SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE RISE OF FEMALE

LEADERSHIP OF VOUDOU IN NEW ORLEANS

by

KENDRA MARIE BUSBY

(Under the Direction of Sandy Dwayne Martin)

ABSTRACT

The Voudou women of New Orleans garnered leadership positions in the nineteenth-century differing from the rest of the United States. This thesis will provide possible explanations as to how this female role came into being. As a city isolated and consistently mismanaged, this enterprise details how New Orleans held an open a space for women, specifically free women of color, to achieve upward mobility unlike anywhere else in the country. It will also document how the voice of the Voudou woman, in particular, has roots in West African Vodu, a religious tradition varies from the

European patriarchy with its delegation of women as near equal. Vodu’s survival upon transplantation to the New World and continued adherence through Haitian Vodou allowed this female role to survive. This work will then cite the Voudou Queen Marie

Laveau as illustration for these leading female figures, aiding in a new historical approach to recover often forgotten, and sometimes overlooked, figures.

INDEX WORDS: Voudou, Vodu, Vodou, Marie Laveau, New Orleans, West Africa,

Haiti, Women, Slavery, Slave Trade, Antebellum South

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE RISE OF FEMALE

LEADERSHIP OF VOUDOU IN NEW ORLEANS

by

KENDRA MARIE BUSBY

B.A., The University of Pittsburgh, 2013

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2015

© 2015

Kendra Marie Busby

All Rights Reserved

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE RISE OF FEMALE

LEADERSHIP OF VOUDOU IN NEW ORLEANS

by

KENDRA MARIE BUSBY

Major Professor: Sandy Dwayne Martin Committee: Carolyn Jones Medine Ibigbolade Simon Aderibigbe

Electronic Version Approved:

Julie Coffield Interim Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2015

DEDICATION

It is a strange predicament, knowing that whomever you dedicate your work to will be appreciative of whatever it is you chose to write, but at the same time feeling the pressure of perfection as they deserve it most. Perhaps that is why I lean on another in undertaking a task that should be far less difficult than writing the thesis itself. When I first read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I felt an unusual affinity toward her words. They were teeming with power in the way of being sly as opposed to startling, and her analysis of the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals faced in the early twentieth-century was not discordant to what I had experienced in the modern era.

It was within this text that Woolf posited, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Habitually overlooked, sometimes forgotten, Woolf’s notion of the woman resonated with my work on women within the religious context. The New Orleans Voudou woman sought to break out of the mold of the silenced “other,” as did Woolf, and as do I in the way of writing about them in this very thesis. My life would be for naught if particular women had not been part of it. They were the women who fed me and clothed me, who taught me to accept everyone but question everything, and who, too, fought against this silence.

I feel a further inclination toward Woolf for reasons resounding outside of the mind, those resounding within in the soul. Suffering from what was often described of as

“mental illness,” Woolf fell victim to a society unwilling to accept or understand the depths of sorrow that is depression. While hard to evince, what I know firsthand is the

iv

continued misconception about depression as if it were either this mercurial state or one that comes to fruition after years and years of internal strife and fomentation.

Unhappiness feels as if you spend every day maundering around to fulfill the workings of a universal equilibrium until you allow yourself to think, I don’t skew the balance, I go unseen, I don’t matter. To shed tears while in a pool of water does not mean you have not cried, only that tears go unnoticed within the confines of encompassed liquidity.

Though I feel a connection to Woolf for her words, her want for feminism, and her struggles with depression, I have been remarkably lucky to find those who feel a connection with me. They are my stars whose incandescence strengthens upon the darkening of the night sky. Without them I would drown within my sadness, and with them I have accomplished this great feat of writing. Accordingly, I want to dedicate this work to these very women: Jennifer, my engrossing sister, Maya, my ingenious childhood companion, Georgia, my roommate with a beautiful capacity to listen, Maria, my intellectual counterpart, and Elizabeth, the sun to my moon and the best friend a girl could ever ask for. Thank you for quelling my inundating anxieties and supporting me without exception.

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Sandy Dwayne Martin for his guidance, Dr.

Ibigbolade Simon Aderibigbe for his insight, and Dr. Carolyn Jones Medine for her indelible encouragement. I also thank my family and friends for being a cornerstone of support.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vi

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Thesis Structure ...... 3

Etymology and Definition ...... 5

Academic Study of Voudou ...... 8

2 UPWARD MOBILITY IN NEW ORLEANS ...... 14

Geographic Sequestration ...... 15

Deviating Jurisprudence ...... 20

Shifting Demographics ...... 28

Upward Mobility of Women ...... 33

3 VODU, VODOU, VOUDOU LINEAGE ...... 41

West African Vodu ...... 42

Haitian Voudou ...... 48

New Orleans Voudou ...... 56

4 THE WOMEN OF NEW ORLEANS VOUDOU ...... 63

Persecution ...... 65

The Historical Marie Laveau ...... 70

The Mythical Marie Laveau ...... 80

vii

5 CONCLUSION ...... 86

The Decline of Voudou Practice ...... 86

Overall Significance ...... 89

7 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 92

viii

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Born of southern lineage, I have always been fascinated by the dichotomous role of the illustrious southern belle. I heeded the idolization of woman, on one end, and, on the other, witnessed her subsequent demoralization. This division is one reminiscent of

Rosemary Ruether and Ina Johanna Fandrich, who respectively wrote of the frustrating disunion between saint and witch, Mary and Eve. In her analysis of the female as symbol of evil in the scriptures of Tertullian, Fandrich asserted that “female initiative and women’s control over their own lives and over others appeared to be the key issue dividing the ‘good,’ submissive, passive, vessel-of-God, saint/Mary type from the ‘bad,’ insolent, active, independent witch/Eve type.”1 I questioned if the adversity of early

Christian European women was not but equivalent to those in the American antebellum

South. Disheartening too was the idea that the male-dominated society of the South, simply put, benefitted the male, he who had no trouble finding theoretical support for a way of life decidedly to his advantage. Obedient, faithful, submissive women strengthened the image of men who thought themselves vigorous, intelligent, commanding leaders.

1 “Consequently, the strong women leaders I could identify either sacrificed their sexuality (and vowed strict obedience to a male clerical hierarchy) by joining a religious order like Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila or they were burned at the stakes as witches like Joan of Arc.” Ina Johanna Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7. 1

Though initial fascination bred from upbringing, it deepened in the discovery of a historical oddity. New Orleans Voudou women, particularly in the nineteenth-century, differed to women of the American South. Voudou offered a model of female behavior contradicting the ideal of “true womanhood”2 permeating dominant groups in New

Orleans. Where this nineteenth-century ideal constructed woman to be “modest,”

“passive,” “self-sacrificing,” and “domestic,” the Voudou woman represented the exact opposite: bold, active, self-assertive, and public.3 Both respective statements – southern women were bred to be submissive and southern New Orleans Voudou women were remarkably dominant – are accurate, but present discordance that posits the question:

How did female dominance in New Orleans Voudou come into being? This thesis attempts to answer this question by providing possible foundations for this rise, tracing the rise itself, and illustrating the rise through female religious figures, specifically Marie

Laveau.

The secondary purpose of this thesis is put fascination aside and assert the significance of this female leadership in New Orleans Voudou. Western historiography deals primarily with “hard” written data where what is not written does not exist within the framework. Cultural history, the history of women, and oral cultures largely escape as the traditional Western historiographer is preoccupied depicting the lives of white and predominately male elites and their never-ending quarrels for power and influence.

Histories “from below” – historiographical accounts of the disempowered,

2 Barbara Andolsen, Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks: Racism and American Feminism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986), chapter 3. 3 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 2. 2

disenfranchised, silenced “others”4 – are a relatively new phenomenon, but a phenomenon gaining traction. The deconstruction of Western, patriarchal, Eurocentric, top-down historiography insinuates female leaders as less significant, perpetuating an inaccurate historical outlook. This new form of approaching the thus far faceless masses of ordinary people will aid in the historical recovery of forgotten or overlooked figures.

Thesis Structure

Approaching this enterprise historically, I structured the explanations for female ascendancy in New Orleans Voudou as my mind comprehended the role of the southern woman, existing on a dichotomous spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is the city of

New Orleans, and on the other the religious tradition of Voudou. The reader is invited to first view each entity respective of the other, asking how each independently accounts for this powerful female role, and then read of their convergence, then asking how they work in tandem to aid in the rise of the dominant female figure.

Within this introductory chapter I will set the theoretical framework for my analysis. First I will provide reasoning behind the spelling of “Voudou,” that of a changing and corrupted etymology, and define terms that frequent the text. I will explain that the lack of information on New Orleans Voudou is not unexpected but rather indicative of the Eurocentric approach to the academic study, following with a description of what that type of study has thus far produced.

4 Ibid., 10. 3

Chapter Two will explore the first end of the spectrum, the city of New Orleans.

Louisiana’s capital granted three specific reasons for opening of female leadership roles:

(1) the city was initially geographically isolated, allowing for an unparalleled culture outside the influence of English patriarchy to take root, (2) the city came into being under three distinct realms of leadership and therefore three distinct means of jurisprudence.

“French Ethos” taught social cohesion and Spanish informality allowed for a more liberal approach to enslavement before the final transition to American hands, and (3) the city’s isolation and consistent mismanagement resulted in an open a space for women, specifically free women of color, to achieve upward mobility unlike anywhere else in the country.

Chapter Three will explore the antipodal end of the spectrum, the religious tradition of Voudou. Setting New Orleans aside, women came to power within this specific religious tradition in greater numbers than other religious groups of the time.

Hence, I focus first on the origins of West African Vodu and the role of women within that society. Because Vodu female leadership nearly rivaled that of their male counterparts, the religious tradition’s survival upon journey to Haiti and further New

Orleans indicates that this unprecedented role of women survived as well. This chapter will further discuss how Voudou developed by summarizing the documented religious practices until the mid nineteenth-century.

Chapter Four is the pivot, the centriole of the spectrum. The city of New Orleans and the religious tradition of Voudou work together to form a single answer to my confounding question of how: an anomalous New Orleans opened the door for upward

4

mobility, and by influence of its West African Vodu roots, the women of Voudou stepped through it. The chapter will reference sources pointing to women as leading figures and illustrate the dominant female by exemplifying Marie Laveau, first historically and then mythically.

Chapter Five concludes the thesis, briefly reviewing the text within the work, expanding on the consequences of female leadership, and noting the importance of an

Afrocentric versus Eurocentric analysis.

Etymology and Definition

One of the greatest challenges I faced as a researcher were the variations in spellings that seemed to shroud nearly each sector of information I uncovered. New

Orleanians usually had two or three given names and during the colonial period and continuing into the nineteenth-century a name might have been rendered in French,

Spanish, or English depending on the native language of the clerk or priest. As illustration, a great deal of the mystery and confusion around the famous Voudou Queen,

Marie Laveau, stems from the fact that her name can be spelled in various ways. Her father signed his name Laveaux, but there are numerous permutations (Lavoz, Labeau,

Leveau, Lavan, Lavou, Levaux, and Lavo, to name a few).5 As Laveau is most commonly used in today’s academic study, I chose to stay with that spelling. Also to be mentioned is that there were at least ten free women of color with this name who lived at the same

5 Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Lavaeu (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), xxii. 5

time, only a few blocks apart from one another in New Orleans French Quarter, many of whom were completely unrelated to the Queen.

These variations further pertain to the word Voudou itself. The spelling and meaning of “Voudou” is complex to say the least. Etymologically, it is derived from the

Fon and Ewe word vodu, meaning “divine spirit.” When spelled “Vodu” or “Vodun,” it means the traditional indigenous religion of West Africa and as such one of the oldest religious traditions on this planet. When more accurately spelled “Vodou,” it refers to the syncretic, African-based popular folk religion of Haiti, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century. Vodou is a mystical religion that emerged under the trauma of slavery as an assertion of resistance on the island of Haiti. When spelled “Voodoo,” or

“Hoodoo” – as the Anglophone African American rural folk tradition refers – it is a generic term for the magical beliefs and practices commonly found among African

Americans throughout the United States.

Because the term Voodoo encompasses not only a religious tradition but also the folk practices and magical beliefs of Hoodoo, I will use an alternate spelling. My thesis does not provide deep insight to Hoodoo practice and therefore any etymological spelling embodying said practice would only confuse the reader further. Instead, I will refer to the religious tradition within New Orleans as “Voudou.” Close in spelling to the Haitian

Vodou and the corrupted English Voodoo, the French Voudou does better as the majority

6

of New Orleans’ prominent Voudou leaders were Francophone or drew from a line of

French descendants.6

In Louisiana, as in all French and Spanish New World colonies, term Creole meant any person regardless of race, who was native born as opposed to one born in

Europe of Africa.7 This thesis will occasionally distinguish between white Creoles and

Creoles of color, or Afro-Creoles. Accordingly, this paper reflects the findings prior to and encompassing nineteenth-century Louisiana, and it frequently refers to both groups and individuals in congruence to the time. These references are not indicative of what is known to be acceptable in modern parlance. An individual referred to in English as black or negro was a person of pure African descent and was assumed to be a slave. A free black or free negro was a free person of unmixed African blood. A free man/woman of color meant a person of mixed race. Collectively they were colored. These men and women were further classified as free mulatto, of half African and half European ancestry, or free quadroon, of one-quarter African and three-quarters European blood.

While one hears of octoroons, who had one part African seven parts European ancestry, the term is never found in the sacramental records or civil documents. These words are simply descriptors and are not capitalized within the text.

The terms native, Native American, native Indian, and Indian similarly refer to the indigenous people of the American territories. I also use the terms queen and

6 Long, Spiritual Merchants (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 37. 7 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, xxi. 7

priestess, in the Voudou context, interchangeably. Both denoted high positions of power within the religious tradition.

Academic Study of Voudou

The amount of documented information regarding Voudou in New Orleans is unfortunately limited. Idealistically, I tried to conduct my research by means of a critical

Afrocentric approach, a meta-theoretical framework that is “concerned with African people as subjects of historical and social experiences rather than object in the margins of

European experiences.”8 An Afrocentric perspective is thus a philosophical and ethical position that aims for correcting the dislocation of the African experience. The problem, however, in pursuing an Afrocentric perspective is that often the African heritage can only be retrieved from Eurocentric sources, and these Eurocentric perspectives would and did result in gross misunderstandings and malicious accusations as to the nature of New

Orleans Voudou.

To provide example, the most widely used source on this topic is Robert Tallant’s

1946 bestseller Voodoo in New Orleans. Because of the lack of primary and secondary sources, I often cite Tallant’s work even as the volume serves more the author’s sensationalist, racially prejudiced interests than doing justice to the religious tradition.9

Leading up to the twentieth-century, an astonishing number of academics accepted the trifling amount of works often doused in Eurocentric perspectives without question,

8 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 11. 9 Ibid., 262. 8

quoting the usual sources, particularly the aforesaid Tallant text.10 These academics are in many ways responsible for New Orleans Voudou existing as one of the world’s most misunderstood faiths. Modern conception is one facilitated by pop culture, in particular the influence of nearly one hundred years of American film. Hollywood’s movie industry has given the term a bad reputation deploying it to vilify and distort the African spiritual heritage. Big screen images of Voudou priests that turn innocent victims into zombies and stick pins into grotesque-looking Voudou dolls to harm their enemies is then what the average American has in mind when hearing the word “Voudou.” Though unjustly mistaken for some repugnant technique of witchcraft, it actually refers to a cluster of religious traditions with great depth and beauty.

