by Lee Sandlin
Today Carnival in New Orleans means Mardi Gras—Fat Tuesday—the traditional tourist draw that marks the beginning of Lent. But the city’s organized Mardi Gras celebration, with the famous parade, dates from around 1860, and tourists began showing up for it in large numbers only after the Civil War. Before then Carnival was strictly for the locals. It was a wilder, more diffuse event that went on throughout the winter. According to one count, there were a thousand masked balls each year between Twelfth Night and Ash Wednesday. A few of these events were lavish minuets of aristocratic glamour; most were wild gatherings overflowing into the streets. At a celebrated ball held each year in one of the city’s best-known brothels, the partygoers wore masks, had guns and knives strapped to their arms and thighs, and otherwise danced entirely naked.
As Lent approached, the celebrations gradually coalesced into one sprawling masquerade that took over the whole city. By the night of Fat Tuesday everyone was in costume: men and women, whites and blacks, free people and slaves. The masks were ornate and astonishing. The British traveler George Augustus Sala described “an eruption, a lava-flow, an inundation of masks.” There were sea monsters, gargoyles, alligators, snakes, mermaids; there were fairy-tale figures from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm; there were kings and queens, nuns and monks, Indians and slaves, a scattering of angels and great mobs of red-horned devils. Always there were confusions of race and age and sex, a perpetual scramble of reversed identities: whites in blackface and blacks in whiteface, boys made up as old women in calico dresses, and young women swaggering through the streets as swashbuckling pirates. One procession in 1839 was led by what a guidebook later described as “an immense cock over six feet high, riding a carriage and delighting the crowd with its stentorian crows.”
The city seemed swallowed up in chaos. But there were a few focal points. One of them was an ornate theater in the French Quarter, which kept its doors open all night on Fat Tuesday for the revelers to drift in and out. Onstage was enacted a series of lewd tableaux based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The big attraction for most of the spectators was The Expulsion from Paradise—it was hard to tell by gaslight, in the uproar and hilarity of the crowd, but Adam and Eve appeared to be naked. The most spectacular scene, though, was The Building of the City of Pandemonium. It began with a big crowd of red-masked demons (almost as many demons as there were among the maskers in the audience) lying unconscious on the stage after their expulsion from heaven. They shook off their stupor and pantomimed amazement and dismay as a narrator declaimed the description of their new land from Milton:
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,
A universe of death: which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good;
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse.
Then, with a great roar of defiance, they set to work rearing up a home for themselves—the great city of Pandemonium. This was done in a bustle of hammering and forging and lifting and carrying, while painted flats were raised and lowered and kettledrums and flutes sounded from the orchestra pit. In the hubbub were demons flashing glimpses of flesh beneath their swirling robes, and other demons in hot pursuit. The demons were mostly the horned and red-faced gargoyles of folklore, but some were ornate apparitions more directly inspired by Milton: figures of bejeweled and regal power who radiated glamour and ambiguous sexuality (as Milton himself had written, “Spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both”). On a platform above, Satan presided over it all, taking in the demons onstage and the demons in the audience, urging his subjects to go on with their great work of taming the wilderness while he flew out from hell in search of Eden:
Go therefore, mighty powers,
Terror of Heaven, though fallen: intend at home
While here shall be our home, what best may ease
The present misery, and render Hell
More tolerable.
……………
While I abroad
Through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all.
Only a few areas of New Orleans had streetlights. All through the Carnival nights the streets were a storm of flying lights and shadows. Masqueraders lined up along the wrought-iron balconies holding candles in paper flowers like wavering stars, and the windows of all the stores were aglow with countless paper lanterns. Down the backstreets were masked revelers carrying torches, and in the crumbling alleyways there were wild skirmishes of shadows like swirling black robes. Within this seethe of confusion people gave way to strange impulses. The custom in those days was to throw flour down from the balconies to pelt the maskers thronging the streets, so that by dawn most of the costumes were streaked white and clotted with wet flour. The maskers would shed them (but not the masks) as they became fouled, getting steadily closer to full nakedness. One year a group of unseen pranksters on a rooftop threw not flour but quicklime, and left a whole street filled with maskers writhing in agony. A mob quickly gathered and began breaking into the houses along the block to catch them, but the pranksters escaped across the roofs into the night and were never found.
Most of the violence was more impulsive. Amid the ceaseless turmoil of masks were assignations made and broken, identities guessed and mistaken, feuds erupting at the wrong targets, wrongs secretly revenged, a year’s worth of scores and resentments anonymously settled, passersby left beaten in alleyways because they’d made an ill-judged joke to a prowling gang of maskers, innocents murdered because they’d worn the wrong mask to the wrong party. There were some sections of the city—including a zone of cheap brothels and gambling houses known as the Swamp, into which the police were afraid to go—where the masquerade turned every year into a riot. The most urgent duty on the first morning of Lent was the burial of the dead.
