Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The violence was fueled by the desperate overcrowding, by the wild currents of wealth running through the economy, and by the waves of immigrants arriving daily. The city had Creoles, Cajuns, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Mexicans, Danes, Portuguese, Belgians, and free people of color from the West Indies and South America—all of whom were at various times feuding with at least one of the other groups. The longest-running tensions were between the Americans and Northern Europeans on the one side and the Spaniards and Creoles on the other; there were skirmishes and sometimes full-scale riots on the streets until the Civil War.

  But it was also a beautiful city. The graceful crescent of white-pillared buildings along the levee was said to be the loveliest urban vista in the New World. The salt air from the Gulf rotted the stucco in curious and delicate ways; buildings only a few years old looked as mysterious as Roman ruins. The skyline was shrouded in fogs and river mists, and the shifting play of tropical light across the pastel-painted walls, with their weatherings and peelings and blotchings, was perpetually alluring and magical. The surrounding landscape added to the air of a dream. The mass of domes and cupolas and steeples floated within a maze of impassable bayous, alligator-haunted sloughs, and dim, receding forest halls of cypress cloaked in Spanish moss; the remote, sinister lagoons glimpsed from the arriving boats looked like the sunlight hadn’t penetrated them for generations.

  The thing that most struck travelers arriving at the harbor was the sound. “Astonishing,” the architect Benjamin Latrobe described it in his diaries: “a sound more strange than any that is heard anywhere else in the world.” It came floating past the turmoil of boats and ships along the levee: “a most incessant, loud, rapid, and various gabble of tongues of all tones that were ever heard at Babel.” The French traveler Marie de Grandfort described it as “a strange concert of oaths, questions, cries, and savage noises.” She heard “the by God of the Yankee, the per la madona of the Italian, the carumba of the Spaniard, the Diou bibant of the Gascon, the gutteral Goddam of the Irish.” Latrobe wrote: “It is more to be compared with the sounds that issue from an extensive marsh, the residence of a million or two of frogs, from bullfrogs up to whistlers, than to anything else.”

  The sound came from the great market on the levee. Between the river and the warehouses, there were hundreds of booths, stalls, and tables in a line more than a mile long. Latrobe described the sellers: “White men and women, and of all hues of brown, and of all classes of faces, from round Yankees to grizzly and lean Spaniards, black negroes and negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes curly and straight-haired, quadroons of all shades, long haired and frizzled, women dressed in the most flaring yellow and scarlet gowns, the men capped and hatted.” Their goods, laid out in the shade of ragged canvas tents and awnings or set on palmetto leaves fanned out on the ground, formed a garish collage of strange colors and textures and smells. There were fresh fish in endless profusion and cuts of what Latrobe thought “wretched” red meat (a lot of it had arrived in port already butchered and in the hot climate was getting rank). There were wild ducks and other game fowl, shellfish and poultry and eggs, Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes, root vegetables of all sorts, pyramids of oranges, heaps of bananas and ears of corn, oozing stacks of sugarcane, and all manner of dry goods and tinned goods, curios and trinkets—there were, Latrobe said, “more and odder things to be sold in that manner and place than I can numerate.” Latrobe was particularly surprised to find bookstalls; something of a collector, he was delighted to turn up, among the saints’ lives and the deeds of notorious criminals, a rare set of bound volumes of political pamphlets from the Revolutionary War.