Yet another crux of this study lies in the following dilemma: Since Voudou was a secret, persecuted religious and cultural expression of an oppressed people forced to go underground, only this second-hand material stemming from the dominant European-

American groups is left,11 and the number is limited. Lack of historical documentation allows three possible explanations: (1) Since the Haitian War of Independence, Voudou was a persecuted religion, suppressed by the dominant social sector, (2) Voudou is a charismatic, secretive, initiatory religion based on experiential knowledge. The religious rituals were generally not revealed to the uninitiated. Even if initiates were well educated in the Western sense, it is highly unlikely that they would write about Voudou rituals.12 In addition, the clients of such initiated practitioners were equally unlikely to write about

10 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, xxxv. 11 Sources such as police reports, census, court and property records, notary entries, newspaper articles, and travel accounts. 12 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 262. 9

their encounters, and (3) Many Voudou initiates were illiterate.13 The religious tradition existed for years orally as eyewitnesses could neither write down their experiences nor read them to fellow adherents.

In this Eurocentric approach to history, Western literacy-centrism gives precedence to what is written over what is spoken. What we must remember is that while marginalized and discredited in a written culture, the illiterate may have given much more importance to their spoken words than a literate person might have done as this was their sole medium of disseminating their own truth. According to West African oral history scholar Hampaté Bâ, “written or oral evidence is in the end only human evidence and it is worth what the man is worth.”14 He continues:

Nothing proves a priori that writing gives a more faithful account of reality than oral evidence handed down from generation to generation. The chronicles of modern wars serve to show that…each part or nation ‘sees high noon from its own doorway’ – through the prism of its own passions or mentality or interests, or eagerness to justify its point of view…What is involved, therefore, behind the evidence itself, is the actual value of the man who is giving the evidence, the value of the chain of transmission he is part of, the trustworthiness of the individual and the collective memory, and the price attached to the truth in a given society.15

13 The issue of illiteracy is intricately related to social stratifications in the colonial, post-colonial, or neo-colonial context. To obtain the capacity to write was the privilege of a small group of elites, and until the beginning of the twentieth century, was not accessible to the larger public. The majority of the population, especially women and poor people, remained illiterate. 14 Hampaté Bâ, “The Living Tradition,” General History of Africa, I: Methodology and African Prehistory (Paris: UNESCO, 1981), 167. 15 Ibid. 10

As such, we do have a good number of eyewitness accounts about nineteenth- century New Orleans Voudou that were recorded between 1928 and 1930 by Zora Neale

Hurston and in the mid-1930s to mid-1940s by the Louisiana Writers Project (LWP).

However, since those accounts stem from interviewees in advanced age recollecting childhood memories, we should approach their accuracy with some trepidation. Not only do children perceive reality quite differently than adults, especially when it comes to the full understanding of religious ceremonies, these interviews were recorded fifty, sixty, or more years after the respective events occurred. Thus, they reflect recollections of activities that took place long ago and are, in some ways, unreliable.

There were some nineteenth-century literary representations of New Orleans

Voudou, specifically augmenting the role of Marie Laveau within the religious tradition.

George Washington Cable was immensely popular within the Crescent City of the 1880s, and it was his fiction and local-color sketches that brought Marie Laveau to national prominence and popularized New Orleans Voudou.16 Lafcadio Hearn, like Cable, promoted the concept of New Orleans as a place of exoticism and mystery. He wrote several Voudou-related stories for local and national publication, though none of his literary output referred specifically to Marie Laveau.17 Henry Castellanos made frequent contributions to local New Orleans newspapers, in particular an article titled “The

Voudous: Their History, Mysteries, and Practices” that appeared in the Times-Democrat in 1894.18

16 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, xxvii 17 Ibid., xxviii. 18 Ibid., xxix. 11

Modern approaches to academic studies saw a shift in the 1990s when scholars in the fields of folklore, anthropology, and religious studies began to move beyond the stereotypes and re-examine the role of female religious leaders within New Orleans

Voudou. Some of these writers have analyzed the work of earlier authors while others have conducted primary archival research. Anthropologist Martha Ward authored the

2004 study, Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau, presenting Laveau as

“two women with the same name – a mother and daughter” who led “dangerous and secret lives” as leaders of the Afro-Creole community.19 Carolyn Morrow Long’s A New

Orleans Voudou Priestess, a text uncovering the historical Marie Laveau by means of elucidating the historical practice of Voudou itself, and Ina Johanna Fandrich’s dissertation, “Mysterious Voodoo Queen Marie Laveaux: A Study of Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” were essentially the cornerstone of this thesis.

I cannot claim to be the first or last to write on this particular subject, nor is my work remarkably groundbreaking in revelation. Rather, it blends the thoughts of various authors to provide hypotheses unlike that of any one particular historian. For example, I rely heavily on Fandrich to provide insight as to the origins of West African Vodu, but her work alone cannot fully convey the full potential of the nearly egalitarian society. In so, I tie in the work of Albert Raboteau and Alfred Métraux. Further, Long provides an excellent detailed history of Marie Laveau, but little information on New Orleans prior to expansion, to which I stich in the work of historian Liliane Crété. Again, my work does

19 Martha Ward, Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), introduction. 12

not claim to be trailblazing but it does inspire hope by showcasing a story of de- victimization and discrimination that will bolster the phenomenon of histories “from below.”

13

CHAPTER TWO

UPWARD MOBILITY IN NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans is a city of her own kind; the epitome of sui generis where the streets have spirit, the earth has ego, and the soil has soul. Its particular colonial history allowed for a unique Afro-Creole culture and an African-based religious tradition known as Voudou. The tradition was not only gender inclusive but also cut across race and class lines, attracting free people of color, enslaved servants, and a small number of whites.

While the white Creole women of New Orleans lived similarly to their Creole and

American sisters on plantations throughout the South20 in recognizing their proper and subordinate place under head of the family, New Orleans Voudou women existed in the majority of leadership roles.21

I propose that this particular role of Voudou women in the nineteenth-century was possible, perhaps only, in the city New Orleans for three reasons: (1) the city’s initial geographic isolation granted an unparalleled culture outside the influence of English patriarchy, (2) this unparalleled culture took root because of unstable jurisprudence under changing French, Spanish, and American sovereignty, and (3) with the growth of this deeply rooted culture came changing demographics, specifically an increase in the number of free women of color. The chapter will conclude New Orleans’ laws and

20 Further, they were expected to maintain large households, supervise a number of slaves, and fill a schedule of social engagements. 21 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 148. 14

commercial structure welcomed women to move upwardly within economic, and subsequently social, spheres.

Geographic Sequestration

The desolate trestle between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain sat isolated by consequence of the surrounding flat and marshy plains, uninhabited and seemingly uninhabitable. Overgrown with moist rushes and trees, the drowned forests were a haven for a disparate bunch of birds, alligators, turtles, catfish, rebarbative reptiles and incalculable insects. The lowlands permeated with cypresses canvased by Spanish moss, their towering trunks rising from the stagnant waters and filtering out the overhead sun to create thin shafts of light penetrating the miry depths. A cathedral-like silence pervaded these wildwoods, converging the sheer terror and majesty of nature.22

Audacious then was the Jesuit father and Frenchman Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La

Salle, who first essayed exploration. After Louis Jolliet and Père Jacques Marquette reached the upper Mississippi River from Canada in 1673, La Salle, travelling from the same colony, descended to the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682. He thereupon seized the territory in the name of Louis XIV of France. Though his attempt to establish a post at the mouth of the river in 1685 came to naught, his lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, erected the

22 Liliane Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana: 1815-1830 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 24-25, 282. 15

Arkansas Post in 1686, the first trading principality of the lower Mississippi Valley.23

This would be known as the seat of French Louisiana.

French explorer Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, recognized the efforts of La Salle to establish a settlement at the Mississippi River delta. He conceded to the conspicuousness of the confluence and enacted a hamlet of French livelihood in 1718 after becoming governor of the Louisiana Territory. He named her Nouvelle Orléans, for the duc d’Orléans, regent of France. New Orleans prosper had edges so erratic her popular name, the ‘Crescent City,’ derived from the original towns perch on a sharp, even if “beautiful,”24 bend of the river. In 1722 the modest seat transitioned to capital of the

French colony.

Although the landscape upon the delta emerged significantly more manageable, the topography continued to be slightly untamed and overrun. Estuaries were a sanctuary for birds and a refuge for natives, outlaws, and backwoodsmen with no other fortune than their strong arms and “indomitable spirits.”25 There were countless streams, bayous, and lakes fashioning an amphibious nature as the territory flourished with fish and crustaceans. Early traveler Claude C. Robin was deeply moved by the spectacle of the conversely eerie and easeful reclusiveness, remarking, “I thought myself in a vast temple where, rapt in contemplation, I remained a mute witness to divine mysteries. Yes, this was indeed a temple, the sacred habitation of Divine Nature who, remote from the

23 Henry Putney Beers, French and Spanish Records of Louisiana: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive and Manuscript Sources (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 3. 24 Charles L. Dufour, “The People of New Orleans,” in The Past as Prelude: New Orleans, 1718- 1968 (New Orleans: Pelican Publishing House, 1968), 20-42. 25 Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 282. 16

profane gaze and destructive hands of man, performs innumerable miracles unbeknownst to human kind.”26 Even in piercing the newfangled city’s inner realm, the rain, heat, and profusion of plant life had devilishly deteriorated her neglectful interior, left to sport sagging rooftops, crumbling chimney pots, and heaving sidewalks like a tarnished badge of honor.

While seemingly benign in saturation, the marshes and quagmires besieging the metropolis brimmed with thick saplings and an air of humidity oppressively stifling.

Though depicted by promoters as “the New Paris,” New Orleans was a miserable place during most of the French colonial period.27 Subject to periodic flooding from the

Mississippi River, she was little more than a huddle of wooden shacks in a sea of mud, plagued by insects, tropical diseases, poor sanitation, and food shortages. “New Orleans, the wet grave, where the hopes of thousands are buried…the wretched asylum for the outcasts of France and Spain, who could not venture one hundred paces beyond its gates without utterly sinking to the breast in mud, or being attacked by alligators,” wrote

German traveler Karl Anton Pöstl.28 To wend was deemed a task exceptionally intolerable and the colonizers had to subsidize the territory heavily since its population was rarely even able to feed itself.

26 As penned by Claude C. Robin in Voyages Dan l’intérieur de la Louisiane, de la Floride Occidentale, et Dans les Isles de la Martinique et de Saint-Domnigue, Pendant les Années 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, et 1806 (Paris: F. Buisson, 1807); As cited in Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 25. 27 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 4. 28 As penned by Karl Anton Pöstl in The Americans as They Are, Described in a Tour Through the Valley of the Mississippi (London: Hurst and Chance, 1828); as cited in Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 35. 17

Of course, lessons are learned in time, and the city’s inhabitants slowly became judicious of their engineering ignorance and adroit in their use of the many pervasive waterways. For the reason that New Orleans’ terrain maintained control of her economic survival, the only way to survive economically was to obtain control the terrain. The riverbanks of southern Louisiana were well suited for the cultivation of indigo and sugarcane. Crops were plentiful among the emerald green prairies, varied by grounds of tobacco and rice, and vast fields of cotton stretched along the banks of the Mississippi above Baton Rouge, extending along the Bayou Boeuf and the Bayou Lafourche, through the foothills of Natchitoches and Opelousas, and all the way to the Attakapas and to the parishes of Pointe Coupée and Feliciana. Under the warm southern sun the cotton industry prospered, for the crop was easy to pick, rarely subject to blight, and the profits were substantial.29

Sugar seems to have been the prerogative of the leading landowners, but cotton was grown by virtually everyone, the staple of the economy, bringing financial security to many and great wealth to some. Farms and plantations lined the banks of the

Mississippi, the farmhouses of the small landholders gradually giving way to the vast estates of the sugarcane planter, with the dark outline of the evergreen forests looming in the distance. Sugar was the second-ranking commodity. In 1828, Louisiana had more than three hundred sugar plantations, employing 21,000 people; a few years later, there

29 Pöstl instructs that in 1826 “one could set up a cotton plantation for $10,000.” The cost of 1,500 to 2,000 acres of fertile land in the Red River Valley was $3,000; ten black field workers could be obtained for $5,000. The first year, one could count on producing thirty bales of cotton on twenty-five acres. The following year, more land could be cleared and the production doubled. The planter was thus almost assured of receiving an annual income of three hundred dollars for each slave he owned. 18

were seven hundred plantations, and sugar production had increased from 15,000 to

45,000 barrels.30 By 1830, she supplied half of all the sugar consumed in the United

States and the sugarcane planters constituted the most prosperous group in Louisiana. In those regions where sugarcane grew well, planters tended to sacrifice other crops – even tearing out cotton plants – to increase their yield.31

The rapid growth of crop production required improved trade routes along

Louisiana’s various waterways, all forming a useful, and well-used, system of intercommunication. To the natives, the explorers, the voyagers, and the intrepid coureur de bois, these were their streets. The Mississippi River connected the city to the northern

Lake Pontchartrain and the bayou network of southwestern Louisiana, inserting her into the domestic marketplace. New Orleans profited enormously from trade and became one of the leading commercial centers of the nation.32

In addition to internal enterprise, the Crescent City emerged as a leading seaport.

Along the low-lying banks of the Mississippi, a levee of compacted earth confined the capricious river within its banks and protected the sugarcane plantations that stretched up and downstream from the capital. The sweep of several miles along the levee of the

Mississippi portended this street of New Orleans to be the Main Street of the World, where boats of all types and all nations rocked gently at moorage. Liliane Crété writes,

“they ranged from rustic flatboats – a sort of glorified raft shaped like a box, used

30 Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 33. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 32. 19

exclusively for downstream traffic – to tall sailing ships with proud lofty masts.”33

Bordered with sumptuous poplars and bosky willows, the backdrop of pale green was a favorite promenade for visitors and townspeople alike.

Lake Ponchartrian additionally held sway beyond mere linkage to the Mississippi

River. Cypress thickets extended from the outskirts of New Orleans to the salubrious shores of the magnificent lake, connected by the Pass Chef Menteur to Lake Borgne, which in turn flowed into the Chandeleur Sound.34 As follows, for ships coming from the

East Coast, Europe, or the West Indies, the lake route was as accessible as the

Mississippi. The manufacturing of the well-broadened port of call meant a new-fashioned international flavor that made itself felt: people of every language and every nation mingled on New Orleans’ shores, while from the ships merchandise unloaded from every corner of the earth.

