Spectacular Wickedness

Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans

Emily Epstein Landau

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780807150160
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From 1897 to 1917 the red-light district of Storyville commercialized and even thrived on New Orleans's longstanding reputation for sin and sexual excess. This notorious neighborhood, located just outside of the French Quarter, hosted a diverse cast of characters who reflected the cultural milieu and complex social structure of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, a city infamous for both prostitution and interracial intimacy. In particular, Lulu White -- a mixed-race prostitute and madam -- created an image of herself and marketed it profitably to sell sex with light-skinned women to white men of means. In Spectacular Wickedness, Emily Epstein Landau examines the social history of this famed district within the cultural context of developing racial, sexual, and gender ideologies and practices.
Storyville's founding was envisioned as a reform measure, an effort by the city's business elite to curb and contain prostitution -- namely, to segregate it. In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which, when challenged by New Orleans's Creoles of color, led to the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, constitutionally sanctioning the enactment of "separate but equal" laws. The concurrent partitioning of both prostitutes and blacks worked only to reinforce Storyville's libidinous license and turned sex across the color line into a more lucrative commodity.
By looking at prostitution through the lens of patriarchy and demonstrating how gendered racial ideologies proved crucial to the remaking of southern society in the aftermath of the Civil War, Landau reveals how Storyville's salacious and eccentric subculture played a significant role in the way New Orleans constructed itself during the New South era.

CHAPTER ONE
The Promised Land of Harlotry

Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense.

—“Evil to him who thinks evil of it,” the unofficial slogan of Storyville

On April 9, 1908, Newton C. Woods stopped in New Orleans on his way to Texas from his home in Alabama. From Union Station on South Rampart Street he made his way to Storyville. He went to a brothel, where he drank a few beers and had sex with one or several women. Afterward, with his pants hanging on a chair near the bed, he fell asleep. When he woke up a little later, he got dressed and walked back to the train station. There he discovered that his wallet, containing seventy dollars and his train ticket, was missing. Unable to board the train, and desirous of justice, he wandered around until the next morning, when he found a police officer and brought him to the house to arrest the three women who lived there.¹

Two days later there was a trial. The prostitutes’ defense attorney asked Woods what he was doing at the brothel. He replied, “Frolicking around.” The attorney continued, “You were having fun?… You were frolicking around with these Negro women?” For Woods was white and the women were black. Woods replied, “Yes sir. I suppose so.”²

Storyville enjoyed considerable notoriety by 1908. Ten years into its official existence the district was well established. It boasted some of the best real estate in the city, its more or less central location made even more so by the completion of the train station at Canal and Basin in the spring of that year—right around the time of Woods’s visit.³ Basin Street was the entryway to the district, and the district’s most infamous and spectacular bordellos were there. Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall was on Basin Street, between Bienville and Customhouse, Josie Arlington’s was a few doors down, and Emma Johnson’s House of All Nations was in the center of the block; Willie V. Piazza, also known as the Countess, lived on the next block, between Bienville and Conti. At the corner of Basin and Customhouse stood Thomas C. (Tom) Anderson’s saloon, the eponymous “Mecca for Sports,” according to one of the famous Blue Books, the widely available guidebooks to the district. At Anderson’s saloon, bands played, men drank, and “private rooms” upstairs served for assignations.

Men flocked to Storyville to hear music, to drink, to gamble, and to have sex with prostitutes. For Woods and other unlucky fellows, the consequences of a stop in Storyville could be the loss of their money. It was a risk many men were more than willing to take. Storyville, created by ordinance in 1897 and open for business in 1898, quickly became the nation’s most notorious red-light district. It was famous well beyond New Orleans for its transgressive sex, its jazz music, and its myriad other entertainments, including sex circuses and naked dances, as well as concert saloons, gambling halls, barrooms, and barrelhouses.

Basin Street Blues

“Won’t you come along with me, To the Mississippi, We’ll take the boat to the land of dreams, steam down the river down to New Orleans.”⁴ Jazz was born in the late nineteenth century, and when people say that jazz was born in a brothel they mean it was born in Storyville. Jazz did not have a single genesis, but rather a series of contemporaneous starts and a long evolution. Few dispute its origins in New Orleans. “New Orleans,” writes the jazz historian Bruce Raeburn, “was a city where music was intrinsic to lifestyle.” Nineteenth-century New Orleans was a cultural crossroads where European, Caribbean, and American musical forms met and melded. Jazz was forged in the crucible of the city’s multicultural furnace. New Orleans also traditionally played host to multiple and diverse festivals, parties, and parades, all of which demanded music. Raeburn writes, “By the early twentieth century, this musical mélange fed a seemingly interminable calendar of festivities,” from Mardi Gras balls to riverboat excursions, funerals, fish fries, and many more.⁵ The “crazy quilt” pattern of residential life in New Orleans also fed the development of a new vernacular music, as white ethnics, African Americans, and Creoles of color lived in close proximity to one another throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whatever particular musical styles these groups brought or adapted from their places of origin (including New Orleans itself) inevitably cross-fertilized with different traditions residing in the same neighborhoods.⁶

