Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (17 page)

From the time of the Spanish period on,
free men of color
enjoyed both economic and educational advantages in New Orleans. They had full freedom to conduct business and to enter into contracts. Free blacks even had their own schools. They added substantially to the literate sector of Louisiana. By 1803, there were 1,355 free men of color out of a population of 10,000. Some of the men were tailors, mechanics, carpenters, or owners in small business. Some opened schools or performed in theaters. They were sober, law-abiding, and industrious. In 1860, the holdings of free men of color in New Orleans were between $13 million and $15 million. There were, at this time, 114,000 free persons of color in a population of 168,000 in New Orleans.

Free women of color were among the most beautiful women in New Orleans. Some of them lived as concubines with white men. In 1792, an ordinance was passed forcing them to become more recognizable as being women of color by wearing a headdress known as a
tignon
. It became a mark of distinction rather than the branding it was intended to be. Surviving portraits of free women of color picture them in black dresses with white lace shawls and tignons.

Concubinage between black women and white men, a custom called
plaçage
(from the French verb
placer
, meaning to put or place) was the style of the times. It was an understanding whereby a white man, usually a French colonist, and a mulatto woman, the
placée,
lived together more or less permanently. Arrangements were made between the mother of the eligible black woman and the white man (usually, but not always, a Frenchman) to set up the daughter in a house, sometimes with slaves, carriages, and all the accoutrements of the wealthy, to be the young man’s mistress, usually until the gentleman married, at which time the house and all of its contents belonged to the mulattress for life. Any offspring were the responsibility of the man: boys were sent to Paris to be educated, and girls were sent to the Ursuline convent for their schooling. Faubourg Marigny and the French Quarter including Rampart Street were the sites for these houses.

According to some historians, the Orleans Ballroom (as well as other locations in the French Quarter) regularly held the famous Quadroon Balls, which were frequented by gentlemen seeking such arrangements. All was handled discreetly, with care taken to protect both parties as to laws and obligations.

Many of the progeny of these relationships moved on to live in Mexico, Haiti, or Paris, passing as whites. From these alliances came many remarkable people:

Norbert Rillieux,
a free man of color born in 1806, son of a wealthy French engineer and a slave. While a student in Paris (1830-32), he discovered the multiple evaporation process of making sugar;

Eugene Warburg,
the eldest son of Daniel Warburg
, a German
Jew, and Marie Rosa, a slave of Santiago, Cuba (whom Daniel Warburg freed), was a noted sculptor. His most famous work is the 1855 bust of the US Minister of France, John Young Mason;

Julien Hudson,
a free man of color, was a portrait painter before the Civil War;

Henriette Delille
(1813-62), a beautiful free woman of color, was the founder of the order of the Sisters of the Holy Family. The nuns lived at the site of the former quadroon balls in a building donated to the order by a free man of color,
Thomas Lafon.
(Today, at that same location, is the Bourbon-Orleans Hotel). Thomas Lafon is the only free man of color of whom a bust was made because of his generosity to his fellow men. A public school is also named in his honor;

and
James Durham,
a physician, had been sold as a slave to a New Orleans physician who taught him medicine and set him free in 1788 to become a physician for both blacks and whites.

The Voodoo Cult

Voodoo was a dominant force among the black population of New Orleans in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had come to the colony originally from Western Africa when the first Africans were brought as slaves. The practice spread and intensified when black immigrants from Haiti arrived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These Haitians, whose ancestors were also originally from Africa, believed strongly in voodoo and practiced it as a religion. They were allowed much freedom of personal expression by paternalistic rulers and lethargic owners.

The Haitians, when living in Saint Domingue, had believed in voodoo gods and zombies (soulless human corpses taken from the grave and transformed by the voodoos into living creatures). In New Orleans, the voodoos had to make changes in their rituals to appeal to the needs and beliefs of the local populace.

Marie Laveau

Marie Laveau, the most famous of all New Orleans voodooiennes, lived in the same cottage at 1020 St. Ann Street for fifty years, conducting rituals in her yard in which she danced with a snake, which she called Zombi. After her sensuous exhibition, her performers (young men and women), danced practically in the nude, consumed large quantities of rum taffia, drank blood from the broken necks of roosters, swooned, trembled, and indulged in sexual intimacies.

A voodoo ceremony in New Orleans. Slaves dance the Bamboula, which inspired Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s famous composition.

Once a year, on St. John’s Eve, June 23, a more elaborate version of the same ceremony took place near the old Spanish Fort at the point where Bayou St. John flowed into Lake Pontchartrain. It was a mixture of Christianity and barbarity, and most citizens considered it a blasphemy, but it attracted hundreds of viewers, including members of the police and the press.

Marie Laveau’s fame spread as a fortune teller, mind reader, and dispenser of love charms and satanic potions, and she was sought out by rich and poor, blacks and whites, for advice on personal matters and local and national political concerns.

