The band started to warm up a little before 11 a.m., right on the corner of Head and Randolph streets. Two blocks away, at San Francisco’s Ocean View Branch Library, Ms. Edna James (everyone just calls her Ms. Edna) heard the drums and all the warm, brassy notes. The parade was about to get going. She grabbed her mask, blue and black and feathery, and started making her way.

The corner was already crowded. Mardi Gras beads were getting passed around. People were clapping — the younger ones shook plastic eggs full of something that rattled and two older women were waving tissues in the air. Lots were singing along, too. “I feel like funkin’ it up/ feeeel like funkin’ it up.” Again. “I feel like funkin’ it up/ feeeel like funkin’ it up.”

All the commotion had neighbors looking out windows, taking videos or coming out into their yards. One man walked out in his bathrobe and nodded along. Somebody handed him a string of beads, and he blushed.

Then the music got quiet for Ms. Edna.

Just down the street, she told the crowd, was the future site of a brand-new library coming to the neighborhood, the work of lots of grassroots activism. This parade was meant to celebrate that — but also to keep pushing the neighborhood further, to bring attention to what the community still needs. (“Beating the drums for more success, beating the drums for community awareness,” she’d said a few days earlier.)

“I marched in a lot of parades in New Orleans,” she told the people on the corner. “I thank you for coming and we look forward to keeping this a tradition. So let’s march down the road. Bons temps rouler!”

The way this small community tells it, they get left out and left behind a lot.

“This is the forgotten community,” says Felisia Thibodeaux, the director of the I.T. Bookman Community Center. (If there’s a physical heart for this part of San Francisco, a place for everybody to come together, it’s shared by the library and the community center.) “There are no services. The majority of our businesses are boarded up.”

Right on the southern edge of San Francisco, Ocean View often gets lumped in with a larger community, a teardrop-shape group of neighborhoods called OMI for short — Ocean View-Merced-Ingleside. It’s easy to forget about the area because, in lots of ways, it’s an island.

“The way this neighborhood was designed, it’s so odd,” says Lynne Maes, the manager of the Ocean View branch. Three major streets and a highway set the boundaries. “You could just go right around this neighborhood … like it’s not even there.”

For a long time, for instance, the only library in Ocean View was a single storefront on Broad Street. A single class, sometimes even half a class, could fill the place up. In the late ’90s there was talk of closing it altogether, but the community fought back, kept the place open and then got the city to open a new branch library on Randolph Street. That was 20 years ago, and the two-story, 4,794-square-foot library is now the city’s smallest branch.

Ms. Edna lived in OMI during that fight. She’s from Houston originally but moved to the neighborhood in 1974. “We knew it wasn’t what we wanted,” she says. “But it was better than what we had on Broad Street.”

Now the city has plans to build a new library, maybe even the biggest outside the main branch, just a few blocks away at the end of Head Street.

But Ms. Edna’s not done, of course. “We don’t have fresh vegetables in this community. That’s my next goal.”

This is the second year in a row that Ocean View had its own Mardi Gras parade. The first one was in 2019 and happened while it rained.

The local library had joined in a national push to read “Trombone Shorty,” a real-life, illustrated book about a little boy in New Orleans “wielding a trombone twice as long as he was high.” (This was a while back: The musician Troy Andrews, who still goes by “Trombone Shorty,” is now 34 years old and 6 feet tall.)

“She just sort of tossed (the idea) out there,” says Lynne Maes, the manager of the Ocean View branch. “We should do a Mardi Gras ourselves.”

And so, along with the community center down the street, they did. It was what they called family-style. No closing the streets. Just a modest parade down the sidewalks of Randolph street. Enough money to pay the band for exactly one hour. Ms. Edna was thrilled when about 50 people turned out. She would have been happy, she said, with 10.

It was the same way this year. As Ms. Edna led everyone down Randolph Street, she did a little side-slide-shuffle thing, waving her mask in the air, smiling nearly the whole way — even though dancing three blocks straight isn’t as easy now as it was back in the ’50s, when she was living in New Orleans and going to nursing school. She’s in her 80s now, after all. At one point, her shoelace came undone, and someone knelt down to get it tight again so she could keep on marching.

“This part of the community has been isolated. ... I’m trying to get recognition to this part of San Francisco and what we’re trying to do over here,” Ms. Edna says. “I said, ‘Let’s have a Mardi Gras parade and show some excitement to the community and bring the community together — bring some light to the community.’”

The parade started with about 40 people, but by the time it got to the I.T. Bookman Community Center, it had picked up another 20 or so and caused a small traffic jam of rubberneckers, who slowed to take in the sight of this small parade with its big sound.

The band leader waved everybody inside, where the sound got even bigger, the notes banging from wall to wall.

Children danced with their parents up in front while older folks clapped along at tables dressed in gold plastic coverings. Ms. Edna tried to make introductions, but it was too loud to make out much of what she (or anybody else) said.

The man with the tambourine passed out more beads. Meanwhile, others got busy setting up a buffet — there were hush puppies, corn okra creole, dirty rice and “creamy Cajun pastalaya.” For dessert: cupcakes with bright purple and green frosting, the sort that stains your tongue and teeth.

Near the end, people lined up behind Ms. Edna one more time for a mini parade around the room. Once the music had stopped, the band — MJ’s Brass Boppers — took their bow. “Mardi Gras is any place in the heart, anywhere in the world,” said Michael Jones, the band’s leader. And then adults got to eating and children got to crafting.

Everyone seemed lifted. The music had done what it was meant to do. As Al Lazard, the man who played the sax during the parade, put it: “You might not know that neighbor, but you hear that trumpet, and now you know your neighbor.” It’s true, too. People who had never met started dancing side by side, all the way down the street.

Thibideau, the community center’s director, watched as people ate. “This is an open-your-door, listen-to-the-music, come-in community,” she said. If she wanted to, Thibideau could run down a whole list of things the folks in Ocean View (and OMI, more broadly) need. But, in that moment, it felt more correct to focus on the community they had. “All you have to have is a desire to want to do the best you can do,” she said. “There’s a lot of people doing great things right where they are.”

All round the room, people called the afternoon a “beautiful” one. “Lately we’ve been having a lot of nice things,” said Blanche White, 85. She was wearing a silver sequin cap.

Marry Harris sat nearby. Like Ms. Edna, she’s been in this community for a long time — 46 years, she says. Harris remembers pushing to get a real school open, for a recreation center and more community programming. She also remembers the library on Broad Street, all the work it took to get a new one 20 years ago, and she was right there, fighting for the latest commitment, the big one set for Head Street. “It’s just taken all these decades to really come full circle,” she said.

The work isn’t done, Harris said, “but we’re coming around to the other neighborhoods.” That was reason to celebrate.

Off to the side, Ms. Edna sat alone, smiling, just like she had been all morning. She joked about the parade, about getting her exercise in as she danced down the street. “I wanna be around until we get the new library,” she said.

“I’m very pleased. It sheds a little light on this community,” Ms. Edna said. She paused for a moment. Took it all in. “We have something out here.”

Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost