Word: leveau
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...other figure was a buxom octoroon woman in her 30's, wearing a high white turbanish mobcap, a bright embroidered shawl and a black silk dress. She was famed Marie Leveau, sometime hairdresser, New Orleans' potent Voodoo Queen, one of the country's first and most successful blackmailers. The picture Painter Catlin made is the only portrait of Queen Marie to survive...
When the late Louisiana Collector Caspar Cusachs died, his heirs found Marie Leveau in his collection, sold the portrait to New Orleans Stockbroker Simon J. Shwartz. In 1926 he smilingly turned down an offer of $5,000. Hit by Depression, he later offered Queen Marie for $1,000, found no takers. Last week the Louisiana Historical Society bought the portrait for $126, to hang in the Society's collection in the Cabildo on Jackson Square. Through New Orleans, where "Marie Leveau charms" are still sold by obscure druggists and necromancers, rose last week a babble of amazing tales about...
...Station, in the heart of the oldtime redlight district. Many a Negro, an occasional white, still believes that if he scratches a cross on the nameless tomb on St. John's Eve (June 23), prays to Voodoo's Gran' Zombi, P'tit Zombi and Marie Leveau, he will get what he wants before next June...
Born the illegitimate child of free mulattoes, Marie Leveau saw New Orleans pass from France to the U. S., mingle young U. S. lustiness with exiled French manners and imported Negro superstition. Like other female octoroons, she was trained by her mother for the career of mistress to a rich young planter who would select her at the annual Quadroon Ball held in the Theatre d'Orleans (now a Negro convent) back of the St. Louis Cathedral. The young men fought duels for fresh or famed octoroon mistresses in the garden behind the Cathedral, handy to a priest...
French Royalist exiles introduced seduction as a fine art, adultery as a vocation. Marie Leveau spied a rich field for blackmail...