“I HEARD THEM SCREAMING UNDER THE FLOOR.” The Chilling True Story Of New Orleans’ Hidden Underground Cells
The year is 1833. New Orleans breathes with a rhythm unlike any other city in the young American Republic.
The air itself seems thick, not just with the subtropical humidity that clings to skin like wet silk, but with something heavier, more complex.
The smell of magnolia blossoms mingles with the stench of open sewage channels running along the unpaved streets.
Coffee roasting in the French Market competes with the sharp tang of sweat and fear emanating from the slave auction blocks on Chartres Street.
The Mississippi River, swollen and brown, churns past the levees carrying flatboats loaded with cotton, sugar, and human cargo from upriver plantations.
This is a city of masks and mirrors, where French Creole aristocracy maintain their elegant pretensions, even as American businessmen increasingly dominate the commercial districts.
The architecture itself reflects this duality. Spanish colonial buildings with their signature wrought balconies stand beside newer American structures, creating a cityscape that feels both European and distinctly New World.
Gas lamps have only recently been installed on the main thoroughfares, casting pools of amber light that make the shadows between them seem all the deeper.
The social structure of New Orleans in this era operates on a complexity that outsiders find almost impossible to navigate.
At the top stand the white Creole families, descendants of French and Spanish colonists who view themselves as a kind of American aristocracy.
Below them, the American merchants and traders, crude and ambitious in Creole eyes, but increasingly powerful.
Then come the free people of color, gens de couleur, a class unique to Louisiana.
Many of them property owners, skilled artisans, and even slave holders themselves.
And finally, at the bottom of this carefully maintained hierarchy, the enslaved population representing nearly 40% of the city’s inhabitants.
But there exists within this already stratified world a subcategory that operates in its own strange orbit, the placage.
These were women of color, often of exceptional beauty and refinement, who entered into formalized arrangements with white men of means, relationships that existed in a gray zone between concubinage and common-law marriage.
These women and their daughters occupied a peculiar space in New Orleans society, neither fully enslaved nor fully free, desired yet disdained, visible yet invisible.
It is in this world that we find our central figure.
Though her real name has been lost to the deliberate obscurations of history, court documents refer to her variously as Célestine, the woman of color known as C, and in one instance simply as the yellow girl of uncommon appearance.
For our purposes, we will call her Célestine, though we must remember that even this name is a kind of mask, a placeholder for an identity that was never entirely her own to claim.
Célestine’s documented life begins not with her birth, but with her sale.
An auction record from May 1st, 1828 describes her in the clinical language of property assessment.
One female of mixed race, approximately 14 years of age, trained in household service and needlework.
No known defects, of remarkable cleanness. She was purchased for the sum of $800, an extraordinary price for the time, by a man named Étienne Laveau, a prosperous merchant in the cotton factoring business.
The Laveau residence stood on Royal Street, a three-story structure with the typical courtyard design of Creole architecture.
The ground floor housed Laveau’s business office and a small counting room.
The second floor contained the formal living spaces, a parlor furnished with furniture imported from France, a dining room with a table that could seat 12, and a music room where Laveau’s wife, Marguerite, gave piano instruction to the daughters of other Creole families.
The third floor held the private family chambers. The enslaved household staff, numbering seven, including Célestine, occupied quarters in the garçonnière, a separate building at the rear of the courtyard.
By all contemporary accounts, Célestine’s beauty was not merely exceptional, but unsettling in its perfection.
A letter from a visiting merchant from Philadelphia, preserved in a family collection at Tulane University, describes seeing her answer the door of the Laveau Laveau home.
I was greeted by a young woman whose appearance so startled me that I momentarily forgot my purpose in calling.
Her features possessed a symmetry that seemed almost mathematical in its precision, and her bearing, though properly modest, suggested an intelligence that made me uncomfortable to witness in one of her stations.
This beauty, we must understand, was not a gift, but a burden, not a source of power, but a marker that attracted predation.
In the economy of slavery, exceptional appearance increased monetary value while simultaneously increasing vulnerability.
Célestine’s looks made her both more valuable and more endangered.
For the first 3 years of her time in the Laveau household, the documentary record shows nothing unusual.
Tax records list her among the household property, and 1830 city census confirms her presence.
A receipt from a dressmaker on Bourbon shows the purchase of two cotton work dresses and one Sunday dress for a household girl charged to Laveau’s account.
The routine documentation of captivity, unremarkable in its horror. But in the summer of 1831, the first discordant notes began to appear in the historical record.