Deviating Jurisprudence

Though for some time the city of New Orleans was geographically isolated, the hands of control were still capable of reaching it. This control began with French

Louisiana’s establishment in 1699. Until 1712, the government was military in character, and from 1712 to 1731, affairs in Louisiana were managed by arrangements between the

French government and John Law’s Company of the West.35 Accountability, armaments,

33 Ibid., 50. 34 Ibid., 25. 35 The trading company incorporated by the States-General of the Netherlands in 1621 shared world trade with the Dutch East India Company. In return for subsidies to the state, 20

and commercial relations were the imperative matters covered by the records of the

French regime of Louisiana, and material on the policy of the Company and on administration and exploitation of the colonies lacked completely.36 In 1745, New

Orleans had only 800 inhabitants, occupied by government and military officials, a contingent of soldiers, members of Roman Catholic religious orders, a ragged collection of white male settlers and indentured servants, a few white women of questionable virtue, some indigenous Indians, and enslaved Africans.37

From the onset, race relations in New Orleans were not clearly etched in black, white, and red. The city was founded under a model of “French Ethos,” one with

Universalist assimilation politics based on the Roman model.38 Like ancient Rome,

France was troubled by fragmentation into a multitude of regional ethnic groups and sought to achieve social cohesion and peace in all its diverse units, in the motherland and the colonies, by granting to all people living within French territory the same citizen rights, thus encouraging them to share one language, to marry among one another, and soon to turn altogether into “one blood.”39 This tolerant attitude toward ethnic pluralism should by no means be mistaken for genuine humanitarian concern for the subjugated people within French borders. It was essentially a means for implementing imperialist the West India Company was granted a monopoly of trade in the Americas and Africa, with the right of colonizing and of maintaining armed forces. 36 Beers, French and Spanish Records of Louisiana, 3-23. 37 Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 11. 38 Jerah Johnson uses the expression “French Ethos” to summarize French nationalist sociopolitical and cultural characteristics developed during the emergence of France as a nation state. See Jerah Johnson, “Colonial New Orleans: A Fragment of the Eighteenth Century French Ethos,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 12-57. 39 Johnson, Creole New Orleans, 12-57. 21

interests. While the French authorities strongly encouraged settlers to intermarry and live with the natives in order to civilize them into this “French Ethos,” the British – and later the Americans who inherited the British system – rejected such intimate associations with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent and, instead, kept both populations strictly apart from one another.40 Historian Jerah Johnson convincingly argues that these radically different colonial strategies mirror corresponding norms of social organization in their motherlands, from whence they came.41

The early years of settlement saw a Consiel Supérieur of leading planters and merchants regulated by French civil law, known as the Coutume de Paris.42 Similar to what happened in Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean before, assimilation collided in the lower Mississippi Valley with the capitalist dynamics of large-scale plantation economics introduced with the African slave trade. “For the sake of economic gain, the enslaved

Africans were stripped of their citizen rights and intermarriage with the French –although it continued to flourish in Louisiana – became a controversial issue.”43 French Louisiana bought her first slaves from the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Dominigue as early as 1716. By the end of the colonial time period (1682-1763), a multitude of

African ethnic groups lived in the capital, though her community was not an arbitrary amalgamation from all over Africa:

40 The North American reservation system is the direct result of British segregation policy. See James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 41 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 74. 42 Johnson, Creole New Orleans, 12-57. 43 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 75. 22

Twenty-three slaves ships landed during the French colonial period, delivering a total of 5,951 men, women, and children. Sixteen of the ships traded goods for captives at the Senegal Concession at Gorée Island, conveying to Louisiana 3,909 Wolofs, Bambaras, Foulbes, and Mandingas from the region between the Senegal and Gambia rivers. The first African community in New consisted by two-thirds of the people from the Senegambia region.44

This high percentage of Senegambians was inconceivable, making up not even twenty percent of the enslaved population elsewhere in the New World. In one way, elucidation came through the close ties developed between Louisiana and Senegal during the first three decades of the eighteenth-century, where both regions were concessions of the Company of the Indies. The Crescent City also had a strong Congo influence, the name becoming a descriptor to everyone of pure African descent in the nineteenth- century.

This acquisition of slaves necessitated laws to regulate their management. French

Louisiana’s 1724 Black Code, the Code Noir was modeled after a set of ordinances already in place in the older French colonies. In respect to slaves, the Code Noir required forced baptism and doctrinal education and outlawed African religious practices and superstitions. Enslaved persons were prohibited from carrying weapons or gathering in large groups. They could not conduct business on their own account, receive donations of money or goods, own property, nor could they sue in court or testify against a white

44 “Senegambia” usually refers to the entire area in the thirteenth century belonging to the great Mali Empire founded by the legendary royal warrior Sundiata Keita. This empire stretched out over today’s Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Niger, as found in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), chapter 2. 23

person. The law specified punishments – flogging, branding, bodily mutilation, and death

–for theft, running away, or assaulting a free person. Regulations imposed in 1758 further enforced Christianization of slaves by controlling the space in which slaves moved: under penalty of death, slaves were not to meet except in the presence of a priest, and were not allowed to gather near the home of their master and in remote spaces.

In 1763, King Louis XV of France sloughed Louisiana onto the Spanish, compensation for Spain’s loss of Florida in the Seven Years’ War in which the allied

French and Spanish fought against England.45 Faced with autonomous control of the

Spanish, inhabitants of Louisiana petitioned their motherland for a rescindment. France had no wish to retain the colony, already facing an internal Revolution. Louisiana existed in a state of disorder:

The newly appointed Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, lacked the will and the resources to assume leadership, and French Creole merchants, planters, and officials finally banished him from the colony. In 1769, Captain-General Alejandro O’Reilly, an Irish mercenary in the employ of the Spanish crown, was sent to New Orleans with a contingent of 2,100 troops to impose control. The leaders of the rebellion against Spanish rule were executed…The French governor was superseded by a Spanish governor, and the Superior Council was replaced by the Cabildo.46

During the Spanish administration, New Orleanians retained their French culture and continued to speak French as their first language, although official business was

45 Ibid., 6-23. 46 Beers, French and Spanish Records of Louisiana, 3-23. 24

conducted and recorded in Spanish, as were sacramental records. Despite shifting power,

New Orleans prevailed a colonial French city.47

Whereas while the French ceased to import enslaved Africans after 1743, the reigning Spanish cabinet reinstated the Slave Trade in 1776, effecting a re-Africanization of the Afro-Creole culture already in existence. This dramatic increase of Louisiana’s slave population accounted decisively, if not exclusively, for the emergence of a numerous and socially significant community of free people of color in Louisiana, the hombres and mujeres libres, as the Spanish called them, or gens de couleur libres as did the French.48 Coupled with the restoration of the Slave Trade, Spanish ascendancy introduced a new and considerably more liberal Black Code, the Codigo Negro, in 1769 when Governor Alejandro O’Reilly ordered the French Code Noir of 1724 to be translated into Spanish. The text surmised the enslavement of Indians forbidden and the enslavement of Africans implicitly temporary. Spaniards, in turn, proved surprisingly complaisant masters. Women of subjugation were protected from the sexual advances of their owners; sexual relations between Europeans and free people of African descent were forbidden; and, slaves were exempt from labor on Sundays and religious feast days.

All the more, severe restrictions and privileges of the Codigo Negro were loosely enforced in comparison to the French correlate. 49

47 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 25. 48 Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Societies,” Journal of Social History 3:4 (1970), 406-430. 49 Documented in the Code Noir, a master aged twenty-five or older could free a slave of his own volition, either during his lifetime or by the terms of his will. Spanish regulations of the Codigo Negro were more lenient: the master’s age lowered to twenty, and a slave could be freed either by written testimony in a will or by simply notifying the slave of his manumission in the presence of 25

France regained sovereignty of the Louisiana Territory in the secret Treaty of San

Ildefonso in 1800, but due to strains by other obligations in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte sold the territory to the United States. In December of 1803, a silent crowd gathered in

New Orleans’ Place d’Armes, a military parade ground overlooked by St. Louis

Cathedral, the Presbytère, and the Cabildo, to witness the transfer of Louisiana to

American rule. The territory acquired by President Jefferson for the sum of fifteen million dollars more than doubled the size of the United States,50 converting the

Mississippi River into an American waterway from source to outlet and opening a seemingly limitless expanse of virgin land to exploration and settlement. The United

States elevated to the rank of world power. “The acquisition of these new lands,” issued

Napoleon Bonaparte, “firmly establishes the might of the United States; and by this sale I have bequeathed to England a naval rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.”51

In the time French representatives inscribed away the vast territory and surrendered the keys of the city to the new American owners, the French tricolor lowered and the American stars and stripes flew over New Orleans. Colonial Prefect Pierre

Clément Laussat recorded a funereal sense amongst the Creoles:

The day, which was to be the first of a truly new era for the Mississippi shores, finally dawned…beautiful and the temperature as balmy as a day in May…The memory of that event will never leave me…The militia officers, wearing the

five witnesses. Further, a slave could request the court to determine his own monetary value, and if he happened to be in possession of the specified sum, he could purchase his freedom on the spot, with or without his master’s permission. Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 77. 50 Ibid., 18. 51 Ibid., 19. 26

tricolor cockade, rushed in. Showing it to me, they said, “We are still wearing it as we present ourselves to you at this time; it will be eternally dear to us, as well as the memory of your brief sojourn in these regions.” There were tears in their eyes. I had steeled myself for the ideals of this day, but I had not expected that one and consequently was not prepared for it.52

An onslaught against the Creoles’ cherished language, laws, religion, and cultural practices would soon be under way. The New Englanders, schooled in the Puritan tradition of hard work, austerity of religious observance, and strict morality, were not fond of New Orleans and her culture. They looked upon the white Creoles as indolent, uneducated to the point of illiteracy, lacking in business sense, and incapable of self- government. The racial mixing of New Orleans society, the prosperity and privilege of the free people of color, the relatively permissive form of urban slavery, and the continued existence of African music and dance traditions horrified them.53

The transfer of New Orleans to the United States dissatisfied her people. The

Creoles, who at the time outnumbered the American residents twelve to one, abhorred

Governor Claiborne because he knew little concerning their country, people, or language.

They were infuriated by the introduction of new customs, distinctly the displacement of

French and French-Creole for English as the official language. As a result, the law

Louisiana in the nineteenth-century was of great disorder. New Orleans held an atmosphere of lawlessness and anarchy where the cultural and legal prescriptions, including gender roles, had limited meaning. More often than not, cultural values and

52 Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 88-90. 53 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 27. 27

skills from Africa and French Creole society prevailed. Further, this revolt against the seemingly ever-changing law was aided by the sociopolitical, economic, and demographic dynamics prevailing in the metropolis.

Shifting Demographics

Free New Orleanians were chiefly comprised of Creoles, a term denoting any person, regardless of race, native born in Louisiana (in the same manner of all French and

Spanish New World colonies) as opposed to one born in Europe or Africa.54 The very word Creole derives from the Spanish criollo, which originally designated white children born in the Caribbean. Creoles spoke French or French-Creole,55 practiced Roman

Catholicism, and established in Louisiana before the arrival of the Americans.56 The term

Creole eventually expanded, by some, to include the free children born of African women and French or Spanish men. The concept of the caste remained fundamental to the

Creoles and their own social organization was extraordinarily complex. Over the course of centuries, the French community assimilated a number of foreign groups, eliminating virtually all traces of their national origins.

New Orleans’ cultural beginnings took a significant turn with the introduction of

African slaves. Inhumanely imported to serve as field hands in the colony, their miserable

54 This omits indigenous Native Americans. 55 Mary Gehman asserts the fusion between cultural elements from Africa, Europe, and America during the turbulent, chaotic, and violent French period, thereby creating a unique Louisiana Creole culture with its own distinct language within Women and New Orleans: A History (New Orleans: Margaret Media Inc., 1988), 11. 56 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, xxi. 28

toils made future construction and agriculture in Louisiana possible.57 The Senegalese were also seized by virtue of the shared climate of their country and the southern Gulf regions. The French settlers were almost exclusively urban people ignorant of how to cultivate the soil and establish rice, sugar, and indigo plantations. Moreover, Senegalese workers were desirable not only because of their technological expertise but also because they were used to working in excessively hot temperatures. They had acquired immunity to some tropical epidemic diseases, and their mortality rate would be much lower than the white settlers. By 1721, just three years after the founding of the city, there were almost half as many more black men than there were white men.58

This rise of the free black population in New Orleans continued toward the end of the eighteenth-century. Self-purchase and third party purchase became more common than voluntary manumission, indicating people of African descent had greater opportunities to earn money and more highly developed networks of support among kinsmen and friends. The faculty in which freedom could be secured for their population alongside the sizeable influx of slaves into Spanish Louisiana allowed for the impressive increase of free people of color during the Spanish rule:

The number of libres jumped from about 165 at the end of the French period in 1765 to 1,175 by 1785 and about 1,500 by the end of the Spanish period. Up until 1785, more than half of the free people of color resided outside of New Orleans on small farms in the districts, then the balance shifted. By 1803 the

57 Louise McKinney, New Orleans: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 15. 58 Ibid. 29

overwhelming number of them lived in the city of New Orleans, close to 1,200 of the roughly 1,500.59

Census records revealed the number of libres increased sixteenfold, though this group reportedly was undercounted throughout the era. The Spanish legal system, combining the politically weak position of the government alongside the favorable demographic, economic, and ecological aspects, created a proud, self-conscious, and economically influential third caste of free people of color.60

The New Orleans population found further change as a result of the Haitian

Revolution. Amidst the rising power of the Haitian slave population, many slave owners and slaves alike fled to Cuba for asylum. When the same slave-owners were forced to emigrate Cuba by France’s declaration of war against Spain in 1809, New Orleans received one of her largest influx of slaves. The newspaper Le Moniteur de la Louisiane announced on January 27, 1810 that the refugees arriving from Cuba numbered 2,371 whites (1,373 men, 703 women, 655 children), 3,102 free people of color (428 men,

1,377 women, 1,297 children), and 3,226 slaves (962 men, 1,330 women, 934 children).

These numbers were massive relative to the population of Orleans Parish in the first decade of the nineteenth-century, more than doubling her French-speaking population.61

Notable too, while African religious practices were observed widely in New Orleans before the arrival of Haitian Vodou, this mass influx of slaves to the territory in 1809 marked the beginning of organized Voudou in Louisiana. Prior to, Voudou adherents

59 Johnson, Creole New Orleans, 12-57. 60 Ibid., 105-106 61 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 28-29. 30

passed on few superstitions of the Vodou belief, but there was only an occasional gathering in New Orleans until the arrival of the Saint-Domingue slaves.62

These Haitian refugees further included natives of France, whites, and free people of color born in the Americas, many of who brought their African-born Fon, Yoruba, and

Congolese slaves. Most arrived lacking any means and were highly motivated to make the best out of their new lives for themselves and their children. The attempt to show allegiance to the new environment was not a troublesome task. They were Roman

Catholics and spoke French like the majority of Louisiana’s population, white and black.

On the grounds of the two groups abundant affinities, Haitian influence did not change the essential character of New Orleans. If anything, their arrival lifted Creole spirits and added reinforcements in the face of Anglo-American aggression.

Syrupy from superfluous stimulation and overflowing occupants, the capital in

1812 encompassed 17,242 denizens, making New Orleans the seventh most populated city in the Union and the first entry in the top ten list not located in one of the original thirteen colonies. The social structure of the following years reflected the peculiar genius of her inhabitants. To an outsider, this framework might appear constituted by a calibrated system. In reality, there were untold variations. Upon initial inspection, the social hierarchy divided into three general groups. At the crest were the whites: Creole,

Americans, and inhabitants of European origin. Ensuing were free blacks: emancipated slaves and their descendants, who were deemed “half citizens.” At the paltry base were the slaves who possessed no civil rights and were regulated to the status of household

62 Robert Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1946), 11-12. 31

property or chattel. On further examination, however, the hierarchical system was a great deal more convoluted:

It was not always so easy to categorize a free black as occupying intermediate position between the white elite and the black slave population. The whites never actually constituted a homogenous social class; and if one were to rank the citizens of New Orleans according to wealth and cultural s, it would soon become clear that many blacks not only occupied the same position as white but even surpassed them on the social scale. To be sure, both law and custom erected insurmountable racial barriers, and an individual of African blood, no matter how wealthy he might be or how pale his skin is, could not be admitted to white society. But nothing prevented him from engaging in commerce, owning slaves, taking on a white business associate, or employing whites as laborers. Some blacks even became planters – a profession that held the highest rank in the social hierarchy.63

According to the 1820 census, Louisiana’s entire population comprised of

153,407 people, including her 69,064 slaves. Specifically, New Orleans population was broken down into 13,908 whites, 1,500 foreigners, 6,237 free people of color, and 7,355 slaves. For the parish of Orleans, the figures are 5,827 whites, 49 foreigners, 924 free people of color, and 7,591 slaves, for a total of 14,391 inhabitants.64 By 1840 the population had reached a staggering 102,193. This ethnic and racial diversity gave New

Orleans a feeling of foreignness and exoticism. In spite of a Southern locale, the French,

Canadian, German, Spanish, Acadian, American Indian,65 Irish, Italian, African and other ethnic traditions kept her from being a typical Southern city. “A man might here study the

63 Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 68. 64 Ibid., 69. 65 This includes but is not limited to Natchez, Seminole, Chickasaw, Mohegan, Abenaki, and Choctaw. 32

world,” penned Lafcadio Hearn, adding “Every race that the world boasts is here, and good many races that are nowhere else. The strangest and most complicated mixture of

Negro and Caucasian blood, with Negroes washed white, and white men mulattoes would scorn to claim as of their own particular hybrid.”66

Upward Mobility of Women

The aforesaid figures indicate that the black population exceeded the white in

New Orleans, but the demographic realities within the urban economy further explain the female preponderance, specifically the preponderance of free women of color. Female libres outnumbered males two-to-one, and enslaved women were higher in number than enslaved men as more women than men were able to gain their carta de liberdad during this period. Masters tended to be more reluctant to part with their male slaves, while, in their view, female laborers seemed to have been much more dispensable and replaceable.67 Further, male slaves were generally more costly than females of equivalent age and health as they frequently received a vocational training that increased their price with each acquired skill. By contrast, females who could not qualify for such professional training were less valuable and therefore able to collect their purchase price in a shorter time span.68 Having analyzed the notary records for New Orleans from 1770 to 1803,

66 McKinney, New Orleans, 20. 67 Ibid. 68 James Thomas McGovan, “Creation of a Slave Society: Louisiana Plantations in the Eighteenth Century,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, 1976, 201-205. 33

James Thomas McGoven discovered that “three times as many women (123) as men (41) between the ages of 20 and 49 purchased their freedom.”69

These demographic realities of New Orleans, where white men consistently outnumbered white females but the number of black females by far superseded those of black males, fostered interracial relationships along with social and cultural ways to facilitate them. Albeit sexual relations between white masters and their female slaves, usually forced, and free women of color were notorious in plantation life throughout the

South, these relationships were not openly recognized and children born of such liaisons were considered either black or slave, taking status from their mothers. In New Orleans, white men and black women held relations that, although unlawful, often resembled true marriages. Legally, the term concubinage referred to any domestic partnership outside of marriage regardless of the race of the parties. In common parlance, the practice persisted as plaçage,70 by the French verb placer – to place [under a man’s protection].

