Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And so on . . .
By the mid-1800s, the city was known for its quadroon balls, opulent affairs where local
dandies went stag to dance halls on Saint Philip Street and watched through opera glasses as
young women of mixed race, the offspring, usually, of a white father and a half-black moth-
er, were marched across the floor in extravagant gowns. When the moment was right, a man
selected a quadroon. Dolled her up. Established her in luxury in a house in a section of the
city set aside for the purpose. Loved her. Impregnated her. A duke from Saxe-Weimar, Ger-
many, who attended a ball described the quadroons as “almost entirely white: from their skin
no one would detect their origin; nay many of them have as fair a complexion as many of the
haughty creole females.” A quadroon, once established, was referred to as a
placée
. She took
her man's name, as did her children. In this way, the wealthy men of New Orleans could lead
a double life, one above ground with a white wife and white children, the other subterranean
with a quadroon
placée
and octoroon children. The practice continued till the Civil War, in
thewakeofwhichracialdistinctionshardened.Nomoreballs.Nomoresecretfamilies.Most
of the quadroons (who, after generations of intermarriage, were more white than most white
people in the city) went north, where they vanished into the fabric of America.
The city owed its importance to the river. The Mississippi was the first American su-
perhighway,
Huckleberry Finn
the first American road novel. The wealth of the farms and
forests, the factories and mills, everything west of the Alleghenies—all of it floated down
the river. New Orleans was the city at the end of the run, where the produce was counted,
tagged, stacked, and shipped. The life of the city was the waterfront, the docks, the boats.
The first were pirogues, or canoes, fashioned, Indian-style, from tree trunks. These were fol-
lowed by keelboats, mackinaws, flatboats, scows, the grandest of them 300 feet long and as
tall as a house. There were barges known as arks; broadhorns, or Kentucky flats; and ferries,
called sleds, with roofs and passenger cabins. Before steam power, the challenge was getting
back upriver—to Cairo, to Saint Louis. After the flatboats were unloaded in New Orleans,
they were broken into pieces and sold as scrap wood. For years, the sidewalks of the French
Quarter were made from the debris of the riverboats. The crews then walked home—a trip
through wild country that took months. When he was young, Abraham Lincoln made the trip
from Illinois to New Orleans by raft. It was in the course of this journey that he first saw
slaves, sold in the French Quarter markets.
It was a rough life on the river, a story by Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London. The
crews slept on the decks of the boats, months in the open, watching the shore—punishing
in its sameness—drift by at two or three miles an hour. The men were unshaven and dirty;
they washed in the river but were never clean. They were bare-chested all summer or donned
brogans studded with spikes. In the winter, when the temperature dropped below freezing,
theyworefursofreshithadclaws.Therewasalwaysacardgamegoing,menhunchedovera
deck,bettingbyfirelight:faro,poker,blackjack,seven-up.Theysubsistedonbreadandmeat