Storyville, with its bordellos, cabarets, honky-tonks, restaurants, and bars, welcomed and nurtured jazz, provided it an ideal gestational milieu, and stamped it indelibly with prostitution and the sporting life. “Sporting life” denotes the male world of drinking, gambling, and patronizing houses of prostitution. Prostitutes were called “sporting girls” and bordellos “sporting houses.” Many early jazz musicians, such as Tony Jackson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Clarence Williams, found work in the brothels and cabarets of Storyville,⁷ and many of the descriptions that exist of Storyville come from the memories of the musicians who played there.

The song “Basin Street Blues” was published in the 1920s, after Storyville had been shut down by the government, and offered a kind of memorial to it. According to the lyrics, New Orleans was the “land of dreams,” nothing less than “heaven on earth,” and Basin Street was the very place to lose one’s Basin Street Blues.⁸ Much later, and in quite a different context, Williams remembered Basin Street as a “street of pleasure” with its “dance halls, honky tonks, and cabarets,” and its bordellos.⁹ The Basin Street bordellos, many of which resembled mansions, could be seen from the street, and aerial views of early twentieth-century New Orleans show the cupolas of Josie Arlington’s and Lulu White’s bordellos towering above the mansard roofs surrounding them. Indeed, Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall could be seen from Canal Street all the way to Esplanade.¹⁰ Basin Street itself was especially broad and had once housed a canal and two sets of train tracks. Only one side of the street was dedicated to bordellos, so it clearly demarcated the district and acted as a kind of entryway. One passed through Basin Street, and into a different world, a demi-monde. Though the district was located in a neighborhood in the back of town, the area northwest of the French Quarter, toward the lake, and behind Rampart Street, and had never been wealthy or even well-off, the houses in the district that had been built specifically for the purpose of prostitution belied the area’s impoverished demographic history. Jelly Roll Morton, for instance, recalled “the mansions where everything was of the highest class. These houses were filled up with the most expensive furniture and paintings.”¹¹ The grand bordellos on Basin Street, remembered another pioneer of jazz music, were “just like millionaires’ houses.”¹² Manuel Manetta, a jazz pianist, remembered Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall as “plush,” with two separate parlors, each with its own piano.¹³ “Those sportin’ houses,” remembered Morton, “had the most beautiful parlors, with cut glass, and draperies, and rugs, and expensive furniture.” Some of them even had “mirror parlors where you couldn’t find the door for the mirrors, the one at Lulu White’s costing thirty thousand dollars.”¹⁴ Upstairs at White’s, Clarence Williams, the musician, bandleader, and producer, said, “mirrors stood at the foot and head of all the beds.” For those who were over-awed and too “scared to go in,” there were smaller brothels, and even cribs—one-room shacks where prostitutes worked without the accouterments of the “high-class” bordellos. Yet, Williams recalled, “once in a while [even] a sailor” might patronize the luxurious bordellos.¹⁵ Overall, according to a souvenir edition of the district’s infamous guidebooks, “Romantic playboys and big-shot financiers alike must have found them irresistible, for the swankier houses are reputed to have paid off like gold mines to their financial backers.”¹⁶

Musicians remembered that the “high-class” bordellos were for “rich people”—“big timers” who paid a dollar for a bottle of beer or $25 for a bottle of champagne.¹⁷ Waiters served them in the parlor while musicians, nicknamed “professors” in Storyville, beat out proto-jazz rhythms and ragtime on pianos. Customers came to Mahogany Hall in “dress clothes” and good shoes. According to legend, a maid might even check a man’s shoes, to ensure that the customers were, indeed, “well-heeled.”¹⁸ The customers at these higher-end bordellos were white without exception, according to Manetta. Even the bordellos featuring women of color were strictly Jim Crow establishments.