The local term for open bi-racial liaison did not involve slave women but rather free women of color who had a limited degree of choice to whether they were to become mistresses and whose mistress they would be.71 The institution gained power in the role of a social custom, sanctioning unions between these women, who were referred to as placeés, and wealthy white men, who were referred to as their “protectors.” The prevalence of concubinage prompted elegant clothing lavished on the colored plaćées by

69 McGovan, “Creation,” 201-205. 70 Unfortunately, no exact history of this plaçage system exists. It is known neither how many such liaisons took places, nor how many men supported their families of color, nor how many men never married. The origin of the system is also uncertain. 71 Gehman, Women and New Orleans, 13. 34

said protectors. These free women of color began arraying themselves in beautiful gowns, bonnets, jewels, and elaborate hairstyles, receiving such finery neither through her own industry nor that of her legitimate husband. With concern to the “idle” colored mistresses being opulently supported by white men, Spanish Governor Estebán Miró concocted the

“tignon law,” pressing that in order to distinguish themselves, women of color cover their heads with a tignon, the same head wrap worn by slaves.72 Instead of being considered a badge of dishonor, the tignon, “traditionally made from a large plaid scarf from Madres,

India,”73 became a fashion statement. The bright blues, yellows, and reds of the scarves, and the creative wrapping techniques employed by their wearers moved the law to become obsolete under American administration.74

Most of these wealthy white planters, or protectors, had two sets of families, the first legal, most likely with a white Creole women who resided with their legitimate children on an estate, and the other, an on-going relationship with a free woman of color in New Orleans. When they came to town for business, they stayed with their mistresses with whom they typically also had children. This intricate informal institution represented a fascinating fusion of European racialized hierarchies and African mother-centered cultural patterns. In contravention of laws forbidding whites to make donations to persons of color, the man would provide a small cottage and support his plaçée and their children for life. Children born in plaçage generally took their white father’s last name, were supported by him, and in some cases indirectly inherited large sums upon his death.

72 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 20. 73 Ibid. 74 Even after the fall of the law, many Afro-Creole women still wore the traditional Madras head wrap. 35

Daughters were often raised to become mistresses of the next generation of white Creole men while sons were sometimes sent to overseas to be educated.

The Roman Catholic Church under the Spanish took her mandate to be a religion for all very seriously and received free women of color and their children with open arms.75 They did not hold women in the role of “mistress” within the plaçage system, or their offspring, responsible for their “sinful” lifestyle. Instead, Catholic clerics blamed the white men of the city who should have set a better moral example. It should also not be assumed that every free woman of color formed an exclusively sexual liaison with a white man, as despite laws to the contrary, interracial domestic unions76 were commonplace in early antebellum New Orleans. Of the 1,391 households enumerated in the 1805 census, 8.6 percent consisted of a white man and a nonwhite woman, often with racially mixed children.77 Many free women of color also chose legal marriage or domestic partnership with men of their own social class, creating strong family networks and forming a free colored elite who embraced French culture and education, served in the military, owned businesses, and were devoted to the Roman Catholic Church.

In her early days, many New Orleanians seemed never to have been very concerned about the Roman Catholic Church.78 After the Spanish had taken control of

75 The archives of St. Louis Cathedral confirm that in the decade between 1782 and 1791 alone, 2,688 free women of color had their infants baptized. 76 Archival evidence shows that in many instances these were long-term relationships that resembled legal marriage. 77 The percentage of racially mixed households listed in the 1805 census was calculated by Virginia R. Domínguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 198. 78 Louisiana was colonized by France and reinforced Roman Catholicism as the official religion of the territories. Unlike North American Protestantism, Catholicism offered a range of 36

the colony in 1769 and instituted Spanish clergymen in the Cathedral, the French colonists demonstratively stayed away from the Spanish priests, their church and their worship services. As the French receded, the increasing number of free women of color residing in New Orleans seized their empty places in the church benches. By the time the colony was transferred back to the United States, black women seemed to have dominated the congregation altogether:

To the astonishment of outside observers, Creole women in all shades kneeled Sunday after Sunday, peacefully immersed in prater next to one another one the same benches in St. Louis Cathedral, the center of Louisiana’s Roman Catholicism. Yet, on a closer look, its most visible active members were free women of color who dedicated their time and their considerable finances to the church. In return, they gained a network of friends and allies and, most importantly, moral and social responsibility.79

At the turn of the century and well into the antebellum period, the congregation of St.

Louis Cathedral embraced all its members, regardless of their skin color. It became thus a safe haven for the increasing numbers of free women of color in town, who soon formed the majority of the parish membership.80 The teaching mission of the Ursuline nuns certainly played a role here as well. From the beginning, they made a commitment to the education of young women of all racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds. They founded

possibilities for African continuity under Christian auspices. Roman Catholic sacramentalism, the elaborate rituals that stimulate all human senses, processions, pilgrimages, and celebrations for the various saints enabled regional popular religiosity of old non-Christian origin to flourish underneath the official cloak of the church. The practice of venerating saints, for instance, proved to have certain compatibility with the African divinities. 79 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 71. 80 Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 144-148. 37

lay female confraternities to improve the Christian morals in town. The efforts of these nuns were partially responsible for New Orleans’ cathedral’s high level of racial integration and high level of women’s literacy.81 It is likely that many of New Orleans’ successful free Afro-Creole businesswomen received their good education from the

Ursulines.

Aside from the possibility of female education, New Orleans held a disproportionally high demand for female labor, most jobs going to the free women of color. The gender-specific labor distribution within the urban economy meant that these women were likely to hold a great number of commercial positions:

Skilled male artisans and craftsmen were only needed in a limited number in the city. There was, however, an enormous demand for female retail and domestic personnel. All domestic service jobs such as cleaning, cooking, pastry and candy making, sewing, ironing, rearing children, etc., and the entire retail industry was with few exceptions in the hands of African and Afro-Creole females.82

This economic power and autonomy was aided by Napoleonic legal codes. It gave any free woman, white or colored, the right to own and manage any property they inherited prior to their marriage and from a former marriage. To reference Carolyn Morrow Long, under both civil and common law, single women and widows could conduct business without male interference, but under common law a married women took her husband’s surname and ceased to exist as a legal entity. Under civil law, a married woman kept her

81 In Louisiana, the education of women and people of color became a controversial issue. As in other Southern states, the ruling white slave-holding group was increasingly concerned about keeping the enslaved population illiterate. Access to writing was perceived as a threat. 82 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 93. 38

maiden name and could have considerable control over wealth and property. A wife retained possession of money, real estate, slaves, or moveable goods that she brought to the marriage, and earnings and property acquired by a couple during their union was held jointly. This “community of goods” was administered by the husband during the marriage, but a wife could declare herself separate in property, gaining the right to conduct business in her own name and insulating herself from her husband’s debts. When the husband or wife died, his or her half of the estate was divided equally between all their children, regardless of gender.83

To American men and women outside the realm of New Orleans, the extraordinary freedom of the women of color appeared to be a baffling issue. A Northern governess working in antebellum New Orleans, upon seeing the behavior of these women, opined in outrage, “[they were] laughing and chatting and apparently as free as the customer who ordered this omelet or fruit.”84 Belonging to neither the world of the dominant white group nor the world of the enslaved African sector, these resilient women

“fashioned discreet identities” and unique lifestyles.85 Their distinctive legal, social, and cultural space, which was carved out at the interstices of a blurring and shifting color line, allowed them to interact freely within all sectors of New Orleans’ society, the

83 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 28. 84 Lois Virginia Meacham Gould, “In Full Enjoyment of Their Liberty: The Free Women of Color of the Gulf Ports in New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1769-1860.” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1991. 85 Gould, “In Full Enjoyment,” 9. 39

peculiar situation of being between slave and free, rich and poor enabled them to assume roles of power and economic independence distinct to them.86

These terms, “allowed” and “enabled” point to the fact that while this space had been opened, not all women took to filling it. Their unique position allowed for upward mobility, but the dominant voices of the nineteenth-century were those of the Voudou women. The succeeding chapter will explain why these specific women so dominantly filled this role.

86 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 72. 40

CHAPTER THREE

VODU, VODOU, VOUDOU LINEAGE

Female leaders occupied a dominant position in New Orleans Voudou from its beginning. “The King was always a minor figure,” Robert Tallant wrote, “Papa didn’t count. Mama was the entire show.”87 Newbell Puckett furthered this notion, concluding,

“[T]he two ministers of the serpent god – the king and the queen, or master and mistress, or papa and mama – communicated the will of the sacred serpent [Li grand Zombi]…and, of the two, the queen was by far more important.”88 Even with the presence of male

Voudou priests attracting significant groups of followers,89 the majority of Voudou leaders at the time were women. How this dominant role emerged in this religious tradition comes into question.

In Chapter Two, I outline New Orleans’ topographical isolation, consistently changing jurisprudence, and increasing numbers of free women of color opened a space for their subsequent upward mobility. Concurrently, the city’s Voudou women filled this space. The question then becomes this: why the women of this specific tradition? I contend that New Orleanian Voudou female leadership can in part be traced to its West

African Vodu roots and the remarkably unique conditions surrounding its assimilation into the New World. Put simply, when a religion allowing for female leadership survives

87 Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans, 31. 88 Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1968), 178-179. 89 Dr. John (alias Jean Montanet) was a very popular and well-known Voodoo priest. 41

transference, female leadership is probable in the place of survival. This chapter will (1) trace the origins of West African Vodu, detailing the place of women in the African cultural heritage that prepared those of New Orleans Voudou for leadership roles, (2) follow the religious tradition’s transplantation to and further survival in Haiti and successively New Orleans, and (3) describe how it was, exactly, this New Orleans

Voudou came to develop until reaching its apex in the mid nineteenth-century.

West African Vodu

While nearly impossible to trace the exact African origins of New Orleans

Voudou, research roughly indicates West Africa to be home of Louisiana’s Africans, discerning their cultural and religious background. Vodu itself was a religion born from blending, a mixture of beliefs from myriad tribes and sacred traditions. Still, as Albert J.

Raboteau writes, “beneath the diversity, enough fundamental similarity did exist to allow a general description of the religious heritage of African slaves.”90 Each faction accepted religion as “an aspect, not a feature, of society – the vital way in which the entire human body collectively expressed its essence.”91

The creation of vodu spawned from many mothers: the Fons, the Nago people, the

Ibos, Congos, Dahomeans, Senegalese, Haoussrs, Caplaous, Mandinges, Mondongues,

Angolese, Libyans, Ethiopians, and the Malgaches.92 It was a system of beliefs melded

90 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religin: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7. 91 Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 210. 92 Milo Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1985), 9. 42

from many geographic procreators and supernatural elements, with vo meaning

“introspection” and du meaning “into the unknown.” Just as it was common to many

African societies, vodu adherents held belief in a High God, or Supreme Creator of the world. By way of creation, this God first fashioned husband and wife, bearing a son and a daughter who mated and produced male and female children, and so mankind increased upon the earth.93 Human derived as husband and wife, male and female, rather than a particular race. There was an emphasis on creating both sexes in order to continue on with life, forming man and woman at the same time. The stress placed upon a person’s individuality always related to the person’s identity within family and to the total social and historical context.

Every person, male or female, centered the relationships between the self, the world, and “invisible powers that influence and are influenced by a person’s behavior.

The moral ideal is the harmonious integration of the self with society and the spiritual world.”94 Each individual was a brother or sister, father or mother, grandmother or grandfather, or cousin, or brother-in-law, uncle or aunt, or something else, to everybody else.95 John S. Mbiti writes, “in traditional life, the individual does not and cannot exist alone except corporately. He owes his existence to other people, including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole. The community must therefore make, create or produce the individual; for the individual depends on the

93 John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Book Ltd., 1989), 91. 94 Benjamin C. Ray, African Religions: Symbol, Ritual, and Community (London: Pearson Publishing, 1999), 92-93. 95 Mbiti, African Religions, 102. 43

corporate group.” He continues, noting, “the individual can only say: ‘I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.’”96 Yielding man and woman to believe in we instead of me, to work together within the construct of community, provided a solid foundation for female empowerment.

The High God of vodu, often associated with the sky, stood somewhat removed from and uninvolved in human activities, especially so when compared with the lesser gods who were actively and constantly concerned with the daily life of the individual and the affairs of the whole society.97 These lesser divinities or secondary gods were plentiful.