  But large and garish as the market was, it was only a pocket curio itself amid the immense movements of cargo through the port. The harbor was swarmed: there was an armada of schooners and freighters from the Gulf, and of rafts and barges and flatboats and keelboats from upriver; the steamboats clustered in such mobs that they were sometimes stacked four deep waiting for a turn at the levee. All around the levee crews unloaded cargo. The warehouses were overflowing with the harvest of the river valley and with the manufactured goods coming in from the North and from overseas. In the shadowy coolness of the arched warehouse interiors were mountain ranges of barrels and crates and tuns and hogsheads: fine silk from China and crude ingots of lead from Iowa, handcrafted furniture from France and raw pine lumber from Minnesota, perfumes from the Middle East and rye whiskey from Pennsylvania. All kinds of basic goods were waiting for transport up the river—coffee, salt, flat-head nails, vinegar, whale oil, rolls of gingham, and crates of window glass. There was also quite a lot of food coming in, not only tinned delicacies from Europe but staple foods—flour and grains and legumes, enormous barrels of beef and pork—and corrals and pens were crammed with livestock. And spilling out from all the warehouses were the goods for export—the cotton bales, the raw sugarcane, the sheaves of tobacco. Millions of bales of cotton were transshipped through New Orleans every year, along with hundreds of thousands of hogsheads of sugarcane and tens of thousands of hogsheads of tobacco. Almost all of it was bound for New York for consignment sale in New England and in Europe. The planters of the lower valley dealt exclusively with brokers, factors, and commission men in New York City and had no direct dealings with their ultimate buyers around the world. The outflow of cotton and sugarcane was growing every year, making New Orleans and the lower valley enormously rich—but also building up destabilizing pressures in the regional economy that would shortly prove catastrophic. No one cared much, as long as the money was pouring in. But there was a reason why the levee was groaning under that weight of imported food and livestock. Even though the lower valley had some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world, so much of it had been planted with cotton and sugar that by midcentury the region was no longer self-sufficient in food.

  If there was a heart to the city, it was down from the old French Quarter, behind the warehouse district at the southwest curve of the waterfront crescent. This was the American Quarter. Its great landmark was the St. Charles Hotel, a neoclassical construction with an enormous dome—the first sight of the city skyline for travelers coming downriver. It was the hotel of choice for planters in town to meet with their local brokers and factors. It was also where buyers went when they were in the market for cheap slaves. A regular auction was held in the hotel rotunda. The slaves sold there were the most defiant, the most recalcitrant, the sickliest, and the feeblest in New Orleans; the bidding would start at two or three hundred dollars and rarely went much higher. But then, the buyers weren’t particular. Most of them were looking for fresh fodder for the sugarcane plantations of the lower delta, where conditions were notoriously brutal and where slaves didn’t have a long life expectancy. It was largely because of these sugar plantations that the New Orleans public auctions were universally viewed by the slaves with such horror: all through the valley, the threat of being “sold down the river” was seen as tantamount to a death sentence.

  Most of the slaves who passed through New Orleans weren’t sold at auction, though, but at the slave yards. The big yards were mainly clustered in the side streets around the St. Charles. They were called yards because they were old-style French buildings with open-air courtyards. They were decorated and maintained with dignified good taste. When customers arrived, the slaves for sale would be brought out into the courtyard (or, if the weather was foul, into a long interior hall or ballroom) and arranged in rows so they could be inspected. The mood was generally low-key, even pleasant. The slaves were well dressed—the women in gorgeous calico dresses with rainbow-spattered bandannas, the men in dark blue suits with ties and vests and dignified beaver hats. On sunny days when there were no customers, they would be sent out to the sidewalk, where they would tease and laugh and pass the time of day with passersby.

  Not all the customers were charmed by the show. The Swedish traveler Fredrika Bremer toured several of the yards near the St. Charles. She found them to be civilize
d-seeming institutions—the slaves all appeared happy and well treated—not resembling at all the sadistic hellholes described by the most rabid of the Northern abolitionists. “I saw nothing especially repulsive in these places,” she wrote, “excepting the whole thing.”

  The geniality of the atmosphere was of course a charade. Henry Bibb, who was sold at one of the yards, described in his autobiography how the slaves were prepared to play their part. By ten o’clock each morning they had to be spiffed up, their hair combed and their faces washed. “Those who were inclined to look dark and rough, were compelled to wash in greasy dish water, in order to make them look slick and lively.” Slaves who slouched when they were in line, were sullen, or didn’t answer questions cheerfully and promptly were punished as soon as the buyers left. The instrument of their punishment was a paddle—a whip would leave marks. Bibb became an authority on this:

  The paddle is made of a piece of hickory timber, about one inch thick, three inches in width, and about eighteen inches in length. The part which is applied to the flesh is bored full of quarter inch auger holes, and every time this is applied to the flesh of the victim, the blood gushes through the holes of the paddle, or a blister makes its appearance. The persons who are thus flogged, are always stripped naked, and their hands tied together. They are then bent over double, their knees are forced between their elbows, and a stick is put through between the elbows and the bend of the legs, in order to hold the victim in that position, while the paddle is applied to those parts of the body which would not be so likely to be seen by those who wanted to buy slaves.

