79rs Gang: Fire on the Bayou

It was St. Joseph's Night 2006, a group of volunteers set off from the New Orleans suburb of Arabi in search of Mardi Gras Indians. The neighborhood we were in was still without power, without mail service, largely without people. Almost no traffic lights worked between our camp and the parts of the city that had been spared the flood. Traveling into town at night was unsettlingly dark, flooded cars still jutted into the road. Today kids doing the same thing would be documenting every second of their experience but I don't think we even owned a camera among us. These days there are also websites telling you where to go but our strategy was to drive to Center City and just start asking around. The Mystery Gang piling out of a van asking which way the Indians went is a common enough occurrence in that neighborhood that we found what we were looking for almost immediately. Most of my fellow volunteers had never heard of Mardi Gras Indians until I excitedly recruited them, and the van, for the experience. I only knew of them because that part of New Orleans street culture has become a point of pride in the city in the 40 years since Tootie Montana, and Bo Dollis and The Wild Magnolias, first appeared at Jazz Fest and opened some elements of the secret societies to public display. The year before, while working in a French Quarter kitchen, I'd spent Mardi Gras morning listening to