Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As soon as there were streets, they were lined with whorehouses. The early inhabitants
were a ragged crew of gamblers, vagabonds, criminals, and drunks. The first women were
prostitutes sent to pacify the ne'er-do-wells. In 1724, Bienville enacted the infamous Code
Noir, which called for the expulsion of all Protestants and Jews, but this order was largely
ignored. Infact, ifyouwere aJewinNorthAmerica inthe 18thcentury,youwouldhave had
a hard time finding a better place. In 1788, the city, then under Spanish rule, burned down
and was rebuilt, which is why the French Quarter looks less French than Spanish. Only two
original French buildings survive. One of these, at 632 Dumaine Street, is markedly differ-
ent from the others—blank-faced with few windows, oblong, closed off, shuttered, lonely,
strange. The French retook control in 1803, holding it just long enough to sell the entire ter-
ritory to the United States. New Orleans was a small city, 10,000 or so people crowded into
streets lined with beaneries, each an imitation of a grander establishment in the French capit-
als of the West Indies, such as Santo Domingo, which themselves were filled with imitations
of Paris.
The United States took over on December 20, 1803. William Claiborne was Louisiana's
first American governor—that's why his name is on everything. As the years went by, New
Orleans, which experts believed would be normalized by an influx of Americans, only be-
came more exotic. By the mid-1800s, its population was a hodgepodge: there were descend-
ants of the French who first settled on the land; there were descendants of the Spanish who
had ruled a generation later; there were descendants of the French who moved in when Que-
bec fell to the British (because they came from Acadia in Canada, they came to be known
as Cajuns); there were Americans who came in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, farmers
and rivermen from Kentucky; there were French nationals who came when the slaves rose in
SantoDomingo,drivingoutcolonialpropertyowners;therewereotherswhoemigratedfrom
thisorthatislandwhenthewrongnationcametopower—FrenchspeakersfromCuba,Dutch
fromCuraçao.NewOrleanswasabigdrain,pullinginthedebrisoftheriverandoceantrade,
with great forests and lumber mills to the north and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, Cuba,
Jamaica, the Spanish Main.
Once upon a time, men in New Orleans carried charts that classified the product of every
conceivable coupling:
1. black + white = mulatto
2. mulatto + white = quadroon
3. quadroon + white = octoroon
4. octoroon + white = quinteroon
5. mulatto + black = griffe
6. Indian + white = mestizo
