Black Out

is the author of New Orleans: Behind the Masks of America's Most Exotic City. It was a bittersweet reunion last Saturday for the men of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club. Dressed in their signature yellow-gold jackets, they gathered in front of the St. John Missionary Baptist Church on Jackson Avenue for a church service, the first event of the Carnival season. In ordinary years, the service would kick off the season with a blessing, and things would get progressively more festive during the two-week countdown to Mardi Gras day, when Zulu floats roll down the club's traditional parade route, with members transformed by blackface makeup, wild wigs, and grass skirts into comical, stylized African characters. This year, though, the service was a memorial, and fewer yellow-gold jackets than usual were in evidence at the church. Many of the members greeted one another in the fervent way of long-lost family members.Like the city of New Orleans, post-Katrina Carnival has become whiter. In contrast to the diminished presence of Zulu, Endymion, the largest of the major krewes and mostly white, will likely roll with even more riders than usual. Members of Zulu, like much of the city's black community, lost their homes to the post-Katrina flood. Currently, more than half of the club's 500 members are living outside New Orleans. Many members journeyed to the event not from their homes in the Ninth Ward, Gentilly, or New Orleans East, but from Atlanta, Houston, or other cities that took in evacuees. Some couldn't make it back at all, including ten who survived Katrina but died after the traumatic evacuation. A few of the club members who were missing, though, were absent by choice. The city's decision to carry on with the Carnival season in the absence of so many black residents troubled some, including Zulu member and attorney David Belfield. After members voted in December to participate in this year's Carnival, Belfield sued the club, seeking to have the vote nullified on the grounds that members had not been properly notified. "I love Mardi Gras," says Belfield, who lost his home and is now living in Lawrenceville, Georgia. "But what is there to celebrate when 70 percent of the population is not even living in New Orleans?" Choosing not to march in Carnival is a significant gesture, given the importance of the celebration to the city, not only in economic terms but also in symbolic ones. But, with the city's future still so uncertain, particularly for its black population, choosing to march has significance as well. For Zulu President Charles Hamilton Jr., parading is a way for Zulu's membership to hold their place in the city until the rest of the black population can return. "That's why our theme this year is `Leading the Way Back Home,'" he says. Most black New Orleanians have remained ambivalent about which decision-- Belfield's or Hamilton's--is best. But they are deeply sympathetic to the fear of marginalization that underscores both approaches. James Borders, a consultant to nonprofit organizations who also lost his home, worries most about the survival of black New Orleans. "For me, the holy trinity of New Orleans culture is the brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians, and the social aid and pleasure clubs," he says. The news media's focus has been on seeing this year's Carnival, particularly the participation of the historically black Zulu krewe, as a sign of resilience. But missing in that story is the more desperate one of the black community trying, through Carnival, to keep a foothold in their city. For all its air of frivolity, Carnival has long been a way for groups to proclaim their place in the city, beginning with the original antebellum krewe of Comus, regarded as the founder of Carnival's parade tradition. Members of Comus took pains to differentiate themselves through Carnival from newer arrivals in town. Carnival was also a field on which the city's residents grappled with racial issues. For years, some of the oldest krewes were white- only, and, long after blacks outnumbered whites in the city, Rex, an elite white-only krewe, continued to dominate the festivities. But, in 1991, the absurdity of lily-white clubs parading in a predominantly black town became too much, and, after long and bitter debate, the black-majority City Council passed an ordinance to prevent discriminatory clubs from marching on public streets. The Carnival war, as some regarded it, illustrated that Carnival had become as much a political ritual as a social one. Rex invited nonwhite members into its ranks, but some of the oldest krewes, including Comus, chose to give up parading rather than open up their membership. Black New Orleanians, however, like women and gays, had long since made their own niche in the Carnival season. Zulu originated in 1909 as one of the social aid and pleasure clubs that were formed in the black community as a kind of social safety net. But, even within the black community, Zulu, whose founding members were inspired by a musical comedy skit involving an African tribe, became a controversial symbol of black identity. During the 1960s, when the idea of clowning in minstrel-show blackface went against the notion of black power and black-is-beautiful, many younger blacks spurned the group. But, by the time of the Carnival war in the early '90s, Zulu had become a pillar of Carnival, along with Rex, and the kings of the two clubs had begun meeting as equals in a ritual on Lundi Gras, the day before Mardi Gras. In one of Carnival's great ironies, Zulu, with its comic parody of white and black royalty, had taken on a kind of gravitas in the city's social world. By the time Katrina hit, Carnival had become an economic engine driving the city's tourism industry, one of the few industries left in town, and therefore something of a sacred cow, even beyond its historical and cultural significance. Pro-Carnival boosters were fond of pointing out Carnival's multiplier effect to the economy: It pumped some $1 billion into the city, directly and indirectly, each year. To attack Carnival, then, was to attack not only the city's social fabric, but also its economic base. After Katrina, the economic argument for Carnival doesn't really hold water, so to speak. This year, the city is expecting far fewer tourists, and no one seems quite sure how the city will pay the $2.7 million it's going to have to spend on police overtime and other expenses. For the first time, the city has hired a p.r. firm to drum up corporate support, but, so far, only Glad Products, the trash bag maker, has come through with a commitment. But, perhaps because Carnival has less of an economic purpose this year, its symbolic one is heightened. A number of Mardi Gras Indians, who come from the city's poorest neighborhoods, are making new suits this year, and they plan to march on Mardi Gras day as an act of defiance. Hamilton talks about the decision to march not only in terms of stake-holding but also in terms of civic duty, explaining, "Some people are saying we shouldn't participate. But we have to take the lead in putting normalcy back into the city." It is the same argument that members of the city's tourism industry--as well as members of the city's white Carnival clubs--have made. But that goal--normalcy--remains elusive, even on Mardi Gras day. Zulu will parade with only one-third or so of its usual number of floats, and it has had to advertise on the Internet for riders. The St. Augustine Marching 100, the legendary black high school marching band, has been merged--along with the school itself--with an uptown prep school, and the combined band will march on Mardi Gras day with Rex instead of Zulu. Missing, too, will be the black throngs that used to picnic on Claiborne Avenue, under the i-10 overpass, where thousands of junked cars are now parked. It is this backdrop that is keeping former marchers like Belfield, a onetime king of Zulu, away. To hold Carnival under these conditions, Belfield says, is a "frivolous gesture." Belfield wrote Mayor Ray Nagin asking that the city put Carnival on hold until its exiled citizens could return, but neither Nagin nor Zulu has heeded his call. Still, no one is under the illusion that this will be Carnival as usual. In recognition of that, Zulu added a jazz funeral to Saturday's memorial service. As the men marched through the city to the dirge and dance rhythms of the Pinstripe jazz band--past ruined houses still spraypainted with rescue markings- -the parade felt like a tentative step in trying to take back the streets and to hold them in trust for those who couldn't be there. But, even with Zulu leading the way home for the black community, as their theme declares, it is going to be a very long road back.

By carol flake chapman