

• Star of screen, large and small

Now Joel didn’t simply emerge from the ground like a crawfish—his parents are significant figures in Cajun music, and his brother and two sisters have likewise made their mark in music and other arts. And even if he did clamber out of a hole in the soil, it’s good soil; Joel flattened me five minutes after we arrived at his house, waving a hand at the broad horizon, casually remarking that the land had been in his family for eight generations, that it was a Spanish land grant. How insane is that? I’ve owned my house for twelve years and it seems like geologic time to me, but this guy lives in a house granted to his family under the authority of the man who abdicated at the behest of Napoleon Bonaparte.

So king or republican,³ Cajuns have got themselves a pedigreed representative in the dark-haired, bearded, gentle-faced Joel, and fantastically talented musician to boot. With all those accolades one could probably pretty easily lunge for a life in limos with darkened windows, throwing TVs out hotel windows and generally giving Joe Walsh a run for his money, but Joel and his wife were warm and welcoming and I felt at home immediately. I poked around their kitchen giddy at the sight of the beautifully restored 1950s-era O'Keefe & Merritt stove that lacked only my grandmother cooking collard greens on it, or the glorious old Seebourg jukebox packed to the gills with great 45s—everything from the Beatles to classic Cajun tunes like “La Danse De Mardi Gras” to Queen. Joel opened it up with evident glee to demonstrate the function of the play counters. 

We went out back of the house to look at his studio, which was equally a creature of a past generation, stocked with boxy old analog preamps and reverb units. He told me he’d picked up some of the equipment at a radio station that was throwing it out. There’s a bit of wisdom for you: the present is expensive, the past is cheap or even free. 

On the back porch we took a stab at an interview. This was Artem’s idea but he may have overestimated my abilities as an interviewer. It didn’t help that I asked the questions I most wanted answers to before we started. Then again, the number of people who care about how you play over a subdominant chord on an instrument—the Cajun accordion—that can reproduce only the tonic and the dominant is probably pretty small. Either way Joel is a good guy to ask. His father makes accordions, which pretty much means Joel does too. Anyway we talked for a while about traditionalism and its virtues and pitfalls, as you do. Joel obviously knows how to cultivate a culture, so it was a bit silly for me to quiz him about it, but he’s thoughtful and spun my puny questions into the shape of a philosophy in which music and culture generally are simply living things that have to be watered and fed and perhaps occasionally pruned.

And then Jourdan Thibodeaux came by. A fellow fiddler with a gravelly Louisiana-French accent and a spark plug personality, Jourdan is a man with a lot to say and he said all of it with a flourish. I sense his arrival might have been somewhat to Joel’s relief—at the risk of being presumptuous about a guy I spoke to and observed for a couple hours at best but I had the impression he might typically prefer listening to talking. Maybe I’m projecting, but they were contrasting characters, which made the music they would play the next day that much more pungent.

We talked to Jourdan a fair bit about race, which is probably more complicated in Louisiana, a state where some of the largest slaveholders were themselves Black, than anywhere else. But putting aside that particular fault line, Cajun country is a riot of different ethnicities and traditions—Spain and France played outsized roles in Louisiana history, as did Africa unwillingly, but Germans and Poles and Native Americans all contributed as well. We transposed the conversation to the wealth of musical traditions that came together to form Cajun music—the fiddle from the Arcadian French expelled from Canada at the conclusion of the Seven-Years War, the pushbutton accordion from Germany, and those magical blue notes from Africa. I lamented that gumbo, the most painfully obvious metaphor for the makeup of Cajun culture, also happened to be the most perfect one, and Jourdan responded that the really galling thing is that it’s not a merely an easy connection to make but it’s also a deep one: gumbo itself is not simply a bunch of crap thrown into a pot; it’s sausage from Germany, Native American spices, stewed African-style with an African name. Or maybe the name is French and the spices come from Africa, by way of the Caribbean. Truth is, it’s a stew. Nobody really knows where this or that comes from; there’s no way to separate it back out into its constituent ingredients. The only people who really try are people like me, dropping in from another planet to try to find out how a small rural pocket of a state half underwater could produce food and music so perfectly matched and so goddamn good. 

Later that night we watched Joel play with a band in a bar called The Holiday, which pretty much opens once a year to host his Lundi Gras bash. As I stood and watched these five guys—two fiddles, a pedal steel, guitar and drums—absolutely destroy while on the dance floor couples put on a great show to the driving beat, a very earnest-looking young man walked directly up to me and held out his hand. “I’m Miguel,” he said. 

This is unusual in my experience but he did the hard part so I was damn well going to learn something from him. So I peppered him with questions. He told me he was a former Marine only recently returned to his home near Mamou. I asked him if he played music. Yes, he replied, and later, “I was surprised when you asked if I played. Everyone around here plays.”

One thing I didn’t ask is who, exactly, he was, and so it was only later that I discovered he was Miguel Savoy, cousin to Joel, so maybe that goes part of the way toward explaining his surprise at my ignorant question. But the truth is everyone knows everyone around there, and a lot of people are related, and related or not they share as distinct and consistent an identity as perhaps any people I’ve ever met, aside from maybe Bavarians. The exigencies of capitalism have made Cajun a reliable stereotype in New Orleans, suitable for keychains and ashtrays and other souvenir knick-knacks, but out here in Cajun country it’s real and organic and, to be quite frank, somewhat enviable in its richness and flavor.

Faquetaique

“Boys, I may not know much, but I know chicken poop from chicken salad.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson

Tuesday morning dawned sunny and warm. We left the motel early and parked in front of Joel’s house, from whence we walked a short distance down a gravel road to where the courir was departing. The Faquetaique⁴ celebration, begun in 2006 to present a more authentic Cajun courir and to offset the ever increasing rowdiness of the other courirs, was more stringent about costume rules. Whereas we’d been able to dispense with our capuchons early in Church Point, on Tuesday we’d have them on the whole day, and they would become slick with sweat by the time the noon sun was beating down upon us. But Faquetaique was more family friendly, and Natalie was able to come with us, so on balance we were ahead. 

I was ready for another day of dangerously heavy drinking, and we’d barely gotten out of the starting gate before Joel’s wife Effie, tall and resplendent in a black catsuit, poured a shot of bourbon for me about twelve inches above my face. Most of it wound up in my beard, so at least I smelled like an alcoholic. I was surprised, however, to find myself still entirely sober at the end of the day. Again: family-friendly. 

What Faquetaique lacked in alcohol consumption it more than made up for in music. The pattern of events was pretty much the same as in Church Point—travel a bit, divert to someone’s house, chase some chickens. But at the end of each stop Mardi Gras were directed to dance while the mobile band played. And the mobile band—there were actually two—wasn’t the only source of music. Small groups of footbound troubadours provided music up and down the line. It was a delight for the ears, and combined with greater emphasis on costumes—these weren’t quite so tightly bound to the traditional template and I saw much more fanciful headgear in particular, in the form of animals and devils and, my personal favorite, a decorative lampshade—the vibe of Faquetaique was both friendlier and more hallucinatory.

After our fourth stop the procession set off across a huge open field, and we stopped in the middle. There was a greased pole with a chicken in a cage at the top, and for the next hour or so we watched large groups of people trying to climb to the top to release the bird. The typical strategy consisted of creating a tightly packed crowd of twenty or thirty people around the pole, and at various times, like some sort of crazy inversion of a Quaker meeting, people would feel the spirit of the chicken and clamber over the top of their brethren, whereupon they might attempt to actually climb the pole, which never worked. Eventually someone else would climb up and scramble up the back of the first person and slowly the whole crowd kept pushing and climbing and squirting people up the pole until either the people at the top gave up and slid back down or—and this happened twice while we were there—by some miracle someone would grab the rope that released the chicken and the whole pile of people would melt like a candle while a detachment went off after the bird. 

Metaphor for life, Cajun and otherwise.

While all this was going on some pickup trucks pulled up with coolers full of fresh boudin. Boudin is a sort of sausage made with rice and pork and spices packed into a pig intestine. It sounds a little gross; especially when you overhear a young woman remark that she likes to squeeze the filling out of the casing, “like a meat Go-Gurt®.” But it’s actually really good. We queued up at the trucks and received a sausage each, no plate or even a napkin so no waste, though we had to wipe our hands on our clothes. We ate our bare boudin and watched the writhing mass of Mardi Gras struggle to get up the greased pole. 

The last stop of the day was at the cemetery housing the remains of the Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee. As we entered, Jourdan Thibodeaux, a capitane in the courir, explained with great force and eloquence that this was no longer fun and games, that this stop was serious and that if anyone was disrespectful he would dismount his horse and fight them. I reckon he would, and I reckon that not only would that person get a fat lip, but there would probably wind up being songs written about the fisticuffs in the cemetery, songs in which the interloper would be forever immortalized as a Cajun bugaboo. 

Joel, left, and Jourdan, right, serenade the dead.

So I kept my mouth firmly shut while we gathered around McGee’s grave where Savoy and Thibodeaux and a couple others played and sang while the cool breeze blew and an American flag flapped overhead. It was at once entertaining but also edifying—really everything church is supposed to be but never really is. I was moved as we stood up to leave and Joel touched McGee’s stone, telling him softly, “We’ll see you next year Dennis.”

The day concluded with a party back at Joel’s house, with a great band and, of course, brilliant gumbo. I ate and reflected on a wild and alien experience. I thought of the look on my chicken’s face as I rose up from the ground with her in my hands. What do you do with a chicken? I had no idea. I wandered briefly, petting her on the head, before I came across a capitane who took the hen from me. “What’s your name,” he asked, and I told him.

“You’re on the books now,” he said. I imagined a big red leather-bound book somewhere with gold edging and a list of chickens, each with the name of her conqueror beside. Deep down in there somewhere, “Eliza the Lame: Fletcher Moore.” But I think he was being figurative. I neglected to take a picture of my bird, so the only people that know I caught a chicken are myself and the capitane. Well, and the chicken of course.

Standing in the warm sun watching people dance to a Cajun tune I thanked Eliza for her sacrifice. And then I took a bite.

1. Chickens.

2. Pronounced Jo-elˊ Sav-wahˊ.

3. I know you guys are educated well enough to note the small R, but in these truthy days you have to draw attention to it.

4. Faquetaique is a small Cajun community on the outskirts of Mamou. The name faquetaique is a derivation from a Choctaw word meaning female turkey.