Book Review: The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans
Long, Alecia P. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and
Respectability in
New Orleans, 1865-1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University
Press, 2005).
While some
historians have chosen to study prostitution and other less reputable behaviors
from social and cultural perspectives; others view the subject through the gaze
of law, politics, and crime. While
Alecia Long’s narrative is driven by a series of five Louisiana Supreme
Court cases, her entrance into this historiography with The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920 resembles
more of a town studies approach.
Her objectives, stated from the first page of the preface, are to
explain a place – Storyville – and how it came into existence. By
using locale as a cohesive focal point, Long successfully considers the
relationship that race and respectability played in the formation, tolerance,
and even promotion of sex entertainment in New Orleans. While her examination of prostitution
reveals many of the unique features of the region, Long successfully places New Orleans within a
national context. Protesting the
exclusion of cities such as New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, and El Paso from larger
conversations about prostitution, Long hopes that her work will be part of the
undoing of a “false picture of southern homogeneity” evident in
other studies. (5)
Offering an escape
from traditional southern morality was an attraction New Orleans exploited. In an era of strict taboos against
interracial coupling, prostitution across the color line “remained a
lucrative and much touted feature of the city’s culture of commercial
sexuality for decades after Emancipation.” (11) From the legacy of
quadroon balls and open market sales of fancy girls emerged a world of concert
halls and brothels that New Orleans
politicians and activists sought to preserve, regulate and segregate. By creating the theoretically isolated
vice district of Storyville, prostitutes and other commercial sex workers could
be kept away from what was deemed respectable society. In practice, however,
Storyville’s sixteen square blocks developed a symbiotic relationship not
only with tourists and traveling business people, but also with the surrounding
city and its residents. According
to Long, “While many respectable citizens were willing to profit from
prostitution indirectly, most did not wish to share physical space with
brothels and other sexually oriented businesses.” (149) Certainly the sex
workers and business owners in and outside of the limits of Storyville made and
spent a considerable amount of money in New
Orleans. In addition they drew business to the city
which economically benefited even the most removed enterprises in town.
The allure of
interracial liaisons dominated the sex commerce in New Orleans in interesting ways. While being white implied a privileged
status in most regions of the South, this was not necessarily the case in
Storyville during the nadir of race relations. Due to the carefully advertised
and well-accepted beliefs that women of color made better lovers, mixed-race
prostitutes represented the ideal combination of refinement and culture while
remaining “skilled in the erotic arts.” (205) Because women were
able to increase earnings by claiming the status of octoroon, women of a
variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds adopted the term if they could pass it
off and profit from it. In fact,
identifiers such as race and nationality had less to do with a woman’s
family tree than it did the sexual acts she would perform. For example, women listed is
Storyville’s Blue Books as French were women who sold oral sex services
(called the “French” at the time), not ladies whose families came
from France.
Similarly, the status of octoroon designated price of services, level of education,
atmosphere of her workplace, and other factors associated with the
prostitute’s behavior.
Long reveals how
race became a tricky classification as Jim Crow statutes changed from relaxed
and tolerant for residents of the vice district christened, Storyville.
Following national trends, progressive reformers attempted to mimic
traditionally southern urban patterns.
In 1917, the city council passed legislation to force segregation in
Storyville. Although reformers
wanted to use racial separation as a means to impose their dictates of morality
and respectability on those in the vice industries, they had two major
obstacles. First of all, after
decades of miscegenation in New
Orleans, race was often difficult to delineate
exactly. While much of the South
cultivated a white-black color scheme of racial codes, New Orleans had long operated on what Long
calls “the tripartite racial system.” (203) Not only did this
disrupt an already complex social strata, it interfered with consumer demands
for cross-racial sex. Some whites wanted to keep black clientele away from
white women, while other white patrons wanted to maintain their access to women
of color. Furthermore, mixed-race women in Storyville resisted this regulation
with a force far greater than politicians and activists had anticipated. For
years the octoroon class of prostitutes took pride in their status at the top
of the workers’ hierarchy in Storyville. Long illustrates the lives and political
battles of two successful octoroon madams affected by the policy changes whose
cases temporarily held off Jim Crow in New Orleans.
Published from her
University of Delaware dissertation, Long’s
complex and compelling analysis of Storyville is sophisticated and contributory
to American, and particularly, southern history. Long convincingly argues that New Orleans is unique to
the South but created by it as an internal release valve of mores and
traditions. This legacy of sex
commerce and loosened social attitudes remained a constant attraction to the
city throughout the rest of the twentieth century despite the official closing
of the district as a segregated vice arena in 1917. While Long’s work
indicates a strong drive to debunk many popular myths about Storyville, the
tales are still vibrant and romantic.
In tandem with her strengths, however, Long neglects the prostitutes as
workers with rights, despite a claim that in addition to studying the district,
she “also wanted to learn about the lives of the women who worked
there.” (xiii) Most of her attention is focused on the city leaders and
wealthy madams at the top. Their omission is unfortunate, but Long’s work
provides a solid foundation and springboard for further studies.