The earliest sign comes not from a dramatic incident, but from an architectural permit filed with the city authorities.
In June of 1831, Étienne Laveau applied for permission to undertake substantial renovations to the rear dependencies of his Royal Street property.
The permit request itself is routine, but a notation in the margin written in a different hand reads, “Inspection waived per request of applicant.
Standard fee paid plus additional consideration.” The phrase “additional consideration” appears nowhere else in the New Orleans building permits of that year.
It suggests something beyond normal procedure, a transaction meant to avoid scrutiny.
Construction began in July. A diary entry from a neighbor, Madame Thérèse Duclos notes, “The hammering and sawing from the Laveau property continues past dark, which seems unusual.
Marie says she saw workers carrying materials through the porte cochère after midnight, which surely cannot be proper.”
The workers themselves came not from the usual pool of enslaved or free black artisans who did most of the construction work in the quarter, but from a crew brought in from Algiers, the rough neighborhood across the river.
An invoice discovered in the 1860s during the renovation of a building on Royal Street shows payment to J.
Rougon and crew for specialized carpentry and masonry work. Discrete sick completion required, the amount $300, an enormous sum for construction work at the time.
What exactly was being built? The permit lists only general improvements to servant quarters and storage cellars, but the quantity of materials suggests something more extensive.
Receipts from a timber merchant show the delivery of 40 linear feet of heavy cypress planking suitable for damp conditions.
An ironmonger bill includes 12 iron brackets, reinforced design, six iron hasps, 20 ft of chain, high quality.
These are not the materials for simple renovations. During the construction period, several household staff members left the Laveau employment.
A free woman of color named Josephine, who had worked as a laundress for the family for 5 years, simply disappeared from the household rolls.
No record of her sale exists. No manuscript papers appear in the notarial archives.
She is there in the city directory of 1830, gone in 1831, leaving no trace.
Another enslaved man, a house servant named Baptiste, appears in a notice posted at Cabo.
“Runaway negro man Baptiste, age 28, speaks French and some English.
Last seen wearing brown trousers and white shirt, may be attempting to reach free territory.
Reward for return.” Runaway notices were common, but what drew attention is that Baptiste ran in September 1831 during the construction, and the notice was posted by Laveau himself, who normally relied on professional slave catchers for such matters.
The reward offered was only $20, curiously low for a trained house servant whose replacement value would have been well over $1,000.
It suggests that Laveau perhaps expected no one to actually look very hard, or that Baptiste’s absence was more convenient than problematic.
It was during these same months that neighbors began to report sounds from the Laveau property at unusual hours.
Madame Duclos’ diary again. “Woke last night to what I believed was weeping.
A woman’s voice, though muffled as if behind walls. Antoine says, ‘I dream too much and worry over nothing.’ But I know what I heard.”
Another entry 3 weeks later. The sounds again, not dreams.
Marie Claire has heard them, too. A scraping noise, rhythmic like something being dragged across a floor.
We do not speak of it at the table, but I see in my daughter’s eyes that she also lies awake listening.
The Laveau family itself began to change during this period.
Marguerite Laveau, who had been known for hosting musical evenings and attending daily mass at St.
Louis Cathedral, withdrew from social engagements. A letter from her sister in Mobile, preserved in a family archive, expresses concern.
“Your last letter troubles me, sister. You write of headaches and sleeplessness, of a house that no longer feels like a home.
Is Étienne’s business struggling? Are there financial difficulties you have not shared?
Please confide in me. I worry for your health and your spirits.”
Marguerite’s reply, if there was one, has not survived. Étienne himself appears to have thrown himself into his business with increased intensity.
Ledgers from his cotton factoring firm show a dramatic increase in activity during late 1831 and early 1832.
But there is something odd about these entries. Among the usual notations of cotton bail weights and commission percentages appear occasional cryptic entries, special cargo, private arrangement, commission paid in cash.
These entries have no corresponding documentation, no bills of lading, no shipping manifests.
They are financial ghosts, money moving through the books without leaving a trail of its origin or destination.
And then there are the apothecary bills. In the New Orleans of the 1832s, enslaved people received medical care when they received it at all through a variety of means, from folk remedies to the services of doctors who specialized in treating the enslaved population.
But the Lalaurie household accounts begin showing regular purchases from an apothecary on Dauphine Street.
Laudanum 6 oz morphine powder, 1/4 oz chloroform medicinal grade large bottle.
These are powerful drugs used for severe pain or to induce unconsciousness for surgical procedures.
