America's Original Mardi Gras

New Orleans will tell you the party is theirs. It is not. The oldest continuous Mardi Gras celebration in the United States began here in Mobile, in seventeen hundred and three, one year after the settlement's founding and fifteen years before New Orleans existed.

A French colonist named Nicholas Langlois organized the first observance that winter at Fort Louis de la Louisiane. The following year, seventeen hundred and four, masked balls began, the Masque de la Mobile. By seventeen eleven, after the town moved to its present site, a group called the Societe du Boeuf Gras paraded on Mardi Gras, sixteen men pushing a cart bearing an enormous papier-mache bull's head through the muddy streets. The tradition survived British occupation, Spanish rule, American annexation, the Civil War, and two world wars, though sometimes barely.

The figure who saved it after the Civil War was a city clerk named Joe Cain. In eighteen sixty-eight, Mobile lay occupied and beaten. Confederate veterans were barred from celebrating publicly under Reconstruction restrictions. Cain put on buckskin and feathers and declared himself Chief Slacabamorinico, a fictional Chickasaw chief whom the Union could not touch, because the Union had no grievance against him. He drove a decorated charcoal wagon through the streets of the occupied city, alone at first, then with whoever would follow. That procession broke the silence and restarted Mobile Carnival.

Joe Cain Day, the Sunday before Mardi Gras, is still observed in this city each year. His tomb in Church Street Cemetery, marked by a ceramic portrait, is surrounded on that day by women dressed in black, the self-styled Merry Widows, who mourn him with theatrical grief and sardonic toasts. Mobile's Mardi Gras has none of the Bourbon Street economy. It runs on neighborhood mystic societies, marching clubs, and the conviction of a clerk in a feathered hat who thought a parade mattered more than the army watching it.