The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  Unfortunately, poor Viala was one of those good-natured tipplers who could never take a drink alone but always had to have a select company about him. Even that would not have dumped the former second mate into perdition, but the fact that his inseparable drinking buddies had such large holes in their pockets did lead to his ruin. His more than ordinary inclination to the fair sex also helped draw pennies from his exchequer. He was particularly fixated on Indian Creoles, and he always fell into a fit when his cashbox would not permit him to satisfy the just claims of these overen-thusiastic entertainers. When Viala had sunk so low that he had sold off his candy jars, empty ale bottles, and mugs, it was his fortune to become acquainted with a woman from Hamburg who moved him to sell her the boardinghouse with all equipment for a modest price.

  Once it was in the possession of this lovable lady—who, it should be said, had once brought all Hamburg to its feet through her amiability—this seaman’s boardinghouse took on an entirely different appearance. Under her control, the old Seaman’s Exchange received the name Hamburg Mill, in the following way: A lady such as Mrs. V*—as she called herself—soon became the goal of all the desires and silliness of lovesick roués and vagabond lovers. The uninhibited sons of Neptune were soon replaced by dandies of the Third Municipality, recruited mostly from swindlers of every sort, rampaging unemployed clerks, ill-starred sons of wealthy parents, and all sorts of rich and poor layabouts par excellence. Although Mrs. V* well knew the loose conduct of her guests, this did not distress her. On the contrary, she saw that these loose and frivolous birds were providing her with a decent living. “There’s nothing better than our Hamburg girl,” German gentlemen both high and low whispered to themselves if they had just treated Mrs. V* to some of their prickly wit. So “Our Hamburg” remained the matins, noonday prayer, and vespers, while Berg, Ahrens (Müller), Locke on the Armory Market and Ältermann Haase’s Little Crispin were the beads of the rosary one would devotedly chant. Mrs. V* was one of the pertest, liveliest, and most infamous brunettes—to be sure, no longer pretty enough to promenade successfully on the new levee, but pretty enough to make a private boardinghouse a great success. At this time the “Hamburg Mill” was still simply “Private Boardinghouse, Mrs. V*,” and, at the beginning, it adhered strictly to the norms and expectations of such a place. She only varied from her sisters in the profession by having no daughter. It could never be determined quite why. This does not prevent us from mentioning the origins of the term Hamburg Mill, although we know that we are telling nothing new to a true child of New Orleans.

  As is the case with all women from Hamburg, Mrs. V* often had the most baroque and original ideas, and when she threw all her good nature into a task she was without equal. So one evening—it was near the culmination of Mardi Gras—she served her boarders a brilliant supper, lacking nothing the palate of the most habituated glutton and gourmand could covet.

  Before the guests were seated, Mrs. V* rang her bell three times and informed them: “You will already have noted, sirs, that there are napkins on your plates, and you will find them there every evening at supper from now on. Do not unfold them too quickly. Open the napkin carefully, so your neighbor cannot see, and be on the lookout for a bright red stripe found only on one of the napkins. Whoever has this stripe should follow the directions on the enclosed note precisely.”

  Three days passed before the secret was discovered, since only the fortunate ones who discovered a red stripe on their napkin could understand it.

  It finally became common knowledge on the fourth day. When the bell rang for supper, they asked one another in a mysterious manner:

  “Which of us will get the stripe this evening and go ‘into the mill’ with our lovely Hamburg lady?”

  From this moment forward the private boardinghouse became known as the “Hamburg Mill,” or, more correctly, “The Mill of the Woman from Hamburg.”

  This is what is found written in the annals of the old Hamburg Mill for the years 1838–42.

