Mobile’s Mardi Gras season wrapped up this week with what many longtime revelers are calling one of the most spirited Carnival runs in years, as crowds returned to the downtown parade routes in force after the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2021 parade schedule. With favorable weather for much of the three-week run, parade-goers packed the barricades along Government Street and throughout downtown, catching beads, stuffed animals and moon pies in numbers that suggested a community eager to make up for lost time.
By the time Fat Tuesday arrived, the exhaustion was evident all over the city, a familiar rhythm for anyone who has lived through a full Mobile Carnival season. Locals often note that the length of the season is close to perfect: just long enough to satisfy the appetite for celebration, and just short enough that everyone is more than ready for it to end by the time Ash Wednesday rolls around.
City crews deserve credit for the cleanup effort that follows each parade. Mobile’s Public Works Department clears thousands of pounds of discarded throws from the streets after each parade rolls through downtown, and by the days following the final parades, the transformation is dramatic. What looked like a sea of beads, cups and plastic debris on Fat Tuesday night is typically cleared from the downtown core within days, a testament to a cleanup operation that runs on a tight schedule throughout the entire season.
This year’s Carnival season also became an unlikely showcase for one of the region’s biggest news stories of the year: the Prichard Water Works and Sewer Board spending scandal. The story, which broke in early February, revealed that board manager Nia Bradley and others were accused of using Water Board credit cards to make nearly $4 million in questionable purchases, including designer merchandise, high-end travel and college textbooks. The revelations shocked residents already struggling with water and sewer bills in Prichard, and the scandal quickly became fodder for Mardi Gras satire.
The Comic Cowboys, the satirical marching group known for skewering the year’s biggest headlines with handmade signboards, were widely expected to take aim at the Water Board scandal during their parade appearance, continuing a tradition of pointed political commentary that has defined the group for more than a century. Elsewhere along the parade routes, revelers embraced the joke as their own. On Joe Cain Day, marchers were seen tossing fake Prichard Water Board credit cards into the crowd, including at least one taped to a bag of ramen noodles, a wink at the board’s alleged high-end spending habits. Other parade-goers held up handmade signs reading “ISO a Prichard Water Board credit card” and “throw it like the Prichard Water Board paid for it,” a nod to reports that among the board’s questionable expenses was roughly $38,000 spent on Mardi Gras-related supplies.
Away from the parade routes, private Mardi Gras gatherings across the Mobile area kept the tradition alive in smaller, more personal ways. Backyard and living room parties featuring local bands, jambalaya, king cake and other Carnival staples remained a fixture of the season for many Mobile families and friend groups, echoing the citywide celebration on a more intimate scale.
Mobile’s Mardi Gras mystic societies have long drawn scrutiny for their historically segregated membership, a subject explored in depth in documentarian Margaret Brown’s 2008 film “The Order of Myths,” which examined the parallel traditions of Mobile’s Black and white Carnival organizations. Even so, longtime observers of the season point out that the crowds gathered along the parade barricades tell a different story than the organizations themselves. People of all races, ages and backgrounds stand shoulder to shoulder each year waiting for floats to roll by, trading opinions on which krewe has the best throws and swapping catches with strangers, including older parade-goers who make a habit of passing along stuffed animals and prized beads to nearby children.
That shared experience along the parade route, community members say, is what continues to define Mardi Gras in Mobile: a citywide celebration that, whatever the divisions behind the scenes, brings tens of thousands of residents together for a few weeks each year to celebrate a tradition that has shaped the city’s identity for generations.