  On average, a slave sold at the yards for somewhere between seven hundred and twelve hundred dollars. Skilled slaves—blacksmiths or coopers, for instance—cost more, usually at least fifteen hundred dollars. Slaves who were known to be able to read and write (they often kept their literacy secret) went for far less, sometimes for closeout prices, five hundred dollars at the most. They were considered highly undesirable, since they were believed to be the smartest and therefore the biggest flight risks.

  The most expensive slaves for sale in New Orleans couldn’t be obtained at either the auctions or the yards. These were the slave girls sold for sex. They were called fancy girls, and they went for thirty-five hundred up to five thousand dollars. The dealers in fancy girls had their own private showrooms, some of which were by invitation only. But others were advertised openly on street-corner placards and in newspapers. The British traveler Robert Everest, on his way downriver, spent a night in Baton Rouge and discovered that fancy girls were the ordinary talk among gentlemen in the public room of his hotel. One group was “discussing the merits of the different dealers in ‘fancy girls’ at New Orleans, and their respective stocks, with as much gusto as amateurs of pictures or race-horses.”

  Fancy girls were bought mostly by plantation owners; the gentlemen of the town made other arrangements. There was an elaborate social network in place by which they would take young women of color as mistresses. The caste system was based on proportions of African blood: from white through octoroon, quadroon, mulatto, and griffe to full Negro. Girls who were octoroon or quadroon were considered suitable as mistresses; the others were fit only to work in the brothels. The men would select these mistresses at formal social affairs known as quadroon balls. They were lavish events. The travel writer Edward Robert Sullivan attended one; admission was a half-dollar, and he was politely asked to check his “implements”—knives, pistols, and other weaponry—at the door. “You leave them as you would your overcoat on going into the opera,” he wrote, “and get a ticket with their number, and on your way out they are returned to you. You hear the pistol and bowie-knife keeper in the arms-room call out, ‘No. 46—a six-barrelled repeater.’ ‘No. 100—one eight-barrelled revolver, and bowie knife with a death’s-head and cross-bones cut on the handle.’ ‘No. 95—a brace of double-barrels.’ All this is done as naturally as possible, and you see fellows fasten on their knives and pistols as coolly as if they were tying on a comforter or putting on a coat.” Sullivan himself had to submit to a search by a policeman who refused to believe that he was unarmed.

  Inside, Sullivan reported, all was glamour. The beauty and charm of the young women, their social skills, their lovely gowns, and the elegance of their dancing were all intoxicating. “I had heard a great deal of the splendid figures and graceful dancing of the New Orleans quadroons,” he wrote, “and I certainly was not disappointed. Their movements are the most easy and graceful that I have ever seen.… I never saw more perfect dancing on any stage.” It was a pity he wasn’t himself in the market for a mistress—but then he was a transient, after all, and a quadroon girl wouldn’t have made a suitable companion back home.

  Strangers found New Orleans a threatening city—particularly Southern strangers, who were disturbed by how little was done to keep the races apart. Free Negroes and slaves were allowed to gather in large numbers in the public squares, and they were known sometimes to mock and taunt white passersby. That was unheard of anywhere else in the lower valley or the South. Prosperous men of color were openly invited into the homes of white aristocrats. The Catholic Church maintained separate parishes for the Creoles, the Irish, and the Germans; black Catholics could attend any service they liked. There were even notorious brothels with both black and white prostitutes. Respectable brothels everywhere else in the South were strictly segregated.