  Then important changes befell this establishment, so that only three years later it would hardly have been recognized by its earlier habitués. Mrs. V*, the spritely, bold, much-tested courtesan and playmate, was stricken by the pox so dreadfully a week after Mardis Gras that when she showed herself among her guests they could only offer her the courtesy demanded by decency. When a nun’s face is consumed by pox, it is of little importance, since pockmarks are not a hindrance for one who wishes to commune with cherubim and seraphim. But when the face of a feminine roué is disfigured by any sort of illness, such as smallpox, she has no choice but to devote the rest of her life to a solid, decent profession. For what beauty clothes cannot likewise be veiled with ugliness. Even though the beautiful Mrs. V* loved to be a little loose and frivolous—from her own point of view—her situation now that she was marred by the pocks would not have been enviable if she had tried to continue to depend on male generosity. Mrs. V* knew what she had to do, for she was a woman of spirit, which is the same as saying she was from Hamburg.

  She left the Hamburg Mill, in which she had so often celebrated the nocturnal rites of Venus, gathered a half-dozen of the greenest, juiciest girls, and renamed herself Boncoeur the milliner.

  Since she thought her extraordinary reputation made it impossible to find a place among the noblesse of her craft, she took her regiment of girls, who could all wield a mean needle, to that stretch of streets in the shadow of the negresse Parasina Abigail Brulard’s residence.

  But since her newly established millinery shop did not exactly flourish, despite its seductive shingle proclaiming Boncoeur (which means “a good heart”), she took away the notice for “Milliner and Dressmaker” and nailed up a simple board advertising “Ironing and Washing” in its place. That worked. After two weeks she was able to put the old shingle in place, a witness to greater prosperity.

  But let us return to the Hamburg Mill.

  If the Hamburg Mill under the aegis of Mrs. V*, alias Boncoeur, was merely an innocently disreputable nest that never harmed anyone but itself, it became a hell of the most shameful vice and crime under her successor, the free zambo negresse Héloise Merlina Dufresne.* Arsonists, murderers, and thieves drank here together with the most debased creations of the colored race, from whose female portion Merlina drew most of her income. That son of civilization, the white man, stood dark and silent at the bar, just released from the deadly embrace of a chino zambo. He drank to forget what boiling sensuality had not allowed him to forget only moments before. Other than one free Negro from New England, Merlina did not tolerate black men in the mill. She did this partly out of consideration for the Caucasians, but also—and this was the main reason—to avoid the conflicts of heated bestiality that would otherwise have arisen.

  Like most zambo negresses, Merlina had a short waist and a long lower torso. On the other hand, she was tall, and her round head displayed a tiger’s forehead, bobbing and weaving on her short, full neck. She wore her lightly kinked hair wrapped cunningly around her head against its natural wave, and in the evening she would drape it in a white turban, leaving her dark, cinnamon face bare to the temples, enclosed in a white frame.

  Her ordinary clothing consisted of a waistless dress reaching all the way to the floor, the opening of which allowed a glimpse of the first crease of her breasts. A dress so loose was the special privilege of a zambo negresse, given as they are to nonchalance.

  Merlina, by the way, was no longer young, although she was only sixteen. For women of this type flourish between their seventh and eleventh years. A zambo negresse is already wilting by the age of eighteen, and her glistening white teeth have already begun to acquire that dark blue sheen that is the certain signal of a loss of freshness. Merlina was already sixteen! This age fills a white man with horror, and he sinks into depressed complaining and dawdling. Place a zambo negresse of eight alongside a Pompadour or Du Barry,14 and you will see the difference. Make a zambo girl cry and you will learn what tears are. Make her laugh and you will hav
e to concede that you have never before seen what laughter is. Stimulate her jealousy and you will have to confess that the woman falls into the same category with tigers and panthers, even exceeding them in some cases. Drink with a zambo and you will glimpse the god Bacchus in all his majesty and glory. Have her put a dagger in your hand, and you will act better than Garrick and Iffland.15 Have her cut your nails, and you will discover the magnetic fluid of the universe at its very source. Merlina was already sixteen! And you, paleface, are merely thirty or forty! It is a secret of chemistry which neither Liebig nor Boussinggault can explain.16 Their knowledge of molecules is of no avail here.

