A documentary film with a deep and in-depth look that focuses on the Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama, the oldest in the United States. It reveals the separate mystic societies established and maintained by Black and White groups, and acknowledges the complex racial history of a city with a slaveholding past. While showing the mystic societies' ties to economic, class and racial stratification, the film showed the beginnings of interaction between the Black and White courts. It tells some of the history of Africatown, a community formed north of Mobile in 1860 by Africans from Ghana, transported illegally as slaves to Mobile decades after the end of the slave trade.