ON JUNE 16, 1881, the newspapers of New Orleans announced that Marie Laveau was dead. This was the Widow Paris.
Immediately the most fantastic legends were born. At the moment of her passing the earth beneath the cottage had trembled and lightning and thunder had passed through the room. There had been the sounds of creaking chains and turning wheels, and shrieks of joy from the fiends of Hell. In reality old Marie died peacefully, in her sleep.
The most astonishing fact about her death was that she bad departed this life in an atmosphere as impressively Catholic as if she had been the Mother Superior of a convent. In her last years she had accomplished a startling, though characteristic enough, metamorphosis. She had renounced the Zombi and all his works, denied any connection with the Voodoos and returned to the Church. Thereafter some members of the family expressed passionate indignation at even an implication that she had ever been a Voodooienne.
Most of the morning newspapers the morning after her death carried stories of her saintliness. One of these, which appeared in the Daily Picayune, was so naive that either its
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author was not a native of the city or he was very young and knew nothing of Voodoo. It is probably one of the most interesting documents in existence regarding the Marie Laveaus, stating:
DEATH OF MARIE LAVEAU, A WOMAN WITH A WONDERFUL HISTORY, ALMOST A CENTURY OLD--CARRIED TO THE TOMB YESTERDAY EVENING
Those who have passed by the quaint old house on St. Ann, between Rampart and Burgundy streets, with the high frail-looking fence in front over which a tree or two is visible, have been within the last few years pleased to notice through the open gateway a decrepid [sic] old lady with snow-white hair, and a smile of peace and contentment lighting up her golden features. For a few years past she has been missed from her accustomed place. The feeble old lady lay upon her bed with her daughter and grandchildren around her, ministering to her wants.
On Wednesday the invalid sank into the sleep which knows no waking. Those whom she had befriended crowded into the little room where she was exposed, in order to take a last took at the features, smiling even in death, of her who had been so kind to them.
At 5 o'clock yesterday evening Marie Laveau was buried in her family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery. Her remains were followed to the grave by a large concourse of people, the most prominent and the most humble joining in paying their last respects to the dead. Father Mignot conducted the funeral services.
Marie Laveau was born ninety-eight years ago. Her father was a rich planter, who was prominent in all public affairs, and served in the Legislature of this State. Her mother Was Marguerite Henry, and her grandmother was Marguerite Semard. All were beautiful women of color. The gift of beauty was hereditary in the family, and Marie inherited it in the fullest degree. When she was twenty
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five years old she was led to the altar by Jacques Paris, a carpenter. This marriage took place at the St. Louis Cathedral, Père Antoine, of beloved memory, conducting the service, and Mr. Mazureau, the famous lawyer, acting as witness. A year afterward Mr. Paris disappeared, and no one knows to this day what became of him. After waiting a year for his return she married Capt. Christophe Glapion. The latter was also very prominent here, and served with distinction in the battalion of men of Santo Domingo, under D'Aquin, with Jackson in the war of 1815. . . .
Besides being very beautiful Marie was also very wise. She was skillful in the practice of medicine and was acquainted with the valuable healing qualities of indigenous herbs.
She was very successful as a nurse, wonderful stories being told of her exploits at the sickbed. In yellow fever and cholera epidemics she was always called upon to nurse the sick, and always responded promptly. Her skill and knowledge earned her the friendship and approbation of those sufficiently cultivated, but the ignorant attributed her success to unnatural means and held her in constant dread.
Notably in 1853 a committee of gentlemen, appointed at a mass meeting held at Globe Hall, waited on Marie and requested her on behalf of the people to minister to the fever-stricken. She went out and fought the pestilence where it was thickest and many alive today owe their salvation to her devotion. . . . Marie was also very pious and took delight in strengthening the allegiance of souls to the church, She would sit with the condemned in their last moments and endeavor to turn their last thoughts to Jesus. Whenever a prisoner excited her pity Marie would labor incessantly to obtain his pardon, or at least a commutation of sentence, and she generally succeeded.
