In a one-story cottage in New Orleans in 1837 two strange figures faced one another. One was George Catlin, painter of Indians, contemporary and counterpart of famed Bird-Painter John James Audubon. For five years he had been living with Amerindians, studying their languages and ways, painting a comprehensive collection of Indian studies most of which are now in Washington's National Museum.
The 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 (see cut).
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 Marie Leveau's strange power over 19th Century New Orleans.
Strangest of all, most of the tales were true. So memorable was Queen Marie that Negroes still go by thousands to a nameless tomb in New Orleans' St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, scratch crosses on the crumbling cement and bricks. Official records list her as having been buried in her 80's in another tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, back of the Southern Railway's Terminal 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 23.
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 for shriving, a doctor for first aid, a cemetery for burying. But Marie Leveau became a hairdresser instead, picked up scandal while she braided great ladies' hair into shapes of towering castles, swans and flower gardens. In semitropical New Orleans the young mature early. The
French Royalist exiles introduced seduction as a fine art, adultery as a vocation. Marie Leveau spied a rich field for blackmail.