“Honi soit qui mal y pense:” Succession, Race, and Gender in the Demi-Monde of Storyville, New Orleans

Amidst the radical changes that swept through Louisiana following Reconstruction, New Orleans became infamous for its identity as a city of revelry and carnal expression, particularly after Alderman Sidney Story’s 1897 legislation decriminalized sex-work in a quarter of New Orleans that came to be known as Storyville. ¹ An ostensibly racially-integrated quarter in the heart of New Orleans, “Storyville” provided sex and entertainment for white men from 1897 to 1917. Turn of the century New Orleans offered thousands of gens de couleur libres – free people of color – a liminal space for exploring race, class, and sexuality in contexts created by Louisiana’s multinational communities. Poised on the threshold of Spanish/French/Indigenous American territories, New Orleans’ “creole” identity was complicated by a history of colonization, enslavement, and war. ²

The term “creole” is weighted with multiple meanings – sometimes referring to the blend of argots that comprise the colloquial cadences of New Orleans, and other times representing the mixed identities of New Orleanians. ³ Women sex-workers from this racially ambiguous group were identified as demimondaines, or members of the Demi-Monde, the “half-world,” of fringe society. Emblematic of the period, brothel owner and madam Lulu White (ca. 1868–1931), the self-described “Diamond Queen of the Demi-Monde,” typified the carnivalesque trespass embodied by the fascination with and desire for mixed-race women during this period. Primarily operating in Storyville, New Orleans’ red light district, White built a successful business in the sex industry by attracting patrons with the promise of lavish nights spent in the arms of beautiful, “exotic” women of mixed or indeterminate race in her brothel, Mahogany Hall.

Spanish and French rule during the early nineteenth century expanded the number of emancipated inhabitants of the region, which subsequently became more tolerant of mixed-race relationships than the surrounding southern states, supporting the growth of a large community of gens de couleur libres (free people of color) who thrived in New Orleans through the 1860’s. ⁴ Unique to the social space of New Orleans was the plaçage, or a “legally sanctioned ‘mistress’ (often called plaçées) relationship between a white man and a free woman of color.” ⁵ The plaçage system, which flourished until 1803, has often been romanticized in historical narratives, illustrating our ongoing fascination with transgressions of race, class, and gender boundaries in the modern era (1890–1930). Though the Storyville district’s brothels, saloons, and jazz clubs were demolished in the 1930s and replaced by low-income housing, a repertoire of stories, songs, and urban legends have sustained the cultural memory and romanticization of New Orleans’ Demi-Monde. Lulu White’s social burlesques during her years at Mahogany Hall, where she gained notoriety for her outré lifestyle, elucidated the byzantine racial borders created by an economy built on marketing sex with “octoroons” to a white male clientele. White’s “queenship,” constructed on a self-invented narrative of her supposed West Indian birth, linked her to New Orleans’ history of Franco-Spanish colonization and creole culture, while capitalizing on the dissonant remnants of the antebellum “Confederate identity,” which itself was rooted in notions of fantasized European nobility.

Pertinent to this discussion is the “tragic mulatta” trope, a popular representation of mixed-race women that frequently appeared across mass entertainment in the modern era. An intersectional reading of the tragic mulattas depicted in fiction, on stage, and in popular celebrity life (such as the case of Lulu White) yields complex portraits of women who benefited from colorism, and gained power from their complicity in the white supremacist marginalization of Black-presenting women, ultimately upholding New Orleans’−and the nation’s racial caste system.

Though White claimed that all her “fancy girls” were octoroons, historians have shown that some of her sex workers were not Black, suggesting that the performance of Blackness and subservience was a fetishized currency at the height of the Jim Crow era. ⁶ Lulu White’s success as an entrepreneur of the social, legal and moral boundaries of race problematizes male- dominant, paternal paths to both financial success and the maintenance of power, while illustrating the hypocrisies of sexual desire in a time of Jim-Crow racial segregation, and the socially-determined limits of opportunity for women who were neither fully Black nor white.

Partus sequitor ventrem and Female Succession in the Cotton Kingdom

An examination of the legal structure and social practices of the antebellum South demonstrates the roots of white America’s anxiety about the presence of Black people in white social and cultural spaces. Laws such as the 1662 “partus sequitur ventrem,” (that which is brought forth follows the belly), which determined that children born to enslaved women were enslaved at birth, and decades of anti-miscegenation legislation, exhibit a powerful mélange of discomfort and fascination with the “other” – manifested in performances that parodied the inferior education and social status of subjugated peoples through wildly popular minstrel shows, melodramatic plays about racial heritage, and novels haunted by the specters of enslavement. ⁷ Such performances served as unsuccessful attempts to mask the South’s discomfort with the presence of mixed-race children engendered by illegal sex between masters and enslaved people, a discomfort woven into the southern myth of a “genteel,” “noble” society that itself mimicked the monarchist culture of America’s European forefathers. Lulu White would later employ the performance of mixed-race identity as a means to empower herself as a businesswoman and symbol of forbidden desire.

