The Prize of New Orleans

The Coconut Man is on deadline, hustling to make gold from a hairy fruit.

Soon, his creations will be the prize of New Orleans, transcending every boundary of age and sex and race and class. Come Fat Tuesday--Feb. 11--all kinds of people will do all kinds of things to lay their hands on a gilded, glittery, literally priceless nut.

“Yes! Yes, indeed!” exclaimed the gray-haired alchemist with a laugh; he’s a corpulent man of 67 with the given name of Arthur Vigne. “I’m getting hyped up right now.”

In the weeks before this event, the Coconut Man could be found hunkered down in the Coconut House, an abandoned apartment in a mildewed, graffiti-scarred, half boarded-up complex worlds away from New Orleans’ tourist haunts. Behind windows cloaked with bedsheets, Vigne was preserving the sacred traditions of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club Inc., the premier African American krewe of Mardi Gras.

Banned from the parade route in segregationist days, the Zulus have evolved into one of the most widely anticipated attractions of the carnival season. Part cultural icon and part minstrel show (many Zulus march in blackface and grass skirts), the 88-year-old organization thrills the crowds by doling out bejeweled coconuts--a symbol, it is said, of the lost riches of their African forebears.

“It’s like, my father’s a king over there and he can afford to give away plenty of gold,” Hildebrand Ebanks, 74, explained between sips of wine cooler at the Zulus’ clubhouse on Broad Street.

At the end of the bar, there’s a bulletin board with a typed advertisement from Brother Vigne (pronounced VEEN), offering his services for $45 a case. “You supply the coconuts,” it says. “I will do the rest.”

Although some Zulus prefer to do their own, or choose to patronize one of his competitors, nobody slathers on more gold than Vigne. By the time the merriment grinds to a halt on Ash Wednesday, he figures he will have decorated more than 200 cases, each containing about 34 coconuts--a mother lode of nearly 7,000 faux nuggets.

“Evidently, I must like to do it,” shrugged Vigne, now in his 28th year of production, a process that usually consumes two months of every winter.

When he’s not painting coconuts, he drives a hearse.

“People don’t stop dying,” said the former Korean War POW, “but at the limousine agency I work for, they know I’m kind of busy this time of year and they try not to call me too much.”

His workshop looks something like a second-rate counterfeiting den, all makeshift tools and jury-rigged methods. An orange utility lamp dangles from a hook, illuminating dozens of cardboard Dole and Chiquita boxes, bought wholesale at $13 a case. Plastic tarps hang from the living room walls, protecting them from the drifts of brown coconut dust that coat just about everything else in sight.

“This is the machine,” Vigne said proudly, pointing to a stainless-steel wire brush. It was mounted on the side of an old washing-machine motor and strapped to a bench, so that it spun around like a jeweler’s grindstone. Vigne pulled on a pair of rawhide gloves and held a coconut against the humming bristles, shaving the furry fruit in less than a minute.

“Smooth,” he said, caressing the oval husk.

In the kitchen, one of Vigne’s assistants, a burly 50-year-old truck driver named George Bowman, was applying the color, Sheffield’s Gold Leaf, with thick strokes of his brush. A double layer of surgical and garden gloves covered his hands. Newspapers covered the stove and sink. Bread trays, salvaged from a bakery, held the painted nuts.

“Right here, it looks dead,” said Bowman, cradling an unvarnished shell. “You put this on,” he added, nodding to the brilliant pigment, “and, man, it comes alive. You don’t even imagine it’s the same thing you were looking at.”

From the kitchen, Vigne carried the coconuts into the bedroom, where nine trays of glitter--from electric blue to neon green to fluorescent pink--were all lined up like gold-mining pans. Clutching a jumbo bottle of Elmer’s glue, he squirted the outlines of his trademark flourishes--a prominent Z, a 97 to mark the year and a tiny Zulu face--onto each coconut.

He spread the glue with a fine-haired brush. Then, with a meaty hand, he scooped up the glitter and sprinkled it over the sticky design.

“That’s the way to do it,” he said.

*

While other Mardi Gras krewes are renowned for showering the crowds with cheap plastic beads--also inexplicably coveted, in their own right, as badges of revelry--nothing quite compares to a Zulu coconut. Part of the equation is merely mathematical: the Zulus measure their inventory in the tens of thousands; beads get tossed by the billions.

But part of the Zulus’ appeal is also their connection to the rich African American history of New Orleans--roots that were not always appreciated in their own time. Although the annual pre-Lenten bash has become a joyous multiracial street party, the carnival clubs that provide much of its financial backing have long been exclusive, all-white aristocracies.

They certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of letting the Zulus share a parade route in 1909, when the club’s first king wore a crown cobbled from a lard can and a scepter fashioned from a banana stalk. Even when jazz great Louis Armstrong reigned as Zulu King in 1949, his entourage was relegated to the back streets--although, to be fair, it was also an excuse to hit the neighborhood watering holes.

In the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights struggle, many black leaders were equally dismissive, viewing the Zulu parade not as campy shtick but as a demeaning relic. Although the club was granted access to the major thoroughfares during that era, finally parading past St. Charles Avenue’s stately oaks, its membership dwindled to just 16 men.

“Zulu has come a long way,” said David Belfield III, a 40-year-old attorney and former Zulu King. He recalled how his mother spent four decades sewing costumes for the Proteus krewe, even though it had no black members and actually stopped parading several years ago rather than obey a City Council order to open its doors.

“You ask a tourist now if there’s one parade they have to see, and I guarantee you that nine out of 10 will tell you Zulu,” added Belfield, whose own club remains predominantly African American and all-male. With 375 members and dozens more on the waiting list, its ranks include Mayor Marc H. Morial as well as a host of other politicians and professionals, many of them sharing the Gallic surnames that still carry an aura of Creole prestige.

As an indication of their stature, the Zulus helped usher “the Coconut Bill” through the state legislature a decade ago, after insurance firms refused to cover them against injuries arising from errantly hurled fruit. The law, which took effect in 1988, added coconuts to the list of official Mardi Gras trinkets--along with beads, doubloons and cups--that can be tossed from a float without liability.

The Zulu King that year happened to be Arthur Vigne. “Actually, you have to be very, very careful, or you can really hurt someone,” he said.

This year, he’ll be riding in a convertible with a cache of 100 coconuts, each wrapped in a plastic Baggie, which he’ll slip into the hands of anyone catching his eye. There will be a million people to choose from, some bribing him with liquor, others tempting him with glimpses of flesh, all screaming at him as if he truly were giving away gold.

“Oh, man,” the Coconut Man said, allowing himself to imagine the moment, before getting back to work.