By Miriam Markowitz
At Brooklyn’s predawn Jouvert celebration, pictured here, the shooting of an aide to Governor Cuomo brought the tradition into the national spotlight and kindled yet another debate about gun violence. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE KEITH / GETTY
Last April, on a trip to Kingston, I asked a friend from Trinidad if he would accompany me to Jamaican Carnival. He begged off. Carnival in Jamaica wasn’t anything special, and it was prohibitively expensive for all but the very wealthy to play mas. The drunken revelries of the costumed élites, he said, were protected from the crowds by dividers and police patrols. Regular people could only watch from the sidelines.
Brooklyn Carnival is still democratic, and with democracy comes chaos. On Labor Day, the annual West Indian Day Parade transformed Eastern Parkway into a bright and beautiful pageant that has become one of Brooklyn’s most beloved traditions. But in Brooklyn, as in the islands, pretty mas is preceded by the dutty mas of Jouvert, a celebration that begins at 4 A.M. and ends at sunrise. Shortly after dawn, the streets still belonged to celebrants anointed with motor oil, paint, mud, and baby powder. Hours earlier, a man I might have known danced me away from my friends and into the faerie pull of the masquerade.
Then morning came, dissipating some of the collective fog. People began to pick themselves up off the sidewalks and head home for a brief respite before the big parade. I realized that I was drenched in grease, like a pelican casualty of Exxon Valdez, and was missing my wallet, keys, and cell phone. But I was only a few blocks from my apartment and had emerged from the night unscathed.
Others were not so lucky. Over the course of Sunday and Monday, in the precincts where people gather for West Indian Carnival, three people were shot and two were stabbed; two of the victims were fatally wounded. The total arrests included thirteen for gun possession, four felony assaults, fourteen misdemeanors, one robbery, three for the possession of deadly weapons (two knives and a machete), and one for disorderly conduct.
One of the men shot was Carey Gabay, the forty-three-year-old son of Jamaican immigrants, and a lawyer in Governor Cuomo’s administration. Gabay died from his injuries on Wednesday evening, more than a week after he was injured. His shooting, which authorities said occurred when an unknown gunman shot into a crowd of revelers, brought the obscure tradition of Jouvert into the national spotlight and kindled yet another debate about gun violence. Cuomo appeared on the news lamenting his aide’s bad fortune. A chorus of commentators called for the banning of Jouvert. Crain’s published an online poll asking, “Should the city end the West Indian American Day festivities to curb violence?” Fifty-six per cent of respondents said yes.
Last Thursday, the leaders of J’Ouvert City International, a community group that has organized the event since the nineteen-eighties, and the West Indian American Day Carnival Association, which oversees the parade itself, had a closed-door meeting with Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, the N.Y.P.D., and city council members. Afterward, Adams announced the creation of a task force that would address violence not just at Jouvert but at New York City events in general. Jouvert was not in jeopardy. “We don’t stop celebrating the Fourth of July because some crazy breaks out a gun,” Adams said. The shooting of Gabay, who at that point was still hospitalized, in critical condition, was discussed at length. The death of the other, unnamed young man was mentioned in passing.
The next day, I spoke to Adams. “Statistically, if you look at what happened over the weekend, those are not high numbers compared to a central Brooklyn standard,” he said, about the crime at Jouvert. I asked him about the Crain’s poll. The people who read Crain’s, he said, are not among the million who go out each year to the Parkway. “Brooklyn is ground zero for gentrification. There are a small number of newcomers who want to know why they have to deal with this. Then why did you come here?”
I asked him if he thought there was a racial element to the anger about Jouvert. “It was hysteria. We didn’t even know what they were calling for the end to. We can’t continue to be irrational about these events because of the economics, the ethnicity, or the location.” He said that if the numbers had shown there was systemic violence attached to Jouvert, he would act differently. As for the second man who had been killed, they were trying to contact his family.
Adams said that W.I.A.D.C.A. and J’Ouvert City could not continue to operate separately, but that that he wouldn’t introduce any measures that might compromise Jouvert. “Jouvert is Brooklyn,” he said. “We can’t corral the people into a small area. We can’t change the spirit of it.”