America’s founding principles reflect a holistic rejection of the system of European monarchy and a fanatical worship of democratic “freedom.” Fear of the potential power of immigrants and enslaved people drove political discourse contemporary to the writing of the Constitution to assert that “the object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandizement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit.” ⁸ While ostensibly spurning monarchist and centralized governments was central to southern nationalism during the decades of chattel slavery, the South nonetheless relied on strict internal racial and class hierarchies, a performance of “Southern hospitality” built on the brutal repression of Blacks, and a masculinist identity incorporating a sense of “righteous” rebellion. This tension between the highest tendencies of southern culture and the cruelest practices of racial oppression would be mirrored by Lulu White and her demimondaine in their many identities.

It is indicative of latent monarchist sentiment that antebellum Southern planters – some of whom were European immigrants and thus former royal subjects – promoted the moniker “Cotton Kingdom” to describe the socio-economic system of chattel slavery, a linguistic choice that conflicts with the Confederacy’s claimed antimonarchist-centered identity. ⁹ Southern planters were not immune to the allure of royal status and subjectivity, for “King Cotton” became the slogan adapted by pro-secessionists in the antebellum period, who believed that their control over cotton exports would supplant the power of President Lincoln:

Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme? ^{10 11}

In declaring cotton the ruler of the world’s economy, white Southerners, by extension, became the pre-ordained custodians of the divine crop, “per me reges regnant.” ¹² The identity of the Confederacy and later, the Lost Cause advocates of the Reconstruction, did not go unnoticed by abolitionists and Northerners. Recapitulating linguistic themes from the Constitution, delegates to a 1794 abolition convention stated: “In vain has the tyranny of kings been rejected, while we permit in our country a domestic despotism…” ¹³ Enslaved people faced oppression, violence, and “tyranny” every day of their lives, while the southern ruling class argued that a loss of free labor was a crime more evil than slavery.

In the decades following the Civil War, Southern Democrats established a political ideology that advocated for individual states’ rights as a means to maintain the region’s power, at the expense of enslaved laborers. In his attempt to veto the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, Andrew Johnson proclaimed: “[Reconstruction Amendments are] a stride toward centralization and the concentration of all legislative power in the national government.” ¹⁴ The economy of the South was devastated by the war, yet contemporary postbellum imaginings of a palatinate tragically ruined by strife and conflict are grounded in a false notion of widespread antebellum wealth, fabulous ball gowns, and chivalric customs. Most of the famed palatial plantation manors were constructed only thirty years before war broke out, and those that were spared survived because landowners readily surrendered to Union troops, were at odds with the fight-to-the-death “rebel” identity that Lost Cause advocates trafficked during Reconstruction. ¹⁵ The myth of the genteel, pastoral South would itself be parodied in the quadroon balls held in the brothels of New Orleans, where white men were tempted to purchase sex with mixed-race women dressed in splendid gowns based on images of white women in the antebellum South.

The racial and sexual politics of the South during the modern era were defined by tensions arising from race and class division, sown by efforts to maintain the oppressed status of the formerly enslaved people as a source of low-wage labor in the postbellum South, while protecting white “Southern identity,” which was almost entirely predicated on shifting blame for the Civil War onto the North, and demonizing integration efforts. ¹⁶

Situated in the midst of the shifting economic topography of the region was Louisiana, which in 1860 “produced about one-sixth of all cotton grown in the United States and almost one-third of all cotton exported from the United States.” ¹⁷ Louisiana plantation life was notoriously deadly, yielding a negative birth rate for enslaved people while white and some mixed-race citizens enjoyed the spoils of their blood and labor. ¹⁸ According to the 1860 census, New Orleans had thirteen thousand gens de couleur libres, who, as part of the Francophone group, maintained their status as a wealthy class through New Orleans’ laws that privileged “mulattoes” over Black Americans, who were largely part of the enslaved class. ¹⁹

