The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  Thus he philosophized for a long time, taking a hearty swig from his demijohn from time to time.

  When he tried to tune his guitar, he discovered to his distress that two strings had broken, and—horror of horrors—the sounding board had a long crack.

  This crack had appeared last night, when he returned home in a rather spirited state and used his guitar to kill a rat.

  If the Cocker had not looked so often at his demijohn, he would have come to the conclusion that the serenade for Orleana was out for this evening.

  We have already remarked that the Cocker was also a poet; but he often committed the unforgivable impropriety of bestowing no garlands on his hippogryph.

  So he commenced reasoning in the following manner:

  “Since it is of no small poetic worth in praising my darling that my heart is broken rather than happy, or to have a split in my heart, which is the same, and since singers and paladins describe their ‘broken heartstrings’ in hundreds and hundreds of songs, it would only be a perfect symbol of my love for me to serenade my compatriot with a broken guitar.”

  Now there was another quaff from the demijohn.

  If up to now he had been a poetic pedant, now he became a frivolous Abbé Chaulieu.

  What an effect the consumption of liquor can have! It makes the dumbest of us witty, the most phlegmatic genial.

  The Cocker was ready to go, his guitar under his arm, a Hecker hat cocked fantastically on his left ear.19

  “Es zogen zwei Burschen wohl über den Rhein!” he whistled away as he stepped out the door into the street.

  The streets were already still.

  The fresh night air had such an enlivening effect on him that it was as if he had wings on his feet; in truth, it seemed as if the gaslights, the houses—everything—rushed with him toward Toulouse Street.

  He passed from whistling to declamation, and one must really confess that here he outdid himself.

  “Beautiful women of New Orleans!” he let his imagination rip, “I love you because of the knavish glances with which you so often tempt me—I—I love you because of your naive sins—I love your children, the representatives of selfless love and sensuality—I love you for the prickly heat on your silken shoulders, when gleaming helios has wounded you with his kiss—I love you for the white powder I get on my shirt-front—I love you for the eau de Cologne on your blouses and stockings—most lovely—most lovely blossoms in the palmetto boudoir of Louisiana, I love you with all the passion of a botanist; for the wilted stems and petals in my herbarium are the gospel of my trans-Atlantic love …

  “Toulouse Street? Hm, hm—that must be Toulouse Street!” He tottered about looking for someone he could ask.

  “Damn’d! I’m already too far—yet—stop! Here—here is the Rheinpfalz, here is the Stadt Mannheim, and here is Victor’s Restaurant—now it’s sure that I’ve come too far—and where does my compatriot live?—so, so, there’s still a light at Victor’s—I must have a quick one along my way.”

  The Cocker pounded two, three, four times on the restaurant door, but in vain. No one would open.

  “I will bankrupt the lout—just you wait, you scoundrel—I’ll be damned if I have supper with you ever again,” he threatened the closed door with his fist.

  The Cocker now entered the phase in which a drunk begins to become brutal.

  His self-deception grew extreme.

  He no longer spoke of the deification of beautiful women, but rather he swore like a guttersnipe.

  When he reached the office of the German Society,20 he pounded his guitar on the door and roared:

  “Well, if you know anything, you in there—you German Society—where is my beautiful compatriot?—You, you are my people—you, you? You’ll take a couple dollars in advance, and then you’d still not lead me to her. Don’t look at the nest! It is so filthy, so infamous and greasy, that a decent person is ashamed just going past it—hah, hah, German Society—get out—where does my compatriot live? ‘—Oh, she is never at home—adieu …’”

  Sometimes stumbling, sometimes leaping high when he encountered something, waving his guitar in the air, he went several squares further.

  If the sound of a piano had not reached his ears now, he would have gone right past Orleana’s house a second time.

  “Halt, halt—here—how beautifully my compatriot can play,” he declaimed, not quietly, once he had had a sufficient look at the house—doors, balcony, and all.

  Then he called out the name of his compatriot with the greatest pathos several times, at last so loudly and piercingly that it was no wonder that Orleana ceased playing and woke her slave woman.

  He was about to begin his “Es zogen zwei Burschen …” when he was hit by powerful blows, and he would have fallen if a nearby wall, which his head struck, had not held him erect.

  “I’ll beat you to death, you lout, if you don’t leave this place immediately and never return!” thundered a voice in French.

  Although the Cocker had never learned a word of French in seven years in New Orleans, he could suspect why he was treated thus, and he hauled himself away as best he could, not going home at all but spending the night in the calaboose.

  The next morning, after he had paid his last cent in a fine to the recorder, he wandered home in a dreadful mood, swearing to revenge the injustice done him and to discourage his competitor from forbidding his serenade.

  Despite this hindrance, his desire for Orleana had grown even more intense.

  Chapter 7

  PARASINA BRULARD-HOTCHKISS

  Now we lead the reader into the Third Municipality, where he will see crimes committed that, although they are rather common in and around New Orleans, are still horrifying and debasing. Robber’s Roost and similar hiding places and dens of vice in St. Louis are temples of the fairies compared with the home of the infamous Negresse Parasina Abigail Brulard, or Hotchkiss—as the Americans call her—in the eastern portion of the Third Municipality.

