The power behind the Mardi Gras mask

Mardi Gras queens wield influence during the parading season and beyond 

Note: This is the second of a series on Mardi Gras and its role in Black communities.    

The original influencers: A young woman in trouble might go to a big queen like Laurita Dollis of the Wild Magnolias before the first lady of the church or perhaps her own mother. image credit: Arthur Severio

For many people in the U.S., Mardi Gras is associated with debauchery and mischief in the French Quarter. However, for New Orleanians of African descent, the two-three-week period of parades and street parties leading up to Fat Tuesday is so much more than the trinkets you catch after chasing floats and the amount of alcohol you can consume. 

Deciding to put aside the headdress when you’re already 12 hours into sewing the hundredth bead onto it because a teenage girl is on the other side of your door in tears is an incredible act of sacrifice. The money for the fabric and beadwork comes out of the queens’ pockets. How they have enough left to buy school uniforms and college textbooks for youth who need them is a thing of wonder. 

For Black New Orleanians, Mardi Gras culture is directly linked to the culture of African-American masking Indians. Karen Celestan, a writer and student of the masking tradition, has formed friendships with the dozen or so active tribes who treat their tradition of hand sewing a new suit every. single. year. and parading throughout their communities as a continuation of the rituals of their West African ancestors. Their intricately beaded regalia complete with elaborate headdress and marching through the community to announce their grandiose presence mimic the spectacle and movement of numerous tribes indigenous to the Coast of West Africa — such as the Fante, Mandinka and Wolof. Popular folklore attributes the masking tradition to the descendants of enslaved Africans paying homage to Native American tribes who granted their ancestors refuge when they escaped enslavement. However, scholars like Celestan maintain that the culture is intrinsically tied to an enslaved people’s commitment to maintaining vestiges of its homeland’s celebratory traditions despite centuries of oppression. 

In 2018, along with the vivid images of photographer, Eric Waters, Celestan compiled “Freedom’s Dance,” a 248-page narrative highlighting the history and rituals of the African-American Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs in New Orleans. She’s currently working on a similar project.  “So So Pretty: African Indian Queens of New Orleans” focuses on the matriarchs of the masking Indian tribes who stand proudly in their roles as the culture bearers of this tradition. “This [tradition] has been maintained from generation to generation,” Celestan says. She cites, for example, Maroon Queen Cherice Harrison Nelson (Queen Reesie), whose father and grandfather were masking Indians with the Guardians of the Flame tribe. Queen Reesie is a proud daddy’s girl so taking on this tradition and parading alongside her brother were essential to her own identity.  

Celetan believes this interconnectedness of the masking Indian tradition to generational lineage is what gives the chiefs and queens of the masking Indian tribes a high level of influence among the old and the young. Everyone knows who the chiefs and queens are. Even if they don’t live in one queen’s neighborhood specifically, they’re likely to identify who she is within moments of seeing her around the city. They’ll also likely know that her father was also a chief, her husband might be and all the responsibilities that have come with her family’s leadership in the tribe. 

Queen Cherice Harrison Nelson a.k.a Queen Reesie has a father and grandfather who were masking Indians with the Guardians of the Flame tribe. image credit: image credit: Arthur Severio 

“In this city, as much as they talk about people not being as educated as they could be or acting out,” Celestan goes on to explain. “It’s less here than in other places because they have people they can look up to and admire.” According to Celestan, the chiefs and queens of the tribes mirror a role that faith leaders often embody. In Black churches across the South, the pastor and his wife are often seen as the moral authorities of their communities. They set the tone for how the congregation will foster its young. How much weight the elders will carry in order to ensure the theological teachings and their practice won’t be lost. 

In the African American masking tradition, chiefs rise through the ranks of the tribes by committing to “dressing out” and parading each Mardi Gras season. Over time, they ascend to the position of chief and hold it until they die. Or until dressing out and parading become too much for them to keep up with. The queens of the tribe ascend in much the same fashion, which can also mean a dressing out and parading woman might rise to this role by marrying a chief. Because these leaders of the tribe have cultural ties with the tradition and generational lineage in New Orleans, they also have the respect and trust of the community at large. 

In neighborhoods throughout New Orleans, young women in trouble will go to one of the big queens of the masking Indian tribes before they even think of going to the First Lady of the church. If a young woman is uncomfortable going to her mother when in trouble, knocking on the door of the Queen of the Wild Magnolias, Laurita Dollis, is seen as the next best thing. Because the queens already see their standing in the tribe as part of the ancestral line they were born into, raising the young in their culture is an expected by-product of their positioning. Celestan has seen queens quietly pay for school uniforms when parents came up short. She knows of college students who needed textbooks and their scholarship money couldn’t cover it. Without hesitation, one of the queens took care of it.  

These examples of mutual aid may seem insignificant since it’s not uncommon in the African-American community for those with financial resources to help out neighbors with less. However, it should be noted that many of the masking Indian queens are very much working class. They earn Louisiana salaries and live in a gentrified New Orleans. Protocol calls for them to hand sew an entire new suit for each parading season. They have a year to purchase every single bead and every single feather that will make their vision for the following year’s Mardi Gras masking tradition even more glorious than the last. 

For working class women with aging parents and young adult children and grandchildren, the cost alone has to be great. Not to mention the time they must also donate to getting their suits sewn in just 12 months. So deciding to put aside the headdress when you’re already 12 hours into sewing the hundredth bead onto it because a teenaged girl is on the other side of your door in tears is an incredible act of sacrifice. The money for the fabric and beadwork comes out of the queens’ pockets. How they have enough left to buy school uniforms and college textbooks for youth who need them is a thing of wonder. 

For three years, Celestan has interviewed many of the queens. She’s spoken to them on the phone late at night as they caught up on their TV programs while sewing on a few beads here and there. She’s been privy to elder queens mentoring younger women who’ve been brought into the tradition, but whose youth can be an obstacle to their ability to grasp that their role in the culture is about more than putting on their suit and marching through the streets declaring, “I’m so so pretty, pretty!” 

Celestan talks of an up-and-coming queen who’s heavily present on social media. Her exquisite suits and her graceful footwork when parading brought her to the attention of national media. She was able to leverage this into a cover story in Essence magazine. While the big queen in her tribe was proud of this, she also lovingly reminded the young queen that the attention she was getting from being in the culture shouldn’t supersede doing the work of the culture. 

“But are you sewing?” the big queen was known to ask the young woman when it seemed one too many videos were posted on TikTok.  Next: Can the elder queens quell a war between two up-and-comers? Stay tuned for part three in our Mardi Gras series.