The American maternal lineage of enslavement, created by partus sequitur ventrem, disrupted French and Spanish racial standards in the colonized city of New Orleans. The libres represented a small, localized departure from partus (“one drop rule”), which determined the racial identity and the free or enslaved status of a child on the “condition of their mother.”²⁰ Partus reveals an inversion of traditional monarchical, male-centered inheritance, instead crowning women with the weight of lineage and succession. The “divine right” to rule that white Southerners greedily protected became Blacks’ divine duty to serve, reinforced by biblical texts found in Genesis (9:23–27), and Ephesians (6:5). Mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, Griffe, or creoles, as they were commonly called, occupied liminal and widely varying positions in post- colonial America, condemned to enslavement in some states, while enjoying the luxuries of free life in others. Troublingly, some free people of color in Louisiana chose to live in a manner such as Andrew Durnford, who was thought to have owned seventy-seven enslaved people, freeing only four in his lifetime. ²⁰ The Reconstruction Amendments extended protections already afforded to libres to Black New Orleanians, encouraging greater political unity between the racial castes. This, along with an urgent need to combat Jim Crow laws, inspired the Comité des Citoyens,a league founded by mixed-race citizens who advocated for racial equity. ²¹ Comité member Homer Plessy famously tested the legality of the “Separate Car Act” in 1890, resulting in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson which ruled against Plessy, a white-presenting mixed-Black man, supporting “home rule” in the states and resulting in Jim Crow, “separate but equal” segregation nationally. ²²

Secondary Marginalization and the “Tragic Mulatta”

Race relations in New Orleans for mixed-race women differed from the rest of the South, but were not entirely idiosyncratic. Scholar Emily Clark writes, “sequestering the quadroon figuratively in the Crescent City shaped American identity and historical narrative in subtle but powerful ways, effectively turning New Orleans into a perpetual colonial space in the national imagination.” ²³ Monique Guillory’s 1997 study, “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls,” is regarded as a definitive examination of the plaçage system, and shows that mixed-Black women experienced a form of marginalization unique to their particular station betwixt races. ²⁴ Guillory writes, “The most a mulatto mother and a quadroon daughter could hope to attain in the rigid confines of the black/white world was some semblance of economic independence and social distinction from the slaves and other blacks.” ²⁵

Drawing from Cathy Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999), “secondary marginalization” is a useful framework for understanding the precarious privilege that mixed-race women experienced throughout the modern era. Writing about the relationship between HIV positivity and Black political progressivism, Cohen uses empirical evidence to contend that among marginalized groups, specifically Black Americans living with HIV/AIDS, some members’ needs are not prioritized in the larger political struggle due to respectability politics, thus creating a “secondary marginalization.” Applying Cohen’s framework to historical conversations about identity politics problmeatizes the use of  race as the primary lens for discussing the experiences of “mulatto” women, thus limiting our understanding of their lack of social mobility. Respectability politics and capitalism had meaningful effects on their privilege. Secondary marginalization offers an intersectional re-examination of the popular notion of political homogeneity within racially marginalized groups: “through this model of politics people of color are forced to demonstrate or ‘buy’ their normativity and their ‘honorary whiteness’ through the modern-era class privilege that they acquire, through the attitudes and behavior they exhibit, and through the dominant institutions in which they operate.” ²⁶

Thus arises the sociological trope of the “tragic mulatta” – a mixed-race woman chaotically split between two worlds, facing equal rejection from both until she is silenced by her own destitution and eventual death, usually by suicide. A reading of the tragic mulatta through the framework of secondary marginalization acknowledges the social power she receives by proximal whiteness, and the potential capital she enjoys by meeting the standards of European beauty and behavior. Unfortunately, this romanticized literary stereotype is better recognized as an agent and result of white supremacy, rather than a progressive figure of self-created identity and multiracial belonging.

Kimberly S. Hangar’s celebrated Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans (1997) discusses the experience of the libres of New Orleans, drawing careful comparisons to contemporary formations of multiethnic identity. Hangar documents the complex social hierarchy in colonial Louisiana, demonstrating what she describes as a collective identity comprised of “three psychological worlds,” in which freedom, captivity, and gender interact. ²⁷ New Orleans’ laws realigned the relationship between freedom/captivity and race, affixing the additional nuance of social class, gender, and education to the dynamic of the mixed- race woman’s “value” to the dominant white class. Shirley E. Thompson writes that “Semi- formalized quasi-marital relationships between white men and femmes de couleur libres were commonplace in New Orleans and spanned the spectrum of stability and mutuality….Often enough, it was the woman of color who brought the financial wealth and business acumen to the relationship.” ²⁸

Many plaçées found themselves in relationships with wealthy white suitors, their families paying large dowries to secure a legal marriage and education for any future offspring, such as the case of famed author Alexander Dumas. ^{29 30} Juxtaposing the history of plaçage and the tragic mulatta archetype against the reality of the sexual subjugation of Black and mixed-race women demonstrates the capriciousness of historical documentation – there is truth to depictions of modern era mixed-Black life as both agonizing and liberatory; therefore, I turn to the life and times of Lulu White to further explore an embodied history of “octoroon” life.

