Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
About 40 years ago, Julius Hunter took a night class at Washington University. His instructor, Elinor Coyle, didn’t pretend to be a scholar; she regaled the class with juicy gossip about characters from St. Louis’ past. One was a woman, freed from slavery, who opened a bordello in St. Louis and made a fortune relaxing Victorian gentlemen. Her white manager tried to steal her money, Coyle added, and wound up in the Mississippi River.
Hunter went on to a career as a reporter, a news anchor, and an author, dealing with hundreds of facts every day. But that snippet about the African-American madam never left his brain. He didn’t even know her name, let alone the address of her brothel. So he went to Joyce Loving, the St. Louis County Library’s manager of special collections—including the Julius K. Hunter & Friends African American Research Collection that he set up at the Headquarters branch. Together, they learned that the madam was Priscilla Henry, and her houses stood at 206 and 208 S. Sixth. One offered the favors of African-American women, the other Caucasian, because by law, the races could not share living quarters. (Caucasian men, however, could patronize either house.)
Henry’s business flourished without impediment until Sarah “Babe” Connor, the mixed-race daughter of a Tennessee plantation owner and one of his concubines, set up shop at 210 S. Sixth. Her backer, Hunter says, was a white man who worked with the railroads and may have helped her transport her bevy of lovely mixed-race employees from New Orleans.
Now, Hunter (who’d never even been to a brothel) had two madams to research—both born into slavery on Southern plantations, both managed by white men, both scandalously successful. He’s been living with these women for the past six years—imagining their lives, their feelings, their words.
Hunter has turned his three file drawers of research—containing wills, plantation records, deeds, plats, census and church records, and breathless accounts from seven newspapers—into Priscilla & “Babe”: From Shackles of Slavery to Millionaire Madams in Victorian St. Louis.It’s a novel born of history, and he describes it as “93 percent true and 7 percent creative license.”
Stefan Bradley, a historian who directs the African American Studies Program at Saint Louis University, gave an advance review of the book, due out this fall: “By inserting the real-life characters of Priscilla Henry and Sarah ‘Babe’ Connor into the historical narrative of the staid, stodgy, and culturally contradictory Victorian era in St. Louis, Hunter investigates and chronicles the underbelly of the African-American experience in the late 19th century… Hunter asks the difficult question, ‘What is success for those who have been severely oppressed in a capitalist and racist society?’
”The book opens with a St. Louis Post-Dispatch quote castigating Priscilla as “a woman whose sins have carried her name throughout the length and breadth of the land.” But what Hunter finds shocking are the many ways she was exploited.
Priscilla Henry was born in 1829 on the Forks of Cypress plantation in northern Alabama. Its then-owner, James Jackson Sr., was—through a son’s cohabitation with an enslaved woman named Easter—the great-great-grandfather of Roots author Alex Haley.
Jackson was dead by the time President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. His widow waited months to tell Henry she was free. When she finally received her papers, she decided to go north; word was,you could make more money as a washerwoman in St. Louis—a booming city crowded with young, single men—than anyplace else.Hunter believes Henry reached St. Louis in 1866. She found a job as a scullery maid at the Lindell Hotel, cleaning toilets and spittoons for little more than room and board. In March 1867, she flew downstairs from her sixth-floor room and stood across the street, watching the hotel, touted by builders as fireproof, burn to the ground. Destitute, she went to live at a “boardinghouse for colored women,” a euphemism for its ill repute.
Henry didn’t join her roommates’ profession right away. She opened a washboard laundry in an alley behind St. Charles Street. She couldn’t make enough money, though. So she took on clients at the boardinghouse, one of them a white man—a former Confederate soldier—named Tom Howard. He’d taken a bullet in his first battle, and the brain injury had altered his behavior. Hunter suspects it also may have affected his sexual performance and ego: “He’d been buying thrift-shop sex, hanging around the boardinghouse.” Soon, he’d made Henry his mistress and helped set her up in a business of her own.
She had the first player piano in St. Louis, Hunter says, and W.C. Handy may have gotten the inspiration for “St. Louis Blues” at her place. “He was from Florence, 5 miles from Forks of Cypress, so they were homies,” Hunter points out. When Handy took his barbershop quartet to Chicago for the World’s Fair and found construction way behind schedule, he drove south and stayed with Henry for a while. In his autobiography, Handy credited the lyrics to a chance meeting with a heartbroken woman in St. Louis; musicologist Robert Palmer placed the encounter in 1892.
Newspapers regularly wrote about Henry’s sins, incensed that she was growing wealthy in the commission of them. Yet she belonged to the St. Paul A.M.E. Church—as did Sarah Breedlove, who’d soon become Madame C.J. Walker, queen of a cosmetology empire. Hunter envisions the two women “bumping into each other in the back pew and striking up a friendship, and Sarah’s aunt doing Priscilla’s hair. Why not?”
Henry adorned her houses with crystal chandeliers, plush velvets, and fine Belgian carpets from P. Loire. Her bill sailed past $437,000—more than $10 million in today’s money—and she paid it off in $500 installments.“Men probably found her bordello more comfortable than their own homes,” Hunter remarks. One day, Hunter asked a well-known St. Louisan whose family owns a mansion on Portland Place whether the person had ever heard of P. Loire. The friend grinned: “They decorated my grandparents’ house.”