The quantities and frequency suggest something beyond treating ordinary ailments.
A receipt from December 1st, 1831 includes leather restraining straps, medical grade, and gag device, cotton lined.
These items appear on an apothecary’s bill mixed among innocuous purchases of camphor and castor oil, as if ordering instruments of restraint was as ordinary as buying cough syrup.
Throughout all of this, Selene appears in the documentary record only as a name on the household rolls, a line item in the inventory.
She is listed as house servant, which could mean anything from ladies’ maid to general cleaning staff.
But small details suggest her position was more complicated, more particular.
A receipt from a mantua maker, a dressmaker who catered to wealthy Creole women, shows the purchase of one evening dress, pale green silk, customized fitting, charged to Lalaurie’s account, but with no indication that it was for his wife.
The dress cost $40, an extravagant sum for a garment meant for an enslaved woman who would have had no occasion to wear such finery.
Another clue comes from the attendance rolls of a school for girls of color operated by the Sisters of the Holy Family, a religious order of black nuns who provided education to free girls of color.
In 1830, a girl named Selene Ward of Lalaurie household appeared on the rolls, receiving instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and French literature.
This was highly unusual. While some enslaved people acquired literacy through various means, for an enslaver to actively pay for the formal education of an enslaved person suggests intentions beyond standard household service.
What was Lalaurie preparing her for? The education of a placage was a recognized practice.
Young women of color were groomed to become the companions of wealthy white men, their refinement and accomplishment making them suitable for the quasi-marital arrangements that were part of New Orleans’ peculiar social fabric.
But Selene was already enslaved, already owned outright. Her education suggested not preparation for a placage arrangement, but something else, something that required her to be more than a simple domestic servant while remaining completely under Lalaurie’s control.
In March of 1832, a notice appeared in L’Abeille, one of the French-language newspapers.
Information sought regarding the whereabouts of Adeline, woman of color, approximately 18 years of age, last seen in the vicinity of Royal Street.
The family is desperate for any news. Reward offered for information.
The notice ran for 3 weeks, then stopped. No resolution was ever publicly reported.
2 months later, another notice. Missing freedwoman of color, age 22, seamstress by trade, last known employment in private households, French Quarter.
Any knowledge of her current location, please contact. The notices began to form a pattern, though one would have had to be paying very close attention to see it.
Young women of color, ranging from enslaved to freed status, all approximately the same age range, all last seen in or around the French Quarter, all vanishing without trace.
In the New Orleans of the 1832s, where the enslaved population was large and fluid, where people could be sold and transported across state lines with no notification to friends or family, where free people of color could be kidnapped and illegally enslaved, such disappearances might not have seemed unusual, but the frequency, the specificity of the demographics suggests something more systematic than random misfortune.
And in the center of this darkening web, invisible in the historical record, but present in the architecture of events, was Selene, the girl whose beauty had made her valuable, whose value had made her vulnerable, whose vulnerability was about to reveal itself as something far darker than anyone could have imagined.
The first direct evidence of Selene’s inner life comes from a source that should not exist, a diary.
Literacy among enslaved people was complicated in the antebellum South.
In some states, it was explicitly illegal to teach an enslaved person to read or write.
In Louisiana, the laws were less clear, but the practice was certainly discouraged.
Yet Selene could write, her education at the School for Girls of Color having given her that dangerous skill.
And at some point in 1832, she began to keep a record.
The diary itself is a slim volume bound in cheap leather, the kind of blank book that might be purchased at any stationer shop.
It was discovered in 1923 during the demolition of a building on Royal Street, hidden behind a brick that had been loosened and carefully replaced, creating a small cavity in the wall.
The building was not the Lalaurie residence itself, but a structure two doors down, suggesting that at some point Selene had hidden this record somewhere she hoped it might survive, even if she did not.
The diary is now housed in the Louisiana State Museum archives, its pages brown and brittle.
Some sections water-damaged to illegibility. But what remains is devastating in its restrained horror.
The earliest dated entry is from July 1st, 1832. I write this not knowing if words on paper can serve as testimony or prayer or simply as proof that I existed, that I saw what I have seen, that I knew what I now know.
Madame gave me this book thinking I would use it for household accounts, not knowing that Sister Marguerite taught me to read and write beyond mere numbers.
I do not know what purpose this writing serves except that I cannot hold these things inside myself alone.
I must put them somewhere, even if only onto paper that may burn or rot unseen.
He came to me three nights ago, not as master to servant, though that would have been horror enough and familiar in its way.