A few years ago, before she lost control of her memory, she was rich in interesting reminiscences of the early history of this city. She spoke often of the young American Governor Claiborne, and told how his child-wife he brought
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with him from Tennessee [and who] died of the yellow fever shortly after his arrival, with the dead babe upon her bosom, was buried in a corner of the old American Cemetery. She spoke sometimes of the strange little man with the wonderful bright eyes, Aaron Burr, who was so polite and so dangerous. She loved to talk of Lafayette, who visited New Orleans over half a century ago. The great Frenchman came to see her at her house, and kissed her on the forehead at parting.
She remembered the old French General, Humbert, and was one of the few colored people who escorted to the tomb long since dismantled in the Catholic Cemetery the withered and grizzly remains of the hero of Castlebar. Probably she knew Father Antoine better than any living in those days--for he the priest and she the nurse met at the dying bedside of hundreds of people--she to close the faded eyes in death, and he to waft the soul over the river to the realms of eternal joy.
All in all Marie Lave au was a most wonderful woman. Doing good for the sake of doing good alone, she obtained no reward, ofttimes meeting with prejudices and loathing; she was nevertheless contented and did not lag in her work. She always had the cause of the people at heart and was with them in all things. During the late rebellion she proved her loyalty to the South at every opportunity and fully dispensed help to those who suffered in defense of the "lost cause."
Her last days were spent surrounded by sacred pictures and other evidences of religion, and she died with a firm trust in Heaven. While God's sunshine plays around the little tomb where her remains are buried, by the side of her second husband, and hex sons and daughters, Marie Laveau's name will not be forgotten in New Orleans.
This was written of the Marie Laveau who had danced with snakes, who had drunk the warm blood of the sacrifice, who had chanted Congo songs to the tempo of the tom-toms,
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who had crept through the streets in the dead of the night to leave coffins and conjure balls on the doorsteps of her enemies. This was written of the Marie Laveau who had been accused of committing human sacrifice.
And it was not the only such article. Almost all the papers carried similar ones. But there was one dissenter. The next day, June 18, a writer published in the New Orleans Democrat the following denunciation of the hymns of praise. He was so angry he did not even bother to use the correct spelling of the Laveau name. Such mispellings were commonplace.
A SAINTED WOMAN
Who has been stuffing our contemporaries in the matter of the defunct Voudou queen, Marie Lavoux? For they have undoubtedly been stuffed, nay crammed, by some huge practical joker. The informant for all is evidently the same, as the stories of the Picayune, Item, and States consist admirably in their uniform departure from historical fact. According to these esteemed but deluded contemporaries, Marie Lavoux was a saint, who had spent a life of self-sacrifice and abnegation in doing good to her fellow mortals, and whose immaculate spirit was all but too pure for this world.
One of them even went so far in his enthusiasm as to publish a touching interview with the sainted woman, in which the reporter boasts of having deposited a chaste kiss on her holy forehead. We are sorry for that reporter if his story is true, for, if he really believes it all, his only consolation is in the fact that greenness is the color of hope. These fictions had one good result, for they created a vast amount of merriment among the old Creole residents, and in fact among all men of mature age who knew the social history of their time in New Orleans.
The fact is that the least said about Marie Lavoux's sainted life, etc., the better. She was, up to an advanced
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age, the prime mover and soul of the indecent orgies of the
ignoble Voudous; and to her influence may be attributed the fall of many a virtuous woman. It is true that she had redeeming traits. It is a peculiar quality of the old race of Creole Negroes that they are invariably kind-hearted and charitable. Marie Lavoux made no exception. But talk about her morality and kiss her sainted brow--pouah!!!
Thus it was, saint or witch, Marie Laveau received even at her death the publicity she seemed so to love during her reign over the Voodoos. Even her age was exaggerated. The certificate of death stated that she was ninety-eight. Board of Health records in New Orleans do show the birth of a Marie Laveau in 1783, but if that is the Voodoo queen, then she was about thirty-six when she married Paris and forty when she bore Glapion the first of their fifteen children. That does not make sense. The name was a common one. There were many Marie Laveaus born during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. There were even several women of that name who lived in the same block of St. Ann Street during the time she lived there. Some may have been relatives, others probably were not. To add to the confusion there were Marie Labeauds and Marie Lavauds. The physician present at her final illness, Doctor J. B. Bass of New York, later made a public statement in which he said that then he did not believe her to be as old as the family had claimed. He judged her as being somewhere in her late eighties.