Henry was tough—Hunter would cast Queen Latifah, if his book were made into a movie—but she continued to defer to Howard. “Priscilla couldn’t read or write,” Hunter says, “and Howard soon figured out that his X looked a lot like hers. One day, he dressed her cook up to look like Priscilla and tried to get all her property turned over. He was so drunk and the woman was shaking so hard, the clerk told them to come back the next day. Then, the clerk jumped in his buggy and flew to Priscilla’s house and ratted on them. Tom and Flo were both thrown in jail. He got out on bond, and she didn’t, because there was no justice for anyone of her ilk.
”Big Jim Claiborne, a Confederate war hero, attorney, and future congressman who represented Henry, insisted that she buy out Howard. So she gave him $500 and severed the relationship. She bought more than 50 acres of the old plantation for her sharecropper father. She also brought Nancy Leathe, whom she introduced as her sister (Hunter has another theory), to St. Louis. Henry set Leathe and her five daughters up in their own house of business at 4262 Garfield, and Howard wiggled his way back into Henry’s life by offering to show them the ropes.
Leathe died soon after, and Henry fell ill. The August 15, 1895, edition of The Hutchinson News reported that Howard was “suspected of poisoning a negress” (Leathe) and trying to poison Henry. She rallied while Howard was incarcerated for trying to steal $885,000 of her property, but she was dead by 1896.Howard was never convicted. But in 1899, he was found “belly-up, floating in the Mississippi River at the end of Soulard,” Hunter says. “His brother identified him by the bullet wound. His brother was a Confederate spy, one of Quantrill’s Raiders. He thought Tom was a piece of shit for shacking up with a black woman.”Did the brother kill Tom? “I’m leaving that open,” says Hunter. “There were so many people who wanted to kill Tom Howard. But he could have stumbled into that river stinking drunk or gotten mugged, or jumped off the fairly new Eads Bridge.”
Babe Connor had an easier time of it. She was born in 1857 in Nashville, Tennessee, and her father, the plantation owner, freed her and her mother immedi-ately after emancipation. At age 16, she came to St. Louis and found work at a brothel. Soon, William Mara, who’d sponsored the famous madam Eliza Haycraft, took an interest in Connor’s career.
When she bought the house next door, Henry was furious. Connor was glamorous (Hunter would cast Halle Berry) and high-spirited. She painted her three-story town house bright white and called it the Castle. Men murmured in code as they smoked their after-dinner cigars: “Are you storming the castle tonight?”
Connor pulled the curtains back and had girls dancing in the windows long before Amsterdam did. She wore gowns from Paris, feather boas around her neck, and diamonds in her teeth. She kept $30,000 worth of jewelry in her bedroom safe—and a .45-caliber revolver nearby. She laid a mirrored floor, and her girls danced on it without underclothes. She turned her place into a club with $50 annual dues and gave members gold coins as admission tokens. “Everything else,” Hunter says, “was a la carte.”
That included the entertainment, which began with Mammy Lou. Dressed in calico with a gingham apron and a bandana covering her head, she leaned her girth on the piano and belted out risqué lyrics. When men sidled up during her breaks, she brushed them off with clipped British speech that they hadn’t expected: Her real name was Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine, and she’d grown up, with great dignity, in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.
Maxwell Marcuse, author of Tin Pan Alley in Gaslight, says the famous cancan song “Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town” both came out of Connor’s brothel in 1893. But Mammy Lou didn’t bother with musical notation, so the white songwriters who scribbled down the melodies and registered them as sheet music reaped the profits.
On fine days, Connor gathered up her hat and parasol and climbed into her big Victorian carriage with a few scantily clad employees. A driver in a top hat clucked to a white horse and guided him around Forest Park as Connor’s courtesans blew kisses to passersby. (Hunter imagines married men, out for a stroll with their wives, ducking in fear of recognition—although he did find that some women, terrified of another life-threatening pregnancy, had urged their husbands to frequent the brothels.)
Connor became so famous that when Oscar Wilde came to town to speak at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, he asked if Connor would receive him. “Hell no. I ain’t got nothin’ up in here he’d be interested in buying, so it’d be a waste of my time and his,” Hunter imagines her saying.
Connor did, however, entertain Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a piano virtuoso who later became prime minister of Poland. “Only 53 people turned up for his concert,” Hunter says. “He said, ‘Is there anything else to do in this one-horse town?’ And they said, ‘Well, there’s Babe’s place.’ He went and had the time of his life accompanying Mammy Lou.
”Not everybody loved the Castle, though. William Marion Reedy complained that “the mohogany-colored [sic] proprietress and her coterie of saffron-hued cyprians make night hideous in their revels.”Yet money poured in, and Connor bought a second house in the new red-light district on Chestnut Street. She painted it white and called it the Palace. It opened just in time: The Great Cyclone of 1896 destroyed Henry’s houses and the Castle.
Connor outlived Henry by only a few years; she died in 1899, at age 41, of kidney disease. The funeral was held at St. Teresa of Avila church near Grand Boulevard. “She’d always had a line out in back of her houses, giving away food,” Hunter says, “and she never passed a priest or a nun without slipping them a hankie of money.”