He came as something else. He asked me questions about my mother, whom I barely remember, about whether I knew who my father was, about whether I had sisters.
He asked these things while looking at me not as a person, but as something he was appraising, the way he looks at cotton samples in his warehouse office.
Then he said, “I was fortunate that I had a quality that would serve a greater purpose, that beauty such as mine was rare and should not be wasted in ordinary service.”
His words were kind, but his eyes were not. They were the eyes of a man calculating profit.
The handwriting here is careful, educated, the spelling consistent. But in later entries, as the content becomes more disturbing, the handwriting deteriorates.
Words sometimes scratched so hard they tear the paper. An entry from August 1st, 1832.
There are rooms below the kitchen that I did not know existed.
The construction last summer was not to repair what was there, but to create something new, or perhaps not new, but hidden, made invisible to ordinary sight.
I have seen these rooms now. I cannot unsee them.
They brought a girl last night. I heard the carriage in the portico after midnight.
I was meant to be asleep, but I do not sleep well anymore.
I heard voices low and urgent. I heard a woman’s voice, confused, asking where she was being taken.
I heard the master’s voice, smooth and reassuring, saying she would be housed here temporarily, that there had been an issue with her papers, that she needed to stay quiet for a few days while it was sorted out.
I knew this was a lie. I knew it the way you know a storm is coming by the pressure in the air.
This morning, he called me to his office. He told me I would be responsible for tending to the guests, as he called them, that I would bring them food and water twice daily, that I would say nothing to anyone, not to Madame, not to the other servants, not to anyone on the street, that my loyalty would be rewarded, and my disobedience would be punished in ways that would make me wish for the mercy of a quick sale to the fields.
I asked him who these guests were. He smiled and said they were investments, that I was too simple to understand the economics of it, but that I should understand I was part of something larger now, something that benefited from discretion.
I went down to those rooms this afternoon. There are four cells, each perhaps 6 ft by 8 ft, with heavy doors that lock from the outside.
Three are occupied. The girl from last night is in one sitting on a thin mattress, her eyes wide with fear.
In another cell is a woman older than me, perhaps 25, who did not look up when I entered.
In the third is a girl who cannot be more than 15, who wept when she saw me and begged me to tell her family where she is.
I did not answer her. I could not answer her because I do not know where to send such a message, and I do not know if sending it would save her or only hasten whatever fate awaits her.
The diary entries from this period become more fragmented, more desperate.
Selene describes a routine that is both mundane and nightmarish, bringing meals to women held in hidden cells, emptying chamber pots, occasionally tending to injuries.
She describes Lalaurie bringing men to see the captives, men who examine them the way buyers examine livestock at auction, checking teeth and skin, asking about health and history.
But these viewings do not lead to ordinary sales. The women are never taken to the public auction blocks on Chartres Street.
They never appear in notarial records of slave sales. They simply disappear, taken away in the night, and new women appear to take their places.
An entry from October 1st, 1832 shows Celine beginning to understand the full scope of what she is witnessing.
I have been keeping count, though it sickens me to do so.
In 3 months, 17 women have passed through these cells.
Some stay only days, others weeks. They are told different stories that their papers are being verified, that there has been a legal complication, that they are being held for their own safety while disputes are resolved.
The younger ones, the ones who are enslaved, are told nothing at all because no explanation is owed to property.
But I have seen the ledgers. The master does not know that I clean his office, that I can read what he leaves on his desk.
There are codes, letters, and numbers that correspond to transactions.
Each woman has a notation delivered to BR, final payment received, or shipped mobile commission collected, or most chilling Havana export premium price.
They are being sold outside the normal channels, outside the law such as it is.
Some are enslaved women being sold in violation of their owners’ rights, stolen property.
Some are free women being sold into slavery illegally. The distinction matters in law, but not in outcome.
All of them disappear into a machinery of commerce that operates in shadows, and I am part of it.
By feeding them, by tending them, by keeping silent, I am complicit in their destruction.
This knowledge sits in my chest like a stone. It is important to pause here and recognize what Celine is describing, an illegal trafficking operation using New Orleans’ complex racial and legal landscape as cover.
The city’s position as a major port, its cultural and linguistic diversity, and its proximity to the Caribbean made it an ideal hub for the illegal slave trade, which continued long after the federal ban on importation in 1808.
But what Laval appears to have been operating was something more specific, a way station for the movement of women who could not be sold through normal channels, either because they were stolen property, or because they were legally free, but vulnerable enough to be disappeared.
