Entry · catalog no. 4556
wild man
/ /ˈwaɪl(d) ˌmæn/ /WYLD-man
noun · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1880s
✓ Verified
1.
A ranked position in a New Orleans Black Masking Indian tribe. The Wild Man walks near the chief and, when two tribes meet in the street, pushes the crowd back and holds the ground open so the Big Chiefs can face each other without interference. The role is performed with deliberate ferocity — the Wild Man is the tribe's disorder, licensed and controlled — and sits inside a strict order of march that runs Spy Boy out front, Flag Boy relaying between him and the chief, then Wild Man, Second Chief, Big Queen, and Big Chief.
“Soon as the Spy Boy hollered, the Wild Man came through swinging and the whole corner opened up for the Chief.”
Origin & Attribution
The rank belongs to the Black Masking Indian tradition of New Orleans, in which African American men and women in working-class Black neighborhoods form tribes, hand-sew feathered and beaded suits every year, and parade on Mardi Gras Day, St. Joseph's Night, and Super Sunday. The offices were set by early tribes such as Creole Wild West and Yellow Pocahontas in the late nineteenth century, and the structure is deliberately military in shape. The Wild Man's job is practical before it is theatrical: at a meeting of tribes, somebody has to make room. Mainstream coverage reduces the whole tradition to costume and calls the practitioners Mardi Gras Indians; many maskers prefer Black Masking Indian, and the ranks are jobs, not characters. The archive notes that no nineteenth-century document naming the rank has been located — the emergence decade reflects the tradition's documented beginning, and the earliest firm records of the rank name are twentieth-century.
1976
Maurice M. Martinez's documentary The Black Indians of New Orleans films the tribes' ranks and rituals
1976
The Wild Tchoupitoulas release their album with the Meters and the Neville Brothers
1994
Michael P. Smith's Mardi Gras Indians publishes the tribal hierarchy in book form
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1880s
Spoken by
Black Masking Indian tribes of Uptown, Downtown, and the West Bank of New Orleans, and the neighborhoods that turn out for them
$WILDMAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady141 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
62/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1885
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Matt Sakakeeny, "Mardi Gras Indians," 64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2016
encyclopedia entry
■
Michael P. Smith, Mardi Gras Indians, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, LA, 1994
book
■
The Black Indians of New Orleans, dir. Maurice M. Martinez, ed. Sam Pollard, 1976
documentary film
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Wild Tchoupitoulas, The Wild Tchoupitoulas, Island Records, 1976
album
See also