They subsisted within pantheons, or groups of gods, associated with natural forces and phenomena. Further existed a powerful class of spirits, ancestor adoration, magic, and medicine. Though pervading in the most stunning of ways, magic was not immune to creation. “That means that the universe is not static or ‘dead’: it is a dynamic, ‘living’ and powerful universe.”98 Those persistent positions carried into action through ritual, weaving in the vibrant pattern of music. This dancing, drumming and singing played an integral part in the worship of such gods and ancestors.99

Hence, vodu rituals formed the sum of its introspection, meaning it was a religion of conciliatory nature. Practitioners often sought to regain favor of gods (loa) and spirits

(lwa):

96 Ibid. 97 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 8. 98 Mbiti, African Religions, 197. 99 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 15. 44

Every loa is responsible for a particular aspect of life, with the dynamic and changing personalities of each loa reflecting the many possibilities inherent to the aspects of life over which they preside…In order to navigate daily life, vodouists cultivate personal relationships with the loa through the presentation of offerings, the creation of personal altars and devotional objects, and participation in elaborate ceremonies of music, dance, and spirit possession.100

Rigaud mentions, “scarcely one hundred pages would suffice to mention all the loas included…especially if all the etymological variants continually given the names of the loas by initiates were taken into account.”101

Female gods were salient in the connection addressing gendered imagery of the divine in West African traditions. The origin of the ensemble of these vodu gods and goddesses became extraordinarily complex on both supernatural and geographic levels because of the assimilation of new gods and goddesses day after day into the pantheon.102

Loa were representatives of a power deriving from an occult origin, and with each god came a goddess. On one level, the loa had indisputably gendered identities. By the very fact that the social tradition was of ancestral origin, it was a simple matter to discover in the pantheon of the loas a governmental form of social hierarchy, where the king of kings, Legba Adingban, ruled alongside the queen of heaven, earth, and angels, Aïda

Wédo.103

Though commonly thought an omnipotent god of extreme power, the male Legba had a female counterpart existing outside of the hierarchal realm. Erzulie was the female

100 Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991), 4-7. 101 Rigaud, Secerets of Voodoo, 58. 102 Ibid., 51. 103 Ibid., 68. 45

energy, Virgin of the vodu initiates. Where as Legba was the Orient, the Sun, the Man,

Erzulie was the Occident, the Moon, the Woman, the most attractive loa of vodu and the heart of the religion – “She is the lover of Legba in the same sense that Erigone is the lover of Bacchus, that is to say, as mistress of the water she is the ritual water, while

Legba is the Eucharistic wine.”104

Women existed in society in the same way the goddesses of vodu existed alongside the gods, revered because of assistance in controlling the loa pantheon, acting as mirrors and maps, making the present comprehensible and offering direction for the future.105 They were faithful, hardworking and not quarrelsome. Even traits typically given to the wife were desirable of the husband, where many men sought feminine qualities like motherliness. This could be attributed to the fact that the female status advanced with the prospect of pregnancy. Marriage and reproduction were religious and social duties as a community thrived when the population replenished. When either parent joined the ancestors after death, children kept his or her memory alive in stories, naming of babies, pouring of libation, and other rituals. Likewise, having more children enhanced the prestige of a couple within society:106

The expectant mother becomes, therefore, a special person and receives special treatment from her neighbours and relatives. This treatment starts before and continues after child-birth…Unhappy is the woman who fails to get children for, whatever other qualities she might possess, her failure to bear children is worse

104 Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo, 75. 105 Brown, Mama Lola, 221. 106 Ibid. 46

than committing genocide: she has become the dead end of human life, not only for the genealogical line but also for herself.107

While vodu societal roles (including that of the loa society) were gender specific, they also transcended the gender classifications generally assigned to them. Gender ambiguity and androgyny were potential qualities of all living things just as spirits and cross-sex impersonations and role exchanges during the rituals are not unusual:

Androgynous potential in all living beings, including the spirits, explains why male divinities can manifest in female devotees and female divinities in male devotees…These ambiguities, as confusing as they may appear to the Western observer, offer avenues for women to see themselves mirrored in images of the divine that are entirely lacking in the Judeo-Christian religious traditions of the Western world.108

When describing the gender ambiguity of the loa, aspects of African religion and African cultural structure emerge: language did not differentiate between sexes but referenced them together. Beyond reference to the loa, West African languages did not allocate gender within their grammatical classification of nouns.109 Lack of gender classification is one of the central characteristics of this language family (i.e. the Niger-Congo language family) in opposition to those distinctly gender-classified (i.e. Amharic, so-called

107 Mbiti, African Religions, 107. 108 Ibid. 109 Joseph Greenberg, The Languages of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 58. 47

Semitic, and Cushitic languages). They group nouns into kinds or classes, one for ‘human beings,’ one for ‘things,’ one for “place and time,” and one for “modality.”110

This does not suggest the genderless classification of nouns in the Niger-Congo language family provides a way of communicating and reasoning untainted by patriarchal conceptions, as all of the languages in this family do have ways of expressing gender differences. But the very grammatical structure is compelling in terms of the gender equality expressed, an equality inconceivable in European languages. This marks a gender oblivious belief system, insisting on the importance of community over the individual, preparing women to lead alongside men.

Haitian Voudou

Most authors who have written about New Orleans Voudou suggest that this tradition is a religious and cultural continuity of Haitin Vodou. Both namesake traditions were not random mixtures of various traditional African religious practices. Haitain

Vodou draws its highly organized structure and cultural symbolism primarily from two

African regions. One is the former kingdom of Dahomey, a West African area that

European colonizers called the “Bight of Benin” during the Slave Trade. Populated by the aforementioned Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba people, it covers roughly the territory of today’s

People’s Republic of Benin and Western Nigeria. The other region was the vast Congo

River basin with its Bantu-speaking population groups.

110 Jan-Heinz Jahn, Muntu: The New African Culture (New York: Faber and Faber, 1961) 99-100. 48

Dahomey’s great influence on vodu requires recognition kingdoms rise to power in the 18th century. The conquering of neighboring Whydah allowed for the increase in size of the kingdom, particularly along the Atlantic coast, as well as increased power, making Dahomey a regional threat.111 This surge in power heightened close to 1740 when leaders found personal benefit both in entering and heavily organizing the trans-Atlantic

Slave Trade.112 It was the kingdom’s primary international trade for much of its history and by many European accounts the Dahomey coast was known as the “Slave Coast” because of its constant activity. The region contributed to possibly as much as 20 percent of the total trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, making it one of the largest suppliers.113

The captives from the Dahomean campaigns provided a supply of slaves for the

West Indian marker of the French traders,114 and with the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade reaching its peak between the years of 1701 and 1810 when slaves were shipped from eight coastal regions in Africa (though the actual origins in the interior are often uncertain),115 those of vodu heritage were high in number. Prior to the Post-World War II

111 Stanley B. Alpern, “On the Origins of the Amazons of Dahomey,” History in Africa 25, 1998, 9-25. 112 Rule of King Agaja from 1708 to 1740. 113 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, “Kongo and Dahomey, 1660-1815,” Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 203-210. 114 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 76. 115 Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) 128-30. The eight coastal regions are listed as (1) Senegambia, including the Gambia and Senegal of today; (2) Sierra Leone, a region somewhat larger than the present country; (3) a region consisting mainly of the present Ivory Coast and Liberia; (4) the Gold Coast, roughly coterminous with the present-day Ghana; (5) the Bight of Benin region from the Benin River, the core of which in the eighteenth century was more the more limited area known as the “slave coast” of present-day Togo and Dahomey; (6) the Bight of Biafra, centered on the Niger Delta and the mouths of the Cross and Duala rivers to the east; (7) Central Africa, corresponding 49

studies, the literature of the slave trade generally gave estimates of total slave imports into the New World of 15 to 20 million. Revisions of the estimates have reduced the total to something like 9 or 10 million.116 From these numbers we see that 42 percent of slaves were brought to the Caribbean Islands, with nearly 864,000 imported to Haiti, making up

9 percent of total importation.117 The Dahomean predominance is not surprising since the majority of Haiti’s enslaved Africans had been deported from there. Alfred Métraux identified similarities in their religious practices and economic structures. He also noticed striking resemblance in physical appearance, in gestures, and behavior patterns between

Haitian and Dahomeans.118

With an exorbitant amount of vodu practitioners transplanted to Haiti, it must be noted that the country was ruled and misruled by both the French and the Spanish for a matter of centuries. Discovered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus claiming the land in

Spain’s name, Haiti’s aboriginal population rapidly declined due to mistreatment and disease and in 1504 the Spanish crown allowed for the importation of two hundred slaves per year as means of replacement.119 By 1517, natives from West Africa were being imported wholesale.120 The middle third of the 17th century found French boucaniers121

roughly with the present-day Angola; and (8) southeastern Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Delgado and including Madagascar. 116 J.E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,” Journal of African History 17, (1976), 197-223. 117 George Eaton Simpson, Black Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 3. As seen in Table 1.1. 118 Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken, 1972), 28. 119 Ibid., 64. 120 Anthony B. Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneaspolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 15-16. 121 French pirates who attacked Spanish shipping in the Caribbean Sea during the 17th century. 50

positioning themselves in northern Haiti and through the Treaty of Ryswick122 in 1697 gained possession of the entire western part of the island, including the establishment of

Saint-Domingue. While often varying in methods of slave control, French and Spanish rule found similarities in religious conviction, that of Catholicism.

Ron Bodin wrote, “captivity changes man – it cages man – it brings out the survival instinct. Slavery organized the captives…determined to use their religion to win their freedom.”123 It was here, both geographically and ideologically, that Dahomey vodu took root and flourished as slaves met at night gatherings to socialize and conspire openly under the cover of religious assemblages designed by masters to introduce the African slave to Christianity. Its facility to blend with Catholicism allowed for the continuation among the system of slavery in Haiti, and contrarily Catholic popular piety had long been open to syncretism with “pagan” belief and practice.124 The two religious traditions shared innumerable attributes, and as Raboteau wrote, “No fundamental contradiction existed between veneration of the Virgin Mary and the saints in Catholic piety, on the one hand, and devotion to the orisha and vodun in African religions, on the other.”125 Catholic belief in the saints and the Holy Father is comparable to vodu ideas about the intervention of lesser gods in the day-to-day affairs of human life, while the supreme god remained benevolent and providential but distant.

122 The treaty of peace settling the War of the League of Augsburg which had pitted France against the Grand Alliance of England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the United Provinces. 123 Ron Bodin, Voodoo, Past and Present (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1990), 9. 124 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 23. 125 Ibid. 51

The use of sacramentals (blessed objects), such as statues, pictures, candles, incense, holy water, rosaries, vestments, and relics, in Catholic ritual was more akin to the spirit of African piety than the sparseness of Puritan America, which held such objects to be idolatrous. Holy days, processions, saints’ feasts, days of fast and abstinence were all recognizable to the African who had observed the sacred days, festivals, and food taboos of his gods.126

Damballah (also known as Damballawedo), the loa associated with the rainbow and both manifesting and symbolizing the serpent, is often associated with Moses because of the miracle of the brazen serpent, as well as Saint Patrick thanks to his connection in repelling the snakes of Ireland. Further he is referred to as the “Father,” comparable to the first member of the Christian Trinity.127 Erzulie, the female loa embodying both femininity and compassion, aligned with the Virgin Mary, specifically her position as

Mater Dolorosa or Our Lady of Sorrows and the portrayal of her in a state of lacrimation.

Papa Legba, serving as the intermediary between the loa and humanity, is essential to both life and ritual. His traits ally him with both Christ and Saint Peter as without his assistance, the “gate” remains closed, communication with the cosmic powers is impossible, and consequently necessary resources and health are denied.

Certainly, Haitian slaves were subject to religious attention from both the Spanish and the French during their separate reigns. The Spanish Crown actively encouraged missionary work and under French rule Catholicism continued to be the religion of interest. But Haiti was a nation unlike that of its slave-owning peers. The geography of the island combined with a relatively limited number of religious leaders hampered the

126 Ibid., 87. 127 As mentioned in the works of both Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience, 21 and Raboteau, Slave Religion, 23-24. 52

complexity and depth of missionary work. With the Treaty of Ryswick, the difficulty in providing solid religious training for slaves was reinforced by a lack of interest on the part of French planters and businesspersons who now controlled the area.128 Genovese furthered this point in mentioning that the religion brought to the sugar islands by the

French, distinctly Saint-Domingue, poorly represented the Roman Catholic Church.

The Church had long had to wage a rear-guard action against the encroachments of the French state, and however one may assign responsibility, it found itself in no position to play a vigorous proselytizing and humanizing role in the French Caribbean.

The French priests in the islands generally behaved badly, and those in Saint-Domingue reputedly behaved worst of all. The Abbé Raynal charged in 1770: “A succession of bad and ignorant priests has destroyed both respect for the cloth and the practice of religion in almost every parish of the colony. An atrocious greed has become the habitual vice of most of the parish priests.” As time went on the Church struggled to send more dedicated priests, but the cynicism of the government officials, the indifference of the planters, the miserable conditions of life, and the temptations offered by slave women, an impossible climate, and a hopeless cause combined to drag down all except the most resolute.129

As a result of inadequate religious leadership, conflict arose between the island nation and the Vatican, and the attempt to replace Vodou with Catholicism was not consistently maintained. Friction between Haiti and Rome resulted in the irregular arrival of priests to the island due to the Pope’s reluctance to recognize Haiti as an independent

128 Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience, 16. 129 Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 174. 53

and legitimate entity capable of developing its own priesthood. Although the tension between the Haitian state and the Vatican was resolved in 1860 with the appointment of church officials for the West Indies and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), the religious landscape was firmly developed and Vodou was a vital component of Haitian culture.130

Demographic factors were a further contributor to Vodu’s place in Haiti. As the

French boucaniers settled in Saint-Domingue following French possession of the land in

1697, Haiti’s inhabitants consisted of “about 6,000 adult while males and mulatto males and about 50,000 black slaves.”131 These numbers are remarkable as the African slave population was slightly more than eight times the size of the population of free men and owners. Consider these numbers when referencing other geographic areas admitting numbers of slaves through the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. With the first United States

Census conducted in 1790, the nation as a whole was comprised of 3,199,355 white males, females, children, and other free persons and roughly 694,280 slaves, where the population of free people, including slave-owners, was 4.6 times the size of the population of slaves. Even in Virginia, the state encompassing the largest slave population at 292,627, the number of while males, females, children, and other free persons was still 1.5 times as large with a population of 454,983.132 As both Frazier and

130 Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 38-47. 131 Robert I. Rotberg, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1971), 25- 26. 132 1790 United States Census, “Number of Persons,” Total Population, Virginia Population, accessed through the United States Census Bureau. 54

Herskovits observed, the ratio of blacks to whites was much greater on the plantations of

Latin America than it was on the plantations of the United States:

In the tropics large plantations were worked by huge gangs of slaves, but in the United States the large plantation with hundreds of slaves was relatively rare. In the American South, where average slave population was comparatively small, contact between whites and blacks was more frequent than was usual in French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies or, for that matter, in the British West Indies…As a matter of fact, in the Sea Islands, where the opposite conditions prevailed – a large slave population isolated from contact with white culture – the strongest incidence of African retentions in the United States were found.133

Population numbers on Saint-Domingue are necessary to note for two distinct reasons. The first works in tandem with the inconsistency of the Catholic rule. As

Raboteau notes, “the smaller the number of slaves, the more complete was the control of the master; the tighter the supervision, the more intense was the pressure to acculturate.”134 Conversely, the larger the number of slaves, the pressure to acculturate decreased and methods to maintain original religious structure increased. The second gives way to the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) made possible in large part by demography, where “by 1789, whites numbered 32,000; mulattoes and free blacks

28,000; and black slaves, an estimated 452,000,”135

133 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 89. 134 Ibid., 51. 135 Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 166. 55

New Orleans Voudou

After the arrival of thousands of Haitians in the city during the first decades of the nineteenth-century, Anglo-American authorities in New Orleans developed a profound fear of Voudou. They were well aware of the perceived role of this religion in the Haitian

Revolution, and they saw Voudou as a potential breeding ground for slave rebellion and a threat to public safety. Though the tradition did fact began during colonial years in the eighteenth-century prior to Haitian immigration, it climaxed in the nineteenth-century, where eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports, though scarce, indicated that it was a female-dominated religion. The priestesses seemed to have always been the central figures in what were known as the city’s Voodoo or Voudou societies and “Voodoo” or

“Voudou houses.” As mentioned in the introductory chapter, “Voodoo” lay separate from

“Voudou” in both spelling and overall meaning. “Voodoo” was understood to be an

“order” or “mystical sect,” defined by locals as “the common term to the superstitions

(collectively) prevalent among West Indian and Southern United States creoles, mulattoes and negroes, and deals with charms, conjuring, snake-worship, and witchcraft.”136 According to this broad definition:

…a Voodoo priest or priestess could be anything from an Akan priestess from Ghana, a Yoruba babalawo or divination priest from Nigeria, a Santería priestess from Cuba, a Obeah man from Jamaica, a Haitian mambo (an initiated Haitian voudou priestess), or a local Louisiana conjurer. Yet, all of these religious leaders here grouped together under the category of “Voodoo priest,” also come from

136 Marcus Christian, “Voodooism and Mumbo-Jumbo,” unpublished manuscript in the Rare Document Collection of the University of New Orleans, 1. 56

distinctly different religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions that had their unique history.137

I take note of this broad definition to assert that the definition used henceforth will be one more narrowly defined. New Orleans “Voudou” is instead defined as the particular set of beliefs and practices that developed locally in the African and Afro-Creole diaspora community in the Crescent City. In this sense, “Voudou” addresses the religious beliefs for the antebellum Voudou women.

