The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920.

The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920. By Alecia P. Long. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xviii, 282. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8071-3112-1; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2932-1.)

In The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920, Alecia P. Long sets out to unpack the mythology of New Orleans, particularly the romantic haze that has surrounded the city's racial and sexual landscape. Five court cases, each the basis of a separate chapter, serve as her starting point. In them Long finds the shifting mores of post-Civil War New Orleans and the South, questions of respectability, and debates over urban order.

Sex is the link between the cases, but as the book amply demonstrates, sex is never simple. Considering the social meaning, economic possibilities, moral debates, and racial connotations, sex is not a strong enough thread to easily link all of the cases. The first case, which concerns the estate of a white man who had a three-decade love affair with an African American woman, is fascinating but has little bearing on the following chapters. The later suits hold together better because of multiple connections to the commercialization of leisure and sex. Here, the ways individuals navigated the shifting landscape in order to preserve their reputations and fortunes mix with debates over the visibility and regulation of sexualized entertainment and prostitution.

Long has gone to great lengths to fill in holes left by the court documentation, researching the individuals and issues that were directly and tangentially involved and using her knowledge of the city and southern historiography to make intelligent speculation. The book carefully details an interracial couple's concerns for health, weekly budgets, and news of friends. It guides the reader through the absorbing life of a Storyville madam whose lover married her sheltered, respectable niece a week after the brothel owner died. And it addresses court cases that helped define the "respectable" limits of public performances, regulate the location of commercialized sex, and challenge racial segregation. Although comparatively more mundane, these cases are important indicators of how New Orleans's approach to commercialized sex developed.

The book falters in trying to pull all possible threads together into a cohesive picture. Long takes up too many of the suggestive elements of the court cases: a shifting racial terrain that moved from one in which love across the color line and multiple racial categories existed to one in which racial lines and definitions hardened into Jim Crow; Storyville as only the city's last and smallest attempt to confine vice; contentious appeals for respectability by individuals and the city itself; the delicate political balance between business boosters and reformers; constrained yet expanding options for women; the connection of race to sex in notions of disorder; and shifting mores and economic ramifications of public space.

The rich accounts of individuals in the commercialized leisure trades are the strength of the book. Lawsuits filed by economic rivals and embittered family members amply demonstrate the complexity that lay behind New Orleans's reputation as "the Sodom of the South" (p. 199). One clear lesson that emerges from this complicated picture is that despite all the popular images of the city's unique eroticism, New Orleans actually battled with many of the same key issues as did other turn-of-the-century cities, indicating that these questions of commerce and culture were national in scope.

GEORGINA HICKEY

University of Michigan--Dearborn