  The Hamburg Mill had received an organization under Merlina’s command that was utterly different from earlier times. The two oyster shops that had adjoined it before were now joined to the mill, which gained not only space but—what was more important from the point of view of this enterprise—also security. The one oyster shop, when combined with its rear buildings, consisting of a coffee room and the spacious bowling alley of an Italian man, Lombardi, covered the rear of the mill, providing it with a rear guard which protected a passage to the rear alley and could be very important in any encounter with the police. While the front elevation of the Hamburg Mill took up only thirty feet of the levee, the annexation of the oyster shops tripled its size. The deepening of the property dwarfed its earlier restrictiveness. Merlina spent a good thousand dollars melding these parcels together into a whole, and she paid another eight hundred for other improvements. After selling his oyster shop, the Italian Lombardi worked exclusively for Merlina. He turned a portion of the mill where the Hamburg lady’s dining room had once been into what appeared to be a miserable fruit store. Besides the usual varieties of fruit, he sold the worst brands of cigars, clay pipes, chewing tobacco of the poorest quality, firecrackers, and the like, and he pumped soda and mead. On the right side of the fruit store were little stools, such as are normally found only in oyster stops of the third rank, those patronized by vagabonds and petty thieves. The door to the inner sanctum of the Hamburg Mill nightclub was hidden by a closet six feet high, crowned with fruit baskets, raisin boxes, and round bags of figs. In front of this closet was a counter topped with the pump for the soda and mead. The leaden pipes of the pump attested to the fact that the beverages being served to thirsty sailors and levee workers were half-poisoned owing to the underuse of the equipment. Lombardi’s very negligence in managing his fruit store and soda fountain told any intelligent observer that the mill was not a legitimate enterprise.

  Although he was only thirty-five, Lombardi was an utterly ruined man with dreadful habits, disgusting, oozing eyes, and an uncleanness without limit. He had been thrown into the state prison at Baton Rouge when he was only twenty. Although he had been sentenced to life imprisonment, he was pardoned by the governor after eight years. For two years he earned a dishonorable living in New Orleans and its environs, until fortune led him to an immigrants’ ship, where he came to know a German country girl whose parents had died at sea, leaving her a considerable sum in cash. Thanks to his minimal knowledge of German, he soon was so involved with the naive girl that she offered him all her money in exchange for a promise to marry, which is how he obtained the oyster shop that he later sold to Merlina. After he had maintained the poor girl with mere promises for a full year, giving her barely enough to eat, she suddenly died—he said it was climate fever. Those who knew him better thought otherwise. But since there was no proof, everyone had to hold their peace. Beyond that, Lombardi was so feared as a nasty character that no one was about to bring the matter into a public court. It was generally known that the ugly, filthy Italian was in touch with every rascal in town, despite his apparently hermitlike existence, and that because of his connections he had nothing to fear from mere suspicions and speculations. People who lived in the area and knew him held him to be the German girl’s murderer.

  The greatest crimes were imputed to him—even the captain of the guard once said to him on leaving the fruit store one day, “Look out, Lombardi, it is well known that this fruit store is not your only source of income—my people are watching!” And yet the Italian was utterly secure. “Keep your people off my neck, Captain,” he had responded boldly, “If they were not so ready to crawl in here and drink my cognac, I would be concerned, Captain! Yes, just wait, you won’t take this bird back to Baton Rouge in any cage—one or the other will help me!” he mumbled to himself after the captain had slammed the door in his face.

  To the left of Lombardi’s fruit store, on a piece of black tin affixed to the doorpost, were the uncertain words, “Furnish’d Rooms to Let.” Below the tin sign was posted a strip of paper with a message in French. After the usual Chambres garnies à louer was appended pour garçons. This part of the building belonged to the Hamburg Mill. The privilege of overseeing the rentals had been bestowed on a person with a good reputation. The renters themselves, with a few exceptions, had no idea that they were under Merlina’s roof and that the sword of Damocles hung perpetually above their heads.

