Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

The early history of the Esplanade corridor, running from the river through the Marigny and the 7th Ward to Bayou St. John and Mid-City is sketched first, and then the dynamics of the major writing to emerge from this area is explored, with Solomon Northup and the lore around Bras Coupé, to Kate Chopin and the lore around Marie Laveau; from there it takes up the memoirs of major musicians, Jelly Roll Morton, Barnery Birgard, and Sidney Bechet, and, in more recent years, Allan Toussaint, Frank Ocean, and a host of others. The area’s role in manufacturing the Higgins Boat, and in turn that work’s role in World War II, is discussed, as well as the important Civil Rights history of the area. Numerous contemporary writers are discussed, such as Ladee Hubbard, Tom Piazza, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Mona Lisa Saloy, Fatima Sheik and Tyler Perry, as well as important contemporary musical figures. Much of the work of this part of the city shares an interest in the dream of escape and flight to a better world, which in turn is reflected in the tradition of political activism, especially among women, in the area.