Columns

Caribbean carnivals are songs of reunion

By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published December 31, 2006

New Year's Day is time for resolutions, promises to start over. But for many folks I know, New Year's Day is time for a new kind of start. It's the kickoff of the annual carnival circuit.

This is a different kind of carnival, with a different kind of carny.

This carnival isn't the traveling circus with Ferris wheels and weird attractions. This is a carnival with an Afro-Caribbean flavor, parades, costumed masqueraders, concerts, house parties, street festivals.

But the biggest attraction isn't the stars. It's the carnies, those who travel from city to city, for whom the carnival is just an excuse to see each other, to reminisce, to drink Heineken beer or ginger beer, drink goat water and eat curried goat.

This carnival circuit crosses continents and international borders. It attracts not just the huge numbers of folks who grew up in the Caribbean and Latin America, but also those who've lived or visited extensively in those regions.

While my boyhood friends who went home to Montserrat for Christmas will see New Year's as the start of a year of carnival circuit, folks from Trinidad and Tobago will see New Year's partying as just a prelude to the upcoming carnival in their native land in February.

Carnies - whether Trinidadian or Montserratian - will reconnect at Atlanta's carnival on Memorial Day weekend in May; they'll see each other when they drive to the Tampa Bay area in June; maybe they'll fly to Toronto for Caribana in early August or head to Brooklyn, N.Y., on Labor Day for the granddaddy of all Caribbean carnivals. And for the carnies who live in the Northeast, the Miami carnival on Columbus Day weekend offers a brief respite before winter arrives.

I used to be a semi-regular carny. I've done Boston, Washington and Brooklyn. But now I'm just an occasional carny. I went to the Atlanta carnival in 2003. It was an entire weekend of hanging around with guys I've known since grade school. This summer, after old friends converged on St. Pete for the Tampa Bay Caribbean carnival, they came to my house. The sound of laughter and childhood stories filled the place until late into the night. That experience prompted me to drive to South Florida for the Miami carnival in October. I saw people I had lost touch with 20 years ago. I resumed friendships interrupted by migration decades ago. The music, the concerts, the parades were all secondary. I was there for the old stories, for the people. Those were my kind of carnies; that was my kind of carnival.

Andrew Skerritt can be reached at 813 909-4602 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602. His e-mail address is askerritt@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 30, 2006, 20:46:14]