The Havana export notation is particularly telling. Cuba remained a slave society until 1886, and there was a documented illegal trade in enslaved people from New Orleans to Cuban sugar plantations.
Women sent to Cuba would have effectively vanished from any possibility of reclaim or rescue, shipped into a foreign jurisdiction with no legal recourse.
But there is another element to Celine’s account that suggests something even darker.
In November 1832, she writes, “A doctor came today, not a regular physician, but someone master called the surgeon.”
This man brought a leather case full of instruments. He went down to the cells and remained there for 3 hours.
I was ordered to assist him. I will not write the details of what I saw.
I cannot. The words would contaminate the paper, and the images already contaminate my mind sufficiently.
I will say only that he examined the women in ways that had nothing to do with assessing their health for sale.
He measured them. He took samples of hair and skin.
He made notations about bone structure and coloring. He seemed to be cataloging them according to criteria I could not fathom.
When I asked the master later what the examination was for, he told me that some buyers have very specific requirements, that the premium prices come from matching products precisely to demand.
He used these words, product, demand, as if we were discussing coffee beans or bolts of cloth.
One of the women, the older one who rarely speaks, whispered to me as I helped her afterward.
She said, “He’s trying to breed us like horses, isn’t he?
Trying to figure out what combinations make what outcomes.” I did not answer because I did not know if she was right or mad or both.
What this woman suggested touches on one of the most depraved aspects of American slavery, the intentional breeding of enslaved people to produce offspring with specific characteristics.
While this practice is often discussed in terms of producing strong field laborers, there was also a documented market for enslaved people of exceptional appearance, particularly women who could be sold as concubines or domestic servants to wealthy buyers.
The idea that Laval might have been involved not just in trafficking, but in attempting to systematically study and potentially facilitate such breeding represents a level of dehumanization that turns people into a kind of agricultural experiment.
By December 1832, Celine’s diary entries show someone approaching a psychological breaking point.
I do not know who I am anymore. In the morning, I wake in my small room above the kitchen and dress in the clothes of a servant.
I go about tasks, preparing coffee, beating rugs, polishing silver.
I move through the house where Madame gives me instructions about airing the winter linens or preparing the dining room for guests.
I am Celine, the house servant, obedient and nearly invisible.
But then, night comes, and I descend to those rooms, and I become someone else.
The keeper of prisoners, the accomplice to theft and trafficking, the hands that feed women while their lives are being sold away.
Sometimes I imagine telling Madame. I imagine breaking the silence that the master has commanded.
But what would I say? That her husband is operating a criminal enterprise beneath her feet?
That the household she manages rests at top a foundation of hidden captivity?
Would she believe me? Would she care? Or would she see me only as a presumptuous slave speaking lies about her master?
And if I told the authorities, what then? I am property myself.
My testimony has no legal weight, and master would know immediately who spoke, and I would disappear into those cells, or worse, into the network that carries women away to places from which there is no return.
So I am trapped, not just by chains and laws, but by knowledge that I cannot safely speak and cannot manage to forget.
The final entries from 1832 take on an almost dissociative quality, as if Celine is separating herself from her own experience as a survival mechanism.
I watch myself from a distance now. I see a young woman moving through her days.
She is not me. She is the person I perform when performance is required.
The real me, whatever that means, is locked away somewhere deeper than those cells beneath the kitchen, somewhere even master cannot reach, though he tries.
He has begun coming to my room at night, not every night, but often enough that I sleep lightly, listening for footsteps.
He does not force himself upon me, not yet. Instead, he talks.
He tells me about his vision, his plans. He speaks of me as if I am a partner in this enterprise rather than another of his possessions.
He says I am special, that my appearance, my bearing, my education, make me suitable for a different fate than ordinary slaves.
He says he is arranging something for me, a placement with a gentleman of means who appreciates quality.
He says I should be grateful that most in my position would have no such prospects.
What he does not say, what he does not need to say, is that this is my reward for complicity and my punishment for knowledge.
He is selling me in the same way he sells the others, but dressing it in the language of opportunity, a placage arrangement perhaps, where I would become the kept woman of some man who wants an exotic ornament, a gentile form of trafficking, but trafficking nonetheless.
I have considered running. I have mapped the routes in my mind through the service quarters, out the back gate, through the streets to the river where boats leave daily for cities upriver, where I might disappear into free territory.
But I have also heard the stories of runaways caught and returned, the punishments, the branding, the sales to deep south plantations where the work kills you slowly and no one cares enough to notice you dying.
