There are many lies perpetuated about New Orleans. 

 

For instance, the lie that “all” native New Orleanians who have been here for more than four generations are the “vomit” of French deportations of criminals, lunatics, and other miscreants in the early 1700’s, is still regularly told.  On behalf of many hundreds of other New Orleanians whose families helped to settle this infamous city, I take personal insult from anyone who attempts to link my lineage to the horrible defecation of France that was, in reality, the “second wave” of settlers in the early Louisiana colony.  The reprobates commonly referred to were sent here to work beside the Kentiauks (Kentucky men) to build the city and serve the French aristocracy and I can say that not a single one of these French discards ever entered into my family tree which includes the famous composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk on my maternal side and Gabriel and Jose Planas, the Kings of the French Market and founders of the Old Spanish Portage on my paternal side, in addition to numerous other notables.  So I absolutely take offense when people who put themselves forth as experts and historians (some of whom are not even from this City) lump all New Orleanians into France’s genealogical backwash. 

 

The myth of the “vampire casket girls” is another that is perpetuated ad nauseum and recklessly.  This is the story of the arrival, very shortly after the founding of the Louisiana colony, of the French “correction girls” (who were, indeed, prostitutes, indebted widows, and the products of French workhouses) in an effort to entice male settlers and keep them from entering into relationships with Native Americans and slaves with the arrival later of the “Cassette” or “Casket Girls.” These girls were, in fact, products of the French aristocracy who had received the benefits of all the secular and religious education available from the French Roman Catholic Church; they had also been groomed as wives for the aristocratic Frenchmen who had already immigrated to the Louisiana colony.  As a symbol of their chastity and worth, the Church issued to each of them (it is generally believed they were twenty-eight in number) a beautiful chest – in French “cassette” – crafted by Church artisans and encrusted with precious metals and jewels.  As well as being a “stamp of approval” from the Church, the chests were intended as dowries for the girls; each chest also contained Bibles, a rosary, a reliquary, and a wedding trousseau.  These beautiful, refined French maidens were guided by the Ursuline nuns into marriage unions with some of the most highly-placed Frenchmen in New Orleans and the few old-line New Orleans families who can trace their heritage back to a “Cassette Girl” are proud to do so.

 

 

But this is a story that visitors to New Orleans never hear.  Instead they hear a big lie about a bunch of reprobate French women arriving with “boxes of an oddly familiar shape” – i.e., shaped like, and as big as a wooden casket – who were herded by the Ursuline nuns into the top floor of the Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street where they were secreted because of their despicable curse of vampirism.  Despite the best efforts of the nuns, and the alleged “fact” that “the Church” had the shutters of the third floor convent “attic” nailed shut with a precise number of blessed nails, the girls nonetheless are said to have frequently escaped and fed on the unsuspecting New Orleans colonists.  And if you believe any of this you might believe the assertions, regularly made with straight faces that these bloodthirsty girls are still on the loose in New Orleans today.

 

This lie not only besmirches the memory of the Ursuline nuns, a pious and brave sisterhood whose building is the oldest in New Orleans not because they were protecting vampiresses but because they were strong enough in faith to face the unsettled and dangerous wilderness of the Louisiana colony, but it also denigrates the upstanding young French women who, with the approval and protection of the Church, were chosen as the most fitting brides for French aristocrats and thereby all their many descendants.

 

And insofar as the shuttered convent “attics” are concerned, sealed with “holy” nails and screws, the shutters hide only the bare cells – or apartments – where the nuns lived in austerity and where the Cassette Girls were housed only as long as it took to marry them all off.

 

Oooh.  That is SO scary, isn’t it?

 

Similar to these greatly embellished and exaggerated tales is the story of the infamous date palm tree, possibly the most mobile piece of greenery in the history of New Orleans.

 

The most fallacious tale, continually perpetuated, is that the notorious date palm tree was planted in the backyard of a notorious house where it is tied into the (probably equally exaggerated) tale of the horrible Sultan’s Lair.

 

New Orleans, 1937. "Le Pretre Mansion, 716 Dauphine Street, built 1835-6. Joseph Saba house. From a negative by Frances Benjamin Johnston

716 Dauphine Street, corner of Orleans

 

According to the “legend” (and here even that word is used loosely) “in the mid-1800’s” the disgraced son of a Middle Eastern potentate escaped with the lion’s share of his father’s fortune and harem, and came to settle in New Orleans in the precursor to the house that now stands at the corner of Orleans and Dauphine Streets where he immediately launched into a life of licentious, drug-addled debauchery.  The New Orleans Sultan began to amass an even larger group of women, young boys, and other hangers-on – one version insists he had “an army of eunuchs” at his command – with whom he indulged every sexual fantasy, including kidnapping, bondage, torture, and death.  One version of the tale says that the evil Sultan used tunnels under the New Orleans streets to access to a torture chamber allegedly (and somewhat conveniently) under the site of The Dungeon bar on Toulouse Street.  (The reader is here encouraged to set this story aside and look at a map of antique New Orleans if so desired, and while doing so consider the high water table in and around the city, especially in colonial times.)

