The Courir de Mardi Gras: The Run

In New Orleans, Mardi Gras is floats and beads and a crowd of strangers. In the Cajun countryside around Lafayette, it is something older and stranger and considerably muddier.

The Courir de Mardi Gras, the Fat Tuesday Run, traces its roots to medieval French rural custom, the fête de la quémande, the feast of begging. Disguised revelers would travel through the countryside performing pranks and songs in exchange for food and money. The Acadians carried the tradition to Louisiana, where it took on local color and never quite let go.

Here is how it works. A rider on horseback carries a flag, the capitaine, usually unmasked, the one figure of authority in a deliberate carnival of its absence. The rest of the riders are fully masked, their costumes made from patchwork cloth scraps and feed sacks, with fringed sleeves, capuchon hats, and wire mesh masks. They descend on farmhouses, begging the homeowner, in song, in dance, in theatrical supplication, for ingredients: a chicken, rice, onions, sausage. The homeowner may release a live chicken into a field. Every rider chases it. The one who catches it earns the prize and the glory.

At the end of the day, the collected ingredients go into a communal gumbo. The entire community eats.

Church Point organized its formal Courir in nineteen sixty-one. Mamou hosts the most prominent all-male version. Eunice draws roughly two thousand participants across a thirteen-mile route. The tradition had declined through the nineteen thirties and forties; the Cajun cultural renaissance of the nineteen sixties brought it back, and it has not slipped away since.