The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld Read Free Page B

identified the Vieux Carré, the old town, with the Old World, with wealth and the master craftsmanship of European artisans (though some of the iron was wrought by African Americans). But these ornate, airy structures overhung streets full of foul-smelling garbage that fed alarming populations of rats. Luckily, Norma had been in Memphis in 1914, when these conditions had caused an outbreak of bubonic plague.
    From the time Norma was born (in 1901) until the time she left for Memphis, she’d seen the French Quarter courtyards as the center of family life, functional areas for hanging the wash and housing chickens, even cows and mules. Though she found many of them still being used this way, she also saw that some people were turning their courtyards into lush tropical havens, where they could escape the squalor of the streets. In contrast, the only way to access these hidden, verdant places of refuge was through narrow, dank alleyways.
    At fifteen years old Norma saw this dirty, crowded old city through very different eyes than when she’d been living on the streets with Elmo. Then she had an eye only for survival; now she had a vision of what she wanted. She was drawn through the chaos of the French Quarter to the place where she hoped to find it. The Cosmopolitan Hotel, a half block off Canal Street, had addresses on both Bourbon and Royal Streets—its lobby ran straight through the entire block. The Cosmopolitan catered to the affluent—for a time it was called the Hotel Astor. It had a reputation as a family hotel. The ladies’ entrance was on Royal Street, but, as Norma observed, not all the women who used it were ladies—except of the night. Attracted as she had been to the Gayoso in Memphis for its wealthy clientele and its class, Norma was drawn to the Cosmopolitan to try her hustling act.
    “I could see all these girls decked out in diamonds and beautiful clothes. They were eating sumptuous meals in the dining room, having drinks, having a ball. I was ready to turn out. Those girls spotted me before I walked across the lobby the first time. They told me I was too young. They said a lot of people were afraid to fool with you when you’re young. They weren’t about to let me hustle on their territory, and it seemed a pretty good idea not to find out how theywould stop me. They said, ‘Why don’t you go to this or that fine house, learn how to do it?’ “
    Norma returned to New Orleans, determined to learn every trick of the trade, just as Storyville was being dismantled in 1917. One of the earliest experiments to confine prostitution to a limited area, Storyville ended with an order from the Department of the Navy, which banned open prostitution within five miles of a military installation. Politicians traveled to Washington armed with statistics proving the success of the experiment. The New Orleans red-light district (such districts were named for the red lanterns trainmen left outside the doors of brothels they visited) now had only a quarter as many prostitutes as it had had in 1898.
    From the girls at the Cosmopolitan, Norma heard that Bertha Anderson’s house had the best reputation, so she went there. Bertha had worked in Storyville, as the protégée of one of the district’s most famous madams, Josie Arlington. Bertha had the foresight to get out of Storyville before it was officially shut down; she was part of the clandestine movement into the French Quarter, which began around 1913.
    Bertha set herself up in a house at 335 Dauphine Street, and by the time Norma arrived she already had a thriving business there.
    Bertha liked Norma. The first thing she did was try to talk Norma out of the life. But Norma told her that her family needed her support.
    Neither Norma’s mother, an alcoholic without resources and well past the age that she could have made much money as a prostitute, nor her brother could fend for themselves. Through Aunt Carrie Norma stayed in contact with her father, and the same