From its inception, West Indian Carnival has been defined by policing as much as celebration. In the late eighteenth century, French colonists emigrating from Haiti introduced elaborate balls and masquerade traditions to Trinidad. One of these was Canboulay (from cannes brulées, or “burnt cane”), a mocking reënactment of the burning of the sugar cane in which participants costumed themselves as slaves. After the British Empire abolished slavery, in 1838, newly freed blacks took up Canboulay as their own, coöpting and subverting the mas celebrations of former masters. In 1881, riots broke out when the British constabulary attempted to shut down Canboulay. Two years later, colonial authorities tried again, this time with an ordinance banning the music of drums, the heartbeat of Carnival. Canboulay endured, and came to symbolize not just freedom but victory. Jouvert (“breaking dawn”) is Canboulay’s spiritual successor.
In Brooklyn, too, Jouvert endures despite antagonism between players and the police. In 1994, residents founded J’Ouvert City to “not only protect and promote the tradition of J’Ouvert but to also protect the paraders and numerous steel-band orchestras from clashes with the police.” I spoke with Yvette Rennie, one of the group’s leaders, after the press conference on Thursday. Rennie, who was born in Trinidad, came to the U.S. in the nineteen-sixties. She spoke quietly but firmly about violence at Jouvert. “Our Jouvert was always a success until Brooklyn lost control of guns. Until America lost control of guns.”
William Howard, first vice-president of W.I.A.D.C.A. fields countless phone calls every year from the press and politicians about the depraved and deadly antics plaguing Jouvert, and every year he must reiterate that his group has nothing to do with the pre-dawn parade or its organizers. By the Wednesday after Labor Day, W.I.A.D.C.A. had been besieged by requests from “every politician under the moon,” or at least by every politician in Brooklyn, who wanted a chance to stump about gun violence.
It’s an unfair burden. The West Indian Day Parade has become respectable (no one is shocked, any longer, by the spectacle of nearly naked women gyrating down Eastern Parkway). And W.I.A.D.C.A. is a deeply rooted community organization committed to Caribbean life in Brooklyn, and a primary connection for many residents to the islands they have left behind. It’s also, in Howard’s words, “New York City’s biggest babysitter”—under its auspices, thousands of kids spend their summers learning to play the steel drums, or building costumes and learning choreography and storylines for the intricate theatrics of pretty mas.
The organization’s relations with the N.Y.P.D. have been friendly since the Giuliani era, when Mayor Rudy finally recognized the huge economic boon Carnival brings to the city each Labor Day weekend. Howard has lobbied for increased police presence at the parade to protect participants, local spectators, tourists, venders, and V.I.P.s—including Mayor de Blasio, “that Facebook lady,” (Maxine Williams, the company’s diversity director and a grand marshal), and high-ranking government representatives from Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Barbados. W.I.A.D.C.A. needs police coöperation not just to maintain law and order but also to put a safe and friendly face on the parade, and, hopefully, to burnish its reputation with government and corporate sponsors. Police commissioner Bill Bratton and former commissioner Ray Kelly have supported Howard’s efforts. A few years ago, Kelly and other members of the force hopped on a float and performed in their own steel-drum band.
Howard, who is not of Caribbean origin, was introduced to Carnival five decades ago, by the late Brooklyn congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who had roots in Barbados. Howard worked as Chisholm’s chief treasurer, and helped lead the successful campaign for a U.S. postage stamp honoring her achievements. He sees Carnival as vital to her legacy and to the preservation of black and West Indian cultural life in Brooklyn. “When John F. Kennedy came to Brooklyn during his Presidential campaign, he stopped at Nostrand and Fulton, and the closest I could get was a few blocks over at Halsey,” Howard told me. “Now Presidential candidates don’t come through Bed-Stuy.”
Howard’s primary concerns, though, remain logistical. “If someone gave us a million dollars, I would retire. I’ve stuck around for forty-eight years because this is the best thing Caribbean people have here, and maybe the last thing black people have in Brooklyn.”
