From History to Myth
The intense feeling acted out upon the LaLaurie Mansion was a testament to the shock and outrage of the general public at the treatment of the slaves. However, the facts alone did not serve that anger for long. Embellishments began to creep in from outside sources. One of the earliest was Harriett Martineau’s account. This version may well have included previously overlooked eyewitness accounts, but they were versions of events colored by two years worth of hindsight.
However, the horrors of 1104 Royal Street had begun to become embellished before Martineau’s visit. The elderly female slave who admitted to starting the fire suddenly assumed the role of the house cook- despite there being no mention of this in the initial accounts. This ‘cook’ was indeed starved and beaten- but instead of lying on a bed, the new stories told how she was found chained to her stove to prevent her escape. By the late nineteenth century, as the distance from the actual events grew, these minor embellishments continued in other books about LaLaurie- books that became the definitive histories of the events in the absence of access to the primary material.
Perhaps the most outrageous embellishments came from Jeanne Delavigne and her 1945 book Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. For Delavigne, it was not enough to show the facts of the slave’s ordeal. Instead, she peppered her account with unsubstantiated imaginings. Delavigne depicted the whipped, chained, neglected slaves as “stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewn together…. intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists.”
As for the man with a hole in his skull, in Delavigne’s version, a “rough stick” had been inserted in the hole “to stir the brains.” Delavigne had taken the facts and exaggerated them grossly. It kept the story of Madame LaLaurie fresh in the mind of readers. However, it wasn’t the truth. The precedent set by Delavigne’s account ensured that by the twentieth century, New Orleans’s tour guides were selling their history-seeking customers a modern myth. Lurid tales of forced sex changes, human caterpillars and crabs littered their accounts. It was as if LaLaurie’s actual treatment of the slaves just wasn’t inhuman enough.
Madame LaLaurie’s already atrocious crimes needed to be embellished to keep her image as a monster alive. For once the initial shock of the discovery in the attic wore off, people must have reflected that her ill-treatment of her slaves was little different to other slave owners.