Matchless Grace and Beauty: Lulu White, Pornography, and the Image of the Octoroon in New Orleans, 1890–1920

In the early 1890s, Lulu White, who would become New Orleans's most notorious madam during the Storyville period (1897-1917), posed for several series of pornographic photographs. The pictures illustrate bestiality as well as racially charged sexual encounters. White claimed to be an octoroon, and the men in the pictures with her are white. This paper will investigate the relationship between these photos and White's later success in marketing a complex image of the New Orleans octoroon, a staple in both reform and travel literatures from the nineteenth century. White's Basin Street bordello was one of several "octoroon clubs" within Storyville, and the erotic appeal of octoroon prostitutes was Lulu White's stock in trade. If the eroticized mixed-race woman was a cultural construction based on centuries of exploitation, and the distillation and reorientation of that history was used to stoke desire among white male clients, how did actual pornographic images reflect these same transformations—or did they? This paper analyzes the photos within the greater context of racial politics and civil rights in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. White posed for the pictures during the intense struggle for racial equality led by New Orleans's creoles of color, creating a counterpoint to their fight for public recognition and honor. A few years later, Plessy vs. Ferguson established the color line in Louisiana and the United States. This paper reads White's pornographic images in dialogue with these political events. It interrogates the relationship between racial politics and the erotic power of White's pornographic photographs, suggesting that the images offer a guide to social and political fantasies as much as to sexual ones.