Lulu White: fantasy and power in the modern era

Storyville’s complex economic structure grew into a vibrant site of music, art, and sex, largely due to the ingenuity of the owners. White male customers were encouraged to peruse blue books, which served as a guide to Storyville largely marketed to tourists and contained advertisements for the many establishments offering entertainment in the district. More alluring than any jazz hall or fine dinner were the images of “octoroons” such as the photograph of a woman who posed seductively in “a pair of garters and belt made out of the skin of the cobra di capello that escaped from the Wombwell menagerie and was killed by a street car.” ³¹ Blue books were organized by race (“white” and “colored”) and last name, indexing the “fancy girls” available to men who were “out on a lark.” ³² In one blue book’s preface, the reader is warned “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” (shame on anyone who thinks badly of it). ³³ There was great care in not directly mentioning sex, authors chose instead to use innuendos such as “French style” or “69” in the workers’ descriptions. ³⁴

Sex workers such as Lulu White employed modern advertising as a business tactic –  flooding the Storyville district with “blue book” advertisements to draw patrons to her brothel. The blue books offer contemporary readers a look at the complex relationship between race and desire, as they reveal Lulu White’s manipulation of racial identity as a means of gaining financial and political power during the period. White’s blue book advertisements describe her as a “famous West-Indian Octoroon” and coyly suggest the book is a “souvenir for her friends,” ³⁵ employing the language of “genteel Southern hospitality” with the formality of high society, appearing to welcome her patrons while simultaneously reaffirming her birthright as the natural ruler of the Demi-Monde. White’s blue book advertisements assert that “as an entertainer Miss Lulu stands foremost, having made a life-long study of music and literature;” ³⁶ White sensed the marketability of intellectual and artistic accomplishment as a means to elevate herself to the level generally ascribed to white women from the slaveholding class in the antebellum South.

Although much of Lulu White’s history is intentionally veiled in myth and legend, White is acknowledged to have been born on a farm in Alabama to a “colored” woman and a white man. ³⁷ White’s is a story of true American origin: born in obscurity, White fashioned herself as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, trading her alleged yeoman upbringing for the danger and thrill of the sex trade in New Orleans. Emily Epstein Landau’s groundbreaking biography of White in Spectacular Wickedness Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans (2016), describes White’s apparition in the New Orleans census in 1900:

She told the census taker that her father and mother were Jamaican, too, and that she had immigrated in 1880. White’s “color” (race) was listed as “B,” black. Her occupation was “boardinghouse keeper” and her five “boarders” at 235 North Basin Street (that is, Mahogany Hall) were all “seampstresses” [sic] and “black.” But in 1910, Lulu White told the census taker she and her parents were from Alabama, she claimed to be forty-two years old, and her race was recorded as “Mulatto.” ³⁸

White’s frequent identity shifts are not a symptom of “mulatta tragedy;” rather, they offer insight into how race and class in New Orleans could be monetized by a particularly imaginative entrepreneur. According to Epstein Landau, White was far from alone in her clever manipulation of the census, noting that while this may reveal shifting attitudes toward race, when placed in the context of sex-work and the marketed “availability” of female libres, it demonstrates the power and precarious privilege of racial ambiguity within Storyville, as it relates to Whites specific brand of self-fetishization.

White quickly established herself as a proprietress and madam, opening a bordello on 166 Customhouse Street in 1890, where she remained for eight years. ³⁹ During this time, White carefully laid the groundwork for her mythic emergence as the “Diamond Queen” by employing easily- recognized references to Southern gentility, however instead of worshipping cotton, White consolidated her queenship through the commodification of her body. White’s 1880 claims of Jamaican heritage can be interpreted as the devising of herself as the “exotic other,” strengthened with a dash of “melting pot” idealism, an idiomatic turn that emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries as part of America’s “city upon a hill” rhetoric. ^{40 41} Emily Clark writes: “The émigré quadroon offered other advantages in the symbolic management of America’s mixed- race population. She was more easily contained and controlled than her domestic counterpart could be.” ⁴² Here, White capitalizes on “Old South” identities, framing her ascendance as mythic, as if she were chosen by God to shepherd the exiled mixed-race women who constituted the Demi-Monde into a powerful, if subversive greatness. Over time, as White sensed that her persona of “tenacious immigrant turned wealthy American” was becoming less valuable to her self-created image, White discarded her “Jamaican” identity for a novel persona: a capitalist completely devoted to the preservation of Southern values.

