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12 |
LOUISIANA TOWN |
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The day I rode with the Broadway Swells my horse wasn't exactly up to the minute. I thought I should have a small horse, since I wasn't nothing but a kid, and so the boys around that was jealous of me called my horse a goat and picked him up by his knees and hollered, "We can truck this horse on our back. . . 8 You shouldn't be riding the horse ... he should be riding you." I got angry two or three times at the way my poor old pony was moving and I tried to beat him to death to show them that he could run fast. Until this day one of the things I feel most sorry for is the way I beat that poor horse.
Those parades were really tremendous things. The drums would start off, the trumpets and trombones rolling into something like Stars and Stripes or The National Anthem and everybody would strut off down the street, the bass-drum player twirling his beater in the air, the snare drummer throwing his sticks up and bouncing them off the ground, the kids jumping and hollering, the grand marshall and his aides in their expensive uniforms moving along dignified, women on top of women strutting along back of the aides and out in front of everybody —the second line, armed with sticks and bottles and baseball bats and all forms of ammunition ready to fight the foe when they reached the dividing line.
It's a funny thing that the second line marched at the head of the parade, but that's the way it had to be in New Orleans. They were our protection. You see, whenever a parade would get to another district the enemy would be waiting at the dividing line.* If the parade crossed that line, it meant a fight, a terrible fight. The first day I marched a fellow was cut, must have been a hundred times. Blood was gushing out of him same as from one of the gushers in Yellowstone Park, but he never did stop fighting.
They had a tough little guy in the Broadway Swells named Black Benny. Benny hung around the charcoal schooners at the head of the New Basin, but on Sundays he'd get his broom-
* One of the boundary lines between two wards—perhaps between a Creole and an American ward. |
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