  Anyone to whom the shameful, immoral activities of the colored people in New Orleans is no longer a secret will not shudder too much when I lead him to a place where the most unnatural sins are practiced as everyday activities and where vice emerges in all its glory and splendor. It is no wonder one sees the untrammeled frivolity of African beauties, who boldly leap over the boundaries of decency set by civilization and innocent nature, drowning in the white-hot stream of a throbbing volcano of sensuality. But for those who have encountered nothing in the South but the golden fruit of the orange tree and the bright blossoms of the chaste magnolia, and who know no greater horror than the growl of an alligator or the poisonous bite of the congo snake—those people might find the colors of my painting a bit garish. They will surely doubt the truth of what is portrayed and accuse us of violating the sovereignty of the human spirit or of having trod its dignity in the dirt.

  We will ask these innocent children of paradise to pass over this chapter and the eighth, and to bide their time until the ninth comes.

  We have long considered whether it is not too daring to permit this chapter in our novel, since many still worship a veiled portrait without having the courage to lift the veil. Those of our times have long since arrived at the philosophy that there is no further profit to be gained from veiling things and that knowledge is by no means as dangerous as the lies of a negative religion would have it. Even if we find human beings to be degenerate beasts under this veil, it is still better that we see them in their full ugliness than hear their howling and gibbering and fearfully hide ourselves behind our nursemaid’s skirts. Vice, when painted in its nakedness, leads to a knowledge of human beings; mere allusion and gentle veiling leads to confusion.

  In the eastern portion of the Third Municipality stands a large building built of brick in the form of a long parallelogram. The many large doors on the front of the house, which faces south, are always barred, and malice has dirtied them and covered them with so many caricatures and slogans that the original green paint
can only be discerned in a few places. This building, with no windows on the ground floor, was once a tobacco warehouse, and in 1847 an auction brought it to its present owner, the free Negresse Parasina Brulard. It was had at that time for the enormous price of fifteen thousand dollars. Considering that the entire first floor consisted only of a single room in which there were only naked piers, devoid of decoration, and considering as well that there were a great number of small rooms on the second floor made of planks of the most indifferent construction, without any hominess or comfort, no one expected a buyer to use this building for any other purpose than as a warehouse. At first it was thought that Madame Brulard would rent out the lower floor or exploit it in some other speculative manner. But a whole year had passed, and the building still stood empty and quiet. There was none of the previous business, no drays, no clerks, no agents—nothing of the sort of thing which had once been common in and around the building. People could think what they wished, and the black woman had the right to do with her property what she wanted. A rather roomy courtyard on the back of the building was enclosed by a wall thirteen feet high, penetrated by a small door that was reached by a step three feet high. That was the sole visible entry, since the doors on the front were never opened, as mentioned. We do not wish to linger on the external description of this place longer but to turn our gaze into the interior.

  The great hall on the ground floor, which occupied the entire width and breadth of the building, and whose view was not disturbed by any partitions or divisions, had been transformed by Madame Brulard into a sleeping hall, with hundreds of straw mattresses covering the floorboards. In surprising contrast to the more than cynic simplicity of this mammoth dormitory, whose bare walls were not even painted and whose ceiling revealed raw beams and planks, there were several clothing mirrors a good six feet high, which were always placed two by two, so that a woman dressing could see herself from both the front and the back. Each of these mirrors hung between two commode tables, in whose recesses were located the materials for lighting the dormitory. Light was absolutely necessary; the place was otherwise so dark that one could barely see the outline of a body. These commodes took the place of the columns usually used for such mirrors, and they had the extra advantage that the light did not create disturbing reflections for the person making themselves up.

  It was Sunday morning. Utter, uncanny silence ruled in the dormitory, only broken here and there by the quiet murmurs of a few girls, barely roused from sleep, as they softly exchanged words with one another. Most were still sunk in slumber or groggily tossed on their colorfully quilted blankets.

  Two of them must have just entered, since their complete clothing and disgruntled faces indicated that they had spent the night elsewhere. More and more were being driven out of bed by impatience, and they stood in their most low-cut negligées in front of the mirrors, trying to put their hair in order. They were all young girls of eleven to fourteen years of age: Negresses, mulattos, mestizas, quadroons—in short, all the shadings of colored blood. Whoever might appear at this hour without knowing the reason for these girls’ gathering would have doubted his own sanity, believing instead that his senses had been clouded by some sort of trickery from the wand of an evil magician. If he then listened in on the soft conversations of the awakened girls, he would have realized, to his horror, that no magic or fantasy was afoot but rather that all of this was true and genuine. He would have come to the dreadful realization that he had entered a shameful den of vice, and that the bodies of these pretty maids were being sold and rented. He might have throttled the woman who owned these girls in his rage, little suspecting that he would never leave this pit alive.