The first report about African-based spiritual or magical practices in Louisiana stemmed from Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz, a French planter and employee of the

Company of the Indies. He wrote during the 1730s the first history of Louisiana, Histoire de la Louisiane, published in 1758.138 Describing the treatment of slaves, he stated,

“Nothing is more to be dreaded than to see the negroes assemble together on Sundays, since, under pretext of the Calinda [a popular dance], they sometimes get together to the number of three or four hundred, and make a kind of Sabbath…” He observed that the

African were “very superstitious and attached…to little toys which they called gris- gris…[and] would believe themselves undone if they were stripped of these trinkets.” 139

What Pratz mistook for “little toys” were Voudou charms, the term gris-gris common to this day as an expression for such a magical device.

137 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 118. 138 Ibid., 122. 139 Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana with an Account of the Settlements, Inhabitants, Soil, Climate, and Products (London: Beckett, 1774), 387. 57

Under Spanish rule came the first court case documenting the persecution of

Voudou practices, the famous “Gri-Gri case” of 1773.140 By then, black and white New

Orleanians no longer considered Voudou charms to be harmless “toys” but feared them as life-threatening weapons. This word, and further the phenomenon it stood for, indicates that at least by the 1770s, and thus long before the Haitian refugees arrived, the preparation of “Voudou” charms was widely practiced in Louisiana. We know, too, that the center of African social, cultural, and economic exchange in colonial and antebellum

New Orleans took place in Congo Square. The activities on these plains started out as one of the city’s weekly markets during the early French period where local Native

Americans offered herbs, fish, bear grease, spices, and baskets. They traded with New

Orleans’ enslaved Africans who did most of the cooking and housekeeping in the city.

Over time – it is hard to discern by when exactly – the market became primarily an

African affair. By the middle of the eighteenth-century on, the area turned weekly into a bustling African market place. There, they could exchange not only good, but also musical and dance skills, and were able to celebrate their rich cultural heritage of faraway

Africa.

Congo Square dances were a source of amusement and entertainment for

Africans, and during the first two decades of the nineteenth century the dances grew and flourished. Still, there was an idea that “real” Voudou dances were never accessible to the general public. Robert Tallant quotes an African American elder as insisting, “I can

140 Two enslaved African laborers were accused of attempting to kill their overseer with a “poisonous gris-gris.” 58

remember the Congo Square dances on Sunday afternoons. [White] people thought they was Voodoo dances and it’s true that a lot of the people who danced there was Voodoos, but they really wasn’t the real thing. The regular dances wasn’t ever held in public.”141

The “real” Voudou rituals took place well concealed from public spectators in secret places in private homes or abandoned yards, or outside of the city along the shores of

Lake Pontchartrain.

During most of the nineteenth-century, the shores of Lake Pontchartrain were uninhabited, and a dense swamp of cypress and scrub palmetto extended from the edge of the city to the lake itself. Within these oak groves or in the nearby ciprière, maroon societies were hiding out. These shores became home to the infamous Eve of the Feast of

St. John the Baptist celebrations, equipped with bonfires, nighttime picnics, singing, dancing, and ritual bathing:

Before the Christianization of Western Europe, religious festivals followed the agricultural and pastoral calendar and marked the summer and winter solstices. At these crucial times of the year, the human world and the spirit world were believed to intersect. Men and women responded by lighting bonfires to attract good spirits and drive way bad ones, protect livestock and people from disease, and ensure a successful harvest.142

St. John’s Eve was in time adopted by the people of African descent and became the most important celebration of the Voudou liturgical calendar. Voudou devotees could have brought the custom to New Orleans from Saint-Domingue. There, the feast of St. John

141 Newspaper clipping from June 3, 1919, Tallant Collection. 142 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 119. 59

the Baptist was observed with bonfires and ceremonies by both Freemasons and Vodou societies.143 It is difficult to reconstruct what actually happened at these well-hidden

Voudou ceremonies as there are no published descriptions of the event from the antebellum period or Civil War years, when Marie Laveau reigned. The first newspaper account of the St. John’s Eve celebration appeared in 1869 when the local news column of the Commercial Bulletin reported:

June is the time devoted by the voodoo worshippers to the celebration of their most sacred and therefore most revolting rites. Midnight dances, bathing and eating, together with other less innocent pleasures, make the early summer a time of unrestrained orgies for the blacks. 144

Successively, the Daily Picayune announced the upcoming St. John’s Eve event in the summer of 1870, and in 1872 a New Orleans Times journalist described the ceremony in an article titled, “The Vous Dous Incantation.”145 By 1875, the ceremonies were covered by virtually every newspaper in New Orleans – the Bee, the Commercial Bulletin, the

Daily Picayune, and the New Orleans Times.146

But perhaps the most commonly cited source for a typical New Orleanian Voudou ceremony from the antebellum period was actually lifted verbatim from the 1797 work of

Medric Louis Moreau de Saint-Méry. His narrative describing Vodou rituals in Saint-

Domingue reappeared in a travel memoir called Souvenirs d’Amerique et de France par

143 Donald Cosentino, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Los Angeles: University of California Fowler Museum of History, 1995), 47-52. 144 Commercial Bulletin, July 5, 1869, p.1, c.7. 145 New Orleans Times, June 28, 1872, p.1, c.6. 146 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 125. 60

une Créole, written in French and published anonymously by the Saint-Domingue immigrant Hélène d’Aquin Allain in 1883. Moreau described a ritual performed by the slaves in which their serpent deity was represented by a snake in a cage adorned with little bells. A “king” and “queen,” possessed by the Vodou spirits, counseled and instructed the assembled community; a goat was sacrificed; new initiates were received and given a protective charm, and the ceremony ended with drumming and dancing. An

English translation of the account was repeated in George Washington Cable’s 1886

“Creole Slave Songs.” While Allain and Cable credited Moreau as the source, later writers did not. This description – complete with queen, snake, gris-gris, bloody animal sacrifice, and sexual debauchery – has been endlessly paraphrased and repeated.147

Albeit little information exists on the specifics of these rituals, we know that many of the events began to take place in seemingly hidden spots within the city, often nocturnally in core of the New Orleans’ French Quarter. This movement from clandestine brushes to urban venues implied a growing confidence and courageousness of adherents as well as the liberal attitude of the city’s inhabitants in their rejection to the new conservative American rule. Correspondingly, the New Orleans police force turned a blind eye to the Voudou events mushrooming in the city during the first decades of the nineteenth-century.

Nevertheless, the debate over slavery escalated as the United States began its inexorable progress toward civil war. Fears of white New Orleanians increased, as did an attitude of brashness within Voudou circles, and attempted slave insurrections in

147 Ibid. 61

Louisiana along with frequent agitation by northern abolitionists made authorities nervous about any mixed gathering of slaves and free people of color.148 With the voice of Voudou becoming one thundering in intensity, it was deemed a particularly dangerous activity and the police force turned a blind eye no more. Therefore, most of our knowledge of New Orleans Voudou during the decades before the Civil War comes from newspaper coverage of Voudou-related arrests.

The negative side to this is a lack of primary sources enveloping the true nature of the practices within this tradition, but a great positive is the revelation of women in prominent female positions. The great majority of articles covered the rituals of female adherents and the innumerable arrests were primarily of notorious female leaders and their followers. I have argued that New Orleans Voudou is a tradition with strong roots in

West African Vodu, and as a result the ability for females to taken on leadership roles was possible if not remarkably probable. The coming chapter will stress what this leadership role entailed and provide a historical and mythical account of Marie Laveau as an illustration for this leading female figure.

148 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 103. 62

CHAPTER FOUR

THE WOMEN OF NEW ORLEANS VOUDOU

New Orleans’ frontier society struggled constantly with uncertainties and changes generating fears and anxieties about the future. Relationships, especially those crossing race and class lines, were fragile and frequently exploitative. Death and illnesses were always imminent and business opportunities speculative. Hence, some free women of color found their calling and niche in the Voudou religion, many choosing to cater to the spiritual and emotional needs of the population by becoming Voudou priestesses. These courageous, independent, self-assertive, and well connected free women of color of

African, Afro-Creole, and Caribbean origin found social protection, spiritual guidance, and sisterhood in Voudou houses and societies.

This chapter is the coalescence of the preceding chapters. For a plausible explanation of both the feminization and the dominant voices of female leaders in New

Orleanian Voudou, we refer to the history of the Crescent City as detailed in Chapter

Two. Specific economic and social circumstances of Louisiana’s unique French and

Spanish colonial history gave birth to a third stratum of society, a caste of racially mixed origins in between the world of the white planters and the enslaved Africans, the gens de couleur libres. Whereas for the dominant group, the white population, the female was subordinated to the male, among people of color, enslaved and free, women often had positions approaching greater gender equality than their white female counterparts. I

63

argued in Chapter Three that this formation of powerful female leadership had its roots in

West African Vodu. These models characterize African women as hard working, strong, and oftentimes independent. Though not matriarchal as in New Orleanian Voudou, West

African Vodu saw women and men as complementary.

The religious transplantation aided too in the demographic realities within New

Orleans: the number of white males was far greater than the number of white women, but black women outnumbered black men by two-to-one. On one hand, the shortage of white females was characteristic for the colonial frontier environment, and, on the other hand, the high demand for female domestic laborers and female retailers in the urban economy brought far more black females than males to the city. An additional reason for this preponderance of women was the questionable option enslaved women had to escape bondage by becoming mistresses of white men within the plaçage system. Free men of color did not have this same access to an avenue of upward social mobility.

These two separate explanations work in tandem to provide a single idea: an anomalous New Orleans presented an open space for leadership and by influence of West

African Vodu roots, the women of Voudou filled it. In this chapter, I will first analyze the particular constellation of New Orleanian Voudou as being overwhelmingly female- dominated in both its membership and leadership, looking to the reports of persecutions of the mid nineteenth-century. I will then encapsulate characteristics many female leaders by example of notorious Voudou Priestess Marie Laveau. Looking at first the historical figure and second the mythical figure, I will showcase the effects of female leadership on, nineteenth-century and present day New Orleans, respectively.

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Persecution

The first female leaders to be spoken of were the early Queens Sanité Dédé and

Marie Saloppé. What is unfortunate is that though they may have been actual people, neither can be located through archival records.149 The early-nineteenth century Priestess

Dédé was said to be a black street vendor of the fried, sweetened rice balls called cala.

She was first described in Marie B. Williams’ “A Night with the Voudous,” published in the Appleton’s Journal of 1875. As she presided over “males and females, old and young, negroes and negresses, handsome mulatresses and quadroons, and half a dozen white men and two white women,”150 Dédé received four initiates of the Voudou tradition:

[Dédé] made cabalistic signs over them and sprinkled them vigorously with some liquid from a calabash in her hand…A tall, lithe black woman…began to sway…[and] gradually the undulating motion was imparted to her body from the ankles to the hips. Then she tore the white handkerchief from her forehead…this was a signal for the whole assembly to…enter the dance…Under the passion of the hour, the women tore off their garments, and entirely nude, went on dancing.151

We hear no more of Dédé until 1936, when Herbert Asbury, in The French Quarter, declared her to have been usurped as Queen in her lifetime by Marie Laveau.

Saloppé was a possibly fictitious character from nineteenth-century literature, though she was mentioned during interviews from the LWP. Saloppé was probably not

149 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 98. 150 James William Buel, Metropolitan Life Unveiled; or the Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, Embracing New York, Washington City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans (St. Louis: Historical Publishing Company, 1882), 518-530. 151 Ibid. 65

the real name of this Voudou Priestess if she were to exist, as in French salope is a derogatory appellation meaning trashy, dirty, slut, or bitch, indicating she was considered a woman of bad character. Alexander Augustin, a narrative informant for the LWP implied Saloppé was a colored woman who “lived on St. Philip Street. She preceded

Marie Laveau in the art of Voudouism. She was equally well known by the older Creoles of that epoch…So great was the faith in Marie Saloppé, that after her death, many went to her grave to pray for certain graces…”152

The middle of the nineteenth-century brought about a crack-down on free people of color,153 in whicch Voudou adherents came increasingly under attack. While early papers like the Louisiana Gazette, the Louisiana Courier, and the Bee published columns providing a fascinating depiction of Voudou life, they turned to focus on more heavily on arrests involving Voudou adherents during the 1850s.154 They typically centered on the arrests of those in leadership positions, garnering a greater interest of the public and mass media, with figures in leadership roles more often than not women, as were the majority of followers. One of the earliest documented arrests took place on July 8, 1850, where the

New Orleans Weekly Delta recorded:

More Voudouism – The fair daughters of Voudou, since the interruption of their ceremonies in the ancient Third, have procured a temple in the neighborhood of the Lake, where, until last evening, their interesting rites were performed without interruption. The Third Municipality police, however, sought them out last night,

152 Alexander Augustin, interview by Henriette Michinard, May 16, 1940, LWP Folder. 153 Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans, chapter 3. 154 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 102. 66

and made quite a successful arrest – several being taken in safely to the guard- house.155

From a court proceeding reported in the Daily True Delta two days later, on July 10,

1850, we know the charge of practicing Voudou became one attempting to specifically destroy the reputation of a woman:

Voudou, or Not Voudou – That Is the Question? – Yesterday, Recorder Genois’ court was startled from its propriety by an angry, though remarkably beautiful, feminine, who ushered herself into the magisterial presence, by loud and importunate demands for protection from the stern arm of the law.“…Would you believe it, your honor, that when, this blessed day, I was promenading in the vicinity of his execrated domicil, he saluted my ear with the hellish word, Voudou! He charged me – contemptible creature that he is – with being one of the weird sisters of that dark fraternity, and his only reason for this diabolical charge, arises from the fact that the tendrils of my heart are attuned to the wild strains of passion, uncontrollable. He has a wife who loves him not, and her, he says, I have bewitched. In the eye of day and of things, he has called me a sorcerer—a Voudou – a worker of witcheries – a charmer with unholy charms!” To calm the excited maiden, the Recorder granted a warrant for the arrest of the accused.156

During this time, the woman designated as the leader of the Voudou society frequently mentioned was a free woman of color named Betsey Toledano.157 According to the Daily

True Delta, Toledano “pretends to possess supernatural powers, and thoughtless women are induced to visit her and participate in the ceremonies she directs, by promises of having their wishes gratified.” The newspaper continued in writing of Toledano as “one

155 New Orleans Weekly Delta, April 28, 1850, p.308, c.1. 156 Daily True Delta, July 10, 1850, p.2, c.2 157 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 234. 67

of the most noted procuresses in the city, and like the whole tribe of fortune tellers and practicers of witchcraft, assumes supernatural knowledge and power to bring within her toils the unsophisticated of her sex and conduct them to speedy ruin.”158 On July 30,

1850, Toledano and her Voudou sisters were arrested yet again amidst in performance of religious ceremonies, falsely imprisoned, improperly fined, and subject to assaults, batteries, and general ill-treatment.159The police went as far as raiding the home of this particular priestess:

Voudouism Unveiled – Betsey Toledano, a stout and intelligent free colored woman appeared as high and chief spokeswoman on the occasion. She contended with no lack of words or weakness of argument, that she had a perfect right to hold the meetings of the Voudou society in her house, if she thought proper so to do – that the society was a religious African institution which had been transmitted to her, through her grandmother, from the ancient Congo Queens – that the performances and incantations, though mysterious, were not immoral – and that, for herself, she gloried in being a priestess to an order so venerable and advantageous as was the order of the Voudous.160

What is learned from Toledano was the free women of color engaged in African sisterhoods161 were keenly aware of their constitutional rights. Despite all public denigration of their faith tradition, these women stood up on behalf of the religion.

