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Historic Cultural Connections of the Mardi Gras Indians

8/31/2022

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An Indian marches during the Super Sunday before St. Joseph's Night in 2019.

You can’t talk about the cultural traditions of New Orleans without talking about the Mardi Gras Indians, who also call themselves Black Indians and Masking Indians. But because the first account of a banjo in New Orleans comes from 1819—just before the banjo was to transform into a wooden-rimmed stage instrument—and because the banjo doesn’t exist in the tradition of Masking Indians today, I couldn’t easily or naturally bring this tradition into Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History.

At the beginning of my research, I was interested by the Indians seemingly close connections to other traditions that I had researched where the banjo did appear, like Junkanno (John Canoe) and Carnival in the Caribbean. In my previous blog post, I wrote about the Backstreet Cultural Museum and Mr. Sylvester Francis’s work to preserve the costumes of the Mardi Gras Indians. When I talked with my friend Tom Piazza about wanting to see the Indians as part of my research, he said that while they come out at Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s night and the Sunday before were really the time to see them. After I saw them and continued to see references to similar outfits and processions in the Caribbean, I couldn't help thinking that this was a shared tradition, even if the specific evidence for how it was shared hasn't been well documented.

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The Backstreet Cultural Museum: A Neighborhood Cultural Library

8/24/2022

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[This was originally presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in 2019 in conjunction with what I wrote about Het Koto Museum in Suriname. Mr. Francis died in 2020 and the original museum building was damaged by Hurricane Ida, but they gained a new home in July 2022. However, I’ve kept the piece in present tense as I wrote it at the time.]

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Most days, Mr. Francis was at the museum to greet visitors. In 2019, I asked him for a photo in front of the museum and to sign my copy of Fire in the Hole.

In an unassuming former funeral home on a quiet street in New Orleans, Louisiana’s Treme neighborhood, another community-driven museum preserves and documents material culture. Through collecting and showcasing the intricately crafted suits and outfits of the Mardi Gras Indians, Mardi Gras gangs, Baby Dolls, and Second Lines, Sylvester Francis is preserving and promoting the unique traditions of African Americans in New Orleans.
The former funeral parlor is almost overstuffed with colored feathers and beads, sewn onto armature in flat and three dimensional figures. Funerals and Second Line parades happen year-round, so many people drawn to the Backstreet Cultural Museum come for this room. Here, Francis has collected suits from tribes across the city for preservation and education. The Mardi Gras Indians or Black Indians of New Orleans only make their appearances during Carnival celebrations, St. Joseph’s Night, or Super Sundays. These traditions evolved from the African American music and dance in New Orleans, often associated with Congo Square.

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Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

8/17/2022

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On the way up the Suriname River, a bar in a Maroon village that served Parbo Bier. When we traveled to Suriname in 2018, guides and guidebooks alike made it clear that taking photographs of Maroons in their villages was unacceptable.

There was a point—well, I’ll be honest, there were many points—where I was getting out every book from the academic and local libraries in Baltimore about Suriname, Haiti, Jamaica, Caribbean dance, Vodou, Obeah, and so many other subjects vital and tangential to Well of Souls. At the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, I found a copy of Willem Van de Poll’s Surinam: The Country and Its People. I didn’t know anything about Van de Poll, but the 1951 publishing date intrigued me. In a 1941 paper by Harold Courlander, I found a reference to a gourd banjo in Haiti, and thought it entirely possible that a gourd banjo or a wooden-rim banjo might turn up in Van de Poll’s photos.
The book is a mix of Van de Poll’s photographs and reportage on Suriname’s history and what Van de Poll saw as he traveled in the country. I later learned that he traveled with the Dutch Royal family as their photographer, including on trips to Suriname. His photographs, while useful and at times gorgeous, are also literally taken through the lens of a Dutch colonialist who was working for the monarchy. Suriname was still Dutch Guiana, and from some of the photos, I was definitely getting mid-century National Geographic exoticism vibes.

But as I flipped through the book, I was keeping an eye out for photos and descriptions of music, dance, instruments, and religion.

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Het Koto Museum: Preserving Suriname's History

8/10/2022

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We walked down a quiet street in central Paramaribo and I checked the map on my phone to make sure we were in the right place. We arrived at a well-kept but unassuming green and white house, a house that has become home to the tradition of Koto Misis. Here, Christine Van Russel-Henar is preserving and documenting the clothing of Afro-Surinamese women, and preserving a tradition and a culture.

The front room of Het Koto Museum, with the photo of Van Russel-Henar's mother, grandmother, and great-aunt.

One of the first things I saw when I entered was a photo of Van Russel-Henar’s mother, grandmother, and great-aunt in koto outfits from around the 1920s. Although the photo is black and white, you can still see the patterns, and the mannequins that fill the room let you see the rich and bold colors of the kotos. They wear large skirts, structured jackets, and elaborately-tied headscarves. The women who bear this tradition are called Koto Misis, and the koto outfits originate in the ritual dramas like the banya prei.
The banya is a ritual play that combines song, dance, and role-playing in a religious ceremony to establish contact with ancestors, spirits, and gods. This developed into the du, which included secular or non-religious plays.

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The Images of John Stedman's Suriname

8/3/2022

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No. 15, The Creole Bania as illustrated in Stedman's book. Although it has three long and one short strings, a rounded body, and a skin soundboard, it looks pretty different from the actual instrument Stedman collected.

The first land he saw was a few rugged islands off the coast, followed by mangroves that lined the ocean. John Gabriel Stedman had journeyed from Holland to Suriname as a soldier contracted to fight Maroons--people who had escaped slavery and lived in the tropical jungle. During his time in Suriname, Stedman kept diaries, notes, and daybooks, which he turned into a massive manuscript, which at the hands of a publisher and ghost writer transformed into Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.
In Minneapolis, during the snowiest February on record and some of the coldest weather I've ever experienced, I sat for days with the writings of Stedman. It brought me back in time to some seven months earlier when I traveled to Suriname, to the tropical climate of the Caribbean I had experienced in Paramaribo and the hot and rainy jungles in the small South American country. They took me back in time to the 18th century, too. His writings offer us an intimate and a detailed look at enslavement and the culture and lives of the enslaved in the Americas during eighteenth century. Most importantly for me, he documented the banjo in Suriname during his trip and brought what is now the oldest existing banjo, the Creole-bania, back to Europe.

The University of Minnesota's James Ford Bell Library bought the remnants of his writings, which are now tucked away in the rare books vaults deep under the cold Minnesota ground. A fellowship at the library allowed me to do the first big research dive for Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History, and I read every word of his writing that remains in order to build out the world around him, the world the early banjo exists in. And I write much more about Stedman and his trip to Suriname in Well of Souls (although an equal amount probably got cut; his time there was so interesting and he wrote so much about it). While I allude to drawings he made in Suriname and the illustrations that went into his book, I couldn’t include them.

The stack of books and papers I researched at the library.

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Come in, the stacks are open.

Historic Cultural Connections of the Mardi Gras Indians

The Backstreet Cultural Museum: A Neighborhood Cultural Library

Willem Van de Poll's Maroon Dancing in Suriname

Het Koto Museum: Preserving Suriname's History

The Images of John Stedman's Suriname

Come in, the stacks are open.

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