And now for the thrilling conclusion of our dive into Delphine LaLaurie and the curse upon Nic Cage. If you haven’t read part 1, start here.
When we left off, I told you there were some pretty important things we had to cover before diving into what really happened at LaLaurie Mansion. So, let’s dive into the truth behind the lore:
There is no public record of Delphine being violent with servants in her home before her marriage to Louis LaLaurie. This does not mean she was never violent with bondspeople, simply that she had either never been caught or she was not as violent. We do know that in the period between Jean Blanque’s death and her marriage to Louis, eight slaves died. They were all younger women and children, with no recorded cause of death. It’s hard to say definitively whether Delphine played a role in these deaths, as death was not uncommon in New Orleans, particularly during the summer months when tropical fevers ran rampant.
However, there is a public record of Delphine’s cousin, Celeste de Macarty LaRusse, killing two of her bondspeople. Celeste was married to the President of the Bank of Louisiana, and it was common knowledge at the time he had rather public affairs with free women of color and several mixed children by different women, one he even went so far as to name CeCe, after his wife (what a great idea). Celeste was jealous and angry over these affairs and took her rage out on domestic staff.
She, like many white women in the South, whose husbands carried on interracial relationships (some consensually with free women, but many “relationships” were non-consensual interactions between slaveowners and bondspeople), blamed women of color for “tempting” their husbands, and took out their rage on the household. And while we often talk about the violence of white men towards slaves, we don’t often talk about how violent white women could be as well, especially in domestic spaces where they held control.
Now, we know Celeste killed at least two female bondspeople. One woman was violently whipped to death, and the other Celeste abused and tortured for some time until the woman eventually died. Celeste was never formally charged with these crimes, as the Court felt it should not pursue charges out of “respect” for her husband, but word of her crimes still circulated in society. Is it possible the two cousins’ crimes were conflated at some point? Or is this a window into how the Macarty family treated their bondspeople?
And how does it end? The full post can be found on our Substack here.