 

Meanwhile, back in Turkey or Kazakhstan or wherever, the Sultan’s father was stewing and decided to discipline his son in a most effective manner.  He is said to have called upon his loyal Assassins (you know the guys, those soldiers of Islam who received revelations from Allah via the use of hashish and dedicated themselves completely to Jihad – holy war – on His behalf …).  These he dispatched to New Orleans where, if the tale is to be believed, they put a big crash on the Sultan’s party, allegedly slaughtering everyone in the house – good, bad, indifferent? – leaving a “river of blood flowing into the street” and burying the wayward Sultan alive in the backyard.  As evidence of their involvement in the work, it is alleged that the Assassins planted a date palm, a tree of Arabic origin, to mark the spot where the corpse of the slaughtered Sultan lay.

 

These days, say some local “experts and historians,” anyone who ventures into the “Sultan’s Lair” is taking his or her life into hand, risking the vengeance of the ghost of the horrible tormenter who met his end in the cloying mud of the courtyard out back – a stiffened hand reaching through the loam the only evidence that he ever existed.  According to some the tree still stands but is cursed and never flowers or bears fruit.  According to others, the tree is never mentioned.  According to others, nothing could keep him down and he’s still tormenting guests at the house and hanging out at The Dungeon where some say the cage upstairs – the one that used to be inhabited by “go-go” dancers in the late 60’s and early 70’s – is a relic of the Sultan’s dirty deeds …

 

Actually, the story of a Middle Eastern sheik or prince taking refuge from a vengeful father (sometimes brother) in colonial Louisiana was already a well-known piece of folklore in the time of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869).  Thus it might be assumed that if there is any truth at all to the story it had to have been widely disseminated by the end of the 1700’s – not the “mid-1800’s” as is alleged.  It can be corroborated that a male resident, presumed to be an immigrant of Middle Eastern origin, was found dead inside the Dauphine Street house, his throat slit and no evidence of who might have committed the crime, the motive of which was presumed to be simple robbery and which was never solved.  Insofar as the wild stories of the lustful harem, the drugged debauchery, and the “slaughter” of a great number of people is concerned, there is no evidence in folklore to support these allegations.

 

So, what the …. ?  Simply put, dear reader, “gore sells.”

 

Out of this convoluted mire of allegedly “true” events there does, however, come one seed of truth.  Well, actually, thirteen of them.   

 

The Legacy of Pere Antoine’s Holy Tree

 

Like the architecture of the French Quarter of New Orleans, Pere Antoine (known to the Spanish as Antonio de Sedella) was an inheritance from the Spanish regime. His death, on January 18, 1829 was looked upon in Louisiana, by “Catholic and Protestant alike, as a calamity. All New Orleans went into mourning. The funeral rites were observed with a pomp hitherto unknown to the city.” The old friar was laid to rest in St. Louis Cathedral among the people he had served to selflessly. It was widely believed that Pere Antoine had been a living saint.

But many of the older Creoles remembered Pere Antoine differently: as the Spanish bigot he had been during his early years in the New World. They recalled how in the late 1780’s he had fought in vain to set up in Louisiana the Holy Office of the Inquisition. They also remembered that fifteen years later, after the purchase of the territory by the United States, he again fought in vain to keep New Orleans in the diocese of the Bishop of Havana. Still, the younger generation recalled only that Pere Antoine was a man of God, dedicated body and soul to fulfilling the vows he took upon becoming a Capuchin.

 

Every day he made his tour of visits to the sick. No man was more frequently seen walking the streets of New Orleans than tall, thin Pere Antoine, cowled and sandaled, no matter what the weather, his brown eyes shining and white beard flying. Often on a mission of mercy he crossed Canal Street and entered a Protestant home in the American faubourg. To Pere Antoine the sick were the sick, whatever their religion might be. Marvelous tales were told of the physical endurance he manifested when one of the ever-recurring epidemics of yellow fever struck New Orleans. It was said that he went without sleep for weeks at a stretch, spending every hour of the twenty-four in comforting the stricken, administering last rites, and burying the dead. No one, it was declared, ever saw him take food from the beginning of an epidemic to the end. It was said that so long as Yellow Jack loitered Pere Antoine’s strength was sustained by a flow of manna that entered his body with the air he breathed.

