By Lisa Allen-Agostini
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2001; Page C01

NEW YORK, Sept. 3 -- Shimmering with body glitter in short white costumes, Nadine and Nikia Thomas looked impatiently at the racks of steel drums that waited
for them in the parking lot of the Brooklyn Museum.

It was Saturday night, two days before the parade that marks the climax of the week-long West Indian American Carnival, an enormous celebration of all things
Caribbean that annually brings millions of people to the streets of Brooklyn. The two teenagers were to play the pans in a competition that night. Although born in
America and living in Queens, these girls consider themselves Trinidadian.

They play the Trinidadian musical instrument with Women in Steel, an all-female orchestra that performs year-round. In preparation for Saturday's competition
against seven other groups, they had practiced with the band for up to six hours a night, every night for a month.

Their father, Norberto Thomas, 50, was born in Panama but has lived in the United States for 33 years. He doesn't consider himself American either, he said, and
neither does his Trinidad-born wife. "I don't want to be Americanized. I like the American money, but I don't want to be Americanized," Thomas said over the
throbbing melody of steel pan music that filled the air.

He's only been to the Labor Day celebrations for the past four years, since Nadine, 17, and Nikia, 13, joined Women in Steel, but says he loves the festival now.
"It's an ethnic thing, it's in the blood," he says. "This is ours."

There were more than 1.4 million Caribbean-born Americans last year, by the Census Bureau's estimate. They came from Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada,
Trinidad and other tiny, verdant islands standing poor and proud in the Caribbean Sea.

To David Caesar, a 41-year-old security officer from Barbados, the choice was clear: stay home and struggle or follow the American dream -- in his case, to
Boston. "You gotta go where the work is," said Caesar, walking in the already bright sunlight at 7 a.m. today along Empire Boulevard.

He wore his native country's flag like a cape on his shoulders. He's been in the United States for eight years and says he journeys to Brooklyn's Labor Day parade
every year.

Here, in the gentle chill of a clear New York morning, the culminating event began with a pre-dawn parade called Jouvert. Caesar and thousands of others reached
back in time for a taste of the sweeter memories of home, painting one another's bodies in mud, oil and paint, dancing sinuously to calypso and steel pan music,
drumming and chanting.

There are at least 13 Caribbean-styled carnivals held during the warm months each year in North American cities from Toronto to Miami. Brooklyn's is without a
doubt the best known, so much so that it has in some respects eclipsed Trinidad and Tobago's own Carnival, on which its structure is based.

It's bigger, for one.

"If you don't have 5 million people, you don't have nothing," said Carlos Lezama, president of the West Indian American Day Carnival Association, which produces
the event. He's 78 and has lived in the United States since the '50s, but he still has the lazy lilt in his voice that marks him as a Trinidadian. He's proud of his accent
and makes a point of telling you that he's never lost it.

Lezama, the association's long-standing president, succeeds the man he calls the founder of the Brooklyn carnival, Rufus Goring. The story is widely told that
Lezama found Goring crying at the side of the road one carnival day somewhere around the middle of the last century. While happy crowds danced around them,
Goring wept, Lezama says, because he had no help to carry on the event. "I decide to help," Lezama says in confirming the tale.

Eastern Parkway is the parade route for the largest part of the celebration; during the carnival, the thoroughfare was renamed Carlos Lezama Parkway -- not that the
masses pushing and jumping and dancing along the road cared about the official address.

Lezama's generous estimate aside, official word puts Brooklyn parade attendance between 1 million and 3 million people each year. It's bigger than Toronto's
massive Caribana festival, held in early August.

Both events trace their beginnings to Trinidad and Tobago's Carnival, a spring festival begun in 1838 after the emancipation of enslaved Africans. In a parody of the
elaborate costume balls held by their Catholic, European masters in the days before the abstentious season of Lent, the freed men moved across the country in
disguise, singing and dancing.

The festival evolved into an orchestrated attack on civility and restraint; you find in Trinidad's carnival a spirit of excess, as glitteringly costumed participants and
spectators swarm through the country's streets for the two days before Ash Wednesday, allowing no earthly pleasure to go unexplored. This is the spirit of
Brooklyn's carnival, Lezama says.

Although its foundation is Trinidadian, Brooklyn's biggest party isn't -- not exclusively, anyway. Early this morning, bodies glistening with oil, a couple of hundred
people danced slowly up Parkside Avenue, the green, yellow and red flag of Grenada decorating head scarves, T-shirts, shorts and skirts. The band of masquerade
players moved behind a banner that proclaimed them to be the Spice Crew -- Grenada's nickname is the Spice Isle.

Just down the road, Jamaican student Randie Anderson, 21, of Brooklyn, leaned sleepily against a wall on Empire Boulevard. He'd been out since 2 a.m., he said,
and was about to head home. He's not a party person, doesn't even like the city, but this was his second time at the parade. He'd come to look at the body-painted,
wriggling, costumed people in the street.

Unlike most of them, he didn't have a smear of oil or paint on his clothing, but he declared his allegiance to the event with the Jamaican flag he'd draped around his
shoulders. "I'm just representing my country," Anderson said.

There were plenty of like-minded Jamaicans on Eastern Parkway later in the day. Jamaica's black, green and gold flag was on many a body and flew nearly as often
as the red, white and black Trinidad and Tobago flag that dominated the parade route, which ended at the Brooklyn Museum.

The two came together in a swirl of color just after midday on the parkway, as hundreds of people waved in unison at the command of calypso singer Alison Hinds.
Shaking her hips while standing on top of a trailer pulled by a truck, Hinds, a Barbadian, exhorted them to put their hands in the air -- and they did, time after time.

Each nation in the Caribbean chain has a separate history and identity, different national foods, accents and festivals, but this carnival brings them together. Behind
the wooden sawhorses that separated spectators from participants, vendors sold an exotic, aromatic array of dishes, including spicy Trinidadian roti, Jamaican
curried goat, johnny bake (a flat, round loaf of bread) from Nevis and coocoo (cornmeal polenta) from Barbados.

There was barely standing room on the sidewalks, jammed as they were with sweating people. Still more crowds, black and white, American and West Indian,
poured out of the subway exits along the route, adding to the riot of language and color. As Norberto Thomas said on Saturday night, "It's not only Trinidadian, it's
everybody now."

                                               © 2001 The Washington Post Company