  The most sinister sight was the presence of African culture on the streets. Voodoo and other West African religions were in fact widespread throughout the slave states, but they were practiced surreptitiously; while every plantation had its witches and conjure men, and the plantation owners routinely used their slaves’ medicines, it was all done out of sight. In New Orleans there were voodoo shops openly advertising for business. The most celebrated was on the old Bayou Road on the outskirts of town. It was run by a black African who called himself Dr. John. He was an imposing figure: invariably dressed in formal suits with frilled shirts, and his face fantastically tattooed. His shop was stocked with glass jars and phials filled with odd swamp weeds, wildflowers, dried lizards, insect eggs, bird feathers, and an assortment of carved bones and amulets. Dr. John practiced astrology and cartomancy; he was a healer and a skilled mind reader; he performed divination with pastel-colored pebbles and curious seashells. “One would stand aghast,” one observer wrote, “were he to be told the names of the high city dames who were wont to drive in their own carriages, with thickly veiled faces, to this sooty black Cagliostro’s abode, to consult him upon domestic affairs.”

  By the 1850s, Dr. John had been eclipsed by Marie Laveau, who became known as the Voodoo Queen. She, too, dealt in herbs and medicines, and she sold charms to guard against curses, spells, and maleficences. She discreetly consulted with her wealthiest clients by paying them house calls as their hairdresser—and she was reportedly an excellent hairdresser. She was also, according to some, an excellent procuress. After a long career, she hit upon a kind of early version of the franchised brand: she secretly retired and set her daughter up in her place. Many people late in the century assumed that the woman they knew as Marie Laveau was the same preternaturally young Voodoo Queen who had been practicing her craft since before the Civil War.

  Marie Laveau was usually cited as the one who did the most to popularize (vulgarize, some said) voodoo among New Orleans’s white society. Local politicians bought Laveau’s charms before elections, and gamblers would carry them on their watch chains when they went out to the racetrack. But in fact there was a large trade in magical tokens throughout the city. People everywhere left poisoned crosses under pillows and trickled the dirt from graveyards around doorways. They bought, or concocted themselves, powders and poisons, which were known as gris-gris: combinations of black and white pepper, arrangements of carved bones stolen from mausoleums, cursed chicken feathers. They attended midnight ceremonies on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain that often ended up as orgies. These were supposed to be secret, but Marie L
aveau would invite policemen, reporters, politicians, and the ladies of high society to ensure that the forces of law and morality left her unmolested.

  There was a well-attended public event on Sundays in a park known as Congo Square. During the afternoons the atmosphere was gaudy and festive. Slaves, free people of color, and whites mingled in the shade of towering old sycamores while in the central square hundreds of dancers exuberantly performed the Calinda and the Bamboula. The spectators bought ginger beer and wine, lemonade and lime soda water, vinegar pies and ginger cakes, at tables set below long awnings draped with streamers. But then at dusk, the tourists drifted off to the restaurants and the opera houses; the staid citizens went back to their homes; the students from the local university, already tipsy, would usually depart singing old Creole lullabies and calling out “Soleil, couche.” The remaining revelers, both blacks and whites, now unobserved, would take “the oath to the serpent.” The oath was, according to one observer, nothing but “a string of barbarous epithets and penalties.” What followed was something like a camp meeting, except that the eroticism was wholly overt. The king and queen of the ceremony would caress a large snake representing the god and begin to tremble; the other celebrants would touch them and begin to tremble as well. Gradually everyone’s movements became more violent and convulsive. They would sing, tear off their clothes, scream, and writhe around and grind against and bite at each other until they at last collapsed in exhaustion—waking the next morning, one observer said, “retaining but one thing firmly fixed in their minds, the date of the next meeting.”

  The life of New Orleans was always at its lowest ebb in the late summer. That was the season for cholera and yellow jack: anybody who could afford to leave was gone. Then, too, the harvests in the valleys up north hadn’t come in yet, and the Mississippi ran the shallowest in August and September. Few boats were arriving from upriver, and the levee was sometimes deserted for days at a time. The traffic picked up in the fall, and by November and December the harbor was jumping. It got quiet again in midwinter after the upper Mississippi iced over, but by then the deals had been made, the warehouses were stuffed with goods, and on the streets the money was flowing easily. That was the start of the Carnival season.