Free women of color were among the most beautiful women in New Orleans. Some of them lived as concubines with white men. In 1792, an ordinance was passed forcing them to become more recognizable as being women of color by wearing a headdress known as a tignon. It became a mark of distinction rather than the branding it was intended to be. Surviving portraits of free women of color picture them in black dresses with white lace shawls and tignons.
Concubinage between black women and white men, a custom called plaçage (from the French verb placer, meaning to put or place) was the style of the times. It was an understanding whereby a white man, usually a French colonist, and a mulatto woman, the placée, lived together more or less permanently. Arrangements were made between the mother of the eligible black woman and the white man (usually, but not always, a Frenchman) to set up the daughter in a house, sometimes with slaves, carriages, and all the accoutrements of the wealthy, to be the young man’s mistress, usually until the gentleman married, at which time the house and all of its contents belonged to the mulattress for life. Any offspring were the responsibility of the man: boys were sent to Paris to be educated, and girls were sent to the Ursuline convent for their schooling. Faubourg Marigny and the French Quarter including Rampart Street were the sites for these houses.
According to some historians, the Orleans Ballroom (as well as other locations in the French Quarter) regularly held the famous Quadroon Balls, which were frequented by gentlemen seeking such arrangements. All was handled discreetly, with care taken to protect both parties as to laws and obligations.
Many of the progeny of these relationships moved on to live in Mexico, Haiti, or Paris, passing as whites. From these alliances came many remarkable people:
Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color born in 1806, son of a wealthy French engineer and a slave. While a student in Paris (1830-32), he discovered the multiple evaporation process of making sugar;
Eugene Warburg, the eldest son of Daniel Warburg, a German Jew, and Marie Rosa, a slave of Santiago, Cuba (whom Daniel Warburg freed), was a noted sculptor. His most famous work is the 1855 bust of the US Minister of France, John Young Mason;
Julien Hudson, a free man of color, was a portrait painter before the Civil War;
Henriette Delille (1813-62), a beautiful free woman of color, was the founder of the order of the Sisters of the Holy Family. The nuns lived at the site of the former quadroon balls in a building donated to the order by a free man of color, Thomas Lafon. (Today, at that same location, is the Bourbon-Orleans Hotel). Thomas Lafon is the only free man of color of whom a bust was made because of his generosity to his fellow men. A public school is also named in his honor;
and James Durham, a physician, had been sold as a slave to a New Orleans physician who taught him medicine and set him free in 1788 to become a physician for both blacks and whites.
The Voodoo Cult
Voodoo was a dominant force among the black population of New Orleans in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had come to the colony originally from Western Africa when the first Africans were brought as slaves. The practice spread and intensified when black immigrants from Haiti arrived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These Haitians, whose ancestors were also originally from Africa, believed strongly in voodoo and practiced it as a religion. They were allowed much freedom of personal expression by paternalistic rulers and lethargic owners.
The Haitians, when living in Saint Domingue, had believed in voodoo gods and zombies (soulless human corpses taken from the grave and transformed by the voodoos into living creatures). In New Orleans, the voodoos had to make changes in their rituals to appeal to the needs and beliefs of the local populace.
Marie Laveau
Marie Laveau, the most famous of all New Orleans voodooiennes, lived in the same cottage at 1020 St. Ann Street for fifty years, conducting rituals in her yard in which she danced with a snake, which she called Zombi. After her sensuous exhibition, her performers (young men and women), danced practically in the nude, consumed large quantities of rum taffia, drank blood from the broken necks of roosters, swooned, trembled, and indulged in sexual intimacies.
A voodoo ceremony in New Orleans. Slaves dance the Bamboula, which inspired Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s famous composition.
Once a year, on St. John’s Eve, June 23, a more elaborate version of the same ceremony took place near the old Spanish Fort at the point where Bayou St. John flowed into Lake Pontchartrain. It was a mixture of Christianity and barbarity, and most citizens considered it a blasphemy, but it attracted hundreds of viewers, including members of the police and the press.
