When Ricky Campbell and his wife, June, meet people in Lincoln Park, they tell people about back home. “When I make groceries or wherever we go, I tell them about New Orleans,” Ricky says. “I tell them I come from Katrina, but I don’t dwell on it. I want to tell them about before Katrina.”
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That’s why I joined up with other former New Orleanians to put together a Mardi Gras party here. Melissa Cook, a New Orleans native who’s lived here since 1981, did most of the organizing. I contributed a carload of beads I brought with me when I moved. Another native, Hayes Ferguson, got a member of New Orleans’s Rex krewe, which sponsors one of New Orleans’s most historic parades, to FedEx a box of doubloons and commemorative wristbands. The museum paid for three large “king” cakes–traditional cakes colored purple, green, and gold–and helped provide transportation. Mama Digdown’s Brass Band came down from Madison and played for free. We set up tables of supplies for kids to construct shoe-box floats, which almost every New Orleans kid learns to make during carnival.
The Heartland Alliance helped get the word out to area evacuees; the museum encouraged all its visitors to join the party. Preparations occasionally got a little excessive. Kris Bares, an evacuee who grew up in New Orleans, spent seven hours making a shoe-box float (with the words “Long Live New Orleans” handwritten on its back) to show the kids how it’s done. She used tweezers to place the sequins on the purple backing and painted a fleur-de-lis to match the one she recently had tattooed on her right arm.
He told me that he’s been dying to second-line since evacuating New Orleans. “You want to be our grand marshal?” I asked. He nodded without hesitation.
Ricky kept moving in time, spinning, ducking, stopping along the way to hand beads to children. We all followed along until we came to a spot where sunlight streamed through high windows. Museum staffers were perched on a second level outside an administrative office, throwing beads down to the crowd. Hands went up in the air, and the shouts actually drowned out the band. We’d achieved some level of chaos. Just like a proper carnival. The beads finally depleted, Erik blasted out another song intro and the parade moved downstairs.
Ricky was raised in New Orleans’s Calliope housing development; he used to dance with the renowned Young Men Olympia second-line organization. June moved to New Orleans from Australia in 1984 and worked as a medical biller and coder. They married four years ago and lived together in Gretna, a suburb on the west bank of the Mississippi. They rode out the storm; after the roof blew off their house, they slept under their bed. They boiled water but still got sick. They ate MREs and food from an apartment complex down the street, but after a week provisions were running thin. So they ventured out.
By the end of the party it felt like we’d achieved some kind of community, but not necessarily a lasting one. Melissa Cook and I realized that nobody had collected names and phone numbers of the evacuees who had attended. Sign-up sheets got misplaced among the beads and construction paper.
