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Marie Laveau

Poor New Orleans. For all the misfortune that has befallen The Big Easy and the white sand Cajun coast, they can blame it on Mother Nature -- La Nina. They can blame the Republican president or the Democrat mayor. They can blame Katrina, BP, or El Nino. But they can't blame Voudou priestess Marie Laveau. For once in the old city's history, the sorceress isn't defending against accusations of malevolent rituals or evil incantations. From 1820 'til 1900 Crescent City citizens -- Cajuns, Creoles, Caucasians, and Africans alike -- gave Madame Laveau wide berth along Canal Street when she promenaded with her retinue of courtesans. So many bizarre occurrences have been attributed to Madame Laveau that researchers have no way of separating what is fact and what is legend about her colorful life.

Contemporaries told of spells being cast that caused men to go insane or become demon possessed. People thought that Marie Laveau could control the weather and that she could cause men and women to become sterile just by a stare. Others maintain that she was just an eccentric whose ancestral mix of African, Creole, and Caucasian cultures had produced in her one of those rare combinations of old world mysticism and new world savvy.

New Orleans jazz musician John Rebennack, alias "Dr. John, the night tripper," sings a song to the notorious woman's memory entitled "Marie Laveau."

"Now there lived a conjure lady, not long ago,

'In New Orleans, Louisiana, -- named marie Laveau.'

'Believe it or not, strange as it seem,

'She made her fortune selling voodoo, and interpreting dreams.'

'She was known throughout the nation as the VooDoo Queen."

Fitting the facts together as biography is a challenge for even the most fastidious researcher, for some locals in New Orleans still maintain that the whole story of this spirit world woman is just a legend -- that Marie Laveau is a compilation of several women who practiced herbal medicine with incantation in the French Quarter during the mid-19th century. Yet another sordid tale says that Marie was a prostitute who cast more than romantic spells upon her gentlemen clients.

Before "Dr. John" penciled his "Marie Laveau" lyrics, rock musicians had already drummed out a 1960s rhythmic hit entitled "The House of The Rising Sun." It's a haunting ballad made popular by singers such as Eric Burdon of the British Blues-Rock band "The Animals" and Los Angeles' Whiskey A-Go-Go" nightclub singer, Johnny Rivers. No one knows for sure who wrote the song, but refrains from the current version have been around New Orleans for decades. The focus is an opium den and brothel that stood on Conti Street in the French Quarter until it was razed after World War II as a vermin-infested public health hazard.

Close your eyes and you can hear in your mind Eric Burdon's gravelly, whiskey-throated voice belting the words:

"There is a house in New Orleans,

They call the Rising Sun.

And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy

And God I know I'm one."

Comically, some sources call Marie Laveau a strikingly beautiful woman whose charms were strictly of an esoteric nature. Others say she was a bent-over old woman with a crooked nose and eyes as black as coal. Most sources agree that this woman whose celebrity status was recounted in faraway places such as the nation's capital, San Francisco, and New York was a mulatto whose mother, Marguerite Darcantrel, had been a free person of color that had had to flee Haiti during a slave uprising.

Laveau's father is believed to have been New Orleans cotton factor Charles Laveau. The liasion that produced the infant named Marie is believed to have been one of the numerous gentleman-mistress relationships that existed in New Orleans in the 19th century. Whatever the case, Charles Laveau left a dowry for Marie as if she had been his legitimate daughter. That's where the story grows vague. One account maintains that Marie used her dowry to establish New Orleans' grandest brothel -- one that even the river boat captains advertized on the way downriver.

Where did the stories of Marie Laveau being a voudou sorceress originate? Speculation has it that Marie's religious heritage was a peculiar blend of French Catholicism, superstition born of illiteracy, and Haitian voudou. Marie was of a racial mix known then as a quadroon, and many of these women possessed a mysterious beauty that men found alluring. Often the quadroons set themselves apart from other persons of color. In New Orleans there were quadroon cliques that were quite prosperous and sophisticated in the mid-19th century.

City records reflect that Marie Laveau had a Catholic wedding performed by Pere Antoine in Saint Louis Cathedral. Her beau was another quadroon, Jacques Paris. Paris wasn't in the picture for long because Marie took a lover by the name of Louis Christophe Dumesnil de Glapion.

Numerous children were attributed to this unblessed union; however, locals believe the de Glapion liaison was a cover for the occasional off-spring that crop up with "ladies of the evening." One of her daughters she christened as Marie Laveau II, and for this reason the tales of the two women morph into one thread that runs almost the entire span of the 19th century. Marie II is reported to have been even more notorious than her mother in all of her endeavors, carnal and spiritual.

The story goes that Marie Laveau became a hairdresser to fashionable ladies in the French Quarter and that the clients confided in her their joys and concerns. Armed with the confidences of so many well-connected women, a whispered word from Marie could cause jitters down on the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. Marie may have delved a bit in midwifery also because quite a few society mavens called for Marie and her bag of assorted herbs, roots, bark, bones, and powders. But it was the eerie incantations that she mumbled -- unearthly sounds that did not seem to emanate from a human -- that convinced the townsmen that she belonged to the underworld.

Together the two Maries sort of hijacked the "Feast of St. John" away from the Catholics and turned it into a Laveau mystical ceremony that had hues of Catholicism and the saints as well as seances with the underworld. Lake Ponchatrain was the site of numerous St. John Feasts, Laveau style. The feast date is always June 24 and its pre-Christian origins lie rooted in summer solstice pagan ritual. Devout catholics shuddered at the popularity of Laveau's voudou carnival atmosphere profaning their own Holy Day. However, Marie Laveau maintained that she was just as devout as her critics.

A notable source cites that as thousands ringed the outdoor festival site " a cauldron boiled with water from a beer barrel, into which went salt, black pepper, a black cat, a black rooster, various powders, and a snake sliced in three pieces representing the Trinity." Naked girls danced provocatively and many townsmen stripped and danced with them. Marie would don a black cape and preach a sermon that seemed quite inappropriate to those who remained sober.

The fact that Marie kept a rather large pet snake named Zombi as a household companion just made tongues wag even more. The name "Zombi" celebrates a west African god of the underworld. The daughter Marie was quite clever in marketing her mother's skills in casting all manner of spells, hexes, and trances. Even at the time many believed the pair to be hucksters who raked in enormous profits from the illicit trade in prostitution, raw opium, and blackmail. Ill-gotten profits, they say, were then pumped into legitimate enterprises such as the hair salon, a hotel, and the stock market. Some say that Marie ran an informal lending agency that financed quite a few businessmen who'd gambled away their family fortune at the roulette tables.

When Marie Laveau finally died in 1881, at approximately 90 years of age, she had an elaborate funeral procession that rivaled anything in the Mardi Gras tradition. Her sepulcher in Saint Louis Number 1 has become a rendezvous for practitioners of the occult. Little artifices of the voudou religion such as candles, strange emblems, and chicken bones deface the tomb.

Marie II either drowned on Lake Ponchatrain in a hurricane or died in the city in 1918, take your pick. In the years that Marie Laveau I thrived amidst the seamy underside of New Orleans' rich, multi-racial culture, she met and entertained the likes of Vice-President Aaron Burr, the Marquis de Lafayette, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, and French General Humbert. Charleston had no one like her at all -- except perhaps the infamous Grace Piexotto.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant.Visit www.historyslostmoments.com.)