Marie Laveau’s fame spread as a fortune teller, mind reader, and dispenser of love charms and satanic potions, and she was sought out by rich and poor, blacks and whites, for advice on personal matters and local and national political concerns.
Laveau was a free mulatto born in New Orleans in 1794. Many accounts indicate that her father had been a wealthy white planter, and her mother a mulatto with a strain of Indian blood. She was married to Jacques Paris in 1819 by Père Antoine. Both she and Jacques were recorded as free persons of color. Her life is shrouded in mystery. Although she earned great sums of money, she never lived as a woman of means. Her husband died three years after their marriage. On her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is the inscription “Veuve [widow] Paris.”
She began the practice of voodoo around 1826, changing the cult to a profitable business; selling charms, favors, and prophecies; but retaining the showmanship necessary to keep the faith of her followers. To the hedonistic exhibitions, she added statues of saints, incense, and holy water for the benefit of the Catholics in her flock.
She later formed a liaison with Christophe Glapion, a union that produced fifteen children. Glapion stayed behind the scenes, possibly acting as her bookkeeper. She is said to have died at the age of eighty-seven.
Voodoo charms can be found at the Voodoo Museum at 724 Dumaine Street. Love powders, boss-fixing powders, money-drawing incense, and come-to-me powders can be purchased there, as well as effigies, lotions, and charms. The museum is purported to be the only one of its kind in the country.
Jews in New Orleans
Although the Black Code of 1724 (the Code Noir) governed the treatment of slaves, its first article decreed that Jews be expelled from the colony. It was a strange article not only because it appeared in the Black Code, but because there was no evidence that Jews were even in the colony. Jews were too clever at merchandising to be attracted to a floundering trading post when they could stay in the Caribbean, where they were doing a great business.
In 1758, there is recorded an argument between Governor Kerlerec and his Intendant, Rochemore, concerning the admittance of a ship, the Texel, whose captain was a Jew named Diaz. Rochemore declared that it was illegal for the ship to dock. Kerlerec wanted the goods on board. Kerlerec prevailed, and a Jew entered the colony.
In 1801, a remarkable Jewish gentleman arrived in the colony: Judah Touro (1775-1854). His business was wholesale consignment; he was an ice importer. In 1838, he was the owner and operator of two ice houses. A man generous to the community throughout his lifetime, he remained a bachelor and lived with two other bachelors at 35 Conde Street, an extension of Chartres Street. Some of his fellow boarders were Jean Baptiste Olivier, chaplain of the Ursulines, and Alexander Milne, who started the community on the lakefront and left funds with which the Milne Boys Home was built.
Judah Touro’s total estate at the time of his death was $928,774. His beneficiaries were in Boston, Newport, and New Orleans, and included Christians and Jews alike. In his lifetime, he purchased many slaves for the purpose of freeing them. He gave liberally to numerous charities, including the Touro-Shakespeare Home, Touro Infirmary, and Touro Synagogue, which bear his name.
Other notable Jewish citizens were:
Samuel Hermann, builder of the Hermann-Grima House on St. Louis Street;
Judah P. Benjamin (1811-80), Confederate Secre
tary of War and State, who, after being exiled, lived in England and gained international fame as a lawyer;
and Martin Behrman, born in New York in 1864 and elected Mayor of New Orleans in 1904, a post he held for seventeen years (not consecutively), a city-wide record.
The Baroness de Pontalba and the Pontalba Apartments
Micaela Almonester was born in 1795, when her father, Don Andrès Almonester, was seventy years old. Almonester, a widower, had married a French Creole, twenty-nine year old Louise de la Ronde, in 1787. Two years after Micaela’s birth, her sister Andrea was born. Andrea died at the age of four, leaving Micaela the only heiress to her father’s vast estate.
