It’s Better Than New Orleans Festival, Alabamians Say : Mardi Gras Is Serious Business in Mobile

Cries of “Moon Pie! Moon Pie!” ring out as hordes of holiday revelers beg for candy and trinkets from gaily costumed characters on colorful papier-mache floats parading through downtown’s historic streets.

It is Mardi Gras time in Mobile--a season of genial madness in this otherwise sedate and conservative port city.

New Orleans may lay claim to the best-known Mardi Gras in the United States. But citizens of this 287-year-old town contend that Mobile’s “Fat Tuesday” celebration was the first and still offers the most fun.

“It’s not as crowded as New Orleans, there’s way far less crime and it’s more family oriented,” said Wayne Dean Sr., an amateur Mardi Gras historian and chief booster of Mobile’s festival. “You can have a good time, and you don’t have to leave the kids at home.”

Dean also argues that Mardi Gras in this city of 210,000 is more authentic, too.

“We feel it’s a purer form of the celebration here,” he said. “You won’t see any advertising on the floats, and the flavor and variety of our events are more in keeping with tradition.”

Mobile’s festivities are attracting larger and larger crowds each year as word spreads about its distinctive “home-grown” Mardi Gras style.

This year, more than 250,000 revelers of all ages are expected to take part in the two weeks of festivities that began Wednesday with an evening parade by the Conde Cavaliers, one of more than a dozen local societies that will stage processions between now and Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

Mobile’s Mardi Gras dates back in a line broken only by wars to 1703, one year after the city’s founding by French explorers at Ft. Louis de la Louisiane on a bluff 27 miles north of the present-day city.

Letter Depicts Observance

“A letter sent back to France by one of the soldiers stationed at the tiny fort tells of the observance of Mardi Gras by the settlement,” Dean said. “This was 15 years before New Orleans was even founded.”

The distinctive style of today’s Mardi Gras--with parades, floats and masked balls sponsored by “mystic societies”--is not French, however. It derives, oddly enough, from the New Year’s Eve escapades in 1830 of Michael Krafft, a one-eyed Mobile cotton broker who originally was from Bristol, Pa.

Krafft and his cronies, reluctant to call an end to their New Year’s Eve partying, raided a downtown hardware store in the wee hours and helped themselves to cowbells, gongs, rakes and hoes. They then set back out into the night and woke up the town as they rang the bells and gongs and clanged the rakes and hoes against iron fences and lampposts.

The following year, they formed the “Cowbellions de Rakin”--the first mystic society in the nation and the progenitor of the exclusive present-day clubs in both Mobile and New Orleans that stage Mardi Gras parades and balls. In 1840, the Cowbellions also set a new fashion when they presented a New Year’s Eve parade complete with floats and a theme--”heathen gods and goddesses.”

“If New Orleans styles itself as the home of the Mardi Gras, it’s because it can lay claim to forming the first of these societies devoted exclusively to Mardi Gras celebrations in the 1850s,” said Caldwell Delaney, Mobile’s official historian and director of the City Museum. “In Mobile, the societies restricted their celebrating to New Year’s Eve until after the War between the States.”

Boost to Both Cities

Today, Mardi Gras in New Orleans draws more than 1 million visitors annually and pumps an estimated $114 million into New Orleans’ economy. Mobile’s celebration does not rival New Orleans’ in tourist revenue, but it is still an economic blessing for this hard-pressed city. The Chamber of Commerce estimates that the holiday season pumps about $20 million into the local economy, including expenditures for costumes, gowns, floats and “throws.”

“Throws” are the beads, trinkets, aluminum doubloons, candy and the like that are tossed from the floats to scrambling crowds during each parade. The most prized catch of all, Mobilians say, are Moon Pies, a traditional Southern confection of chocolate and marshmallow. Mardi Gras officials estimate more than 2 million of these are thrown each year.

“I caught enough Moon Pies last year to last me and my kid for 2 1/2 months,” says a transplanted Montanan who came to Mobile 14 years ago and claims not to have missed a single Mardi Gras parade since then.

Perhaps the most unusual event in Mobile’s calendar of Mardi Gras activities is the “Joe Cain Procession,” which traditionally takes place on the Sunday before Mardi Gras Tuesday. The parade is named after the Confederate veteran and town clerk who is credited with reviving Mardi Gras here after the celebration died out during the Civil War.

On Mardi Gras Tuesday of 1866, Cain dressed up as the Chickasaw Indian Chief Slacabamorinico and drove through the Union-occupied streets of Mobile in a fancily decorated charcoal wagon, accompanied by half a dozen fellow Confederate veterans.

Cain’s choice of Slacabamorinico (pronounced SLACK-uh-BAM-uh-REHN-ick-KOH) was a subtle gesture of defiance toward Mobile’s Yankee conquerors. “The Chickasaws had never surrendered nor had they ever been defeated,” notes Edward Ladd, president of the Mobile Carnival Assn., which coordinates the town’s Mardi Gras festivities.

Cain died in 1904 in the nearby town of Bayou La Batre. But in the mid-1960s, his remains were moved to Mobile and an annual parade in his honor was begun. Traditionally led by the 106-year-old Excelsior Band and “Old Slac” himself in turkey-feather headdress and bear-fur skirt, the procession is a “people’s parade” that allows ordinary citizens to don masks, build homemade floats and parade through the streets.

The procession also ends up with a wide-open party that is a refreshing departure from the white-tie-and-tails, by-invitation-only balls put on by the more exclusive Mardi Gras societies.