Jouvert (that's JOO-vay) the Great

Your Average American Negro enjoys holidays like anyone else. On Thanksgiving he eats turkey and falls asleep. At the stroke of midnight each New Year, he shoots a pistol into the sky. On Labor Day he stops wearing white. And on the Fourth of July, just last Monday, he barbecued lots and lots (and lots) of chicken.

Despite it all, he lacks a special occassion on which to revel in his American Negritude. Martin Luther King Day is a celebration of history, which is important, but different. And Kwanzaa, an American Negro's only cultural celebration, is a joke. Have you ever met a Negro that celebrates Kwanzaa? I know some white folks that celebrate Kwanzaa, but nary a Negro.

Maybe you can understand why I sometimes envy those Caribbean Negroes with all their parades and multicolored costumes and carnivals and dances. Like them, sometimes a Regular Old American Negro wants to offically celebrate his Negritude with a bunch of other Regular Old American Negroes, all in full costume. I guess that's too much to ask.

Last weekend in Houston, Caribbeans celebrated Jouvert, a late night bash which precedes Carnival. The party was at a large parking lot on the Southwest edge of the city. On one side of the lot was a little Caribbean night club, where, some Negroes say, a man was shot and killed at last year's celebration. On the other side of the lot was the Blue Flame, a nice little Negro strip club where, I'm guessing, the strippers are either really, really skinny or really, really fat and have keloidal bullet and/or stabs wounds in their midsections. (A celebration is nothing without ambience.) The parking lot was fenced off and had a police patrol. The celebration started at midnight.

There's a reason that Jouvert is held outside. The defining characterstic of the celebration is that at some point in the night, people start to sling mud, paint and powder at each other, almost like a giant food fight, only with more dancing and singing and less mashed potatoes, Jell-O and glazed ham. It is quite the primal pleasure.

This Jouvert started off slowly. There were several large box speakers stacked one on top of the other that blasted soca music across the parking lot and out to the adjacent highway junction, but no one danced. The big space in the middle of the parking lot reminded Your Average Negro of his first middle school social. But as the night wore on, excitement and anticipation grew.

If A Regular Old American Negro knew more about soca music, he would tell you the exact song at which the crowd went bananas. From his uninformed persective, it appeared as if the DJ flicked a switch. First it was Off: Caribbean Negroes sauntering about in the nighttime heat. Then it was On: Every Caribbean elatedly jumping up and down and frantically waving his or her country's flag. Drummers and flame throwers came out of nowhere.

The Trini, Jamaican, Guyanese, Bajan, St. Lucian, Granadan and Bahamian flags blended into a flurry of colors. A Regular Old American Negro could have waved the Red, White and Blue, but that would have been somehow out of place. I opted instead to take my shirt off and wave it around my head just like a helicopter. I happened to be wearing my black American Apparel T-shirt, which, in the end, represented Regular Old American Negroes just fine.

The jubilation climaxed when two half-naked men worked their way to the middle of the crowd carrying a porcelain bathtub full of mud. Before long there was mud all over A Regular Old American Negro -- in his mouth, his ears, his pants, all over his clothes. It was enough for A Regular Old American Negro to yearn for his own day to wallow in the mud. Your Average American Negro deserves as much.