So I remain. I feed the prisoners. I keep silent.
I write in this book that no one may ever read, and I wait for whatever end is coming because I can feel it approaching the way you feel winter coming on, even while the days are still warm.
The end, when it came, arrived not as a single catastrophic event, but as a series of cascading failures that exposed what had been so carefully hidden.
The first crack appeared in the form of a letter received at the office of LeBe To the editors, I write to direct your attention to certain properties in the French Quarter where women of color are being held against their will and sold through illegal channels.
I cannot provide my name as I fear for my safety.
But I urge investigation of households where construction of new cellars or underground rooms has occurred in recent months.
Look particularly to those properties where servants have fled or disappeared, where neighbors report strange sounds at night.
Evil hides behind fine facades and respectable names. Someone must look beyond the masks.
The editor, a man named August Dubourg, filed the letter among the crank correspondence and conspiracy theories that newspapers regularly received.
He did not investigate, and his defense the letter provided no specific addresses, no names, only vague allegations that could apply to dozens of households, and making accusations against prominent citizens without concrete evidence was a good way to find oneself sued for libel or worse.
But the letter was not the only warning. In March 1833, a free woman of color named Delphine Mercier walked into the office of the city recorder, a municipal judge, and filed a complaint stating that her sister Josephine had disappeared after going to work at a household on Royal Street and had not been seen since.
Mercier provided the address, the Laval residence. The recorder, following protocol, sent a clerk to make inquiries.
The clerk returned with a statement from Etienne Laval stating that a woman named Josephine had indeed been employed as a lauresse, but had left the household of her own accord more than a year prior.
Laval provided what appeared to be a letter of character dated and signed that he claimed to have given Josephine upon her departure.
The handwriting matched Josephine’s hand, according to her sister, but the signature looked forced, shaky.
The matter might have ended there. The word of a prominent white merchant against the concerns of a free woman of color carried very different weight in New Orleans courts, but Delphine Mercier was persistent.
She hired an attorney, a free man of color named Armand Lanusse, who had studied law in France and practiced in the limited capacity that Louisiana law allowed for non-white attorneys.
Lanusse began making inquiries in the neighborhood, talking to other servants to shopkeepers, building a circumstantial case that something unusual was happening at the Laval residence.
It was these inquiries that apparently reached Etienne Laval’s ears.
A diary entry from Celine dated the 28th of March, 1833.
Everything is being moved. He is dismantling the operation. The cells are being emptied.
The women taken away in carts in the middle of the night.
He is destroying documents, burning papers in the courtyard fireplace.
The smoke has been constant for 2 days. Madame asked what he was burning and he said, “Old business records, spring cleaning.
I am terrified. I do not know what will happen to those women or to me.
He has not spoken to me except to order me to clean the basement rooms thoroughly, to remove any trace of occupancy.
I am to scrub the floors, whitewash the walls, make it appear that those spaces have never been anything but storage cellars.
I am complicit in this erasure. But what choice do I have?
I am washing away the evidence of crimes I witnessed and could not prevent.
When those rooms are clean, it will be as if none of it ever happened.
As if 17 women did not pass through them, as if their suffering was not real because no record of it remains.
I have hidden this diary. If something happens to me, perhaps someone will find it.
Perhaps someone will know that this was real, that I was real, that they were real, that we existed beyond the lies in the ledgers.
On the 3rd of April, 1833, Armand Lanusse presented his findings to the city recorder.
Testimony from three neighbors about strange sounds and unusual nighttime activity.
Testimony from a shopkeeper who had noted an unusual pattern of food purchases from the Laval household.
A statement from a cart driver who had transported cargo from the Laval residence to the docks on two occasions and had been paid unusually well to ask no questions.
The evidence was circumstantial but troubling enough that the recorder issued a warrant for inspection of the premises.
On the afternoon of the 5th of April, 1833, the city recorder, accompanied by two constables and Armand Lanusse, arrived at the Laval residence to conduct an examination.
What they found, or rather what they did not find, would become a matter of legal dispute for months afterward.
The official report states that the property was inspected thoroughly, including the service buildings and basement storage areas.
No evidence of illegal activity was discovered. No hidden cells or imprisonment facilities were found.
The basement consisted of ordinary storage rooms containing wine racks, preserved foods, and household supplies.
The enslaved members of the household were interviewed and all stated they were treated well and knew of no wrongdoing.
Etienne Laval cooperated fully with the inspection and expressed dismay that such accusations had been made against him.
