Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

by Gary Krist

  AND, miraculously, the city really did respond, and promptly. CITY WILL CONTROL SEGREGATED AREA UNDER NEW SYSTEM read the headline in the Times-Picayune of January 24. Commissioner Newman, acting with the grudging acquiescence of Mayor Behrman, had announced sweeping new measures to “drop the lid” on Storyville and the adjacent Tango Belt. For one thing, the city imposed a new ban on cribs in the District. No longer would prostitutes be allowed to rent these places (at exorbitant rates) by the hour or day; the women must hereafter actually live in these structures in order to practice their profession from them. Moreover, any prostitutes living outside the boundaries of the Tenderloin would immediately be evicted, even if their workplace was within the District. As for the cabarets and saloons of Storyville, Newman would refuse to renew their licenses once they expired, so that the places could be closed for good. Until that time, he would revoke their permits for music and for staying open all night. “The cabarets as they have been conducted in the cabaret district, and as legal institutions, are impossible,” the commissioner announced. A simple sandwich would no longer serve as a way of getting around the Gay-Shattuck Law. In order to operate and serve drinks, a cabaret or dance hall “must have a licensed restaurant attached.” And to ensure that these goals were actually accomplished, Newman would take personal command of the city’s police department until further notice.

  But the edict that would change the culture of Storyville more than any other was Newman’s order for the total racial segregation of the District. Going well beyond the requirements of Gay-Shattuck, the order would require all “Negro inmates” to vacate the neighborhood by March 1 and reestablish themselves in the Uptown district that had come to be known as Black Storyville. Even customers would be segregated under the plan. “The appearance of a white man in the Negro district will cause his arrest,” Newman decreed, and “should a Negro woman even stroll in the white district, she will be jailed.” As for the famous octoroon houses of Basin Street, they would either move or be closed, since the word “Negro” in New Orleans now meant any person with even a trace of African blood, whether self-described as black, Creole, or octoroon.

  This was, needless to say, an extreme measure. Until now, Storyville had been more or less an oasis of relative racial tolerance. Granted, the District had not been entirely immune to the prevailing mood of racial regimentation; by 1908, for instance, the listings in the Blue Books, formerly separating prostitutes into “white,” “colored,” and “octoroon” categories, had begun describing the women only as “white” or “colored.” But the attraction of the mixed-race brothels had apparently not diminished significantly. This lingering appeal, in fact, was the source of much of the wrath against Storyville from reformers like Philip Werlein, for whom the idea of interracial contact seemed far more objectionable than that of legalized prostitution. But now, Basin Street as an affront to white racial purity would be a thing of the past. And when in February the city council unanimously passed Ordinance 4118, Newman’s edict officially became city law. Beginning on March 1, Storyville—and Basin Street in particular—would become a very different and very segregated place.

  For Tom Anderson, the racial segregation of the District would not be particularly onerous. His extensive interests in Storyville brothels were virtually all white-only (and there is some evidence that Anderson, Mayor Behrman, and other Ring politicians allowed Newman to go ahead with his plan because they thought it would mollify reformers without actually closing the legal district). But for important Storyville figures like Lulu White, Willie Piazza, and Emma Johnson—with their large investments in brothels founded on the trafficking of interracial sex—the new law promised to be financially disastrous. White, Piazza, and a score of other madams and prostitutes immediately filed suit against the city, attacking the ordinance on constitutional grounds. They claimed that it denied their rights to equal protection under the law and discriminated against them—not on the basis of where they lived, but rather on their employment outside the home. Surprisingly, the court initially upheld these petitions, and when the March 1 deadline arrived, many were allowed to remain in Storyville pending the outcome of their legal actions (though not without first being arrested).

  But events in the greater world would soon render all of these cases moot. On April 6, 1917, the United States officially entered the war in Europe. Mayor Behrman and New Orleans’ business leaders, hoping to attract federal dollars and visitors to the city, lobbied to host a military encampment within city limits. Their effort succeeded, and doughboys were soon pouring into Camp Nicholls in City Park. As hoped, this influx proved to be a boon to the local economy—not least of all in Storyville, given the proclivities of young soldiers. But it also put the city at the mercy of the US Department of War. And the federal government in times of war had powers that social reformers could only dream of. Before summer arrived, Congress would pass a law that—more than any local reform effort ever could—would threaten the very existence of the twenty-year-old legalized district, leaving the city little choice but to close its famous tenderloin entirely.

