Not Just a Madam: Lula White of Basin Street
Getting to know Lula White (c.1868-1931) means getting to know her world. In the thirty-eight block New Orleans “red light district” of Storyville, and between 1897 and 1917, there were too many houses of prostitution to come up with an accurate count. Reigning over them all was Lula White’s house, Mahogany Hall. Reigning over Mahogany Hall, was Lula.
Lula seized the crown of the New Orleans sex trade because she put her eye to the keyhole that was New Orleans and shrewdly assessed the world she saw through it. She had to have noted:
Women as an underclass. There’s no way to overestimate the risk taken by Lula (sometimes spelled Lulu) Handley, a young mixed-race girl from Selma, Alabama, when she began her career as a prostitute in New Orleans. Her career and her life could have ended there. Instead, by reinventing herself as Lula White, she used the sex trade to generate power and economic independence for herself and other women who would otherwise be shut out of both.
Enfranchisement, its absence. Votes for Women gave hope to white women. Women of color remained invisible at the polls for decades. However, New Orleans was one of the few locales in the country where people of color routinely used the judicial and political systems to at least try to better their lives. Lula defied unfavorable statutes in and out of court, confronting the status quo to empower one woman—and thereby all women—of color.
Economic bias. Opportunities for women of color to rise in the marketplace were pathetically few in the South. Even so, Lula White was success personified. She draped herself in diamonds from head to toe. The décor of Mahogany Hall was as elegant as the mansions of the Garden District, the “boarders” beautifully dressed and coiffed. It was an inspired interpretation of the capitalist ethic, one that—for Lula—turned race-based economic privilege on its ear.
The identity of race and sex. Scholar Alecia P. Long has argued that, in New Orleans, sex across the color line meant everything from rape to concubinage, all rationalized by myths of hyper-sexuality and hyper-desirability applied to women of color, especially so-called “octoroons.” By making sex across the color line the foundation of her business, Lula White turned institutionalized exploitation into a tool of prosperity.
Venereal disease. As insidious as the disease was, its use by social reformers—both religious intolerants and well-meaning “reformers”—to enforce identification, segregation, and expulsion of sex workers* (which in New Orleans largely meant women of color), became a bête noire for Lula. She loudly and visibly fought such directives in the press, in person, and in court.
Advertising. Print advertising was the Internet of America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s impossible to know if Lula had a playbook, but she had the Blue Book. Blue Books (and later Red Books) were guides to New Orleans sex workers and brothels, complete with thumbnail photos and flattering bios. With a spurious and exotic West Indian origin story, Lula published her own guides, year after year, to manage the narrative of her professional life.
In most retrospectives, Lula White the madam eclipses everything else we know about her. It’s a lopsided view she helped create and sustain. Long before the word “marketing” got around, Lula White created an irresistible brand, positioned it like pastry on a plate, then enjoyed watching New Orleans gobble it up. In fact, the “Queen of Diamonds,” “Queen of Octoroons,” and “Queen of the Demi-monde” was one of a tiny handful of black millionaires at the turn of the nineteenth century. The complexity beneath her relentless self-promotion demands we take a second—and third, and fourth—look at a woman who was so much more.
*A strategy also applied to Asian women in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Article by Written by Guest Historical Fiction Writer, Annie R. McEwan
In Her Own Words
“ … having been fortunately gifted with a good education it did not take long for her to find out what the other sex were in search of.” Third person bio authored by Lula White in the Blue Book of 1898-99 (from The Historic New Orleans Collection.)
About Annie R. McEwen
A career historian, Annie R. McEwen has lived in Spain, France, the U.K., and Morocco. Her background helps her create award-winning historical fiction set in faraway times and places. Winner of the 2022 Page Turners Award (Romance Genre), Annie also garnered two 2022 RTTA (Romance Through The Ages) Awards from Romance Writers of America: a First Place for her novella Nine Sins and a Second for her novel Tamsin Lee and the Jaguar God, as well.
Nine Sins
by Annie R. McEwen
In my novella Nine Sins, Lula White, circa 1889, appears in a two-person debate over the proposed creation of Storyville. Her opponent: the pastor of New Orleans’ largest Presbyterian congregation. The occasion: a fundraising ball for a women’s refuge, some of whose inmates are former prostitutes who didn’t take away Lula’s positive impression of the sex trade. My goal, apart from crafting an intriguing scene, was to portray Lula White as the major player she was in New Orleans politics and commerce.
WEBSITE https://www.anniermcewen.com
More about Lula White
Bellocq, E.J. Storyville Portrait: Photographs from the New Orleans Red Light District, circa
1912. John Szarkowski, ed. Catalogue of Museum of Modern Art, Greenwich, CT, 1970.
Kein, Sybil, ed. Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Louisiana
State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2000.
Long, Alecia P. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans,
1865-1920. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2004.
The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC) “The Sex Workers of Storyville.” Digital
research, THNOC, n.d. https://www.hnoc.org/virtual/storyville/sex-workers-storyville
The Honest Courtesan by Maggie McNeil