Laveau was a free mulatto born in New Orleans in 1794. Many accounts
indicate that her father had been a wealthy white planter, and her mother a mulatto with a strain of Indian blood. She was married to Jacques Paris
in 1819 by Père Antoine
. Both she and Jacques were recorded as free persons of color. Her life is shrouded in mystery. Although she earned great sums of money, she never lived as a woman of means. Her husband died three years after their marriage. On her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1
is the inscription “Veuve [widow] Paris.”

She began the practice of voodoo around 1826, changing the cult to a profitable business; selling charms, favors, and prophecies; but retaining the showmanship necessary to keep the faith of her followers. To the hedonistic exhibitions, she added statues of saints, incense, and holy water for the benefit of the Catholics in her flock.

She later formed a liaison with Christophe Glapion
, a union that pro
duced fifteen children. Glapion stayed behind the scenes, possibly acting
as her bookkeeper. She is said to have died at the age of eighty-seven.

Voodoo charms can be found at the Voodoo Museum at 724 Dumaine Street. Love powders, boss-fixing powders, money-drawing incense, and come-to-me powders can be purchased there, as well as effigies, lotions, and charms. The museum is purported to be the only one of its kind in the country.

Jews in New Orleans

Although the Black Code
of 1724 (the
Code Noir)
governed the treatment of slaves, its first article decreed that Jews be expelled from the colony. It was a strange article not only because it appeared in the Black Code, but because there was no evidence that Jews were even in the colony. Jews were too clever at merchandising to be attracted to a floundering trading post when they could stay in the Caribbean, where they were doing a great business.

In 1758, there is recorded an argument between Governor Kerlerec
and his Intendant, Rochemore,
concerning the admittance of a ship, the
Texel,
whose captain was a Jew named Diaz. Rochemore declared that it was illegal for the ship to dock. Kerlerec wanted the goods on board. Kerlerec prevailed, and a Jew entered the colony.

In 1801, a remarkable Jewish gentleman arrived in the colony:
Judah Touro
(1775-1854). His business was wholesale consignment; he was an ice importer. In 1838, he was the owner and operator of two ice houses. A man generous to the community throughout his lifetime, he remained a bachelor and lived with two other bachelors at 35 Conde Street, an extension of Chartres Street. Some of his fellow boarders were
Jean Baptiste Olivier,
chaplain of the Ursulines, and
Alexander Milne,
who started the community on the lakefront and left funds with which the Milne Boys Home
was built.

Judah Touro
’s total estate at the time of his death was $928,774. His beneficiaries were in Boston, Newport, and New Orleans, and included Christians and Jews alike. In his lifetime, he purchased many slaves for the purpose of freeing them. He gave liberally to numerous charities, including the Touro-Shakespeare Home
, Touro Infirmary,
and Touro Synagogue
, which bear his name.

Other notable Jewish citizens were:

Samuel Hermann,
builder of the Hermann-Grima House on St. Louis Street;

Judah P. Benjamin
(1811-80), Confederate Secretary of War and State, who, after being exiled, lived in England and gained international fame as a lawyer;

and
Martin Behrman,
born in New York in 1864 and elected Mayor of New Orleans in 1904, a post he held for seventeen years (not consecutively), a city-wide record.

The Baroness de Pontalba and the Pontalba Apartments

Micaela Almonester
was born in 1795, when her father,
Don Andrès Almonester,
was seventy years old. Almonester, a widower, had married a French Creole
, twenty-nine year old Louise de la Ronde, in 1787. Two years after Micaela’s birth, her sister Andrea was born. Andrea died at the age of four, leaving Micaela the only heiress to her father’s vast estate.

Since Micaela’s name and fame have survived so many generations due to the apartment buildings she constructed flanking the Place d’Armes
, it would be well here to trace the history of that property. In the century and a quarter after de La Tour, the French military engineer who sketched the first plans for officers’ lodgings on the Pontalba site in 1721, buildings rose and fell in that location. When they were destroyed by fire, rains, or hurricanes, they were quickly replaced by others: first, a barracks, used as a place of worship until the first parish church was constructed; a warehouse; quarters for employees of the Government house; a residence for the governor; and finally, barracks for French soldiers and sailors. After the Spanish flag was raised over the Place d’Armes
, the residence of Don Andrès Almonester
was built on the site. Before his death in 1798, when Micaela was three, he had acquired all the land on both sides of the square. It was the choicest real estate in the city, and its use would be determined by his widow and his daughter, the indomitable Micaela.

Portrait of Micaela Almonester, Baroness de Pontalba, who built the apartments flanking Jackson Square, now a historical monument of the city.
(Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

In 1804, Almonester’s widow married Jean Baptiste Castillon
, the French consul of New Orleans, who died five years later in 1809. Madame Castillon was now a wealthy woman, who controlled the estates of both of her former husbands by community property law and also the properties they had given her or she had acquired.