With about a week left until Mardi Gras, Anthony Hingle Jr. went to his parents’ house to finish a set of beaded pterodactyls. Using white plastic from a bleach bottle, he cut tiny zigzagged edges and placed the dinosaur teeth expertly into beaded mouths.
Some New Orleans children, budding musicians, tap on pots and pans with spoons. Growing up in a Black Masking Indian household, Anthony Jr., now 56, and his younger brother, Jermaine, 52, were surrounded by glue, beads, needle and thread, cardboard, canvas, satin, and feathers. They began wearing their own beaded-feathered suits “straight out the stroller,” says their mom, Diann Hingle.
As a child, the Black Masking Indian procession in March was the high point of his year. “Super Sunday was always my favorite holiday,” he remembers. “I’m talking above Christmas, above Easter, Thanksgiving. It was my holiday.”
Today, four generations of the family mask Indian, to preserve the sacred New Orleans tradition – and to honor his dad, “the living legend,” as Hingle describes him.
In his native 7th Ward and across the city, his dad, Anthony Hingle Sr., 74, is best known as Flagboy Meathead, who played his tribal position under famed Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe. For more than two decades, Flagboy Meathead was part of a Yellow Pocahontas lineup of spyboys and flagboys so legendary that they are still talked about today.
Within the Hingle house, the family lineage is displayed in framed photos that line the walls. Of Meathead during his glory days. Of the two brothers and their cousins in matching suits. Of the grandchildren. All in feathers and beads.
Most of the suits themselves were lost to the floodwaters from flawed nearby levees that burst open in 2005, flooding the house as Hurricane Katrina approached. But even in photos from half a century ago, the intricacy of the beading is evident, setting a standard for those who follow.
Flagboy Meathead was known for “sewing heavy,” with solid beadwork, few sequins and massive suits that weighed more than 200 pounds. But about three decades ago, in the early 1990s, he had a heart attack. His body couldn’t handle those heavy suits anymore, his doctors told him. He retired.
If times had been different, his oldest son would have stepped into his place then. But a few years earlier, in the fall of 1988, Anthony Jr., then 18, got in trouble with some friends in New Orleans East. Watching a friend get pounded by a rival, he pulled out a gun and shot. He ended up with a second-degree murder conviction and deep regret for what he’d done.
For the next 32 years, while Anthony Jr. was at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Jermaine, hit hard by his big brother’s incarceration, masked occasionally. In later years, the grandkids, nieces and nephews also masked.
While at Angola, Anthony worked as a healthcare orderly in the prison infirmary and medical dorms, providing compassionate care for fellow prisoners. He worked with youth heading toward release, through a re-entry program that he created called, “The Walk Through; The Reality of a Life Sentence.”
Even beyond formal programs, he was well-known for mentoring younger guys—often giving them advice through his role as a volunteer barber. “You ain’t gonna get out of my chair until I finish cutting your hair, so whatever I want to say to you, you’re gonna hear it, whether you wanna hear it or not,” he said during an interview with the Visiting Room video project, for which he served as an ambassador.
Beyond his prison jobs and keeping in close touch with his family by phone, he had one intense focus: legal work on his case, to get himself home, he said.
He did not touch a needle and thread.
But during his off-hours, within his dorm, Anthony kept a close eye on the tradition, by studying big packets of Indian-suit photos sent by family members after each Carnival. He committed to memory his dad’s famous suits, with pink elephants, mosquito hawks and boats. Through photographs, he also kept up with suits created by other 7th Ward Indians, many of whom are cousins.
He also felt an urgency. Everyone did. “When his daddy got real sick, it was like his daddy was holding on, waiting for Lil Anthony to come home,” said Black Feather Big Chief Corey Rayford, 53.
In April 2021, Hingle’s charge was amended to manslaughter and he was released. He landed a job, got settled, and prepared to continue his family legacy, with his dad and his brother at his side.
Through photographs, he had observed transitions. “I could see the suits was changing, through the years and decades that I was incarcerated,” he said. “But at the same time, I kept in my mind the suits my daddy was doing, because the suits he was doing way back then were before his time. So I knew that it wasn’t going to be no problem for me to come home, do one of my daddy’s suits and compete with whatever they had out there.”
He had planned it all in his head during his years away. Finally, he was able to reach for the familiar needle and thread again. He sewed at night and on weekends and in the car as he waited for his wife Tamara to get off work.
Just before Mardi Gras, his dad nodded admiringly as his son stepped back to take a look at the work created from thousands of beads sewn on cardboard and canvas.
In a quiet voice, Flagboy Meathead gave his official pronouncement.
“They’re not ready for you,” he said.
