A LITTLE MARIE LAVEAU

When we sit down and sink our teeth into designing a collection, we are always channeling something, whether that’s a person, a place, a movement, or an era. For Born on the Bayou, it was a little bit of Marie Laveau.

Imagine being such a presence that, nearly a century and a half after you passed, your gravesite is still one of the most visited – and considered one of the most culturally significant – in the country. No, it’s not a politician, a priest, or a prophet. It belongs to the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, Marie Laveau (1801-1881).

As you might imagine, her story is a fascinating and complex one, far more than we can get into here and definitely worth exploring. By trade, Marie was an herbalist, a midwife, and a salon owner, but her claim to fame was as a renowned practitioner of Louisiana Voodoo. Some believed her to be a clairvoyant; some thought of her as somewhat supernatural. She was sought after by all echelons of society for her perceived sorcery, and she was held in unusually high regard for a free woman of color in the Deep South at that time.

Everything about Laveau’s life is shrouded in legend and lore. She never kept a diary, so much of her story has been passed down by word of mouth through the generations. She’s been the subject of documentaries, a 2020 musical production, and a season of the television series American Horror Story. And, for all her witchy wonder, her legacy still looms large in The Big Easy.