Mardi Gras meets apartheid in Mobile, Alabama. By JOE SHEPPARD.

FOLLOWING the excellent documentary on Nashville minstrel Townes van Zandt (Be Here To Love Me), US filmmaker Margaret Brown headed further south to her ancestral home in Mobile, Alabama, for the 2007 Mardi Gras. Established in 1703 – before the city of New Orleans was even founded – Mobile’s fortnight of spectacular rituals differs from her more famous Louisiana counterpart in one key way: all the parades, debutante balls, and ‘Mystic Societies’ are racially segregated, culminating in dual carnivals and twin coronations. (The sole integrated society, the Conde Explorers, has only one white member.) Brown manages to capture an historic moment when the white regents get down and party at the Comrades’ Ball for the first time ever.

Brown’s wide access behind the scenes of pageantry uncovers the secret history of Mobile’s patrician families, based on cronyism, racism and self-delusion. For example, the 2007 Queen Helen Meaher, is at once the granddaughter of the oldest living carnival queen, the daughter of the town’s leading property magnate, and descendant of the last man to import slaves to the States.

The chief rationalisation for the festive apartheid – which has become normal to the Alabamans – is a bizarre local reverence for the values and customs of the past that extends across all demographics. Helen is simply dwarfed by the centuries of tradition that protect her from criticism and prevent anyone from questioning the logic or appropriateness of the status quo. So conservative is the climate that the avenues of the parade route are diverted to avoid the roots of the massive, ancient trees there, but ‘getting back to their roots’ is difficult when the same boughs have been used for lynching as recently as the 1980s. The anonymity of the festive masks chillingly recall the Klan, as do the parochial and old-fashioned values of the Mobile Mystics, the carnival society that accepts ‘anybody’ – as long as they’re white adult males – and whose members still have words like ‘mongoloid’ in their daily vocabularies.

Brown’s title refers to the oldest float in the parade, where Death flees Folly’s whip around the remains of a fluted column. But she could just as easily be describing the different value systems and mythologised histories that Alabamans and outsiders alike – both black and white – have to negotiate in order to enjoy their version of the carnival. As William Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is not dead. In fact it’s not even past’, but The Order of Myths equally looks forward to a future where the mistakes of earlier generations might improve the lives of the present.