Alice Dunbar-Nelson - "A Carnival Jangle" - 1899

🎭🎡 Alice Dunbar-Nelson - "A Carnival Jangle" (1899) 🌌✨

A vivid exploration of freedom, desire, and societal constraints set against the dazzling chaos of a carnival. 🎠🌟 In this richly atmospheric story, a young woman navigates the vibrant yet unsettling energy of the carnival, torn between her upbringing's moral rigidity and the alluring possibilities of indulgence.

🎭💔Amid the swirling lights, masked figures, and festive noise, she is drawn into a world that challenges her identity and values. The carnival becomes a metaphor for the fleeting and tumultuous nature of human desires, offering a momentary escape from societal expectations but also exposing the fragility of those moments.

🎡✨Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "A Carnival Jangle" is a masterful blend of introspection and sensory richness, capturing the tension between duty and desire, and the bittersweet beauty of transience. It is a timeless meditation on the delicate balance between freedom and restraint, framed by the intoxicating spectacle of the carnival. 🎠🌌🎭

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Alice Dunbar, a Carnival Jangle, published in eighteen ninety nine.
There is a merry jangle of bells in the air,
an all pervading sense of jester's noise, and the flaunting
vividness of royal colors. The streets swarm with humanity, humanity
in all shapes, manners, forms, laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a

(00:22):
mass of men and women and children, as varied and
assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever, a crowd
that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.
It is Carnival in New Orleans, a brilliant Tuesday in February,
when the very air gives forth an ozone intensely exhilarating,
making one long to cut capers. The buildings are a

(00:44):
blazing mass of royal purple and golden yellow national flags,
bunting and decorations that laugh in the glint of the
Midas sun. The streets are a crush of jesters and maskers,
jim crows and clowns, ballet girls and mephistos, Indians and monkeys,
of wild and sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants,

(01:05):
and comic ones of befeathered and belled horses, a dream
of color and melody and fantasy gone wild in an
effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes
kaleidoscope like before the bewildered eye. A bevy of bright
eyed girls and boys of that uncertain age that hovers
between childhood and maturity were moving down Canal Street when

(01:25):
there was a sudden jostle with another crowd meeting them.
For a minute. There was a deafening clamor of shouts
and laughter, cracking of the whips which all maskers carry,
a jingle and clatter of carnival bells, and the masked
and unmasked extricated themselves and moved from each other's paths.
But in the confusion, a tall prince of darkness had

(01:46):
whispered to one of the girls in the unmasked crowd,
you'd better come with us, Flow, You're wasting time in
that tame gang slip off. They'll never miss you. We'll
get you a rig and show you what life is.
And so it happened when a half hour passed and
the bright eyed bevy mist flow and couldn't find her

(02:06):
wisely giving up the search. At last, she the quietest
and most bashful of the lot, was being initiated into
the mysteries of what life is. Down Bourbon Street, and
on Toulouse and Saint Peter Streets, there are quaint, little
old world places where one may be disguised effectually for
a tiny consideration. Thither, guided by the shapely Mephisto and

(02:27):
guarded by the team of jockeys and ballet girls, tripped
flow into one of the lowest, sealed, dingiest and most
ancient looking of these shops. They stepped a disguise for
the Demoiselle, announced Mephisto to the woman who met them.
She was small and wizened and old, with yellow, flabby jaws,
a neck like the throat of an alligator, and straight

(02:48):
white hair that stood from her head uncannily stiff. But
the Demoiselle wishes to appear a boy, unpatigued garsone. She inquired,
gazing eagerly at flows long, long, slender frame. Her voice
was old and thin, like the high quavering of an
imperfect tuning fork, and her eyes were sharp as talons
in their grasping glance. Mademoiselle does not wish such a costume, gruffly,

(03:14):
responded Mephisto, Ma foi, there is no other, said the ancient,
shrugging her shoulders. But one is left now. Mademoiselle would
make a fine troubadour, flow, said Mephisto. It's a dare
devil's scheme. Try it. No one will ever know it
but us, and will die before we tell. Besides we must.

(03:37):
It's late, and you couldn't find your crowd, And that
was why you might have seen a Mephisto and a
slender troubadour of lovely form, with mandolin flung across his shoulder,
followed by a bevy of jockeys and ballet girls, laughing
and singing as they swept down Rampart Street. When the
flash and glare and brilliancy of Canal Street have pulled

(03:57):
upon the tired eye, when it is yet too soon
to go home to such a prosaic thing as dinner,
and one still wishes for novelty, then it is wise
to go into the lower districts. There is fantasy, and
fancy and grotesqueness run wild in the costuming and the
behavior of the maskers, such dances and whoops and leaps
as these hideous Indians and devils do indulge in such

(04:20):
wild curvetings and long walks, in the open squares where
whole groups do congregate, it is wonderfully amusing. Then two,
there is a ball in every available hall, a delirious ball,
where one may dance all day for ten cents. Dance
and grow mad for joy, and never know who were
your companions, and be yourself unknown. And in the exhilaration

(04:43):
of the day, one walks miles and miles, and dances
and skips, and the fatigue is never felt. In Washington Square,
away down where Royal Street empties its stream of children
great and small, into the broad channel of Alesion Fields Avenue,
there was perfect Indian pow wow. With a little imagination,

(05:03):
one might have willed away the vision of the surrounding
houses and fancied one's self again. In the forest, where
the natives were holding a sacred riot. The square was
filled with spectators, masked and unmasked. It was amusing to
watch these mimic red men. They seemed so fierce and earnest.
Suddenly one chief touched another on the elbow. See that,

(05:26):
Mephisto and Troubadour over there, he whispered huskily. Yes, who
are they? I don't know, the devil, responded the other quietly.
But i'd know that other form anywhere. It's Leon. See.
I know those white hands like a woman's and that
restless head. Ha. But there may be a mistake. No,

(05:50):
i'd know that one anywhere. I feel it is he.
I'll pay him now, Ah, sweetheart, you've waited long, but
you shall feast now. He was caressing something long and
lithe and glittering beneath his blanket. In a masked dance.
It is easy to give a death blow between the shoulders.
Two crowds meet and laugh and shout and mingle almost inextricably,

(06:13):
And if a shriek of pain should arise, it is
not noticed in the din. And when they part, if
one should stagger and fall bleeding to the ground, can
any one tell who has given the blow? There is
nothing but an unknown stiletto on the ground. The crowd
has dispersed, and masks tell no tales. Anyway. There is murder,
but by whom for what Queen sabe? And that is

(06:38):
how it happened on Carnival night, in the last mad
moments of Rex's rain. A broken hearted mother sat gazing,
wide eyed and mute at a horrible something that lay
across the bed. Outside. The long sweet march music of
many bands floated in as if in mockery, and the
flash of rockets and Bengal lights illumined the dead white
face of the girl troubadour