New Orleans

In the 1860s through 1880s, New Orleans was in a number of respects dominated by the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, born around 1800. It appears that there were actually two Marie Laveaus, one the daughter of the other; the elder Marie died in 1881, and it's not entirely clear when the younger died. Both were Creole free people of color, and they ruled a surprising amount of New Orleans through magical fear and raw blackmail. They created Voodoo as a business institution, and moved it out of a world completely dominated by the slave situation.

The basic division for a Shadows in the Fog game would be, of course, black and white. Placing the characters on the dividing line is not difficult: Lafcadio Hearn leaps to mind, as do all Creoles. Further, because of the Voodoo issue, you have the declining legacy of Dr. John (not the musician, but the magician) and through him Marie Laveau, whose clientele reached far beyond the black world.

Beyond this basic division, the postbellum situation in New Orleans entailed the rise of what would eventually become the Jim Crow laws. Antebellum, ownership balanced against surprising (outside New Orleans) freedom and pity for the "Negroes." After the war, this shifts increasingly toward hatred. Two creepy and horrible sides of institutionalized racism....

And as you like, you can draw on all sorts of early American history as well as Haitian and other Caribbean histories: remember that Voodoo originally seems to have arrived in New Orleans from what's now the Dominican Republic, yet there was real fear throughout New Orleans that these Caribbean slaves would be more dangerous and more "savage" than their "American" counterparts. There was some justification for this: Voodoo (Vodun, etc.) in Haiti was and is a powerful political force, often embracing revolution and violence. That it never really took this form in New Orleans does not undercut the fact that it could very well have done so with a slight alteration of times, and especially if Marie Laveau had not decided to sell Voodoo to the whites: she charged $10 a head, for example, to view the ceremonies out on St. John Bayou. Thus you have to remember that everyone is both afraid of and fascinated by Voodoo.

Sources on New Orleans are easy to come by. Sources on New Orleans Voodoo are trickier, but not that difficult to find.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 17 Jan 2005