Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [73]
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