Order of Myths captures Mardi Gras in black and white
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
COURT OF SURRREALS: Mobile, Ala.'s African-American Mardi Gras court
The Order of Myths presents Mobile, Ala.’s Mardi Gras as the country’s first such celebration, predating New Orleans’, and as one of the South’s last bastions of segregation. Mobile’s white and African-American communities each embrace the pomp, pageantry and parades of Mardi Gras, and while their festivities may be unequal, they’re definitely separate.
Director Margaret Brown, a white native of Mobile, returns to her hometown to chronicle the preparations for the 2007 Mardi Gras, particularly the hoopla and costuming surrounding the queens of the respective “royal courts.” Willowy Helen Meaher hits the country club circuit as the queen of the white organization, while schoolteacher Steffanie Lucas serves as her African-American counterpart of sorts. The two have more connections than they or the audience realize. Brown’s interviewees allege that the well-established Meaher family hired a slave ship that ran in the Mobile area in 1859, and that some of the unwilling passengers were distant relatives of Lucas. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Lucas says. (more…)
