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6 Violent Lives A ntebellum New Orleans was home to a society permeated by violence . Prostitutes were often the victims of brutal acts, sometimes by their customers, sometimes by brothel bullies, and frequently by other prostitutes. A few public women turned on themselves and tried to commit suicide. For example, in 1855 Augusta Smith, a seventeen-year-old German immigrant, used laudanum “as a means of fleeing from the ills she suffered.” Three months later, Fanny Palfrey also used laudanum in an attempt to end her life, but someone discovered her intent and administered an emetic. She survived the incident. The same year, Lena King jumped into the Mississippi River in an attempt to commit suicide. An onlooker jumped in and saved her, and “she was sent back to her disreputable home.” The New Orleans Daily Picayune noted that this attempt was Lena’s second try at ending her life.1 The following year, “one of the frail daughters of Gallatin street,” Ann Doyle, jumped into the New Canal and drowned. The Picayune observed: “Hard, indeed, must be her lot, if her prospects are darkened by the change.” Three weeks later a free woman of color named Eliza leapt into the “Father of Floods” (the Mississippi River) in a suicide attempt. A passerby grabbed her by the hair and saved her life. She told him that she had been dis­ traught because her lover had deserted her and enlisted in the “Nicaraguan movement.”2 In 1861 Mary Ann Winters, an “abandoned woman,” tried to commit suicide in the First District Lockup by hanging herself from the upper bunk in her cell. The clerk of the institution observed her actions and cut her R 90 Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women down. The Picayune noted that the clerk had saved her life, “casting her once more adrift on this wide, wide tempestuous world.”3 Men who associated with prostitutes sometimes took their own lives. In 1856 twenty-three-year-old Washington Johnson, who “was much addicted to strong drinks and the use of opium as a stimulant,” took a large quantity of laudanum in a brothel and died. Originally, police thought that some of the women in the brothel had poisoned him, but an autopsy proved that he had caused his own demise. Two year later, Frank Ringler, a German immigrant, went to a brothel on Gravier Street, wrote a suicide note, and swallowed a fatal dose of laudanum. He wrote, “An unfortunate love affair brings me to this determination. . . . The enclosed miniature will indicate the person for whom I die.” The following year, a twenty-year-old French immigrant named Eugene Lacoste killed himself in a brothel on Burgundy Street. He had spent the previous night there, as well as some other nights, and upon awakening, he asked one of the women of the house to go for coffee for him. When she returned, she found him dead with a gunshot wound to the head. Before his death, Lacoste had been a vendor at the cigar stand in Santini’s Coffee Saloon. He left a note addressed to Joe Santini the day before he died telling him that he would not see him again and that he would find some money missing when he checked his accounts. Santini denied any discrepancies in his accounts. He said he had always known Lacoste to be honest and upright and felt his death must be the result of some family trouble . In 1861 another man, not identified by the Picayune, “out of respect for his family, which is a very respectable one,” killed himself in a brothel on Tremé Street.4 Some public women drank prodigious, and sometimes fatal, amounts of alcohol. City authorities had to put “Shell Road Mary alias 2.40” (the price of her favors?) into a taxicab to take her to the lockup because they found her in the gutter of Perdido Street in an advanced state of inebriation. The recorder sentenced her to three months in the workhouse, calling her “idle, worthless, lewd and abandoned.” Police arrested Ellen Flemming, alias Judy Come Home with the Soap, on Perdido Street so drunk that they brought her to the watch house in a furniture cart. The recorder sent her to “her old quarters in the Workhouse.” Catherine Kennedy, aged thirty-one, died in a brothel in 1856. The coroner’s verdict: “died of intemperance. Deceased was a poor, frail, fallen creature.” Police arrested Ellen O’Brien, “who ever since she crossed...

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