“At its beginnings, the New Orleans Mardi Gras was based on the French Catholic pre-Lenten festivity calendar. It was celebrated in public at first by white men who appeared in blackface and strangely reenacted some of the moves that celebrated the bringing together of slaves from different plantations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after the crops had been harvested. . . . This was a time of serious play, deep play, in which all the resources of the community were called on in an amazing bonfire blast that could easily be interpreted as a riot.”

—Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America’s Creole Soul, 2006.