The first settlers of New Orleans had sensibly built their town on the hilltops. The French Quarter stood on the highest land and was the only part of the city that generally survived the floods. The later waves of construction spread down into the lowlands. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the city was below sea level and even below river level: passengers coming in by the river were amazed to look down over the sides of the levees and see rooftops gliding below them. The ground in the lowlands was so thoroughly saturated with river water that it wasn’t particularly habitable—at least, the conditions caused a number of fundamental problems in the city’s conduct of ordinary life. Burials, for example, were difficult, because any hole dug more than a few inches deep would immediately fill up with water.
“Strictly speaking, there is no architecture in New Orleans,” Mark Twain observed, “except in the cemeteries.” The cemeteries were elaborate and fantastic constructions. Burial in the earth was a last resort only for the poorest citizens: everybody else was laid to rest aboveground. The cemeteries were crammed with ornate crypts and freestanding mausoleums lined up along stone streets like habitations of the dead. As the grounds became more crowded, the tombs grew taller and narrower; to stand out from their neighbors, they were loaded down with garish statuary and sometimes were extravagantly decorated with harlequin-patterned tiles. The epitaphs were a jumble of mourning tongues. Sometimes it was hard to make out exactly what language they were in or even if they were in an earthly language at all. A representative example (apparently composed, one later writer said, “in the language of the Jabberwock”) read as follows:
Alas that one whose dornthly joy had often to trust in heaven should canty thus sudden to from all its hopes benivens and though they love for off remore that dealt the dog pest thou left to prove thy sufferings while below. Sacred to the memory of Robert John, a native of this city, son of Robert and Jane Creswell died June 4, 1845 age 26 years, 7 months.
The funerals were often just as mysterious. Benjamin Latrobe came across a funeral procession as he was returning ho
me one evening. Around two hundred Negroes, all dressed in white and carrying candles, were making their way through the twilight streets and singing a hymn of mourning. Latrobe couldn’t resist following them into the cemetery. They threaded through the aisles between the grand mausoleums until they reached the outskirts of the necropolis, where weeds began poking up through the flagstones and there was a patch of grassy ground. Here were the plots set aside for the poor citizens. The gravedigger was at work. It was a sweltering night, and he was naked except for a pair of ragged breeches. Latrobe guessed that the grave was around three feet deep, and it was already halfway filled with river water.
As the mourners waited, five priests entered the cemetery; they were preceded, as was traditional, by two boys bearing urns and one boy bearing a large crucifix. They began their prayers while the women crowded in around the grave and cried out their lamentations. The coffin was let down into the grave. It immediately bobbed up in the water. The gravedigger began shoveling earth onto the coffin to weigh it down. One of the mourning women (who seemed, Latrobe noted, “particularly affected”) hurled herself into the grave. She hit the water with a great splash, and the coffin popped up out from under her. The gravedigger used his shovel to lever her up. Some of the other mourners reached down to grab her arms and legs and pull her out of the grave.
Meanwhile, the young boys in the group were getting bored. Beside the hole was a big heap of skulls and bones that had been unearthed by the gravedigger; the boys began tossing the skulls around and using the leg bones for a sword fight. One of the skulls hit the coffin with a loud, melancholy, reverberant thud. The adults all froze in shocked silence; then some of them began to laugh. “The whole became a sort of farce after the tragedy,” Latrobe wrote. The boys went on tossing the bones and skulls at each other, and the mood of hilarity spread until all the mourners were laughing.
PART THREE
THE COURSE OF EMPIRE
11
The Mound Builders
WHEN THE EARLIEST EUROPEAN EXPLORERS came down the Mississippi in the seventeenth century, they had been startled to find, everywhere they went, evidence that somebody else had been there before them. The evidence was cryptic but irrefutable: it took the form of gigantic earthen mounds, some of them more than a hundred feet tall, piled up in the open land along the riverbanks. Some mounds stood in clusters like mushrooms; others were posed in solitary isolation against the prairie sky; many had been worn down by the weather and were half covered by the wilderness, barely distinguishable from natural forms. The farther the explorers went, the more of the mounds they found. There were hundreds of them and then thousands and then tens of thousands, all along the Mississippi valley to the delta and up the Ohio to the Alleghenies.
But what were they? Monuments? Observation posts? Funeral mounds? Nobody knew. The only thing that seemed obvious to the explorers was that they couldn’t possibly have been the work of the Native Americans. The Indian nations of the river valley had no contemporary large-scale works like these, no lasting constructions of any kind; they lived in small transitory villages and in nomadic camps. Then, too, the mounds were clearly the product of a unified culture, and the Native Americans were fractured into hundreds of warring splinter societies with no common language. (By one count there were two hundred mutually incomprehensible languages spoken in North America when the Europeans arrived.) And lastly, none of the Native American societies laid claim to the mounds; in fact, they professed to be just as baffled by them as the whites were.
