Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans by Emily Epstein Landau (review)

Whether it is justified or not, New Orleans has a reputation for decadence that dates back more than a century. A great deal of that history centers around the famous or infamous French Quarter, and at the turn of the twentieth century, race, sex, gambling, prostitution, and other “vices” flourished in a section just north of the district known as Storyville. In this book, Emily Epstein Landau dives into this underworld to examine the lives of those who made it tick and the problems facing New Orleans and the Jim Crow South in general. She asks how many of Storyville’s “stories” actually just perpetrated grandiose myths that are still alive today.

Landau explains that Storyville came to be because of a city council ordinance passed in 1898 that designated close to twenty blocks north of New Orleans’s French Quarter as open to prostitution. This decision was not unique in larger American cities at the time, and it was part of plans to beautify the city by confining vice to a specific, controlled district. Landau makes a point to note that New Orleans’s racial history differed from other southern cities. Dating back to the antebellum period and even before to the French and Spanish colonial eras, New Orleans and Louisiana had tiered racial hierarchies, with special classes of Creoles and lighter-skinned African Americans sitting somewhere in the middle of society.

Some of these Creole prostitutes defied the Supreme Court’s 1896 landmark ruling on segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson, by catering to white men. Categorized as “octoroons” because they carried one-eighth “Negro blood,” these women were subject to segregation laws, but Landau shows that the laws were not always enforced in Storyville. To further her point, Landau delves into the life of one of Storyville’s most famous madams, Lulu White, a self-proclaimed octoroon who often even denied her African American heritage. She thus straddled the color line, often defying the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision and personifying the vague, murky position of many Storyville residents.

Landau uses a good portion of the book to explore the modernization of New Orleans, the creation of the New South, and Storyville’s place within broader developments in American society and memories about this era. Storyville existed from 1897 to 1917, a time of great change and racial strife in the South. It was a period dominated by adherents to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and those who claimed that a “New South” was being created. These elements often contradicted each other, a fact nowhere more apparent than in race relations. Defenders of the Lost Cause thesis looked back to the antebellum period for inspiration, striving to re-create the Old South and its institutions, chiefly, white supremacy and the access of white male society to sexual power. Landau notes that the houses and bordellos of Storyville partially served to re-create this antebellum, white supremacist sexual order. Some were even decorated to resemble plantation parlors and houses. She concludes the book by highlighting the fact that the district helped to bridge the gap from slavery to segregation in New Orleans at the beginning of the Jim Crow era in the early twentieth century.

Landau’s exhaustive use of sources, ranging from court cases from the federal, state, city, and district levels to national and state government documents and private document collections, allows her to provide a comprehensive investigation of the city’s history, with a particular emphasis on the lives of those who called Storyville and New Orleans home. Landau’s book is successful in breaking down myths about the city’s history under Jim Crow while at the same time illuminating the differences between New Orleans and other southern cities, differences partially created by Storyville and the “third class” its inhabitants represented.