  Storyville, in other words, was now truly under siege. But it would not go down without a final fight.

  LITTLE LOUIS ARMSTRONG NEEDED MONEY. EVER since the shooting incident at Henry Ponce’s honky-tonk, the place had been closed down, meaning that Louis had lost his best and most regular paying gig. The recent reform efforts to suppress the city’s cabarets, meanwhile, had made other engagements harder to come by. Armstrong still had his job making deliveries on the coal cart (pulled by an amiable mule named Lucy), and Mayann had started working as a domestic for club owner Henry Matranga, but it wasn’t enough. Not long before, one of Mayann’s second cousins had died after giving birth to an illegitimate son, Clarence. Louis, though still in his teens, had decided to take financial responsibility for raising the boy (he would later adopt him). So now there were four mouths to feed in their little household, and Louis was feeling the pressure to earn.

  So he thought he might try his hand at a slightly different kind of business. “I had noticed that the boys I ran with had prostitutes working for them,” he later recalled. “I wanted to be in the swim, so I cut in on a chick.” The chick in question was named Nootsy, and although she was hardly a great beauty—she was “short and nappy-haired and she had buck teeth,” according to Armstrong—she made decent money. Of course, it’s questionable how much value a shy, peaceable teenager could be to her as a pimp, but Nootsy apparently took to him immediately. One night she even invited him to share her bed. Louis, who admitted being a little afraid of “bad, strong women,” demurred. “I wouldn’t think of staying away from Mayann and Mama Lucy,” he told her, “not even for one night.”

  “Aw, hell,” Nootsy replied. “You are a big boy now. Come in and stay.”

  But Louis still refused. In a fit of pique, Nootsy grabbed a pocketknife and plunged it into her new pimp’s left shoulder. He retreated in a panic, planning to say nothing about the incident. But when he got home, Mayann saw the blood on his shirt and coaxed the story out of him. Enraged, she pushed her son aside and marched right over to Nootsy’s crib, with Louis and several of his neighborhood friends following behind. She pounded on the door, and the moment Nootsy opened it, Mayann grabbed the prostitute by the throat. “What you stab my son for?” she shouted.

  Fortunately, Black Benny was among the witnesses to this spectacle. “Don’t kill her, Mayann,” the drummer pleaded, pulling her off the traumatized woman. “She won’t do it again.”

  “Don’t ever bother my boy again,” Mayann spat, still furious. “You are too old for him. He did not want to hurt your feelings, but he don’t want no more of you.”

  So much for that experiment in income supplementation. But Louis still had his music to fall back on, though even on the bandstand he was not invariably successful. He was still a relative beginner on the cornet, and despite his substantial raw talent, his repertoire was limited. This fact became painfully clear whe
n he was asked to sit in for his mentor on a gig. Joe Oliver, it seems, had taken up with a woman named Mary Mack and only had the opportunity to visit with her from eight to eleven in the evenings. Oliver asked violinist Manuel Manetta and trombonist Kid Ory, whose band he was playing with, whether Louis could substitute for him during those hours. They agreed, but discovered that the protégé did not have the drawing power of his mentor. According to Manetta, Louis knew how to play only three tunes at this time, which the group would have to play over and over again, to an almost empty house. “People lined up outside,” Manetta recalled, “but not a soul came in the hall”—until, that is, Oliver returned from his tryst at eleven P.M., and the crowd flooded in like the Mississippi River rushing through a levee breach.