But there are other accounts. A letter from Armand Lanusse to a colleague in Mobile written a week after the inspection tells a different story.
The inspection was a farce. By the time we arrived, anything incriminating had been removed.
I could see fresh mortar in the basement walls where, I am convinced, doors to cells had been sealed over.
The whitewash on the walls was so fresh it had not fully dried.
The enslaved people we interviewed were terrified. Their answers were clearly rehearsed.
One girl in particular, the one they called Celine, she would not meet anyone’s eyes.
When I tried to speak to her privately, Laval intervened, saying it was inappropriate to question his property without his supervision.
I know what was there. I know what we would have found if we had come a week earlier.
But knowing and proving are two different things, and the law, such as it is, protects men like Laval while offering no protection to the women who have disappeared.
I have failed them. We have all failed them. The case was officially closed on the 12th of April, 1833.
No charges were filed. Delphine Mercier’s complaint was dismissed for lack of evidence.
Etienne Laval’s reputation remained unblemished. The machinery of denial worked perfectly, smoothing over the cracks, maintaining the facade of respectability.
But Celine’s diary continues. The entries becoming more desperate, more fragmented.
They are going to send me away. I heard master and madame arguing last night.
She said I had become a liability, that my presence in the house attracted the wrong kind of attention.
He said he had already made arrangements that I would be leaving within the week.
I do not know where I am being sent. He says it is to a household in Mobile, a gentleman who has commissioned specifically for someone of my qualities.
But I do not believe him. I think he is sending me into the same network that consumed the others.
I think I am disappearing because I know too much and cannot be trusted to remain silent.
I am writing this final entry in the early morning of April 14th.
If this diary is ever found, please know that I did not go willingly into whatever darkness awaits me.
Please know that the women who disappeared from this place were real people with names and families and futures that were stolen from them.
Please know that behind the beautiful facades of this city, behind the music and the flowers and the elegant architecture, there exists a machinery of cruelty that grinds up human lives and spits out profit.
My name is Celine. I was born somewhere in Louisiana.
I do not know exactly where. My mother was enslaved, my father unknown to me.
I am 19 years old. People say I am beautiful, but this beauty has been a curse, not a blessing.
It made me visible to the wrong people, valuable for the wrong reasons.
If you are reading this, I am likely already gone, but please remember that I existed, that I saw, that I tried in my small way to leave a record, that I was more than property, more than an inventory line, more than a body to be bought and sold.
Please remember us. This is the last entry in the diary.
The pages that follow are blank. What happened to Celine after the 14th of April, 1833, is unclear.
The historical record becomes frustratingly opaque, as if she simply evaporated from existence.
There is no bill of sale in the New Orleans notarial archives recording her transfer to another owner.
There is no record of her in Mobile city directories or tax records.
There are no further diary entries, no letters, no testimony.
But there are hints, fragments, suggestions in the historical record that allow us to piece together a possible trajectory.
A newspaper notice in the Mobile Register dated May 1st, 1833.
Reward offered for information regarding the whereabouts of a young woman of color, approximately 19 years of age, of notable appearance, believed to have arrived in Mobile from New Orleans in late April.
Family seeking to locate inquiries directed to the notice runs only once, then never appears again.
A ship manifest from May 1st, 1833, showing the departure of the merchant vessel Celeste from Mobile bound for Havana, lists among its cargo four units domestic merchandise private consignment.
In the parlance of the illegal slave trade, domestic merchandise was a euphemism for human beings being transported in violation of law.
A ledger entry in Etienne Laval’s business records discovered during an estate settlement decades later dated the 15th of May, 1833.
Final commission on C, premium price received, account closed. These fragments suggest a narrative that Celine was indeed sent to Mobile, that she was held there briefly, and that she was then shipped to Cuba, where she would have been beyond the reach of anyone who might have sought to find her.
In Havana, a young woman of remarkable appearance would have commanded a high price in the slave markets that continued to operate openly until the 1862s.
What life she lived there, whether she survived, whether she ever gained freedom, these questions have no answers in the archives.
But there is one more piece of evidence discovered only recently that suggests Celine’s story did not end with her disappearance into the Caribbean slave trade.
In 2003, researchers working in Cuban archives discovered a freedom suit filed in 1847 in Havana by a woman identified as Selena Moreno Lebe, Selena, free woman of color.
The suit was brought against a plantation owner who had held her enslaved for 14 years despite her claim that she was legally free and had been kidnapped and illegally sold.
