This won’t tell you who she was, but who she wasn’t

Back before Christmas, I told enquiring minds that I was after books on interesting or infamous women. This book made up part of that haul.

I have to admit that I didn’t personally know a huge amount about Marie Laveau before she was depicted by the glorious Angela Bassett on American Horror Story. After-show googling netted a huge amount of legends swirling around her – this book basically demolishes those legends although, thanks to the lack of real information available on her, it doesn’t do too well at painting a picture of the real woman.

During her lifetime, Marie Laveau was referenced a couple of times in newspaper articles as Priestess of the Voudous of New Orleans, but it was until quite some time after her death that most of the now established legends around her first started to raise their heads. Powered by writers whose imagination was more important to them than possession of facts, it was here that we start to find talk of her giant snake, relationship with Dr John, talk of procuring girls for wealthy white men and depictions of wild, sexually frenzied ceremonies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these depictions were very obviously coloured by the racial attitudes of the time and the average white man’s need to tell himself that he was somehow superior to the ‘savages’ around him. With those stories then repeated ad infinitum in the newspaper stories and books that followed, what was obviously bollocks soon became established ‘truth’.

Carolyn Morrow Long, in her efforts to uncover the ‘real’ Marie Laveau, has clearly done an astonishing amount of archival research to write this book. Sadly, due to the fact that these records are simply registers of births, deaths, marriages and property transfers, not much more than the bare bones of Marie’s life have been uncovered. Interviews with people who had been alive in Marie’s lifetime only shed a tiny bit more light – most of these people were children when Marie was old, and besides, thanks to the proliferation of Marie’s just within her own household (a number of her children were also named Marie) it’s not always entirely clear that we’re all referring to the same woman.

A good, if slightly dry effort at untangling the life of Marie Laveau, come for the myth-busting but look elsewhere for substance.