  The actual whereabouts of Merlina’s cohorts and her satellite Lombardi were in the middle of the rented building and the fruit store, hidden in such a way that one had to be well acquainted with the place in order to have any notion of how to get there. The alley running to the Italian’s old oyster shop only led to the mill’s back rooms, from which one could access the remnant only by crossing the yard all the way to the fruit store’s back door, lifting the cover to the double door by means of a switch, and thus going up into the salon of the Hamburg Mill itself.

  On the right side of the salon, a carpet-covered door led to two smaller rooms, separated only by a light tapestry barrier hardly two feet high. Here slept the female employees of the zambo negresse, in rather decent beds with sulphur-yellow mosquito netting. In the middle of this dormitory was a simple enclosure in which the overseer of subordinate personnel had her bed. One could observe everything that went on here from the security of this enclosure. Merlina had commissioned a pale chino zambo chola as overseer: choosing someone with this combination of blood guaranteed the strictest control of order due to her complete absence of humane sympathies. If Merlina wanted to go to her own room, she had to pass through this dormitory, which was illuminated with a camphene light the whole night through.

  On the left of the salon was a little chamber that opened to the right for the kitchen and wood bin, and, beyond that, diverged in another direction, ending in a door to a narrow, covered passageway leading to four larger rooms, numbered 97, 98, 99 and 100, each with their own lock. These rooms all would have provided a view of the levee if anyone had opened the shutters. This had not happened since Merlina moved in.

  The mill’s salon, which sat parallel to all the rooms mentioned, was the gathering place for Merlina’s guests. The uninitiated were not permitted to enter here; before anyone could pass through the double door, in response to “Who’s there?” he had to say the password, Death or Merlina! Then the person entering had to knock twice with his left knuckles on the back of his head and receive a small card from Merlina* These cards had a narrow red border that seemed to be an unbroken line but actually consisted of innumerable hearts, each barely a twentieth the size of the head of a pin. Right at the edge of this line, at each corner, was the initial letter of a code word. This card had to be returned when the guest departed. He could only keep the card if he was a member of the 99th or 100th degree. The walls of the salon were decorated with four mirrors, about eight feet tall, whose richly decorated gold frames were hung with black crepe, probably to keep their surfaces from being tarnished by the thick tobacco smoke.

  All around the room by the wall were little tables with matching comfortable easy chairs. In the middle was a great round table with a white marble top, usually only occupied when domino à la poudre was being played. Merlina had once participated when the establishment was reopened, but she now abstained from it because her presence often provoked coarse excesses. Everything rema
ined quiet when a game of domino a la poudre was being played. The attention of the players was only likely to be disturbed occasionally by momentary noises.

  That is how things were in the upper parts of the mill. Balls were not staged here. During Mardi Gras, Merlina had Lombardi’s fruit store cleared, and she gave picnics and so-called cow-tails, to which everyone was admitted free. This hospitality was covered by doubling the price of the drinks. In the same way, the barroom Merlina opened a few months later, next to the fruit store, was open to all. This barroom was supposed to draw the public’s eyes away from the real goings-on. She gave it over to an old Irishman, who put a young German man behind the bar and proceeded to neglect management day and night—for this unreformed child of St. Patrick sat drunk all day in his easy-chair, with his feet on a table, cursing and joking with the passersby or spitting at their backs to pass the time of day. When he was somewhat sober, he would go behind the bar, open the cash drawer, and count the money taken in. If the income seemed too small, he would cuss out the poor barkeeper, threatening to chase him out. When these gross accountings occurred too often, the mistreated barkeeper revenged himself by taking a few dollars from the old man on a regular basis. “That drunken swine,” he thought to himself, “curses every time he checks, and he is never satisfied, even when he knows no more could have come in. I see no reason to be cussed out for nothing.”