The arrests of black women with charges of practicing Voudou continued throughout the 1850s and lasted until the late 1860s, well after the proclamation of

158 Daily True Delta, June 29, 1850, p.3., c.1. 159 Ibid., August 10, 1850, p.3, c.2. 160 Ibid., July 31, 1850, p.2, c.3. 161 Similar all-female organizations can also be found in the regions around the Bight of Benin, in Dahomey and Nigeria, where women hold a position of power. 68

emancipation that freed all people of color. Over and over again, among the accusations against these women was “indecent” behavior such as “dancing naked” and brewing loathsome liquids in cauldrons:

Six females were lying in a state of nudity within a chalked circle on the floor, mumbling some nonsensical incantation. A cauldron of water, containing a large snake, was boiling in the fireplace, and the table was spread with roasted oysters, hard boiled eggs, and liquor, of which free indulgence had been made…they had only commenced the heathenish process when interrupted by the police, and were awaiting the arrival of an old negro hag, who possess reputed powers of witchcraft, to complete and effect the charm.162

As with the case of Betsey Toledano, these all-female groups, or African sisterhoods, were comparable to both the gender-specific African societies and Catholic confraternities for women.

The aforementioned Sanité Dédé, Marie Saloppé, and Betsey Toledano, as well as many other Voudou women, presided over adherents and found trouble in the police raids during the 1850s and 1860s, but the key person of New Orleans’ Voudou scene, Marie

Laveau, remained undisturbed. Her name never appeared in the roster of those arrested during the summer of 1850. She did, however, serve as a complainant against the police force,163 selflessly speaking out for her fellow adherents and selfishly seeking a confiscated wooden statue to which she laid claim. The Picayune reported:

162 New Orleans Bee, October 15, 1860, p.4, c.5. 163 On July 2, 1850, Marie Laveau and another free woman of color, Rosine Dominique, accused one of the watchmen of harassing their coreligionists during the June 27 raid. 69

Marie Laveau, otherwise Widow Paris, f.w.c., the head of the Voudou women, yesterday appeared before Recorder Seuzenau and charged Watchman Abréo of the Third Municipality Guards with having by fraud come into a possession of a statue of a virgin worth fifty dollars.164

Her reference as the “head of the Voudou women” insinuates Toledano acted as spokeswoman, but Laveau was the reigning Queen. She was the embodiment of the powerful and dominant Voudou woman within New Orleans, with eyewitnesses remembering her as “the most powerful woman there is.”165

The Historical Marie Laveau

In stark contrast to the necessity of newspaper articles to uncover the whereabouts of Voudou activity in the nineteenth-century, Marie Laveau (1801-1881)166 was seldom the subject of the press. In her infrequent appearances, she was nevertheless referred to as

“the head of the Voudou women,” “the Queen of the Voudous,” “the celebrated Marie

Lavaeu,” “the Priestess of the Voudous,” or “Queen Marie,” indicating her exalted position was widely recognized. It was only after her death, beginning with the obituaries and remembrances, that her name became synonymous with Voudou.

To that end, the most fascinating note to make about Marie Laveau’s historical life is the inability to know how, why, and when she became the notorious Voudou

Priestess or Queen whom Tallant declared to be “the essence of New Orleanian

164 Daily Picayune, July 3, 1850, p.2, c.6. 165 Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans, 64. 166 As for the date of her birth, while popular sources say 1794, the records indicate 1801. 70

Voodoo.”167 Historically, nearly everything about her life has been contested, including her burial place and whether her death even happened. Her elusive life can only be traced through archival data, revealing nothing of her role within the religious tradition. What this data does give us, however, is a look into a life leading to or resulting in her place as reigning Voudou Priestess and points to three characteristics potentially aiding in her rise:

(1) she was devout, (2) she was cunningly charismatic, and (3) she was charitable. Our only other view of her life historically comes from the myriad of obituaries written on her. It is my intention to cite several in order to convey not only her celebrity but also her reach.

Laveau’s grandmother may have been the slave concubine of one or more of her white owners, but Laveau’s mother was freed from slavery “at the age of eighteen and subsequently became the plaćée of a well-situated white government official.” Laveau herself was born free in 1801, and in 1819 chose legitimate marriage with a man of her social class, the marriage contract marking her first verifiable appearance in the archival records.168 She married Jacques Paris, a free quadroon from Saint-Domingue, most likely a refugee who came to New Orleans as a result of the Haitian Revolution known to have sufficient means. Though everything written about Laveau, scholarly works as well as popular historical accounts, state unequivocally that no children were born of her

167 Christian, “Voodooism and Mumbo-Jumbo,” 15. 168 Enacted before Notary Hugues Lavergne on July 27, 1819, she was referred to as a minor under the age of twenty-one, the natural daughter of Marguerite D’Arcantel, free woman of color, and of Charles Laveaux, also a free man of color residing in New Orleans. This document was discovered and translated by the LWP. 71

marriage to Paris,169 and stories contest their marriage was not a happy one, his fate remains a mystery. No documentation of his death has been discovered, merely a note of him in the Daily Picayune and Daily City Item obituaries of Laveau herself, declaring

Paris “disappeared” a year after their marriage.170 Whatever happened to her husband, after he had been gone for more than a year he was officially declared as dead, and

Laveau was designated in official records as “the Widow Paris,” going by such name for the rest of her life.

Sometime after the disappearance of Paris in the 1820s, Laveau entered a domestic relationship with Louis Christophe Dominic Duminy de Glapion, a white veteran of the Battle of New Orleans of pure French ancestry. Interracial relationships like Laveau and Glapion’s were common in the early nineteenth-century New Orleans though the union is recorded nowhere. The relationship lasted until Glapion’s death in

1855 where the Daily Picayune obituary declared, “Fifteen children were the result of this marriage. Only one of them is now alive.”171 Although this number is likely an exaggeration,172 most subsequent writers have repeated the story.

After becoming a widow, Laveau supported herself as a hairdresser, being called to homes of wealthy white women to arrange their coiffures. “It is said that family secrets learned from these patrons during her hairdressing days later proved useful in her

169 A search of the St. Louis Cathedral baptismal registers did uncover entries for two daughters, Marie Angèlie Paris and Felicité Paris. Whether or not these were the legitimate children of Laveau, both most likely died in childhood, although this information cannot be verified as the St. Louis Cathedral funeral registers for 1825-1829 have been lost. 170 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 49. 171 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 53. 172 She did not have fifteen biological children as only five have been identified in the Sacramental Records of the St. Louis Cathedral. 72

Voudou practice.”173 Her hairdressing profession is given some credibility by several

LWP interviews:

Theresa Kavanaugh, born about 1860, said that Marie Laveau “called herself a hairdresser, and that’s how she got good in the graces of the fine people.” Mary Washington was born in 1863. As a young women, she operated a fruit and oyster stand on the corner of Rampart and St. Ann streets, steps away from Marie Laveau’s cottage. She claimed to have been a Laveau disciple, telling her interviewer that she “often visited the home of the Voudou Queen.” Mrs. Washington recalled that Marie “was some kind of a hairdresser and seamster, but she did all that in her early days. Shucks, she son would cut that stuff out. Her associating with the white people made her know how to fool them.”174

Known was Laveau’s devoutness as she was first a Catholic and a dedicated member of the congregation of the St. Louis Cathedral.175 In the early years of the nineteenth-century, there were many among New Orleans’ slaves and free people of color who had come from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, and Central Africa. These community elders and their New Orleans-born descendants surely retained elements of their traditional religions, in which women took responsibility for initiating their daughters. Any neighbor or kinswoman might have trained the young Laveau in the religion of her ancestors, just as her mother or grandmother could have served the

Voudou spirits in addition to their Roman Catholic Father, Jesus, and saints. We do know

173 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 50. 174 Theresa Kavanaugh, interview by Zoe Posey, n.d.; Mary Washington, interview by Robert McKinney, n.d., LWP Folder. 175 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 158. 73

Glapion played no role in Laveau’s religious vocation, as her adherence to Voudou originated before and continued long after his death.

Though we do not know when Laveau began practicing Voudou, she did begin holding weekly services, private ceremonies of the sort described in newspaper reports of police raids in the 1850s and 1860s. The informants referred to such meetings as parterres or layouts, derived from the practice of “arranging an offering of herbs, food, liquor, flowers, candles, and coins on a white cloth on the ground or floor.”176 The congregation was racially mixed, and a core group was always present. According to the

LWP, frequent visitors to Laveau’s home talked of rooms filled with altars, candles, and images of saints:

Marie Laveau had so many candles burning…I don’t see how that house never caught on fire…She had all kinds of saint’ pictures and flowers on the altar…[Laveau] had a big St. Anthony…and she would turn him upside down on his head in her yard when she had ‘work’ to perform.177

In these accounts, the blending of Voudou, European magic, and folk Catholicism is apparent as New Orleans Voudou adherents and traditional Catholics alike enlist St.

Anthony to find lost articles and bring back strayed lovers. Laveau too practiced less beneficial magic, as accounts from LWP interviewers described her altar to be “for bad

176 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 110. 177 Dédé/McKinney interview; Charles Raphael, interview by Hazel Breaux, n.d., LWP Folder. 74

work…[where] she prepared charms to kill, to drive away, to break up love affairs, and to spread confusion. It was surmounted by statues of a bear, a lion, a tiger, and a wolf.”178

Laveau’s power was said to be so great that she could appear at several places simultaneously. Some people claimed to have seen her involved in rituals at the lake as other swear having met her at the Cathedral and others are convinced they have observed her shopping on the French market. These witnesses most likely did not see the same person, but it attests to her notoriety and charisma. Not only could Laveau be recognized in various sectors of the great metropolis of New Orleans, she could convince people they either had, or had not, seen her. Many stories also allude to her cunning charm as she carried out many lawsuits and won all of them, many against wealthy individuals, particularly free men of color. These lawsuits are not in existence within the court records, but these stories again highlight Laveau as someone who either charmed her way in the courthouse, convinced a population she had, or did so in a spiritual way from her altar at her home.

Laveau too was a remarkably charitable person. She had a sense of justice and compassion for the poor, the injured, the underprivileged, the sick, the dying, and the imprisoned. In the 1850s, we find civil court records indicating Laveau put bail bond money out for friends or clients, and it was said she always gave money to the poor, nursed the sick and terminally ill, and comforted prisoners on death row. Tallant reports of a popular story:

178 Raphael/Breaux-Villere interview; Raymond Rivaros, interview by Hazel Breaux, n.d., LWP Folder. 75

Antoine Cambre was of an old and distinguished Creole family, but had led an erratic existence, spending most of his time drinking and carousing. One night very late he had an argument with a lamplighter in one of the city’s streets and in a drunken rage shot and killed the old man. After a long trial he was sentenced to be hanged, and Marie Laveau began the usual visits to the death cell…It was usual…to allow prisoners about to suffer death…to erect an altar. This altar was placed in the hands of Marie Laveau. The day before the execution Marie is supposed to have asked him, “My young one, before you die, tell me what you want to eat.” The man shook his had, too miserable to think of eating. “I’ll make you gumbo such as you have never eaten in your whole life,” the Voodooienne is said to have promised. When the guards came for the condemned man the next day they found him on the floor…He had eaten Marie Laveau’s gumbo.179

The Daily Picayune consequently reported a story attesting to Laveau taking care of the spiritual and physical needs of the condemned when she was already 70 years old:

For more than twenty years, whenever a human being has suffered the final penalty in the Parish Prison, an old coloured woman has come to their cell and prepared an altar for them. This woman is Marie Laveau, better known as Priestess of the Voudous. Arriving at the prison yesterday morning, she proceeded at once to prepare an altar for the worship of men who have been sentenced to expiate the guilt of murder on the scaffold. It consists of a box about three feet square; above this are three pyramidal boxes, rising to a small apex, on which is placed a small figure of the virgin.180

During the last few years of her life, Laveau was bedridden and frail, and she died on June 15, 1881 from the complications of old age. She was interred in the Widow Paris tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No.1. All of New Orleans’ English-language dailies noted the passing of the Voudou Queen, as did the New York Times, but their reports are

179 Francine Prose, Marie Laveau (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 95. 180 Daily Picayune, May 10, 1871, No. 91, p.2, c.6. 76

drastically dichotomous. The reporters from the City Item and the New Orleans Daily

States treated Laveau as the cherished relic of a more romantic past, portraying her as a traditional herbal healer and a Christian woman of unfailing charity. Similarly, the longest of the obituaries, titled, “Death of Marie Laveau – A Woman with a Wonderful

History, Almost a Century Old – Carried to the Tomb Yesterday Evening,” appeared on

June 17, 1881 in the Daily Picayune and sang a gracious eulogy:181

Those who have passed by the quaint old house on St. Anne, between Rampart and Burgundy streets, with the high frail-looking fence in front over which a tree or two is visible, have been within the last few years pleased to notice through the open gateway a decrepit old lady with snow-white hair, and a smile of peace and contentment lighting up her golden features. For a few years past she has been missed from her accustomed place. The feeble old lady lay upon her bed with her daughter [singular!] and grandchildren around her, ministering to her wants…

On Wednesday the invalid sank into the sleep which knows no waking. Those whom she had befriended crowded into the little room where she was exposed, in order to take a last look at the features, smiling even in death, of her who had been so kind to them…

Besides being very beautiful Marie was also very wise. She was skillful in the practice of medicine and was acquainted with the valuable healing qualities of indigenous herbs…

Marie was also very pious and took delight in strengthening her allegiance of souls to the church. She would sit with the condemned in their last moments… All in all Marie Laveau was a most wonderful woman. Doing good for the sake of doing good alone, she obtained no reward, ofttimes meeting with prejudices and loathing; she was nevertheless contented and did not lag in her work. She always had the case of the people at heart and was with them in all things…

181 This rendition of the obituary has been condensed from the original. 77

Her last days were spent surrounded by sacred pictures and other evidences of religion, and she died with a firm trust in Heaven. While God’s sunshine plays around the little tomb where her remains are buried and her sons and daughters, Marie Laveau’s name will not be forgotten in New Orleans.182

This article presents a combination of truths, half-truths, and outright fantasy, perhaps a journalistic embellishment of family history incorrectly remembered or deliberately falsified. Neither the Daily Picayune nor the City Item mentioned Laveau’s role as a

Voudou Priestess. The City Item protested, “Whatever superstitious stories were whispered about her, it is at least certain she enjoyed the respect and affection of thousands who knew her.”183

Conversely, several papers wrote of Laveau’s infamy, dissenting views of her as pious and good-natured. The New Orleans Times printed an obituary citing a typical

“Voudou orgy” story titled “Voudou Vagaries – The Spirit of Marie Laveau to be

Propitiated by Midnight Orgies on the Bayou,”184 the New Orleans Democrat, a paper with affiliations to the Anglo-American sector of the city, vehemently discounted the accuracy of any favorable assessment of Laveau’s contributions in an obituary titled “A

Sainted Woman”:

Who has been suffering our contemporaries in the matter of the defunct Voudou queen, Marie Lavoux? For they have undoubtedly been stuffed, nay crammed, by some huge practical joker. The informant for all is evidently the same, as the stories of the Picayune, Item, and States consist admirably in their uniform

182 Daily Picayune, June 17, 1881, p.8, c.4. 183 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, xxiv. 184 Daily Delta Times, June 23, 1881, p.7, c.4. 78

departure from historical facts. According to these esteemed but deluded contemporaries, Marie Lavoux was a saint, who had spent a life of self-sacrifice and abnegation in doing good to her fellow mortals, and whose immaculate spirit was all but too pure for this world.

One of them went so far in his enthusiasm as to publish a touching interview with the sainted women, in which the reporter boasts of having deposited a chaste kiss on her holy forehead. We are sorry for that reporter is this story is true, for, if he really believes it all, his only consolation is the fact that greatness is the color of hope. These fictions had one good result, for they created a vast amount of merriment among the old Creole residents, and in fact among all men of mature age who knew the social history of their time in New Orleans.

