“Mardis Gras, a time when the old town came alive with magic and beauty, flags and bunting, pennants, and lights, lights. Lights strung around Bienville Square, red, white, yellow, blue, orange, green lights, all flashing and glittering. The fountain in the Square wrapped in colored lights. . . .

The night, the purple and red night, the flaring flames of orange torchlight wavering hippity-humpity through the exciting, magic realm of Mardi Gras by night. The great colored floats glittering in gold leaf and silver leaf, the tinsel scintillation of the floats rocking along beside the white robed Negroes toting their white metal boards against which the yellow torch flames danced. The white-robed mules pulling the floats, and on the floats, the symbols that spelled out a complete fairy legend, or a tale from classic Greek. There might be a dragon with open mouth gasping out black clouds of smoke, a green-and-orange dragon accentuated with gold leaf. Or thered be a ship, a galley with oars moving, with a silver sail, and warriors standing there in golden armor, warriors jigging and dancing and throwing out red, blue, white, yellow strings of serpentine to the crowds illuminated by the passing torches. Warriors in golden shining armor, reeling with the jerk of the float, gayly taking a swig from a bottle and passing the bottle around to the other warriors, all of them leaping and throwing out serpentine and silver-wrapped chocolate kisses.”

—Julian Lee Rayford, from Cottonmouth, 1941.