  Part of the problem could have been Armstrong’s style, which may have been a little too advanced for these early jazz audiences. Louis played in a freer, highly improvisational manner, tracing a complex melodic line more like a clarinet’s obbligato than the lead cornet’s usual, relatively straightforward, statement of the tune. (“I’d play eight bars and be gone,” he later admitted. “Clarinet things, nothing but figurations and things like that … running all over a horn.”) Oliver once even criticized the boy for this. “Where’s that lead?” he asked Louis one night after hearing him perform in a honky-tonk band. “You play some lead on that horn, let people know what you’re playing.” But Armstrong was already taking the sound pioneered by Bolden and moving it in new directions. Audiences—not to mention his fellow jazzmen—would eventually catch up.

  The increasingly oppressive atmosphere in New Orleans, however, was making some of Armstrong’s colleagues—like Sidney Bechet—yearn to get out of the Crescent City and try their luck elsewhere. Certainly Bechet wasn’t hurting for work; in recent years—making good on the astounding versatility he’d displayed as a child at Piron’s barbershop—he’d been developing his skills on other instruments. He’d learned to play the cornet (to pick up work with marching bands) as well as the saxophone (a relatively new instrument that had yet to make much impact in New Orleans). Even so, he was still impressing audiences primarily as a clarinetist. For his occasional gigs at Pete Lala’s, he’d learned George Baquet’s old trick of taking his clarinet apart as he was playing it. Whenever he’d perform the stunt, gradually disassembling the instrument until he was tootling away on the mouthpiece alone, the crowds would respond with enthusiastic glee. “Mr. Basha [sic] is screaming ’em every night with his sensational playing,” one black newspaper wrote, about a series of performances at New Orleans’ Lincoln Theatre. “Basha says, look out, Louis Nelson, I am coming.”

  But when an opportunity arose to play outside the city, Bechet grabbed it. In late 1916, pianist Clarence Williams put together a traveling vaudeville troupe; Bechet signed on to play in a quartet that would accompany comedy and vocal routines (with the musicians sometimes doubling as actors in the skits). The company set out with hopes of touring widely throughout the country, but ran out of bookings once they reached Galveston, Texas. Bechet and pianist Louis Wade, still eager to see the world beyond New Orleans, joined a traveling carnival for a time—until one day they woke up in a town called Plantersville and discovered that the whole company had moved on without them. “When we went down to the carnival ground in the morning, it was just an empty field,” Bechet recalled. “I learned later there had been some sheriff who had come around and told them they had to clear out. And so there we were.”

  A few nights later, Sidney was asked to play for a dance in town. He was reluctant at first; the dance would end late, and walking back to his lodgings after midnight would be a dangerous thing for a black stranger to do in a small Southern town. But one of the organizers promised to find someone local to walk him home, so Sidney agreed to do it. Unfortunately, however, his escort proved to be a drunken white man whose idea of a joke was taunting his young companion and scaring him half to death. As they were passing through a dark and lonely rail yard, the man disappeared into the blackness and then jumped out at Sidney from behind a pile of railroad ties. Sidney, who had picked up a slab of wood for protection, swung it at him before he could think twice. “I felt that stick hit and I knew I’d fixed him good,” Bechet wrote. “He made a grab at me and I swung that stick again, and then I didn’t know what I was doing.” Panicking, Bechet started running away along the dark railroad tracks as fast as he could. “I kept running for a mile, maybe a mile and a half, until I had to catch my breath.”

  Now he was truly frightened. In these parts, he knew, a black man who assaulted a white man could not expect to live long, no matter how justified his action. So he hopped on the first freight train that passed, hoping it would take him back to Galveston, where one of his older brothers was living at the time. But his trouble didn’t end there. A brakeman who had seen him board came over the top of one of the boxcars and began swinging his club at Bechet, trying to knock him off the ladder he clung to. But Sidney would not let go. “He could have killed me,” he recalled, “but I’d have died holding on to that bar.”

  Eventually—perhaps after seeing how young Bechet was—the brakeman gave up trying to dislodge him from the ladder. He came down between the cars and made the young man climb to the top of the ladder. Then he marched him back along the swaying boxcar roofs to the caboose. Sidney was expecting trouble, but the brakeman had turned friendly now; he and the other crewmen in the caboose talked about having Bechet arrested at the next stop, but he could tell that they were just teasing. He also found out that the train was headed straight to Galveston, just as he’d hoped. “That kind of changing around, the way luck goes faster than you can figure it,” he later wrote, “it just won’t be understood.”

