Meet the Baby Dolls of Mardi Gras, the Black women carrying on a longtime tradition

On Fat Tuesday, New Orleans is celebrating Mardi Gras after a year-long pandemic hiatus. A few hundred Baby Dolls will strut through the city streets, carrying ornately decorated umbrellas and wearing colorful satin outfits. These women make up a few dozen groups; Harris leads the N’awlins D’awlins.

The groups are social clubs of a sort, formed by women connected in some part of life: as childhood friends, neighbors, co-workers, sisters, cousins. Harris hails from a big family in Uptown New Orleans, and much of her group hails from the same area, she said.

Black women have long ridden with Black men’s Carnival krewes, whose members ride on parade floats and toss trinkets to the crowds. Up until 1992, when the City Council banned segregated Carnival krewes, most krewes allowed only White men to be members. In recent years, more krewes have included Black members, and in 2013, the Mystic Krewe of Femme Fatale became the first krewe founded by Black women for Black women. Baby Doll groups now also walk in some of the big Carnival parades.

The exact origins of the Baby Doll tradition are unclear, so many group members have formed their own explanations. To Harris, the Baby Dolls reflect the resourcefulness of hard-working Black women.

“It’s about us creating something with the nothing that has continually been given to us,” Harris said. “And that something turns into magic.”

“I think they reacted to the popular media of a time — vaudeville, stage and screen — that cast grown-up women in baby-doll outfits as sex symbols,” Vaz-Deville said.

In her book, Vaz-Deville theorizes that the practice spread from that 1912 parade into other Black communities that were excluded from the city’s segregated Carnival. At the time, Carnival mostly consisted of celebrations along St. Charles Avenue, where Black people were historically welcome only as servants, mule drivers and “flambeaux,” men who carried large metal torches along parade routes to light up floats.

But Harris grew up hearing a different origin story for the Baby Dolls. After talking with older people in her neighborhood, she said, she believes that it dates back further, maybe 150 years, and was a part of mainstream life in Black communities.

Members of Harris’s family mask as Mardi Gras Indians on Carnival day — another complex tradition dating back 150 years. She said her family members told her the Baby Doll tradition was rooted in everyday working households, often connected with members of their Mardi Gras tribes, who wear satin jumpsuits underneath elaborately beaded and feathered suits. She was told that once the tribes’ suits were complete, the women in those households would take the leftover satin material from the fabric bolt and make little Baby Doll dresses for themselves.

“Somebody cooked, somebody cleaned, somebody got on the sewing machine,” she said, envisioning how the preparation for celebration unfolded.

That origin story is very possible, said Vaz-Deville, noting that the tradition is not well-documented because of who the earliest Baby Dolls were: “They were women, they were Black, they were poor, and they were probably not literate,” she said. The prostitutes from Black Storyville may have made it into official histories because they were more bold and more visible, Vaz-Deville added.

In recent years, the tradition has seen a resurgence. Ten years ago, Harris, who worked as a limousine driver, got a gig driving for the late Eva “Tee Eva” Perry, who was then in her mid-70s and was one of the city’s last remaining Baby Dolls. “One day, I took her to buy fabric, and she bought purple fabric for me, as well,” Harris said, recalling that she then gave the material to her sister, a seamstress.

“It was the first time she’d ever made a doll dress for a grown woman,” said Harris, who wore the outfit on Mardi Gras 2012.

Today’s Baby Doll revival can be traced to several women, including Perry, her good friend Antoinette K-Doe, Miriam Batiste Reed, Lois Andrews and Merline Kimble. Although most have now passed away, Kimble is still actively masking with her group, the Gold Digger Baby Dolls, named for the group that her grandmother led in the early part of the 20th century. The group — like many other ones of that era — went dormant until about 20 years ago, until Andrews, her close friend and neighbor, tried on a satin dress that Kimble kept from her grandmother’s time.

“We were sitting outside that day. Lois put on that dress and told me, ‘C’mon, Merline, we’re going to bring back the Baby Dolls,’ ” Kimble recalled.

Alana Harris (who is not related to Carol Harris), 50, sees an almost revolutionary spirit behind the tradition. For Harris, who works in City Hall as deputy director of arts and culture in the mayor’s office of cultural economy, this spirit is reflected in her family history: Her mother, Linda Diane Smith, a young member of the Congress of Racial Equality, picketed and integrated theaters in New Orleans in 1964, when she was 15.

On Tuesday, when Alana Harris and her 12-year-old daughter Pinky leave the house as part of the Creole Belle Baby Dolls, they are representing a long line of women who broke race and gender barriers, Harris said. “We are continuing my family’s matriarchal line through the spirit of the Baby Dolls,” she said.

The tradition is openly bawdy and bacchanal. Baby Dolls often carry baby bottles filled with liquor on Mardi Gras Day. Historically, to fend off unwanted advances, Baby Dolls carried shivs, razors or ice picks in garters or bricks in purses, according to Vaz-Deville’s book.

As a child, Lauren Blouin, 58, who now masks as “Baby Blue” with the Black Storyville Baby Dolls, remembers her mother warning her about getting too close to “those barroom women.” But few other current Baby Dolls have any memory of the earlier days of the tradition.

These days, many Baby Dolls see the practice as a kind of self-care. Trieshena “Baby Doll Dragon Fly” Duventre, 49, joined her cousin’s group, the Original Black Seminole Baby Dolls, last year.

“I realized there is more to life than going to work,” she said. “I need some fun.”

Outside of Mardi Gras, Baby Dolls are often asked to dress up and volunteer at funerals, concerts and events. During the pandemic, the groups, dressed in their classic satin outfits, have been front and center in the city’s efforts to push mask-wearing and vaccinations; their photos have been emblazoned on buses with their sleeves rolled up; and they’ve staffed events to hand out at-home coronavirus tests.

“I think it’s because the city knows people will always trust a Baby Doll,” said Carol Harris of the groups’ prominence throughout the pandemic. In fact, she said, she believes that Baby Dolls are the perfect antidote for a pandemic-weary world.

“There’s so much darkness around us,” she said. “We bring color, and we bring the spirit of the strong woman. If we get knocked down, we get back up.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the N’awlins D’awlins. It is the N’awlins D’awlins, not the N’awlins Dawlins.