Since Micaela’s name and fame have survived so many generations due to the apartment buildings she constructed flanking the Place d’Armes, it would be well here to trace the history of that property. In the century and a quarter after de La Tour, the French military engineer who sketched the first plans for officers’ lodgings on the Pontalba site in 1721, buildings rose and fell in that location. When they were destroyed by fire, rains, or hurricanes, they were quickly replaced by others: first, a barracks, used as a place of worship until the first parish church was constructed; a warehouse; quarters for employees of the Government house; a residence for the governor; and finally, barracks for French soldiers and sailors. After the Spanish flag was raised over the Place d’Armes, the residence of Don Andrès Almonester was built on the site. Before his death in 1798, when Micaela was three, he had acquired all the land on both sides of the square. It was the choicest real estate in the city, and its use would be determined by his widow and his daughter, the indomitable Micaela.
Portrait of Micaela Almonester, Baroness de Pontalba, who built the apartments flanking Jackson Square, now a historical monument of the city. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)
In 1804, Almonester’s widow married Jean Baptiste Castillon, the French consul of New Orleans, who died five years later in 1809. Madame Castillon was now a wealthy woman, who controlled the estates of both of her former husbands by community property law and also the properties they had given her or she had acquired.
On October 23, 1811, when Micaela was sixteen, she was married to Joseph Xavier Celestin Delfau de Pontalba, her twenty-year-old cousin. He was the son of Baron Joseph Xavier Delfau de Pontalba of Mont L’Évêque, France. Celestin, or Tin-Tin, as he was called, came over from France for the wedding, having never seen the bride before. Both Celestin and Micaela were heirs to enormous fortunes as well as to a barony, and nothing else mattered. The wedding had been arranged by their parents.
The young couple went to Europe on their honeymoon, accompanied by both mothers. If ever a couple was suited to such an arrangement, it was Micaela and Tin-Tin. Micaela had been educated by the Ursuline nuns and was therefore very sheltered. Never “pretty,” she was strong willed and intelligent. At the time of her wedding, she was childish in her dress and habits. She wore her hair in pigtails until the day she married and played with dolls on her wedding day. Celestin was her exact opposite. He was handsome (prettier than the bride, some said) but a weakling, who had been spoiled by his mother and ruled with an iron hand by his father. Once again, in marriage, he was to be dominated by a determined, headstrong personality: Micaela.
Celestin’s father had been born in Louisiana and educated in France. Like Almonester, he was a real estate genius who had accumulated a fortune in rental property.
Micaela loved the activity and gaiety of Paris far better than the quiet of Château Mont l’Évêque, which Celestin’s father had built and considered the family home. During the early years of their marriage, Micaela had three sons: Celestin, Alfred, and Gaston. When she was pregnant for her first son, her husband requested that she sign a contract, a “project of testament,” (prepared, no doubt, by his father), which put claims on her fortune in case she died in childbirth. She would not sign it. Arguments followed. This was the beginning of the end of the young Pontalbas’s marriage. Money and property had always kept the two families wary of each other.
Twice Celestin left Micaela. In 1831, she sailed to Louisiana without him and wrote that she was beginning proceedings for a divorce. Later, she returned to France, and her son, Celestin, now seventeen, ran away from military school to live with his mother. Hearing this, the Baron, his grandfather, now eighty-one, dropped the boy from his will. In an attempt at reconciliation, Micaela drove to Mont l’Évêque on October 18, 1834. She lodged in a “little château reserved for the use of visitors.”
The day after she arrived, the Baron, waiting until she was alone, went into the lodging, walked upstairs and into her room, and locked the door. Immediately, he shot three balls into her chest, followed by two more, which missed. While he was priming the pistol, Micaela found the strength to open the door and run to the floor below, where she collapsed. The Baron, thinking her dead, closed himself in the room once again and fired two shots into his heart, which proved fatal.
The scandal rocked Paris and New Orleans. Micaela, now Baroness de Pontalba, having inherited the title, had received four chest wounds, two of which were serious, and had lost two fingers of her left hand trying to protect herself; yet this incredible woman lived to the age of seventy-eight and was yet to accomplish her most memorable undertaking. In 1848, she returned to New Orleans to begin working on her buildings.
