Coconuts

It is Shrove Tuesday in New Orleans. Early on this Mardi Gras morning, before the white folks' Rex comes in splendor to Canal Street, the Negroes are having their own carnival. Up squalid New Basin glides a barge, canopied in sacking, to the wharf at Rampart Street and Howard Avenue. Off the barge strides the King of the Zulus, right royal in black underwear, a hula skirt of sea grass, a tin crown. His sceptre is a broomstick, topped by a snow-white rooster. Preceding him is his Queen, behind are his capering dukes. The King mounts his throne--a decrepit easy chair on a mule-drawn wagon. Up darktown's Rampart Street whoop King and courtiers, laughing at the whites on the royal way. At 7 p. m. their parade ends, and the drinking and the loving begin. It is carnival for the merriest of people. It is also dark satire on the pretentious, elite Mardi Gras courts of the white folks' Rex, Momus, Comus, Proteus, the Druids.

John Metoyer, an olive-brown pixie who founded the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club in a woodshed 30 years ago, had never been King of the Zulus. He hardly cared. As daily host to the Zulus at his cafe (now called the Brown Bomber) on Perdido Street, he was the uncrowned soul of Zulu. And at last, this year, John Metoyer was elected King.

But never will King John ride in tin-crowned glory up the Street of the old Rampart Last week, at 47, John Metoyer died. At the Brown Bomber the mourning Zulus gathered, planned a proper funeral with five bands, pallbearers in Mardi Gras skirts of grass, and all the Zulu mourners carrying coconuts. The coconuts would be laid on John Metoyer's bier, that he might fight his way to joy with the heavenly Queen of the Amazon Islands. Mourners hoped that John Metoyer's boyhood friend and Zulu clubmember, famed Zulu Louis ("Satchelmouth") Armstrong, would come down from Manhattan's Harlem with his trumpet to lead the bands in There Never Was and There Never Will Be a King Like Me.

In Harlem, Satchelmouth announced that he could not go to the funeral. "Poor John," he mourned, "he was a great guy." Poor John's relatives announced that they and not the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club were running this funeral, reduced it to a respectable affair with only one band, pall bearers in tuxedos and white gloves, no grass skirts, no coconuts. Said John Metoyer's heir apparent to the Zulu presidency, Charles Fisher: "If it was me and I died right now, I'd have the biggest funeral in the history of New Orleans. I'd want exactly five bands and all that was due me. I'd want John Metoyer to do that for me, with all the trimmings."

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