But the Cherokee did tell one story. They said that when they had first arrived in the river valley, it had been inhabited by strange beings with milky white skin and eyes like moons who could do many cunning things in the dark but couldn’t see in the daylight. They were long gone, the Cherokee couldn’t say where—maybe they were the ones who had made the mounds.
Inevitably they came to be called the Mound Builders. In the nineteenth century, people along the frontier began excavating the mounds systematically to see whether the builders had left any traces of themselves behind. What was found was strange and tantalizing. The Mound Builder culture had plainly been enormous: it had thoroughly explored the Mississippi River system out to its remotest tributaries and beyond. A single mound along the banks of the Ohio proved to contain silver pieces from Lake Superior, alligator teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, chalcedony from North Dakota, and volcanic glass from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The Mound Builder craftsmen had been remarkable and subtle artists: the mounds contained exquisitely carved statues and pieces of jewelry. The Mound Builders had had a peculiar religion of their own: there were ritual masks in which human faces were fused with those of hawks and wolves, as though illustrating some form of spirit possession. And, most sinister of all, there were signs that the Mound Builders had been practitioners of human sacrifice: some mounds held rows of human skeletons, each with a puncture wound at the base of the skull.
But in none of the mounds was there any writing: not a symbol or a hieroglyph; nothing to indicate who the builders of the mounds were, what they’d called themselves, where they’d come from, or where they’d gone.
There were countless theories. The Mound Builders had come to America from across the Pacific—from China or from India: they were Siberians, or else Tatars, or possibly Mongols. Or they had come across the Atlantic: Vikings from Greenland or Irish who had migrated during the Dark Ages. Or else they might have been a branch of the Toltecs or Mayans or Aztecs who had come up from South America. Maybe—and this theory was especially popular—they were the lost tribes of Israel. Or—an even more popular theory—they were refugees from the sinking of Atlantis.
Whoever they were, they had to have resembled the Europeans more than they did the Native Americans. A story that some of the skeletons were holding cross-shaped objects suggested that they might even have been Christian—or if not Christian exactly, then proto-Christian, or quasi-Christian. Maybe, as one writer put it, “some stray fragments of the holy structure [had been] obscurely delivered over to them by paternal or patriarchal hands.”
As for what had happened to them, there were still more theories about that. Were they destroyed by a plague, or an earthquake, or a volcano? Or was it some deep cultural malaise, some collective loss of will, like the spiritual decadence that was believed to have brought down the Roman Empire?
A novel published in 1839 offered a particularly garish solution to the mystery. It was called Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders. The author, Cornelius Mathews, was a well-known poet and editor. He took his inspiration from the gigantic bones of prehistoric creatures that were often found in the river valley. He imagined that one of these monsters had been the leveler of the Mound Builder civilization. Behemoth describes how a woolly mammoth of unimaginable size, a kind of proto-Godzilla, appears out of the mountains of the Far North and comes rampaging down through the river valley, trampling everything before it into the ground. The Behemoth is so large that “the whole region trembled as when a vast body of waters bursts its way and rolls over the earth, ocean-like, wave shouting to wave, and all crowding onward with thunderous tumult.” Nothing can stand up to him: “In vain was the solid breast-work; the piled wall was in vain; in vain the armed and watchful sentry.” Soon whole cities are falling before him: “Like some stupendous engine of war, he bore down on them, rendering human strength a mockery and human defences worse than useless.… He swept through the towns and villages, the tilled fields and pleasure gardens of the Mound-builders—desolating and desolate—none daring to stand before his feet thus dreadfully advanced.”
But what proves to be far worse than the physical destructiveness of the Behemoth is the psychological damage he leaves in his wake. His nightly stampedes break the will of the Mound Builders; they can see no point to going on when their proudest achievements are being so casually smashed down all around them:
The voice of joy died away into a timid and feeble smiling; proud and stately ambitio
n fell humbled to the earth, and love and beauty trembled and fled before the gloomy shadow of the general adversary. Men shunned each other as if from a consciousness of their abasement, and skulked away from the face of day, unwilling that the heavens should look in upon their desolation and shame.
In the later sections of the novel, a lone hero rises up and inspires the Mound Builders to one last supreme effort: they capture and kill the Behemoth. But the damage to their civilization is irreversible, and they go down into oblivion, brought to their ultimate ruin by their own failure of spirit. Their great mounds become their mass graves, and the rest of the works of their civilization disappear.
Behemoth the novel is itself forgotten, pretty much on its merits. (Edgar Allan Poe once reviewed a book of Mathews’s poetry and pronounced it, not unfairly, “gibberish.”) The only influence it may have had on American literature is indirect and speculative: Mathews happened to know Herman Melville, and it’s conceivable that Behemoth provided an initial stirring of inspiration for Melville’s world-shaking Leviathan. But as ephemeral a novel as it was, its premise was not that far removed from what the most respected scholars of the time were actually saying. They, too, assumed that the Mound Builders must have been done in by some dark and mysterious power. Not a woolly mammoth, but one they regarded as quite as sinister: the Native Americans.