The fact is that the least is said about Marie Lavoux’s sainted life, etc., the better. She was, up to an advanced age, the prime mover and soul of the indecent orgies of the ignoble Voudous; and to her influence may be attributed the fall of many a virtuous woman. It is true that she had redeeming traits. It is a peculiar quality of the old race of Creole Negroes that they are invariably kind-hearted and charitable. Marie Lavoux made no exception. But talk about her morality and kiss her sainted brow – puah!!!185

The outraged author of this piece seemed to have been primarily concerned with

Laveau’s appropriation into sainthood as he never questioned the other paper’s conclusions regarding her life and family. To a certain degree, these exacting reports present the inaccurate depictions of her life. Laveau was never properly depicted, as no one ever knew of her true nature. But to another degree, these polarizing views were representative of the views New Orleanians themselves. The population constantly questioned who she was, what she did, and what her role in Voudou entailed. They either praised her or admonished her, but they never actually knew her.

185 New Orleans Democrat, June 18, 1881, p.2, c.3. 79

The New York Times printed a lengthy obituary for Marie Laveau titled, “The

Dead Voudou Queen – Marie Laveau’s Place in the History of New Orleans – The Early

Life of the Beautiful Young Creole – The Prominent Men Who Sought Her Advice and

Society – Her Charitable Work – How She Became an Object of Mystery.”186 This rather lengthy headline does perfectly to conclude Laveau’s historical life. From birth to death, her life is documented in sacramental, conveyance, notary, court, police, census, and city directory records. But this data never sufficiently explains Laveau’s extraordinary power as the Voudou Queen. For this, we shift from the historical figure to the mythical character she became.

The Mythical Marie Laveau

New Orleanians quickly forgot, or perhaps never remembered, the historical details about Marie Laveau, but her memory is kept alive in songs and stories within the

Crescent City. Where the preceding section focused on hard, written data, the following section will instead focus on the soft data of oral sources. Folktales, legends, stories, and myths are not simply beautiful figments of the human mind that happen in a vacuum.

Rather, they are always imbedded in the power dynamics of the sociopolitical and cultural contexts from whence they arose. Different from archival data, this oral history is a “living tradition”187 with complex functions, seeking to entertain and educate its audience.

186 New York Times, June 23, 1881, p.2, c.3-4. 187 Bâ, “The Living Tradition,” 167. 80

What stands to be most characteristic of each story passed on about Laveau is her legendary power. Her trickster wit functioned as both a source and a manifestation of said power. As I noted earlier noted, Laveau was never arrested as were her many Voudou sisters. Luke Turner, Zora Neale Hurston’s Voudou instructor, offered an interesting story about Laveau’s defense against the attacks of municipal authorities:

The police hear so much about Marie Leveau that they come to her house in St. Anne Street to put her in jail. First one come, she stretch out her left hand and he turn round and round and round and never stop until some one come lead him away. Then two come together – she put them to running and barking like dogs. Four come and she put them to beating each other with night sticks. The whole station force come. They knock at her door. She knew who they were before she ever look. She work on her altar and they all went to sleep on her steps.188

In line with oral tradition, the community gave heed to Laveau because of her mastery of the spoken word. In African traditions, the spoken word had, beyond its fundamental moral value, a sacred character associated with its divine origin, “superlative agent in magic, grand vector of ‘ethereal’ forces, it was not to be treated lightly.”189 In this way,

Laveau utilized the power of her words for the benefit of the people, and if someone’s cruel behavior provoked her anger, the words that she uttered could have grave consequences:

In moments of passion she shrieked out imprecations and curses, and her relatives say, and tremble as they tell it, that even when she launched the doom of death

188 Hurston, Mules and Men, 202. 189 Bâ, “The Living Tradition,” 167. 81

against those who had merited her displeasure her words came true, the victims expiring with frightful agonies at the stated time.190

The effectiveness of her words was aided in her knowledge of city affairs. As a hairdresser to rich, upper-class white women, Laveau stepped foot in their elaborate home, spending hours tending to their appearance. It was then that she listened closely to what her clients shared with her and how she learned of the most intimate affairs of influential New Orleanians. Quite contrastingly, the enslaved African and African

Americans of the city, particularly Voudou adherents, too provided Laveau with private information. As Tallant wrote, “It is probable that nearly all Negro servants had some connection with the cult. No event in any household in New Orleans was secret from

Marie Laveau.”191 Community elder Mary Ellis furthered this notion in combining the characterizations of Laveau as a cunning trickster and secret possessor:

…that kind of foolin’ was always wit’ white people…White people was different. She knew their ways; she had learned men’s ways from the women and the women’s ways from the men. Sometimes she’d really fix ‘em. She’d git a gal for some married man and when he and his gal got layin’ up, Marie Laveau would see that his wife found out about it. She wouldn’t tell the wife herself, understand? She would just start it spreadin’ by word of mouth ‘til the wife got hold of it. Then the wife would come to her husband to git the husband back. That would cost her money. After that the man would be told his wife had found out that he was messin’ ‘round and he’d better stop it. In cases like that all she had to do was fool the white people – and that was easy. Sometimes she’d collect both

190 New York Times, June 23, 1881, p.2. 191 Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans, 56-57. 82

ways, and she’d git money from both the wife and the husband. God, that was a smart woman!192

With all of the information she collected, Laveau effectively assessed and treated the causes behind her clients’ problems. She was consulted for just about every imaginable cause ranging from political decision to minor tensions with family members, financial dilemmas or unwanted pregnancies. She was best known for her expertise in affairs d’amour, matters of the heart:

Monsieur S., a wealthy white old bachelor, fell madly in love with the lovely daughter of another Creole gentlemen and, despite the fact that he was old enough to be her grandfather, came to court the young lady…It was all in vain. The girl swore she would rather die than marry Monsieur S. He was ugly and repulsive, and, besides, she had already given her heart to a young solider and adventurer...In desperation, the father and the rich man went to seek the services of Marie Laveau. She listened to them and said that she could promise that the marriage would take place…She advised the men to be patient and not to ask the girl to marry Monsieur for a period of two weeks…Two weeks later the girl, her voice trembling, announced to her father than she had changed her mind and that she was ready to marry the old man. Monsieur S. fell to his knees and kissed her hands and the father nearly fainted with joy.

Plans were made immediately to have the wedding take place at once…That evening there was a reception in the mansion of Monsieur S., where champagne flowed as from a fountain and there was every sort of delicious rare food. As the guests imbibed freely on the champagne, the party grew gayer and there were demands that the bride and groom dance alone on the ballroom floor…Suddenly, he stopped dancing…turning from red to purple, swayed for a few moments and then crumped to the floor…Monsieur S. was dead. The excitement and exercise had been too much for his heart.

192 Ibid., 101-102. 83

Madame S. inherited a large fortune and was able to call a young her young lover home. After a year, during which she, being properly reared, observed conventional mourning, they were married and live happily ever afterward…when she would ask Marie Laveau a question regarding the affair, she would say with the trace of a smile: “I promised only that the wedding would take place.”193

There were those who claimed to remember Laveau’s affaires d’amour in a more feminist light, noting that she never got married “because she didn’t need to have any man bossing her around in the first place,”194 and there were also those who loved her simply for the sake of her celebrity. In some ways the myth coincided with the historical figure, as with stories about her compassion and dedication to her fellow New

Orleanians, though they strayed in the idea of her altruistic nature:

Once a young man came to her house, complaining that he was “broke” and hungry. Marie, somewhat in need of cash herself, determined to make some money for both of them. She stretched the man out upon a couch in the front room of her cottage, covered him with a sheet and lighted candles at his head and feet. Then she went outside and sat on her front steps. As the neighbors passed, she burst into sobs and loud cries of grief. There was the corpse of a dear friend within, she told them, and there was no money with which to defray his burial expenses. Marie then took a stand by the couch, a bowl in her hand and as visitors passed they dropped in coins. Soon the bowl was filled, so she requested that she be left alone with her dead. The room emptied, the “corpse” sat up, and he and Marie divided the money.195

An analysis of Laveau’s mythical power tells us that aside from her undeniable genius and personal charisma, inherent traits within her, it was the African cultural capital that

193 Ibid., 98-100. 194 Ibid., 103-105. 195 Ibid., 101-102. 84

enabled her to successfully reverse the power dynamics in New Orleans. For those who benefitted, Laveau was designated a saint, and for those who were threatened by her power turned her name into a synonym for witchcraft.196 Here, the historical figure and the mythical being align, both falling under the aforesaid saint-witch dichotomy.

Regardless, her myth symbolized African wisdom and spirit reversing the encroaching racist regulations of New Orleans.

Voudou women of the Crescent City helped to define the boundaries of a group identity and helped in determining the real value of “true womanhood.” Both women of color and white women followed Laveau and along with her predecessors and fellow leaders. Enslaved women of color were attracted to them because they represented a familiar form of leadership, and, by practicing African traditions, they reestablished their violated sense of cultural identity. Free women of color were also empowered because they were one of them. They gained their position of power by fully exploiting the possibilities afforded to them as a free woman of color. The white Creole women were drawn to them because they simply provided a powerful female role model, one nonexistent in their Christian tradition.

196 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 205. 85

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

African Americans in New Orleans, free and enslaved, underwent a “crisis of meaning”197 during the antebellum period. After a time of relative independence and increasing equality under French and Spanish rule, the American government was extremely oppressive and denied them, one by one, most of the legal rights they had thus far attained. Free women of color could provide the type of prophetic leadership by instilling hope despite the odds with their privileged positions vis-à-vis men.

Unfortunately, this rise in female leadership within New Orleans Voudou was met with its subsequent downfall.

The Decline of Voudou Practice

This time of Voudou Renaissance, with an abundance of dazzling Voudou Queens and female adherents, did not last long. As the Union army left New Orleans in 1877, a white-supremacist backlash began. Panicked whites, both Creoles and Americans, engendered such racist organizations as the Knights of White Camellia, the White

League, and the Ku Klux Klan.198 By the 1880s, Jim Crow segregation had set in and continued to terrorize African Americans for almost a century. This renewed persecution

197 Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), chapters 1 and 8. 198 Their objective was to maintain white supremacy, observe a marked difference between the races, and prevent political power from falling into the hands of the inferior race. 86

of Voudou adherents and the complete vilification of anything African forced the followers to go underground during the first half of the twentieth-century, constituting the death of the ceremonial aspect of the tradition.199 With emancipation and increased economic and educational opportunities, old ways of acquiring power – especially by the use of chicken bones, clamshells, dolls, and oils – were either no longer needed or no longer acceptable to those wishing to acculturate into the mainstream of American society, and, therefore, the tradition lost adherents to both fear of persecution and desire for assimilation:

Some African Americans seem to have turned their backs on traditional ways in an attempt to be assimilated into the dominant social structure as an avenue for personal, political, and economic power. With increased educational opportunity, the superstitious nature of the belief system may have discredited Voodoo. Simply put, there no longer was a need for an organized Voodoo in Louisiana and so the formal, structured “religion” disappeared.200

The religious tradition saw further decline based on a newfound position as entertainment. With the increased participation of whites in Voudou and with the influence of New World Catholicism on practitioners, it is no surprise that in the late nineteenth-century Lafcadio Hearn claimed that the European influence had succeeded in considerably modifying African Voudou in Louisiana. The problem faced by Voudou and its practitioners in the twentieth-century has been one of maintaining some sense of ritual roots in the face of mass interests on the part of tourist.

199 Fandrich, Mysterious Voodoo Queen, 148. 200 Bodin, Voodoo, Past and Present, 27. 87

New Orleans was transformed from a tripartite society of white, colored, and black to a rigidly segregated society of white and black beginning in the 1880s and

1890s. The Louisiana Legislative Code of 1890 classified persons with “any appreciable amount” of African ancestry as Negro, obliterating the distinction between freedmen and the people of mixed race who had been free for generations. Creole neighborhoods that had one been racially integrated became all people of color. Concubinage between “a person of the Caucasian race and a person of the Negro race” was made a felony.”201

Schools that had been open to all races became segregated, and, after 1898, public schools for children of color were limited to the first five grades.202

The closest surviving descendants of Voudou are the Spiritual Churches of New

Orleans and the Hoodoo system of magic, divination, and herbalism. Spiritual Churches share an ideal of female leaders including female bishops and build elaborate festive altars for the spirits and saints they serve.203 Hoodoo has transformed from African religion into a microcosm of the African American experience that combined elements of loss with a persistent drive to survive in the face of persecution. Nineteenth-century

Hoodoo was a result of “creolization” and syncretism, the mixing of multiple African,

European, and Native American cultures, which together resulted in a form of magic unique to the American South.204 Rural Louisiana Hoodoo was individualistic, faith-

201 Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 182. 202 Ibid. 203 For study of New Orleans Spiritual Churches, see Claude Jacobs and Andrew Kaslow, The Spirited Churches of New Oreans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 204 Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 134-139. 88

based, and handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth like a good folk-tale or a traditional Cajun song. A constant need to make do with scarce funds soon

“focused attention again on the all-powerful ‘root-doctor’ or ‘hoo-doo’ mean as a healer of diseases.”205

Conjure has further developed by interacting with the massive influx of immigrants whose faith in the supernaturalism is similar to that of African Americans, and its expansion beyond the bounds of African American society is helping to preserve it for future generations. “Some practitioners even argue that the United States is in the midst of an African American magical renaissance.”206

Overall Significance

With the precipitous fall of New Orleans Voudou, the need for Afrocentric approaches to studying powerful leadership within the tradition is but more essential.

Eurocentric approaches stifled the growth of a group promoting the inclusivity and equality of all people. It was a beautiful notion ahead of its time. To continue to take a

Eurocentric view of Voudou leads to further historical inaccuracies and silences a voice resonant with today’s society.

It would take more than 150 years, a time span encompassing both the

Revolutionary and Civil Wars, for free women in New Orleans to begin establishing rights equating them with men. The Constitutional Convention of 1879 allowed, for the

205 Bodin, Voodoo, Past and Present, 18. 206 Ibid. 89

first time, women to merely speak before a state body in search of their rights.207 It was not until 1919 that the Joint Resolution of Congress passed the constitutional amendment extending the right of suffrage to women across the United States, Louisiana included.208

Still, in 2013, female full-time workers made only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 22 percent,209 and women on average earn less than men in virtually every single occupation for which there is sufficient earnings for both men and women to calculate an earnings ratio. A beautiful occurrence is that of women’s equality, the free female making her presence known, and in that same time span of a century and a half, the Voudou religion saw an astronomical rise in popularity. This gives us in modernity the potential for with equal identities of men and women, and on a more emotional level, it allows us to simply hope for it.

The intention of my thesis is to assert potential reasoning behind the allowance for a rise in female leadership within New Orleans Voudou, discussing the formation of this leadership from within the complex stratifying dynamics along the lines of race, economic class, gender, and religion prevailing in the city. It is also an attempt to speak for those who could not and approach this topic, though with trepidation, outside of the

Eurocentric model and as close to an Afrocentric model as possible. Even seen as a group

“from below,” the disempowered, disenfranchised, silenced “others,” a whisper of the

Voudou female emanates in New Orleans. She is the reason for the air of femininity that

207 Glenn R. Conrad, A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Association in cooperation with The Center for Louisiana Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1988). 208 Carmen Lindig, The Path from the Parlor: Louisiana Women 1879-1920 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1986). 209 According to study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. 90

surrounds the city, engulfing adherent and tourist alike, swirling in a magnetic intensity with attention-grabbing capacities. The ghosts of priestesses haunt the swamps, apparitions of past queens still visible to the modern observer. Whether tangible banshee or hopeful hallucination, the likes of the enigmatic Marie Laveau linger in the crowds on

St. John’s Eve, shadows in the night on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

91

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