White soon outfitted herself with a new biography of American succession, claiming to have inherited a great deal of wealth from her father’s time working on the New York stock exchange. ⁴³ Epstein Landau references an article from New Orleans paper The Mascot: “[Lulu White was] taken to New York by her father, who was a Wall street broker, and after his death she fell heiress to No. 166 Customhouse Street.” ⁴⁴ The truth lies somewhere in between: White most likely inherited enough money to live comfortably, and wisely invested in the property she would eventually call Mahogany Hall in the developing red light district of New Orleans.

White spins a tale of familial duty to establish her obligation to the Customhouse property in an arguably masculine, imperialist rationale. As Napoleon I (who, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase was the Emperor of France) famously crowned himself at his coronation, White rejects coronation by the Church and turns toward self-actualization as a royal quality. ⁴⁵ White’s claim that she inherited her wealth from a patriarchal source was a calculated risk for a mixed-Black woman, and was quite likely only possible in the racially liminal geography of New Orleans. White’s clever employment of entrepreneurial branding and octoroon privilege illustrate her precise manipulation of Cohen’s framework of secondary marginalization.

By positioning herself as the reluctant heir to great fortune, White engages with the respectability politics of the modern era, which Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham contends were a result of the imbrication of the bourgeoning women’s movement of the Progressive era and the omnipresent violence of Jim Crow: “[Black women] felt certain that “respectable” behavior in public would earn their people a measure of esteem from white America, and hence they strove to win the Black lower class’s psychological allegiance to temperance, industriousness, thrift, refined manners, and Victorian sexual morals.” ⁴⁶ Such respectability politics exploit those trapped in positions of secondary marginalization, incentivizing their assimilation and rewarding those who attempt to adhere to tacit standards set forth by Eurocentric hegemony. As a brothel owner, White cannot rise to the standards of “Victorian sexual morals;” her only means of social acceptance is to embody the values of industriousness and thrift by the savvy investment of her father’s money in valuable property – an act that would certainly have won the approval of a financier. While Lulu White’s mythic rise suggests that she assumed a throne attained by her own grit, in reality, White’s wealth was built upon the backs of Black Americans who were unable to traverse racial boundaries that were closed to Blacks − boundaries that the “queen of the octoroons” eroticized.

White’s reputation as New Orleans royalty was well established by the time the Storyville ordinance was passed, but the establishment of the red light district allowed Lulu White to seize the role of “the country’s handsomest octoroon.” ⁴⁷ By spring of 1897, White purchased the property at 235 North Basin Street which she named Mahogany Hall. Landau indicates the multilayered word play at hand in the brothel’s moniker:

That The Mascot described these aforementioned women as “mahogany colored” reminds us of the name later chosen by Lulu White for her bordello on Basin Street. Mahogany, dark and tropical, grows in the “hot regions of the world”; it is an exotic wood; it was the wood of Haiti, until that country sold all its lumber to France as an indemnity to pay for its independence. ⁴⁸

In “New Mahogany Hall,” White’s 1898 blue book, the brothel is described as a palace: “The house is built of marble and is four story; containing five parlors, all handsomely furnished, and fifteen bedrooms.” ⁴⁹

Principal to an understanding of White’s emergence as a “Queen,” are her groteseque images of inverted propriety. In positioning Mahogany Hall as a cite of exotic, sensual luxury, White manipulates her maternally-inherited Blackness and history of enslavement to excuse her “unladylike” occupation as a sex worker. White preyed on gender and race expectations by crafting an image of herself as a daughter of wealth, ostracized from acceptable society by the “drop of midnight in her veins,” representing the tragic mulatta trope. ⁵⁰ White marketed her almost-whiteness for social mobility by serving a clientele that craved transgressive sex with mixed-race women, violating not only social norms surrounding race, but deviating from socially-acceptable sexual intercourse between men and women. A series of photographs from the period show White engaging in acts of bestiality and other deviant pornographic acts. ⁵¹ Landau notes:

It was widely believed that aristocratic tastes in sexual pleasure exceeded the boundaries of respectability, and sexual deviance was associated with aristocratic power…. Such were the ideologies of racialized sexuality generated in slavery times but retained and reinscribed as much through the mechanisms of Jim Crow as by Lulu White herself. ⁵²

The sex workers featured in the “New Mahagony Hall” blue book are white-presenting women, described as “demure,” “petite,” and “accomplished.” Despite appearances, the women are categorized as “colored,” capitalizing on the visual ambiguity of race, and marketing mixed-race identity as part of Mahogany Hall’s allure. In the same advertisement, Lulu White archives her self-coronation: “In describing Miss Lulu, as she is most familiarly called, it would not be amiss to say that besides possessing an elegant form she has beautiful black hair and blue eyes, which have justly gained for her the title of the “Queen of the Demi-Monde.” ⁵³ Beauty, manner, and education are coded as whiteness, thus the Demi-Monde becomes a metaphor for another “half world” occupied by the mulatta, one of half-race.