 

In his lifetime of service to St. Louis Cathedral, he is said to have baptized Marie Delphine Macarty, later Madame Delphine Lalaurie, and performed all three of her weddings; he officiated at the wedding of Marie Aimee Brusle to Edward Gottschalk, but did not live to see their birth of their son, composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk; he also performed the wedding ceremony of Marie Laveau and Jacques Paris, and baptized the earliest of her offspring from Christophe Glassion.  Together with Marie Laveau, Pere Antoine did much to advance the state of the poor, the imprisoned, and the slave population in New Orleans.

 

He lived on the Rue Dauphine, near the St. Ann, in a wooden hut which he had built with his own hands. On the stretch of turf in front of the kennel-like structure he had planted a date palm. By 1828 the tree was big enough to provide shade for the 80 year old friar as he sat on a stool in his doorway listening to the accounts of distress poured into his ears by this suppliant and that.  The tree allegedly had magical healing properties and that once a girl was magically cured of a crippling fever after having consumed some of the fruit of that tree.

 

When Pere Antoine died and of his death spread through the City of New Orleans, throngs of the faithful, convinced in their hearts that he had been a living saint, demolished the hut on the Rue Dauphine with their bare hands. Even the slightest splinter of wood was carried away from the site to be preserved as a holy relic.  Many old-line families cherish among their heirlooms a piece of the hut of Pere Antoine.

 

But for generations no two people in New Orleans could agree upon what happened to the date palm tree.  In the passing of the years its actual history and stories of its miraculous powers was lost.  Ultimately it was absorbed into the fallacious story of the Sultan and his Lair in which it is demeaned by association with the murder of a disgraced Muslim.

 

Recently, however, research into the ultimate fate of Pere Antoine’s “Holy Tree” has suggested a more fitting end to the date palm so beloved by the old Abbe.

 

Interviews with descendants of several old-line New Orleans families, as well as examination of family documents and anecdotes, indicate that, in the days preceding his death Pere Antoine anticipated his end was near and undertook to preserve his most beloved legacy. 

 

During his ministry the Abbe had made a gift of a date palm seed to the Ursulines.  The sisters in turn took the seed and planted it upon the grave of a convent slave who, in his youth, had been miraculously healed by an encounter with Pere Antoine.  There the date palm flourished until the closing of the Ursuline convent in 1824 when the palm, now a vigorous tree, was transplanted from the slave’s grave in the Ursuline burying ground and where, or if, it grows today is not known.

 

As his death approached, Pere Antoine enlisted the assistance of one who had shared his ministry and stood beside him in the face of pestilence – Marie Laveau.  The old Abbe gave to her twelve date palm seed pods and instructed her to help preserve his legacy in whatever way she saw fit.

 

After Pere Antoine’s death, and after the outpouring of mourning from the City had subsided, Laveau took the seeds of the Abbe’s Holy Tree and distributed them to those whom she felt worthy.  Ten of the seeds were gifted to ten of the eldest families in New Orleans, those who had been part of the City since the days of its founding; one she gave to the keeping of the Voodoo priest, Dr. John; one she hid inside the high altar of St. Louis Cathedral; and the last she kept as her own.

 

According to descendants of the families, some preserved the seeds but others were planted and these scions of Pere Antoine’s Holy Tree still grow somewhere in New Orleans.  It is alleged that Dr. John planted his seed and a tree grew up somewhere on his property between Prieur and N. Roman Streets off Esplanade Avenue.  Marie Laveau is said to have kept her seed and wore it, coupled with a mustard seed, in a locket which she kept always pinned to her shawl and which passed into the possession of her heirs at her death.

 

It is hard to comprehend how the memory of such a holy tree could be so violated as to be included in such a far-fetched tale of blood, lust and death as that of the “Sultan,” but if you believe that all of us down here in New Orleans are the descendants of criminals and lunatics through their unions with blood-sucking vampiresses imprisoned by an order of nuns willing to keep their nefarious secret for the sake of the future of the Louisiana colony, then you might believe anything, and you might also (though I sincerely hope not) pay to hear about it!

 

When it comes to tales of New Orleans take a hefty grain of salt and apply the old adage, Caveat Emptor!

 

 

MORE ORIGINAL ARTICLES BY ALYNE A. PUSTANIO