The buildings were designed by James Gallier. But Gallier and the Baroness disagreed, and in 1849, she turned over the contract to a builder named Samuel Stewart. The architect Henry Howard also played a part. The Baroness, Howard said, not altogether satisfied with his drawings, called at his office to ask him to make a complete set of plans for the building. He asked for $500. She refused. He finally agreed to a fee of $120 without specifications.
The buildings were constructed of dark red brick with cast iron-decorated balconies, probably the first in New Orleans. The design for the iron work was done by Waldemar Talen, who had also done the iron work for Nottaway Plantation on River Road.
The contract for the buildings called for sixteen houses fronting on the Place d’Armes on St. Peter Street for a price of $156,000 using Howard’s plans with Gallier’s specifications. Micaela designed the A-P (Almonester-Pontalba) monogram that can be seen in the cast iron railings and was assisted by Talen, who made the drawings. When the uptown side was finished in the fall of 1850, the Baroness and her two sons moved into the third house from Decatur Street. In 1851, the downtown side was finished at a cost of $146,000. She had talked the builders into accepting $10,000 less on the second contract.
The Pontalba apartments.
The city undertook the renovations of the Place d’Armes, contrac-ting for an iron fence, which still surrounds the square.
When the St. Ann Street apartments were complete, there were sixteen buildings on each side of the Square, with party walls between them, built to be used as stores downstairs and handsome residences above, as they still are used today. Each house had an entrance on the street leading to an inside staircase and to a courtyard and service area in the rear. The stores were generally rented to different tenants than the houses and had their own entrances. The second floor consisted of a salon with guillotine windows opening onto a balcony overlooking the Square and a dining room. The third floor was designed for family bedrooms, and the attic for servants’ rooms.
To the Baroness’s great good fortune, Jenny Lind visited the city just when the buildings were completed in 1851. P. T. Barnum, the circus impresario, was her sponsor; he had arranged for her to do thirteen concerts in New Orleans. She arrived in New Orleans from Cuba on the steamer Falcon, and as her ship approached the wharf, cheering crowds, estimated at ten thousand people, gathered to see the famous singer. One of the Pontalba houses had been reserved for her use, complete with the silver name plate on the door. They traveled there in carriages from the wharf as the crowds pressed around them. Jenny Lind was delighted with her apartment, and she received applause every time she s
tepped out onto the balcony. After Miss Lind departed, Baroness Pontalba had the furniture from her apartment sold at an auction, bringing in a total of $3,060.50.
Jackson Square
While the second set of row houses was still under construction, improvements were begun on the Place d’Armes. In 1851, the name of the Square was changed to Jackson Square in honor of the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. In 1840, Jackson had visited New Orleans and laid the cornerstone where a monument to him was to be erected. A decade later, spurred on by improvements all around the Square, the Jackson Monument Association renewed its efforts and legislature appropriated $10,000 toward the project. In 1866, Clark Mills’s equestrian statue of Jackson was unveiled.
Until the Baroness Pontalba’s apartments were built, the Cabildo and the Presbytère had only two floors. The old Spanish roofs leaked and needed repairs, so the City Council decided to add a third story to the two buildings with a Mansard roof and dormers. Flatboat wood was used and can still be seen in the construction. This addition gave the entire Square a more balanced effect.
In March 1852, the Baroness and her two sons left New Orleans for France, never to return. She died in Paris in 1874. Her former husband outlived her by four years. They are both buried at Château Mont l’Évêque, near Senlis, France.
In 1921, the Pontalba heirs, seventeen in number, sold the buildings on St. Ann Street for $68,000 to William Ratcliff Irby, who willed it to the Louisiana State Museum. In 1920, the St. Peter Street building was sold to Danziger, Dreyfous, and Runkel for $66,000. They sold it in 1930 to the Pontalba Building Museum Association for $200,000. The Association turned it over to the city.
The Pontalba Apartments are often called the first apartment houses in the United States, but there is no proof of this claim. They are, however, beautifully designed and planned, an outstanding work of architecture and one of the nation’s foremost historic monuments.
Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans Page 12