Nowhere in the accounts of the death or the funeral is there a word about Marie II. Legally, strange as it may seem, Marie II died with her mother.
There is, however, mention of a single daughter, Madame Legendre, who is described as being "majestic in appearance" and "nearly white." She was the widow of a white man and the mother of several nearly white children. What had become of Marie II and of John Laveau? Had all the other children of old Marie died or gone away?
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There are several theories. One is that Madame Legendre was so anxious for the family to attain a respectable reputation that she somehow secured dominance over Marie II and banished her from the St. Ann Street cottage after their mother's death. Another is that Madame Legendre and Marie II were the same person. The latter is not impossible, but it is not very probable. Madame Legendre bore the reputation of being a highly religious woman, who though she sometimes told fortunes and invited people to burn candles and tapers before the altar in the house, despised anything that was tainted with Voodooism. It was probably she who had convinced the newspaper reporters of her mother's saintliness.
It was Madame Legendre who spent the next few years in a fervent effort to purify the family tree. When George W. Cable wrote of Marie Laveau as one of the greatest sorceresses; of all time, Madame uttered protestations, threatened libel suits, wept, swore and made novenas. If this was Marie II putting on an act it seems without purpose. No, we can be sure that Marie II must have been a separate being and certainly a source of much displeasure to Madame.
A reporter for the Daily Picayune (he sounds like the same one who penned the sentimental account at the time of the death of the Widow Paris) called at the Laveau cottage and read its occupants a part of Cable's impressions of Marie Laveau and a few days later published a story of his visit--this was five years after the passing of old Marie--and of Madame's reaction, telling how:
Although it was an April day, there was a fire in Marie Laveau's old room. Around it sat Mme. Legendre and three of her daughters, one of them a chubby child across her lap. There are still three generations in the place.
Every one of the group was comely. Madame, although her heavy mass of hair is turning as white as that of her mother, still shows the sign of beauty which she inherited. Tall, majestic, graceful, the eye still flashing fire, and with
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firm step she rules her household, even if she has not the tact of Marie Laveau to extend her realm and number her subjects by the hundreds. This is what the reporter read to the group, in the little room of the old house, beside the fire that failed to brighten the walls, but cast a glow upon the faces. It is from "Creole Slave Songs," in the April Century, by George W. Cable:
". . . I once saw, in her extreme old age, the famed Marie Laveau. Her dwelling was in a quadroon quarter of New Orleans, but a step or two from Congo Square, a small adobe cabin just off the sidewalk, scarcely higher than its close board fence, whose batten gate yielded to the touch and revealed the crazy doors and windows spread wide to the warm air, and one or two tawny faces within, whose expression was divided between a pretense of contemptuous inattention and a frowning resentment of the intrusion. In the center of a small room whose ancient cypress floor was worn with scrubbing and sprinkled with crumbs of soft brick--a Creole affectation of superior cleanliness--sat quaking with feebleness in an ill-looking old rocking chair, her body bowed, and her wild, gray witch's -tresses hanging about her shriveled yellow neck, the queen of the Voudous . . . her daughter was also present, a woman of some seventy years, and a most striking and majestic figure. In feature, stature and bearing she was regal. One had but to look on her, impute her brilliance--too untamable and severe to be called charms or graces--to her mother, and remember what New Orleans was long years ago, to understand how the name of Marie Laveau should have driven itself inextricably into the traditions of the town and times. . . ."
None of the four women waited until the reading was over. Several times the reporter was interrupted by angry laughs of derision and angry cries of "It's a lie. It's a lie." When the reading was over they were quite beside themselves with rage. Madame was walking up and down the
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room with quick sharp steps, making vain attempts to express herself in English and then relapsing into scorching French. . . .
It went on and on. Madame Legendre threatened to have the house torn down as soon as she had sufficient money to build a new one. She was tired of it all. Too many curious persons were bothering her and the children. Artists came and wanted to paint pictures. Newspapermen and writers would no longer be welcome. They had been received kindly, then had gone off to write untruths. The house would be boarded up and the front gate locked.
Somewhere in or near the city Marie II must have been worried about her future.
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