The tragic mulatta trope has been regarded as a tool for abolition, haunting the memory of American literature as a symbol of fiendish arousal, carnivalesque reversal, and social progress. The paradoxical existence of mixed-race women has been troubled by authors from the antebellum period through to the present, taking shape as both temptress and victim, representing a complex snapshot of America’s in/visible caste system. Lulu White’s conscious engagement with the tragic mulatta trope mirrors its propagandistic nature – the festishized Black woman’s body fused with the respectability of proximal whiteness furnished forth a caste system that operated separately from America’s free/enslaved, rich/poor double dialectic of the era. Landau writes, “In White’s case, she represented in her actions the tenuousness of and the fallacy of Jim Crow – its racial binary and historical amnesia alike.” ⁵⁴

White’s oscillating identity, which was documented across census, blue books, and newspaper articles, began to take on a shape of its own, influenced by her shifting social standing and changes in attitude toward Storyville. Increasingly concerned about New Orleans’ status as the “Sodom of the South,” city officials sought to clean up the reputation by enacting stricter legal measures on sex-workers. ⁵⁵ Despite Mahogany Hall’s catering to white clients, reform acts endeavored to codify the district as “Black” through increasingly sensationalist language that aligned passionate immorality with the “colored” race, and Victorian morals with whiteness, harkening back to Confederate identities. Lulu White embodies the racialization of good versus evil: “Lulu White seems to have no social club manners,” wrote the Daily Picayune, “for the notorious negress broke up a poker game which was going on in George Lambert’s place…” ⁵⁶

Gone was the soubriquet of “Queen,” replaced by race-based descriptors: “This negress has a habit of taking a shot at a white man occasionally…” ⁵⁷ Her violence is transformed into a wholesale threat against white men, aligning Lulu White with the likes of infamous enslaved rebel Nat Turner, who was once described as “notorious” by newspapers celebrating his execution. ⁵⁸

White proved harder to dethrone than city officials hoped, for she fought multiple legal battles against ordinances that sought to destroy her “queendom.” Unfortunately, calls to segregate Storyville after the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson − the case that began in New Orleans − grew louder and gained support from influential white New Orleanians such as commentator and musician Phillip P. Werlein, who wrote several editorials for the Item in 1910: “The open association of white men and negro women on Basin Street, which is now permitted by our authorities, should fill us with shame as it fills the visitor from the North with amazement. [This association] is calculated to prejudice the casual visitor against the sacred tenet of Southern people – racial purity.” ⁵⁹ Werlein, a proud supporter of the Confederacy who was accused of unlawfully plagiarizing the sheet music for “Dixie,” revived the old Southern tradition of white supremacy by establishing dominance over Black and mixed-race people on the basis of “sacred purity.” In recalling the white race’s divine right to rule, Werlein argued for a Southern identity closely tied to the Confederacy, a frequent motif in the lexicon of enslavement.

White’s sexual exploitation of Old South mythos finally backfired in 1917, when New Orleans moved to make Storyville an all-white district, serving “colored” brothels with eviction notices. ⁶⁰ White attempted one last costume change, this time denying her Black heritage, stating that she “held herself out for the purpose of her business only as an Octoroon.” ⁶¹ Without a borrowed identity and fantastic myth, White was little more than Alabama farm girl in a crown far too heavy for her head. Possibly sensing that her show was nearing curtain call, Lulu White disappeared west to California, fading into obscurity and reportedly dying at the home of Willie Piazza, a fellow brothel owner, in 1931.

Although much is to be learned from unpacking White’s devious race play, a larger contextualizing of Southern identity reveals a conscious inversion of masculinist traditions of inheritance, furnishing forth a palimpsest of gender, race, and power in the postbellum South. Lulu White embodied New Orleans’ – and by extension, the American South’s – complex relationship with sexual morality, race, class, and monarchical rule throughout her storied years in the so-called “Queen city of the South.” White’s queenship mocked respectability politics of the modern era and provokes discourse about historicizing privilege and the fetishization of mixed race identity. Moreover, her tale challenges the veracity of the archive versus repertoire and contemporary documentation of historic sex work – “honi soit qui mal y pense.”

WORKS CITED

“Antebellum Louisiana I: Disease, Death, And Mourning.” The Cabildo: Two Centuries of Louisiana History. Online.  June 27, 2020. https://www.crt.state.la.us/louisiana-state-museum/online-exhibits/the-cabildo/antebellum-louisiana- disease-death-and-mourning/index.

“Minutes of Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies”. Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, 1794. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

“Slavery in Louisiana,” The Whitney Plantation. Online. Accessed September 14, 2020. https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/slavery-in-louisiana/https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/slavery-in-louisiana/.

