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

pre-Storyville days this block, between Bienville and Conti, was the worst in the Tango Belt. It had been known as Smoky Row in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even after the turn of the century, residents were still finding bloodstained wallets and articles of male clothing buried in their courtyards. It was rumored that the men’s corpses had been buried too.
    In no time Dora had ten or fifteen girls living with her. Some of them were legendary, like Teeny, who had killed her lover Dapper Dan Williams and beat the rap. Dora’s girls walked the streets at night; they got men out of cars. They lay naked in the window or stood on the sidewalk out front wearing only kimonos, flashing them open for passing men, even grabbing their privates and “plucking them in,” as Norma called it, with the same vehemence, sometimes violence, as the women of Smoky Row. They were so prosperous that Dora opened another house at 304 Burgundy, which put Norma right between her two thriving bordellos.
    In spite of the competition Norma continued to do well above Pete’s Ringside Bar and Lounge, as did many others in the Tango Belt. Black women, who outnumbered white women better than two to one, did especially well. Camilla Turner and Juliet Washington worked only white girls out of the windows of their houses; Melba Moore drove girls around in a Cadillac to pick up men. Business was so good that both Camilla and Juliet bought property; Melba bought a second Cadillac.
    There was enough business to keep everybody friendly and even take one night a week off. And there was enough liquor to keep everybody drunk during Prohibition. “Sunday night was our night for balling,” Norma said, using her shorthand for “having a ball.”“We’d close up the house, and all the girls and their men would go to Pete’s, La Vida, or the Little Club. We’d drink champagne and dance all night. The hustlers would get drunk enough to start breaking up the place. But the next day it was forgotten and everyone was friends again.”
    One Sunday night a fight broke out between a tough blonde who’d been around with prizefighters and a brunette who wasn’t shy. They had enough liquor in them to decide that they didn’t like each other much. Everyone in the bar talked them into going out to City Park at daybreak to duel it out.
    “We all jumped into cars, just as full of rum as you can imagine. These two girls were into the show. They pulled hair and tore each other’s clothes off with all the characters egging them on. After a while the police came, but instead of putting everyone in jail, they just told us to get on back where we belonged, which is what we all did. We went to bed and forgot about it, and the next day was another day.”
    Captain Theodore Ray continued to crack down on the prostitutes, but the Tango Belt was as rowdy as ever. To keep the peace, the chief of police put a beat cop in every block where girls hustled behind window blinds.
    “The policeman would have had to be deaf, blind, and dumb not to know we were landladies and what was going on,” Norma said. “He was good protection. One night a colored man took out his tool and shook it at one of the girls. The policeman ended that. He kept the drunks from pestering us. It was nice to know he was on the block.”
    Blue was a pretty redhead from Knoxville. She didn’t have a pimp, as many of the girls did; she had a boyfriend, a nice Italian fellow who actually had a legitimate job. She paid her room and board at Norma s, twenty-five dollars a week, but also had a room around the corner on Dauphine Street. Norma assumed that Blue kept the other place so she and her boyfriend could have some privacy. She liked Blue and trusted her, sometimes leaving her in charge of the house.
    Every night around midnight Blue asked Norma’s permission to go out for a while. She returned in about half an hour, and she alwayscame back happy. Norma assumed she went to see her boyfriend on