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The omnipresence of disaster - in the form of vengeful floods and hurricanes (and, in the old days, cholera and yellow fever) - may help explain the propensity of the citizenry to seek delight in the here and now. It all makes sense in city where celebration and death, as exemplified by the jazz funeral tradition, have long been closely connected.
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Anyone can join in the fun and be king or queen for a day but none, in the end, can escape the grasping reaper. The bone men evoke the literal meaning of Carnival - farewell to the flesh - and serve as a reminder that Carnival, like death, is a great equalizer. He’s mysterious and stealthy: “I come without a warning… ready to dig a hole in the ground dance all around” when one’s time is up and it’s “too late to cry.”
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Sunpie channels Gede, the rambunctious guardian of the graveyard in the spiritual pantheon of voodoo, which came to New Orleans mostly by way of Haiti.
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The chief’s ominous raps and pronouncements, about taking stock of one’s life before it’s too late, have a way of cutting to the bone.Īfter each line, the crowd chants “Too late.” Under Sunpie, the North Side Skull and Bone Gang has broadened the Scared Straight program to all age groups. “And the bloodier it was, the more meat it had on it, the better it looked.” (The film’s writer and producer, Royce Osborne, who died in 2017, masked as a bone man. “Everybody had a bone,” Alfred Morris, who preceded Sunpie as chief, explained in the 2003 documentary All on a Mardi Gras Day, which explored African American Carnival traditions. The essential accessory came fresh from the meat market. It was an inexpensive way for Black men to participate in Carnival, at time when people of their race were not welcomed in the “official” celebration. The skull heads were sculpted with wire and covered with cheese cloth, then painted with multiple coats of white enamel. Long johns dyed black, with bones painted on them, did the trick. Their costumes were simple but effective. They’re menacing, in fact, with oversized skull heads crafted from bale wire and papier-mâché gloved hands gripping massive meat bones intimidating spears made with antelope horns and aprons scrawled with skulls, bones and their signature catchphrase: “You Next.” There’s primal drumming and chanting, along with booming intonations and songs from Big Chief Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, who is known to adorn himself with huge alligator teeth and have the horns of an African water buffalo protruding from his skull head.īack in the day, Mardi Gras skeletons would wake up the Tremé and send children scrambling in fear - warning them of a scary comeuppance if they didn’t stay in school and out of trouble. They come out before dawn, in the Tremé neighborhood, and keep it on the real.
Northside skull and bones gang free#
They’re not trying to be the prettiest anything or bond with revelers intent on indulging giddy fantasies at the greatest free show, in the city that care forgot. To the uninitiated, the skeleton-masking North Side Skull and Bone Gang - representing, on the most basic level, death - might seem out of place on Mardi Gras. An emissary of the dead, his raps and pronouncements cut to the bone.