With Apprehension, New Orleans Celebrates Mardi Gras

NEW ORLEANS -- On the verge of what may be it smallest and biggest Mardi Gras celebration ever, New Orleans today is swirl of ambivalence, eerie juxtapositions, and stark contrasts. The crowds may be the smallest in memory, but for a city trying to prove that it can comeback from Hurricane Katrina, there could be no bigger moment. Bourbon Street is full of tourists: beaded necklaces fill the night sky, draft beer is still a dollar and when the West Jefferson High School marching band made the turn at Canal and Baronne on Thursday night during the Bacchus parade -- trumpets, trombones and tubas blaring -- it almost felt like nothing had changed.

But there are typed signs in a window casually announcing that this person drowned in the storm or marking showing that a dead body was found in this house, and, so, there is sometimes a forced quality to this fete.

Diana Turner can partly tell you why. "It ain't clean enough for Mardi Gras," says Turner, 57, sitting on the stoop of her childhood home in the Treme section of the city just north of the French Quarter. Hurricane Katrina damaged the house she lived in on the other side of the Mississippi, just outside the city, forcing her into a trailer provided by FEMA. Her husband's aunt did not evacuate and was found dead across the highway from where she lived. Many of her friends and neighbors are spread across the country, and she does not expect them to come back. She laments the depopulation of the city.

"After 5 o' clock, it's dark, dark, dark around here," she says, suggesting something direr than the onset of early winter nights. Turner herself was evacuated during the storm, first to the Convention Center and then to Lake Charles, La., 230 miles west. "If I was not a homeowner, I wouldn't come back," she says, "There is nothing left in New Orleans." The irony, of course, is that Turner is dressed in a festive yellow sweat suit, with green and gold splashes, just in case she gets a chance to go to the Bacchus parade, which she has always loved. "I don't drink anymore, so I don’t need Mardi Gras, but I'm not everybody," she says.

What is left in New Orleans are some people who are determined to go on, and for them Mardi Gras is an important step in that journey. "This is absolutely what this city needs," says Amy Hicking, a retired lab technician from Connecticut, who moved to New Orleans six years ago. "I think everybody here needed it," says Anthony Boudreaux, 30, an Air National Guardsman, whose unit has been detailed to the recovery effort. "We need to let our hair down. We are working in that crap everyday."

And the crap is everywhere. Whole neighborhoods lay quiet, as if anesthetized, frozen in time. Building fronts bear the marks of the disaster, evidence of being searched and telltale sign of what was found, and whether it was alive or dead. Among the eeriest reminders of the storm are the markings on the buildings that were searched two Sundays after the hurricane: They all say '9/11' in one corner, seeming to somehow overlay one tragedy with another. Garbage is being picked up and it is now possible to walk in many parts of the city, without having to step in rubble, but if the wind is blowing right, dark damp buildings will suddenly exhale a rank, putrid odor before receding back into the generalized debris. "The biggest surprise to me right now" say Boudreaux, "is how still tore up everything is, just like the day after the storm."

In truth, there have been massive improvements since the storm. The airport is operating about half of its pre-Katrina volume of 166 flights per week. More than a third of the restaurants are open; half the cabs are back on the streets and a hotel room is nearly impossible to get. [In the French Quarter, the Ritz-Carlton, the Fairmont and the Hyatt Regency are closed, and about 10,000 of the available rooms are occupied by people involved in the recovery effort or evacuees for destroyed areas.] And the city, which used to derive more than 60 percent of it tax revenue from tourism, is spending a lot of time and money this Mardi Gras on the care and feeding of national meeting planners, whom they hope will soon be willing to bring their convention business back to New Orleans.

A huge billboard hanging along the bonsaied Mardi Gras parade route, declares: 'Nothing Cancels Mardi Gras. Nothing.' It is an ad for Southern Comfort, and may be cold comfort for all those New Orleanians displaced and spread out across the country.

But there is the suggestion that most of them knew there would be a Mardi Gras. In the words of former Mayor Marc Morial: "You can’t really cancel Mardi Gras. It’s in the city’s DNA." The big question is what happens next. "I think next year Mardi Gras will be back to normal," predicts Boudreaux.

Diana Turner worries about the next hurricane season. "See how warm it is now," she says. "A couple of week ago we had some bad weather, and I'm telling you: It ain't over." Katrina, she thinks, is now in the city’s blood, too. “Everybody is going to leave this time."

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