The Making of a Living Legend
Several decades ago, on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph’s Night, when Yellow Pocahontas hit the streets, it was with an all-star roster.
Flagboy Meathead – along with flagboys like Ray “Hatchet” Blazio, Victor “FiYiYi” Harris, and Charles “Bubblegum” Robertson – blocked Big Chief Tootie from harm, with help from Wildman Clarence “Breeze” Terry. In front, spyboys like Fred Johnson, Franklin “Wingy” Davis, Greg Sellers, Lionel Delpit, and David Crowden kept an eye ahead and around them.
“I was a little boy, looking at them. Meathead was someone I idolized. And I wanted to be all those dudes,” said Tyrone Yancy, 59, who ran spy for Yellow Pocahontas and now is council chief for the Black Feather tribe. “When they hit the streets, the representation that they carried and the way they conducted themselves, oh man. It was beyond me.”
In those days, the 1970s and 1980s, Yancy said, their competition within the city was also at a high level as they faced off with familiar rival tribes like the White Eagles, headed up by Big Chief Jake Millon and Spyboy Nat Williams, and the Creole Wild West, run by Big Chief Lil Walter Cook and second chief Howard Miller.
Tootie and his Yellow Pocahontas tribe also pioneered a new look: three-dimensional designs. That flowed from their work as craftsmen. Some were plasterers. Tootie was a lather. Meathead’s brother, Ernest “Red” Hingle was a carpenter. “It was easy for me to put stuff together because I did it as a work habit,” said Hingle, now 75, who drew designs, shaped cardboard models, and helped to construct half of the tribe’s suits, as one of the tribe’s famed “hookup men, which included him, Melvin “Left” Reed and a few others.
While Meathead innovated through his needle, his brother experimented with 3D shapes. “We operated as a team,” Red Hingle said. “I didn’t privatize my knowledge; I shared it.” Over the years, those who learned his methods sometimes said that they’d been through “Hingle University,” he said.
It was a time when meet-ups between Indians could be violent and rough, before Montana helped steer the tradition to focus on “out-prettying” each other. And, for the time, Hingle played his position well, blocking the way to his chief with massive, intricate suits and a big stick labeled FLAGBOY, topped with razors to slice the suits of Indians who dared to get too close.
“He had a big ol’ stick. He always had the stick,” Rayford said. “And when he played flagboy, you’d better not get close to him, because Meathead would swing and, before you knew it, he’d have your whole suit on top of his stick and then drop it in front of you.” Or your entire crown would flop over, just collapse. So no one got close to Tootie because you did not get that close to Meathead. Tootie trusted Meathead with his life.”
Meathead started masking as a teenager; he had already been masking a few years when he met Diann Peters near Gayoso and St. Ann Streets. Like others within Indian families, including her mother’s sister Joyce, who married Tootie Montana, Diann Hingle helped sew beaded pieces. And as Carnival approached, she headed to her sewing machine in the back bedroom, creating the matching jumpsuits that Indians wear under each year’s suits.
Though crowds often ooh and ahh at the work of a specific Indian, it usually takes a family to get an Indian on the streets. Neighborhoods also feel a certain pride when a celebrated Indian lives within their midst.
Several decades ago, large crowds would gather on Mardi Gras morning at the corner of Frenchmen and North Villere Streets, to see Flagboy Meathead come out of his house and move down North Villere to pick up Chief Tootie.
He was high profile. But he didn’t talk big. “Meathead is a prime example of making the needle dance, speaking through his needle and his work,” said Rayford, who was an eager student. “I always wanted to be like Meathead.” he said.
Roughly 30 years ago, in the early 1990s, Meathead and a few others – Lionel Delpit, Tyrone Yancy, and Corey Rayford – left Yellow Pocahontas to start their own tribe, with Montana’s blessing.
Red Hingle remembers the day that the name came to them—literally. “As we were standing on the corner of Elysian Fields and North Robertson, a black feather fell out of the sky and dropped right there,” he said. “A black feather. Single black feather. And we said, ‘That’s the name of the tribe right there – ‘Black Feather.’”
They’d planned that Meathead would become Black Feather’s big chief. But then his health took a turn. So Meathead handed the tribe to Delpit. Rayford is now its big chief.
But Black Feather’s singular style of beading endures.
“We came from Tootie,” Rayford said. “But you can tell the difference between Yellow Pocahontas and Black Feather because we stack and we loop. If you lay down a stone, you have to loop it with four or five rows of beads. That’s the way Meathead taught us to do it.”
Back to sewing, after a 32-year gap
By day, Anthony Jr. works at Voice Of The Experienced, or VOTE, where he advocates on behalf of people still incarcerated and those who have been released. Through his work, he’s become known as a level-headed, analytical thinker. When the advisory panel was preparing for the Historic New Orleans Collection’s acclaimed recent exhibit about incarceration in Louisiana, it was Hingle who came up with the exhibit’s name: “Captive State.”
He brings that same consistency to his masking, within a family that is connected both by blood and by thread.
So, as Anthony Jr. came home four years ago and began to sew, Jermaine’s needle also got busy, as did his mom’s and his dad’s. They started out making suits for the grandchildren.
Then, in 2023, he quietly started sewing his own Indian suit for Mardi Gras 2024, using drawings made for him by two seasoned designers, his uncle Red and Melvin “Left” Reed.
The suit started with black mamba snakes on his boots and was topped by a massive bald eagle on his crown. It was beaded precisely, of course, Red Hingle said. “Anthony is my nephew. He came through our camp and his work reflects that.”
But to be true to the Indian tradition requires masking every year.
Right after Mardi Gras 2024, Anthony started on this year’s suit. It’s based on his dad’s dinosaur suit from 1987. But it’s not a replica of that suit. It’s more of a Meathead remix, built around different beaded dinosaurs, with lime green feathers instead of the kelly green that his father wore. Anthony also brought in artist Merlin Armstrong, who designed many of the new prehistoric creatures overseen by Reed, with suggestions on fabrication and placement from Uncle Red.
It’s also different in style, because, as a flagboy, his dad’s suits had to be wide and heavy to block access to the chief. As a spyboy, Anthony Jr. has to move quickly and his suits reflect that role, with more compact crowns and aprons that end above his knees.
If he put his suit on a scale, then multiplied it by two, it might start to approach the weight his father carried, he said.
“He reminds me of his daddy. He moves like a Hingle and he sews a lot like his daddy,” said Yancy, the Black Feather council chief. “He is actually making a spyboy suit, not the big spyboy suits that some people make today in the competition to make the biggest suit. But he is making a beautiful, traditional spyboy suit, with more three-dimensional work than most people who mask.”
But within his smaller suit, every detail is exact. Even his lime-green boots were created exactly – with a satin covering and lining, a beaded triceratops that runs the length of the boot, and a blinking purple light, especially for St. Joseph’s Night.
“I love everything about Anthony’s attention to detail, in his suit and in playing his position. Which is amazing, because he was gone so long,” said Stafford Agee, the Black Feather second chief, who walked behind Anthony this year in an ornate marine-animal suit that paid homage to Delpit, Sellers and other elders.
All through his son’s process, Flagboy Meathead has stayed close. “Before you go outside and smoke that cigar, let me check your pressure and your sugar,” his wife said on the Saturday before Mardi Gras.
A few minutes later, cleared for Indian duty, he came out the back door and sat in a chair under the family carport, watching his two sons work intently, like surgeons next to a table, putting the final touches on the latest masterpiece.
On Mardi Gras morning, Flagboy Meathead also followed closely behind his son, watching from the back seat of the family car as Anthony Jr. led the Black Feather tribe through the 7th Ward. And on St. Joseph’s Night, Meathead emerged from the car and rolled his wheeled walker past the late Chief Tootie’s house on North Villere. As the Black Feather tribe came down the street, Meathead rolled into the crowd, to watch Spyboy Anthony Hingle Jr. face off with other tribes and alert the chief, Agee, to what’s ahead on the street.
Unlike during the heyday of the Yellow Pocahontas, few Indians use razors and machetes anymore. But there’s still there’s a lot of big talk exchanged, as spyboys meet up. Like his dad, Anthony Jr. doesn’t respond in kind. “I ain’t got ‘fat mouth’ for them,” he said. “I’m not worrying about what any Indian on the street has to say.”
“Because I was doing this before they even started—I just disappeared for a minute.”
The only critique that truly matters, he says, comes from the 7th Ward’s legendary flagboy, the one seated quietly several yards away. He doesn’t call attention to himself. But they light up at the sight of him. “Nice to see you, Flag,” they say. They tell him that his son looks good. “He’s good with that needle,” one man tells him.
Yancy walked over and bowed to Flagboy Meathead. “I always pay homage,” he said. “Because some of Meathead is in my suit every year. This sewing, this stacked sewing, I learned it from him.” That kind of reverence for the Hingle family is felt across the 7th Ward, he said. “This family really, really put their imprint on three-dimensional designs.”
Given his dad’s prominence, some might say that Anthony Jr. has big shoes to fill.
Agee sees it a little differently. “He’s maintaining the memory of how those shoes walked,” said Agee, who, from his position as a chief, has spent the past two years observing Anthony Jr.
“He is following the path of his dad,” Agee said. “But he is taking his own steps.”
