Nothing is normal in winter 2021, including Mardi Gras! House floats replaced parades, with residents on St. Charles Avenue and throughout the city hiring local Mardi Gras artists to decorate their homes and yards.
The statues were the only ones getting beads this year!
Local organizations got creative with house floats and cutouts!
Dinosaurs in top hats walked down St. Charles Ave!
Houses had elaborate themes and celebrated the culture of the “Big Easy” - a nickname for the city.
Even the bus stops were decorated to the nines!
I visited the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé neighborhood, America’s oldest African American neighborhood. Here, Jazz Funerals are celebrated and visitors learn about the Mardi Gras Indians who parade in elaborate costumes during Mardi Gras festivities and other special occasions. These costumes weighed between 30 and 100 pounds!
I visited Whitney Plantation, the only plantation in Louisiana with a focus on the lives of the enslaved people who worked and lived on the plantation. This is a memorial to all of the children who died while enslaved here and on nearby plantations. I highly recommend a visit to this incredibly informative place for every American.
Enslaved people processed sugar cane into granulated sugar by boiling the sugar cane juice in these large vats, a very dangerous job that claimed the lives of many enslaved people. Pictured in the background is a hut where enslaved people lived in the 1800s. Their descendants lived in these shacks until the 1970s and worked as poorly paid laborers on the same plantation.
Beautiful sculptures brought the violent history to life on the Whitney Plantation. Here is a sculpture of an enslaved child looking at the owner’s elaborate home flanked by oak trees.
On my last few days in New Orleans, I visited gravesites in the city and learned about the people buried there in above-ground tombs due to the high water level. The oldest grave I found was from 1840! Due to the storm sweeping across Texas and the South, which left many without power and electricity, I extended my stay from four to 11 days to avoid icy road conditions.