  When the brakeman saw the clarinet case tucked into Sidney’s waistband, he asked to hear him play, and Sidney complied. “If I had any doubt before [about the brakeman’s good intentions], I knew it was gone when I saw him sitting there listening to the music. It was noisy in that caboose, but the clarinet had a tone that cut through those train sounds, and I could tell that these men, they were enjoying the music real good.”

  And so he played for them all the way to Galveston, rocking along in the caboose through the chilly Texas night. When they finally reached the station, the brakeman even pulled him aside and told him how to get away from the train yards without running into the resident detective, who would be on the lookout for tramps.

  For the next several weeks, Sidney lived with his brother Joe in Galveston. They’d play some engagements together at local joints, returning home early every night. But Sidney, being Sidney, could behave only for so long. One night when his brother wasn’t with him, he stayed out late, hopping from saloon to saloon as the hours passed unnoticed. In one place he met a Mexican guitarist who spoke little English but “could play the hell out of that guitar.” They jammed together for a time, and then, at the end of the night, when Sidney learned that the man had no money and no place to stay, he decided to take him home to his brother’s house.

  It was apparently time for Sidney’s luck to change again. As they made their way down M Street in the early hours of the morning, they were stopped by two policemen who asked them where they were going. Sidney tried to explain that they were going to his brother’s house, which was tucked away on an alley he knew only as “M and a Half Street.” The cops just laughed, claiming that there was no such place, and carted them off to jail as suspicious characters.

  It quickly turned into a nightmare. One of the detectives at the station, who had lost a hand in a shooting incident in Galveston’s Mexican ghetto, apparently held all Mexicans responsible for his misfortune and proceeded to beat Sidney’s friend until his face was an unrecognizable bloody pulp. Sidney could only watch in terror. “I was just standing there,” he recalled, “frozen up with fear, thinking they’d be doing the same to me … that it would be me lying on the floor with my face kicked in.”

  In the end, they merely threw him into a cell wi
th several other men and slammed the door behind him. They hadn’t hurt him physically. They’d even let him keep his clarinet. And that was what he turned to for comfort. “It was while I was in jail there,” he wrote, “that I played the first blues I ever played with a lot of guys singing and no other instruments, just the singing. And, oh my God, what singing that was.”

  With Sidney playing along, the other men in the cell just started chanting about the hard times they’d seen. “This blues was different from anything I ever heard. Someone’s woman left town, or someone’s man, he’d gone around to another door … I could taste how it felt … I was seeing the chains and that gallows, feeling the tears on my own face, rejoicing in the Angel the Lord sent down for that sinner. Oh my God, that was a blues.”

  For Bechet, it was a lesson about where the blues—and the blues impulse behind jazz—really came from. The singer or player of blues, he realized, “was more than just a man. He was like every man that’s been done a wrong. Inside him he’s got the memory of all the wrong that’s been done to my people … You just can’t ever forget it. There’s nothing about that night I could ever forget.”

  The next morning, his brother explained to the police that there really was an M and a Half Street, and got him released from jail. (Sidney would never know what happened to his Mexican friend.) As they walked home, Joe told him that he’d just gotten a job offer to play in New Orleans again, and he wanted Sidney to come back and play with him. Sidney agreed immediately. “I hadn’t been out of New Orleans long,” he wrote, “but there never was anyone who could have been readier to go back.” Before the week was out, he was home again.

  But Bechet would soon have other opportunities to escape the oppressive environment of his Southern home. Many of the jazzmen who had already left New Orleans were finding enthusiastic audiences elsewhere in the country. Freddie Keppard, for one, kept sending home newspaper clippings from the road, full of praise from critics in places like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. And it wasn’t just musicians who were making good elsewhere. With the economy gearing up for the coming war effort and factories losing many of their workers to the armed forces, jobs were increasingly plentiful in the industrialized cities of the North; some companies were even sending labor agents through the South to recruit black workers for their factories. The first wave of the Great Migration of African Americans had begun, and its pull would be felt by blacks across the South for decades to come.