“The Cabildo: Two Centuries of Louisiana History, “Antebellum Louisiana II: Agrarian Life.” Louisiana State Museum Online Exhibits. Accessed November 10, 2020. https://www.crt.state.la.us/louisiana-state-museum/online-exhibits/the- cabildo/antebellum-louisiana-agrarian-life/.

“The Civil Rights Bill of 1866,” History, Art & Archives, The United States House of Representatives. Accessed December 5, 2020. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-Civil-Rights-Bill-of-1866/.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter, 1853.

Brutus, “Essay IV, November 29, 1787.” In Ralph Ketcham, The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates: The Clashes and Compromises that Gave Birth to Our Government. New York: Penguin, 1986.

City Gazette & Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston, South Carolina) Nov. 21, 1831. Online. Accessed December 5, 2020. https://www.readex.com/blog/researching-nat-turners-slave-revolt-american-and-african-american-newspapers

Clark, Emily. The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Coan, Titus Munson. “A New Country.” The Galaxy Volume 0019, Issue 4 (April 1875).

Cohen, Cathy J. “Straight Gay Politics: The Limits of an Ethnic Model of Inclusion.” Nomos 39 (1997): 572–616.

Conlin, Joseph R. The American Past: Volume 1. Boston: Wadsworth, 1984.

Dubois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1935. New York: The Free Press, 1992.

Dumas, Alexander. play, Le Demi-Monde. 1855. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921.

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore. “People of Color in Louisiana.” In Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Edited by Sybil Kein. Shreveport: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Englund, Steven. Napoleon: A Political Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 863–1877. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

Guillory, Monique. “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls.” In Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century. Edited by Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker, 67–92. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Hammond, James. “Cotton is King.” Speech to the United States Senate. March 4, 1858.

Hangar, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (revised edition). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Kotlikoff, Lawrence J. and Anton J. Rupert. “The Manumission of Slaves in New Orleans, 1827–1846.” Southern Studies. (Summer 1980). Accessed December 4, 2020. https://kotlikoff.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/The-Manumission-of-Slaves- in-New-Orleans-1827-1846.pdf

Landau, Emily Epstein. Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Medley, Keith Weldon. We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Fight Against Legal Segregation. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003.

Murphy Angela F. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal. Shreveport: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.

New Orleans City Ordinance No. 13,032, council series, (1897).

per me reges regnant et legum conditores iusta decernun, (‘By me kings reign, and princes decree justice’ (King James version): Proverb 8:15 in the Vulgate Latin Bible.

Sollors, Werner. Neither black nor white yet both: thematic explorations of interracial literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sumpter, Amy R. “Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans.” Southeastern Geographer 48, no. 1 (2008): 19–37.

Surdam, David G. “King Cotton: Monarch or Pretender? The State of the Market for Raw Cotton on the Eve of the American Civil War.” Economic History Review 1998 51(1): 113–32.

Thompson, Shirley E. “‘Mon Cher Dupré,’ Interracial Marriage, Property, and Affect in Antebellum New Orleans.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association Vol. 58, No. 2 (2017): 217–36.

Turner, Sasha. Contested Bodies, Pregnancy, Childbearing, and Slavery in Jamaica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

White, Lulu. “Mahogany Hall.” The Historic New Orleans collection. Accessed November 14, 20. http://hnoc.minisisinc.com/thnoc/catalog/2/4585#.

