Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel by Maryjean Wall (review)

Maryjean Wall’s book, Madam Belle, is full of amusing anecdotes and diverting digressions about the characters who inhabited the Lexington, Kentucky, underworld in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ostensibly about the legendary madam Belle Brezing, Wall also offers a view into the world of Bluegrass horse culture, enlightening the reader about thoroughbreds, trotters, and the men who made their money on them. While the stories Wall tells are interesting and fun, they do not add up to the promise of the book, a cohesive narrative about public morality and prostitution in Kentucky between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I.

Wall explains in her introduction that previous treatments of Brezing’s life have ignored the significance of Bluegrass horse culture and the individuals who inhabited it; their world intersected in important ways with the demimonde. Thus, she writes, “We cannot know Belle without knowing Lexington as she knew it. Much of her world was connected in some way to horse racing and breeding. A greater proportion of Lexington’s population ‘spoke horse’ in Belle’s day than is true of modern times.” And importantly, “Belle’s clients were horsemen” (vii). While stories of these horsemen provide an intriguing context for the world of prostitution, here they have overshadowed rather than complemented the stories of Belle Brezing—the women who worked at various brothels—and the culture of illicit, commercialized sex in the modernizing postbellum South.

To be fair, Wall indicates in her preface that this book “is not solely Belle’s biography.” Wall warns the reader that “Belle disappears at intervals throughout the narrative” (vii). Indeed she does, only to reappear often in conjectural ways, as when, at the end of chapter eight which describes the coming of the automobile and other hallmarks of modern life to Kentucky. “Belle would have seen and welcomed these changes,” Wall claims. “A brilliant businesswoman, she sensed big money coming to her town” (112). How did this “big money” affect Brezing’s life and business? How did modernization affect sexual morality and prostitution? It is not clear. Horses and horse traders remain the focus.

We learn that Belle’s brothel was as much—or more—a meeting place for men on the make to socialize with one another in a comfortable, even luxurious, atmosphere, where the liquor flowed and deals were made, than it was a place to purchase sex. Indeed, the prostitutes under Belle’s roof seem almost to have been superfluous. This homosocial atmosphere, charged with sex, money, and privilege, is called up vividly by Wall. Brezing’s patrons “knew that, at her house, they could enjoy a night drinking among like-minded men while perhaps sealing a deal on a horse. And if they so desired, they could walk upstairs for a longer night with one of Belle’s prostitutes” (2). It is intriguing to consider how bordellos served as retreats for men to engage in horse-trading, where they were guaranteed total discretion.

The early chapters of the book describe Belle’s childhood. She was born in Kentucky on the eve of Civil War. Kentucky was a border state; its residents were divided among Unionists and Confederate sympathizers, and the streets were the scenes of some bloody confrontations. Yet the central issues of the Civil War and its aftermath are papered over. We never get a sense of how race played out in Lexington. There are some tantalizing glimpses. For instance, the “best jockey in the nation” in the 1890s, according to Wall, was an African American man named Isaac Murphy, but we never learn more about him and his career, in spite of Wall’s focus on the turf (5). In another instance, a madam named Sue Green was indicted for running a brothel; her lawyer denigrated the charges because they had been brought by “negroes” living in the red-light district (59). There...