Erin and I stay toward the back of the group as Ronnie leads the way down a side street, and I can’t help but admire my surroundings. Everything is just so… festive. The shops are all brightly painted in Mardi Gras colors, and everything is so authentically New Orleans, from the mask and bead stores to the random Voodoo shops we pass by. If I could, I’d wander through each and every one of them.
I hear Erin chuckle beside me, and I glance down at her. “What’s so funny?” I smile.
“You. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy such as yourself look so longingly at storefronts before,” she says.
“A guy such as myself?” I prompt.
“Ya know… straight.” She shrugs.
I laugh loudly, apologizing to the people right in front of us that I startled. “I don’t like just any old shopping. I only love touristy shopping. Like those beach shops with all the souvenirs, and the places everywhere that have the name of the city on everything. But this… this is awesome. Voodoo shops? Where else in the US could you find a voodoo shop on every street? Only New Orleans, Louisiana. And Mardi Gras masks? I bring one of those babies home to my yaya, and I won’t even have to tell her where I got it. You only get stuff like this here.”
She nods, giving me a sweet smile. “Yeah, it’s one of the reasons I never left. There’s nowhere in the world like it.”
The group comes to a stop, and we break our gaze at each other when Ronnie speaks.
“The first stop on our tour is Ursuline Convent, which you can see across the street.” Ronnie gestures toward the massive structure. The left side looks like a church, while there is a wall surrounding what I assume is a courtyard to the right. There is a huge three-story building attached to the church, windows lining the entire top floor.
“The year is 1704, and the few cities that existed in what is now the United States are mostly along the coasts. They’re brand spanking new, and most of the colonists are men. It was hard to get women to make the long voyage from Europe, which was obviously a problem. These guys needed wives. They needed to make babies and establish roots here, to start the first generations of Americans.”
At this, Erin makes a little grunt that brings my eyes briefly down to her before she looks up at me, seeming to pretend like she didn’t make the noise. Ronnie draws my attention back to him as he continues the story.
“At first, the city officials recruited these potential wives for the men of NOLA within their actual town limits. They even went shopping for these girls in jails and brothels. They didn’t care, as long as they had a vagina.”
One of the drunk tourists in the group holds up his beer in the air and yells out, “Wooo! Pussaaay!” making most of us chuckle. One doesn’t come on a ghost tour in arguably the biggest party city in America and expect it to be a serious lecture similar to a class in college.
“Needless to say, these women didn’t make the greatest wives for what were mostly religious colonists,” Ronnie says, to which the same tourist yells, “Prudes!” before his friends shush him. He hisses, “Sorry!” allowing our guide to go on. “So, they had to look elsewhere.
“Over the years, a lot more people besides the original colonists were sent over to populate the new world. Tons of them were convicts and prostitutes who made the journey against their will. Instead of the leaders putting them up in their jails or dealing with them in other ways, they decided just to ship them off and get rid of them altogether, using the new world as sort of their own personal human dump. But in 1704, the first of three groups of girls arrived in what is now Mobile, Alabama. They had one purpose—be the fresh batch of women to choose from to become the wives of the colonists.
“These girls were all between the ages of fourteen and nineteen—the average marrying age of females back then—and they were mainly chosen because they were virgins. They’d been recruited from France, from their convents and orphanages. But there were also rumors that even more were sent over after being picked up off the streets. Another group was sent to what’s now Biloxi, Mississippi in 1719, and another to our beloved New Orleans in 1728. Unfortunately, the journeys on the ships were anything but luxurious, and many of the recruited would-be wives didn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic. Over the years of this practice, things changed a little, and the women who survived the trip were now allowed to mingle with the male colonists and choose husbands from them. Unlike the previous settlers, the journey itself was now consensual, and so was their choice in hubby,” Ronnie says, making the women giggle.