The prostitutes working in these lavish houses would come downstairs as the evening started “dressed in the finest of evening gowns, just like they were going to the opera.” The musicians remembered that the women were “just beautiful.… Some of them looked Spanish, and some were Creoles, some brownskins, some chocolate-brown. But they all had to have that figure.”¹⁹ “There were always twelve to fifteen women [at Mahogany Hall],” dressed in “beautiful costumes, not naked, they wore beautiful costumes. Up to date, long evening dresses, gowns.”²⁰ Another musician remembered the women’s clothes as very expensive, evanescent and sexy, even see-through.²¹ While the pianist played the “Maple Leaf Rag” or another contemporary hit on the piano, men could exchange glances over their drinks as these women, some wearing “lots of make up,” slinked down the stairs into the parlor—a veritable parade of desire. The prostitutes were on display for the customers to select from, like mannequins in a department store window; they were dressed up in the finest evening clothes, and, depending on the bordello, in a rainbow of hues. Some frequent customers had their “regular girls,” but others chose their “dates” from among the women working in the house that evening. The price for such a “date” ranged from $3 to $5, according to Louis Armstrong (compared to fifty to seventy-five cents in other, less glamorous areas of the city).²²

Not all the sporting houses in Storyville were like “millionaires’ houses.” Within the district there was great variety. Jelly Roll Morton remembered: “They had everything in the District from the highest class to the lowest—creep joints where they’d put the feelers on a guy’s clothes, cribs that rented for about five dollars a day and had just about room enough for a bed, smalltime houses where the price was from fifty cents to a dollar and they put on naked dances, circuses, and jive.”²³ One customer described his experience in Storyville:

I was walking around yesterday, I started a little before two in the afternoon and I went through the red light district. I went down Customhouse to Basin and turned right. I know that I was on Customhouse street, and got four doors off from the corner, four or five doors, and there was a woman standing in the floor or on the steps—Anyway, she joined me and we walked about two doors still nearer the corner and I walked in a house with her and she sat on my lap and I stayed there a few minutes, and she began fumbling with me, and the first thing I knew we were having intercourse with each other, she across my lap. I stayed there, I guess, ten minutes or longer, but not much longer than ten minutes I am sure.²⁴

During that ten minutes this man was robbed—or so he claimed:

I then got up and walked out and walked probably fifty feet and got to the corner and just as I turned the corner the thought struck me to see if I had my money in my pocket book—I had paid her for the pleasure I had out of the odd silver money I had in change in my pocket—I opened my pocket book and saw that there were three twenty dollar bills gone, I think that there were two other bills in that side of my pocket book, but I am sure that there were three twenties gone. I immediately turned back and went to the same door and there was no one in the house, there was no one to be seen. I then saw an officer and told him the circumstances, and we walked up by this house and there was no one there. I told him just what had been done in the house, and he told me that if I wanted to bring charges against her [and arrest her] that he would have to detain me as a material witness. I never was in jail in my life and I did not want to go to jail. I then left the officer, and did not do anything more then until between five and six o’clock in the afternoon when I consulted the sergeant and he told me to go to headquarters and make my statement, which I did, and then the gentleman in the Court room now came with me and arrested this woman.²⁵

The woman arrested was not the woman Fred Smith had had intercourse with—she was rather the brothel-keeper, the “woman of the house.” This he could not have been mistaken about since she was black, whereas the woman Smith had been with was white, or, as he put it, “She was as I thought a white woman.” The defense attorney asked Smith, “You have anything at all to do with this woman?” Smith answered, “No sir.” The attorney asked, “She steal your money?” Again, Smith replied, “No sir.” Finally, when asked again, “You did not have anything to do with her at all?” Smith repeated, “No sir.” The landlady was nevertheless fined $25 or, if she could not pay, sentenced to thirty days in the parish prison. The judge made his decision based on what he called “General Principles.”²⁶

Sometimes men were robbed without even having “the pleasure,” as this man put it, of paid sex. One summer Sunday, in the wee hours of the morning, a New Orleans man named August Monlezun was walking through the district to catch a streetcar. He had been out with some friends and was headed home. When he passed the corner of Bienville and Marais streets, a woman beckoned to him to “come on in” to her crib. He kept on walking. The woman ran up to him, “snatched” his hat right off of his head, and retreated to her crib with it. When August ran after her to get it, “someone behind the door held [his] arms” down while the woman with his hat went through his pockets and took two and a half dollars from him.²⁷

For sailors docked in New Orleans, the district was very often their first stop in town. Two such sailors (from a fruit steamer) lost or were robbed of their money in Storyville, one $5, the other $10. They only noticed they were missing the money after they left the brothel they had visited and had gone to get a beer. Another man, Presialiano Morina, lost significantly more money—$90—in Storyville. As he recounted his experience, “There were three women in the house, two negroes and a white woman and I went to bed with the white woman,” then added, “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Land of Dreams
• Chapter One: The Promised Land of Harlotry
• Chapter Two: The Quadroon Connection
• Chapter Three: Public Rights and Public Women
• Chapter Four: Where the Light and Dark Folks Meet
• Chapter Five: Diamond Queen
• Chapter Six: The Last Stronghold of the Old Regime
• Conclusion: Farewell to Storyville
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations