MAMOU, LA. — MAMOU, LA. -- The teenage boy is covered in mud, literally from head to toe. After wading through a flooded rice field to catch a wayward chicken, he wipes mud from his eyes.
"I almost had him," he says to a friend with a shake of his head, and shrinks back to his horse.
Welcome to the home of the Cajun Mardi Gras, where men dance on horseback, chickens are their prey, and frivolity is the rule.
Mamou is a small town plopped in the middle of farming fields in the center of Cajun country, three hours northwest of the state's most famous Mardi Gras reveling town, New Orleans.
There is one high school here, one stoplight and no Wal-Mart. The population of 3,500 is generally divided into halves -- white or black, Baptist or Catholic, young or old. It is also my hometown.
Mamou has a few claims to fame. Fred's Lounge, a bar in the center of town where Cajun musicians gather every Saturday morning for a live radio music show and dance, is one. There's also the annual Cajun Music Festival -- a given for a town claiming to be the "Cajun Music Capital of the World."
It birthed Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, an internationally renowned Cajun music band that often returns home to play the street dance the night before Mardi Gras here. And Chicago Bulls player Chris Duhon was born here.
But there is nothing more famous here than the Courir de Mardi Gras.
In the courir, which literally means "the run," on Mardi Gras day men dress in costume and ride horseback from home to home in the countryside, "collecting" ingredients for the town gumbo -- and by collecting, I mean chasing after live chickens and catching them with their bare hands.
The tradition started in the 1800s in rural south Louisiana, but was suspended during the Civil War and in World War II. It was revived in Mamou in the 1950s and is practiced in several other towns around the area.
Local historians say the idea of the rural run was a way for the community to share in a pre-Lenten celebration, especially when times were difficult and the ingredients for a large gumbo hard to come by. It has evolved, however, into a sort of Cajun bar mitzvah. Teenage boys, usually about age 16, run the Mardi Gras as an informal entry into manhood.
While thousands of tourists flock to Mamou each year to enjoy the Cajun music and four-day festival in town (this year Feb. 2-5), few venture out into the rural prairies to follow the Mardi Gras riders. But they should -- that is where the area's truly unique traditions can be found.