1. New Orleans City Ordinance No. 13,032, council series, (1897).[↑]
2. Werner Sollors, Neither black nor white yet both: thematic explorations of interracial literature. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 272.[↑]
3. Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Edited by Sybil Kein. (Shreveport: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 3.[↑]
4. Amy R. Sumpter, “Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans.” Southeastern Geographer. 48, No. 1 (2008): 22.[↑]
5. Sumpter, “Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans.”[↑]
6. Emily Epstein Landau, Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 5.[↑]
7. Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies, Pregnancy, Childbearing, and Slavery in Jamaica. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2017), 11.[↑]
8. Brutus, “Essay IV, November 29, 1787,” in Ralph Ketcham, The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates: The Clashes and Compromises that Gave Birth to Our Government, (New York: Penguin, 1986), 346.[↑]
9. For more information about European immigrants and enslavement, see Angela F. Murphy in American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal, (Shreveport: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).[↑]
10. David G. Surdam, “King Cotton: Monarch or Pretender? The State of the Market for Raw Cotton on the Eve of the American Civil War.” Economic History Review 1998 51(1): 113–32.[↑]
11. James Hammond, “Cotton is King.” March 4, 1858.[↑]
12. per me reges regnant et legum conditores iusta decernun, (‘By me kings reign, and princes decree justice’ (King James version): Proverb 8:15 in the Vulgate Latin Bible.[↑]
13. “Minutes of Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies”. Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, 1794. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, 36.[↑]
14. “The Civil Rights Bill of 1866,” History, Art & Archives, The United States House of Representatives. Online. Accessed 12/5/20. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-Civil-Rights-Bill-of-1866/[↑]
15. “Slavery in Louisiana,” The Whitney Plantation. Online. Accessed September 14, 2020. https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/slavery-in-louisiana[↑]
16. W.E.B. Dubois described the period: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” For more information on the precarity of race relations, see Dubois Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 863–1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 2002).[↑]
17. Louisiana State Museum Online Exhibits The Cabildo: Two Centuries of Louisiana History, “Antebellum Louisiana II: Agrarian Life.” Online. Accessed November 10, 2020 https://www.crt.state.la.us/louisiana-state-museum/online-exhibits/the- cabildo/antebellum-louisiana-agrarian-life/[↑]
18. “Antebellum Louisiana I: Disease, Death, And Mourning.” The Cabildo: Two Centuries of Louisiana History. Online. Accessed June 27, 2020. https://www.crt.state.la.us/louisiana-state-museum/online-exhibits/the-cabildo/antebellum-louisiana- disease-death-and-mourning/index[↑]
19. Lawrence J. Kotlikoff and Anton J. Rupert, “The Manumission of Slaves in New Orleans, 1827–1846” Southern Studies, Summer 1980. Accessed December 4, 2020. https://kotlikoff.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/The-Manumission-of-Slaves- in-New-Orleans-1827–1846.pdf[↑]
20. Joseph R. Conlin, The American Past: Volume 1. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1984), 370.[↑]
21. Keith Weldon Medley, We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Fight Against Legal Segregation, (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company 2003), 14.[↑]
22. Conlin, The American Past: Volume 1. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1984), 370.[↑]
23. Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 9.[↑]
24. Monique Guillory, “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls,” In Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century, edited by Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker, (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 67–92.[↑]
25. Guillory, “Under One Roof,” 83.[↑]
26. Cathy J. Cohen., “Straight Gay Politics: The Limits of an Ethnic Model of Inclusion” in Nomos 39 (1997): 578. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24219987.[↑]
27. Kimberly S. Hangar Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 5.[↑]
28. Shirley E. Thompson, “Mon Cher Dupré,” Interracial Marriage, Property, and Affect in Antebellum New Orleans.” 2017, 3. Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring 2017).[↑]
29. Thompson, “Mon Cher Dupré,” Interracial Marriage, Property, and Affect in Antebellum New Orleans.”[↑]
30. The term Demi-Monde originates from an 1855 Dumas play, Le Demi-Monde.[↑]
31. The Historic New Orleans collection, “Mahogany Hall.” Online. Accessed November 14, 2020. http://hnoc.minisisinc.com/thnoc/catalog/2/4585#[↑]
32. The Historic New Orleans collection, “Mahogany Hall.”[↑]
33. The Historic New Orleans collection, “Mahogany Hall.”[↑]
34. The Historic New Orleans collection, “Mahogany Hall.”[↑]
35. The Historic New Orleans collection, “Mahogany Hall.”[↑]
36. The Historic New Orleans collection, “Mahogany Hall.”[↑]
37. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 133.[↑]
38. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 135.[↑]
39. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 136.[↑]
40. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 136.[↑]
41. Titus Munson Coan, “A New Country”, The Galaxy Volume 0019, Issue 4 (April 1875): 463[↑]
42. Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, 7–9.[↑]
43. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 136.[↑]
44. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness 140.[↑]
45. Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).[↑]
46. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2003), 14.[↑]
47. I Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 14.[↑]
48. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 138.[↑]
49. The Historic New Orleans collection.[↑]
50. Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, William Wells Brown, 1853.[↑]
51. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 140–42.[↑]
52. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 142.[↑]
53. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 142.[↑]
54. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 133.[↑]
55. “Letter to Raymond Fosdick, chairman of the Commission on training camp activities,” in Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 160.[↑]
56. New Orleans Daily Picayune, November 14, 1904. In Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 156.[↑]
57. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 157.[↑]
58. City Gazette & Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston, South Carolina) Nov. 21, 1831. Online. Accessed December 5, 2020. https://www.readex.com/blog/researching-nat-turners-slave-revolt-american-and-african-american-newspapers[↑]
59. Werlein editorials, Item, Feb. 2, 15, 1910 in Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 168.[↑]
60. Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 202.[↑]
61. Lulu White v. City of New Orleans, Civil District Court, Parish of Orleans, Docket 5, no. 119, 511, in Landau, Spectacular Wickedness, 159.[↑]