  The two who had just arrived sat down on one of the empty beds after having taken off their clothes and put on long shifts. They were registered in their mistress’s name list as Pharis and Elma. They were of middle height, and their pitch black hair wound about their full brown shoulders. Their deep black eyes, their dark red lips, their glittering white teeth—which made every word they spoke to each other visible—the round, swelling contours of their body, all welled up with the warmth of life, which had not yet been stilted by the poisonous pall of habitual prostitution: these were all positive qualities that Parasina Brulard understood how to exploit. When she was in a good mood, she called these two her dear “gold chickens,” a term of endearment not worthy of them. They were highly regarded by the other girls, and anyone who disturbed Pharis and Elma had reason to fear mistreatment at the others’ hands.

  “Pharis,” Elma said, so quietly that the others could not hear, “do you really believe we can trust the young gentleman?”

  “What could he intend with us, Elma?” Pharis replied in a concerned tone. “If he doesn’t keep his promises to us, we could hardly end up in a situation worse than we are in now. I will follow his proposition, come what may.”

  “But just consider what torments we will endure if we are brought back! Madame will not rest until she has us in her clutches, and her connections with rich gentlemen will make it easy for her. I do not know the laws, but Celia, who came to us from a plantation a few weeks ago, tells me that her brother fled to Boston due to his massa’s brutality, and that he was brought back and had to endure the most dreadful tortures. I haven’t forgotten that!”

  Pharis seemed to think for a moment, then she responded in a relaxed voice: “They can force us back into slavery, Elma, but they cannot force us to lead such a shameful life. We will make a complaint against Madame and get justice!”

  “Make a complaint?—Get justice? Don’t you know,” Elma continued, “that we have no rights and cannot lodge a complaint?”

  “Why not? What are the courts for, the lawyers and all those white gentlemen? If I have suffered an injustice, why can I not make a complaint? Does color make a difference there, too?”

  A loud knocking, which seemed to come from the upper story, interrupted the conversation, and all eighty girls leaped up from their mattresses as if at a single command, dressed themselves in their long white shifts, and slipped on their shoes. Then they washed and did their hair in front of the mirrors, and in an instant they stood ready, lined up in two ranks along the whole length of the dormitory.

  This maneuver had a particular purpose, as we shall soon discover.

  Pharis and Elma had placed themselves in the first row.

  “Madame,” the first whispered, “will get no sin-money from me today; the young gentleman promised to pay me next Saturday. I hope that Madame will not be upset as a result.”

  “I have no idea,” Elma remarked in a somewhat louder voice, “what Madame’s attitude is right now. Ask Hyderilla, who will tell you what was done to her in a similar situation.”

  “What are you saying about me?” a girl of about eight called out with a bright child’s voice.

  “Elma thinks that you were severely punished by Madame when you extended credit to a rich planter’s son for a whole night.”

  “Yes I was,” declared the mestiza, barely out of children’s shoes. “Now I have them all pay in advance. I could not bear this punishment a second time. Oh, how it burned and stung!—And I could not cry out, since they had bandaged my mouth. But you all know how badly I was hurt then.”

  “Poor Hyderilla!” another remarked sympathetically. “She could have died of it.”

  Madame Brulard entered with a purse in her left hand and a pocketbook under her right arm. At her side was a slim little man.

  Anyone who encounters the personality of this woman for the first time has to be amazed. It would be pointless, a mere Tantaluslike hunt for proper words, to portray the full power that Parasina exercised on her poor victims simply by appearing. A glimpse of a holy shrine, prostituted by a priest to a faithful crowd, could not have summoned up such devoted silence. One could distinctly hear the breathing of the black and brown hosts. Their eyes flitted anxiously back and forth, barely daring to rest upon their mistress. Whoever has an imagination that can fly high eno
ugh to conjure up the Whore of Babylon and fix it in memory would have found Parasina her double.

  Madame Brulard was a powerful figure, a full six feet in height, whose large and mobile breasts emerged from a negligently closed dress. Her skin color, the blackness and crispness of which competed with satin and ebony, could easily be compared with dark pitch gilded by the shining rays of a tropic sun. Her large, black eyes, like the second hand on the white disk of a clock, left the slow minutes behind, continually twitching forward, shadowed by a crown of long lashes in which the bold son of Cythere had taken his residence. From her half-open mouth of bright red glittered the enamel of her faultless teeth. Her breasts heaved and rolled like the ocean in a hot night’s tempest. About her head was a sort of turban of carmoisin-red silk with fine black stripes. Her ears bore golden rings, which hung to her half-naked shoulders. The long shift, already so often mentioned, of the purity of new-fallen snow, was bound under her bodice with a rope of green silk, set with gold thread, whose tassel hung below her knee. Her feet were covered with moccasins decorated with bright blue bows and beads. On her little finger sparkled a diamond.

  Her companion, who had probably passed the night with her, was so short that he barely reached her breasts. He was dressed in a long black gown buttoned to his neck, and he wore a black straw hat that was pointed on top. His entire manner, his slack facial features, his unsteady, unclean gaze, continually leering at the rows of girls, testified to his identity as a man who had plunged to the depths. His head was quite small, his eyes set deep in their sockets, and his cheeks puffed. His face had that indeterminate color between that of one recovering from yellow fever and that of a drunken decadent. His hands were small, and of impeccable whiteness and fineness—certainly the most admirable feature of an otherwise despicable figure.