Who doesn’t love a dramatic ghost story told on a quaint 19th-century street? I spent 15 years walking groups of tourists around the New Orleans French Quarter telling such tales. Many visitors were drawn in by the chance to see an imposing gray mansion on a quiet corner, once owned by actor Nicolas Cage, though he’s not the owner they most want to hear about.
Visitors are more fascinated by the infamous Madame Delphine Lalaurie, who tortured her slaves in the house and allegedly now haunts the place with ghostly reenactments of her heinous crimes. It’s a dramatic yarn, especially for an evening tour, full of the glamorous and the grotesque. Tourists aren’t the only ones who are smitten — people have been caught up in the horror of this story since April 10, 1834, when a kitchen fire exposed the gory details.
But for all the cheap thrills, there is a real story here that fits into both the bigger picture of American history and our current moment. A closer look at the story of the Lalaurie mansion reveals a lot about systemic racism and what drives it: power.
Madame Lalaurie’s story dominated local news coverage at the time, and even made it across the pond. By August 1834, the French Consul to New Orleans felt compelled to explain the story to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, apparently assuming the story was already making the gossip rounds. An excerpt from Carolyn Morrow Long’s book, Madame LaLaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House, highlights this:
“Allow me to quote the facts to you, because you could not believe them if they were not confirmed to you by sufficient authority… I never saw a more horrible spectacle! The dislocated heads, the legs torn by the chains, the bodies streaked [with blood] from head to foot from whiplashes and sharp instruments… when [the slaves] were discovered, they were already devoured by maggots.”
Of course, the story didn’t end when it faded from the news cycle. From mid-19th-century travel writing to early 20th-century apologists to 21st-century binge television (American Horror Story: Coven), people can’t look away from a wealthy white woman who commits gruesome acts of violence against the Black people she’s enslaved. This horrific story has entered our collective imagination.
Walking away from the mansion, people try to make sense of the story in one of three ways: hate, madness, or disbelief. These explanations may turn Lalaurie into a mystery, but mysteries are to be solved. With some historical highlights, some story-telling embellishment, and some critical social theory (shout out to critical race theory, a “way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced,” as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the person who coined the term, once explained it), I think we can solve this one.
Tour guides like to start with the glamorous: “Delphine Lalaurie wore all the most beautiful 19th-century gowns, bedecked herself with the most expensive jewelry, and threw the most extravagant parties. How could she afford to do this?”
In the 19th century, the entire US economy was built on the bedrock of institutional slavery, and New Orleans was a thriving port city. As author Ibram X. Kendi reminds us, “It is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.” Capitalism has always relied on cheap, plentiful, and expendable labor; institutional slavery provided that labor; and systemic racism justified this entire arrangement.
Let’s not forget that people at the top of the social hierarchy relied on people at the bottom for everything: plantation profits, food preparation, even getting dressed. To be at the top of the social hierarchy was to not only be free of having to do physical labor, but to never need to understand what it takes to get something done. This was not a merit-based system; it was a system that promoted incompetence at the top.
After laying this groundwork, tour guides often follow the glamorous with the grotesque: “During these elegant parties, Lalaurie’s bloodlust would overtake her, and she’d disappear to the attic, returning only after putting on yet another elegant gown, having splatted the first in blood.”
Institutional slavery was violent. Enslavers were always terrified of rebellion. After the Haitian Revolution, they could no longer pretend that a rebellion could not succeed. When we tell Lalaurie's story, we often feign bafflement at her violence. By doing this, though, we gloss over the reality that to enslave another human being is itself an act of incredible violence. Enslavers verbally and physically abused the people they imprisoned in order to keep them compliant and reassert their dominance.
But let’s return to those three ways — hate, madness, or disbelief — people use to try to make sense of Delphine Lalaurie’s egregious acts. It is common for us to choose to reduce racism to hate. Too often this becomes an excuse to brush off racism as human frailty, something we can do nothing about. But human frailty does not explain racism, just like merit doesn’t explain social inequality.
Institutional slavery and the racism used to justify it are systems of inequality that do not rely on hate; they rely on everyone knowing “their place.” The system used violence and the ever-present threat of violence to keep everyone in their place. Popularizing stories of violence feeds the sense of that ever-present threat.
Choosing to write off Lalaurie’s actions as hate also gets more complicated when you take the larger picture into account. In Long’s book, she describes how many Creole men, including many of the men in the Lalaurie family, had long-term relationships and families with Black women — enslaved and free. You’ll notice I didn’t say they had Black wives, because being married would have elevated the women’s social status, and prevented the men from taking white wives, as some, but certainly not all, did.
Nonetheless, church registries are full of the baptisms of children born to white fathers and Black mothers, with both parents present as well as godparents. Lalaurie did not shy away from being the godmother to her mixed-race relatives. This tells us nothing of her “feelings” about those she enslaved, but it does tell us something about the complex social hierarchy she sat at the top of.
Other people choose to write her off as “crazy.” Lalaurie’s behavior was clearly extreme, but less so than we may want to believe. Chastising enslaved people to keep them in line was considered necessary by enslavers. In fact, according to Long’s research, women enslavers in New Orleans were notorious for going to extremes. Lalaurie's actions did not disrupt the social hierarchy; they reinforced it. When we attribute her actions to mental illness, what we really mean is that the problem is her, not the system. Or worse, we’re saying there is no system at all.
Finally, some tourists, wincing in discomfort, choose to insist that it’s all fiction. Erasure is not the answer to discomfort. Long explains that the St. Louis Cathedral funeral records reveal that 20 people enslaved by Lalaurie died between 1816-1833, most of them children and young women who were seemingly healthy.
After the kitchen fire of 1834, even more people disappeared from the archival record altogether: Francoise, Arnante, Thom, George, William, Rosette, Nancy, Louis, Lubin, Pauline, John, Amos, Cyrus, Jack, Mary, Matilda, Rochin, and Samson. These people matter. History matters. Discomfort is a feeling to sit with, not an excuse to blind us to uncovering new elements of history that help to better understand the present.
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