Ghosts on St. Charles Avenue

While a geology student at Northeast Louisiana (now University of Louisiana Monroe), I attended a Geological Society of America convention in New Orleans. The St. Charles Hotel was the convention headquarters. When we arrived, I learned the hotel had lost my reservation.

It was an earlier place and time. Instead of turning me away to seek lodging some other place, they erected a cot for me in a large towel closet (I kid you not!) and I spent the night there. It was only for one night because they found a room for me the next day.

The original St. Charles Hotel burned in 1841, reconstructed and burned again in the 1890’s. I stayed in the third hotel built on the original site, it razed in the 1970’s. It was already a bit seedy when I stayed there but the original St. Charles Hotel was widely accepted as the most regal hotel on earth at the time.

The original St. Charles Hotel was a meeting place for wealthy Americans. The French built the equally regal St. Louis Hotel. Like many historical places, they had their dark sides. Stocks for selling slaves stood inside both hotels. Here is a compelling excerpt from an account of the everyday slave trade as told by Harnett T. Kane in his book Queen New Orleans – City by the River published in 1949 by William Morrow & Company.

The two hotels shared a sight that made certain visitors, Southern as well as Northern, wince. Here stood blocks on which human beings were auctioned. From one point of view it was merely a sale of property, no different from that of a horse or a table. From another – but let us watch such an event as eyewitnesses reported it.

An elderly dark woman, sunken –chested, is helped up to stand on the block. The auctioneer starts briskly: “Now, gentlemen, here’s Mary. Clever house-servant, excellent cook. Only one fault, shamming sick. Nothing wrong with her any more than with me. Put her up, gentlemen. A hundred dollars to begin?”

Several men reach over and prod Mary in the ribs. “Are you well?” one asks.

“No, very sick.” The words are strained. “Bad cough, pain in my side, suh.”

The auctioneer interrupts: “Gentlemen, I told you she’s a shammer. Damn her humbug! Give her a touch or two of the cowhide, and she’ll do your work. Speak, gentlemen. Seventy dollars only? Going, going, gone!”

Nobody is much interested. “Lots of skin and bone,” a younger man comments, and his neighbor chuckles loudly: “Guess that ‘ere woman will soon be food for the land crabs.” Amid general laughter, the sick slave is led away.

A bright-eyed youth steps up. The auctioneer praises his intelligence. Neither he nor any of the others would be for sale, the man says, if their master were not in financial trouble. Several growers escort the boy to a side room to strip him for sores or other imperfections. A high price. Next!

A smile on her lips, a pert mulattress glides over. A stout man opens her mouth to examine the gums. He and several others make a motion to the auctioneer and take her away, as in the previous case, for private examination. A yet higher bid, a lively raising of it while the girl’s smile widens proudly. Sold!

A middle-aged woman takes the block, her eyes somber, in her arms a sleeping child. “How much/” The auctioneer describes her training at length. Not once does she raise her eyes from her baby. He tells of her experience, what her masters have said of her dependability. She still stares down. Sold! Next –

The planters stroll about, bored. “Not much left, eh?”

“Have to hurry home, anyway.”

They throw on their top coats. Tonight they will be back, a few feet from this spot, sipping wine, dancing. And the cadence of the music will rise where Negro men and women have been whispering together, and the dancers’ feet will slide across a polished floor where slave people shuffled to the block and off it again.”

There are still many compelling stories about New Orleans but there were no slave blocks in the lobby when I stayed at the hotel, only friendly people trying hard to accommodate a young geologist wannabe. Still, I felt the specter of the slaves as they dragged their shackles down the hall - that night long ago spent in the towel closet of the St. Charles Hotel.

Gondwana