The documentation is fragmentary, but the woman’s testimony includes details that are hauntingly familiar.
She states that she was born in Louisiana, that she was educated at a school run by nuns, that she was held in a household in New Orleans where she witnessed illegal trafficking of women, that she was sold to Cuba in 1833 to prevent her from testifying about these crimes.
The suit was ultimately successful. Court records show that Selena was granted her freedom in 1848 on the grounds that her enslavement had been illegal from the outset.
But what happened to her after that, whether she returned to Louisiana, whether she survived the political upheavals of the 1850s and the coming wars, this is lost to history.
We cannot be certain this woman was the same Celine who kept the diary found hidden in a wall on Royal Street.
The name is similar but not identical. The dates align but are not perfect.
It is possible this is another woman with a similar story, because tragically, the machinery of trafficking that Laval operated was not unique.
Across the American South, similar operations existed in the shadows, exploiting the vulnerabilities of enslaved and free black women, operating in the gray zones of law and custom.
But I would like to believe it was her. I would like to believe that Celine survived, that she endured 14 years of illegal captivity and still found the strength to fight for her freedom, that she won, that she lived to see her story vindicated in a court of law.
Because the alternative, that she simply disappeared into the machinery of slavery and left no trace beyond a hidden diary, is too devastating to accept without resistance.
As for Etienne Laval, his life continued with little disruption.
The accusations of 1833 left no lasting mark on his reputation.
He continued his cotton factoring business for another decade, accumulating considerable wealth.
City directories list him at the same Royal Street address through the 1842s.
He served on the board of a local bank. He donated to the construction of a new cathedral.
In every public document, he appears as a respectable merchant, a pillar of the community.
He died in 1851, age 63, of yellow fever during one of the city’s periodic epidemics.
His obituary in the Daily Picayune described him as a gentleman of the old Creole families whose business acumen and civic contributions enriched our city.
There is no mention of the investigation of 1833. No hint of the accusations that had briefly threatened his reputation.
His widow, Marguerite, died two years later. The estate inventory lists the usual accumulation of a wealthy household, furniture, silver, art, property, and 15 enslaved people whose names are recorded only as line items in an asset column.
The Royal Street property changed hands several times over the following decades.
During the Civil War and Reconstruction, it fell into disrepair.
By the 1882s, it housed multiple families divided into apartments.
In the early 20th century, it was a boarding house.
In the 1962 and during urban renewal projects, it was slated for demolition.
It was during that demolition in 1923 that workers discovered an anomaly in the basement structure.
Behind a wall that appeared to be original construction, they found a space that should not have existed according to the building’s floor plans.
A narrow corridor leading to four small rooms with heavy doors and iron brackets set into the walls.
The whitewash on the walls had yellowed to a sickly cream color, and beneath it faint marks were visible.
Scratches in the plaster as if made by fingernails, and what appeared to be words carved into the soft brick.
Help us and remember, and a series of names barely legible.
The discovery was briefly noted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune under the headline hidden rooms found in French Quarter building, but the story generated little interest.
In 1923, the city was focused on modern concerns. The growth of the port, the coming of talking pictures, the boom of the Jazz Age.
The idea that these rooms might have been cells for holding captive women 90 years earlier was mentioned but not pursued.
The building was demolished as planned. The basement was filled in.
A parking lot was built on the site. In the 1962 seconds, that parking lot was paved over to create a small plaza.
Today, tourists walk across it without knowing what lies beneath the fill-in remnants of those rooms.
The obliterated evidence of suffering that the city chose not to examine too closely.
But the diary remains preserved now in climate-controlled archival storage available to researchers by appointment.
It stands as testimony to what Celine witnessed and what she endured.
Historians have debated its authenticity. Some arguing that the language is too sophisticated for an enslaved teenager.
Others pointing out that she received formal education and that trauma often produces eloquence.
But most scholars who have studied the diary believe it to be genuine.
Its details too specific and too consistent with other documented aspects of New Orleans’ illegal slave trade to be fabrication.
In 2015, the city of New Orleans installed a small plaque on the building that now occupies the site where the Lalaurie residence once stood.
The plaque is easy to miss, a bronze square about 12 in across mounted at eye level near the entrance.
It reads, On this site stood a residence where in the 1832 seconds, women of color were illegally trafficked and held captive.
This plaque honors the memory of those women whose names have been lost to history, and particularly remember Celine, whose diary provides testimony to these crimes.
May we never forget the human cost of slavery and the courage of those who witnessed and survived.
The plaque is part of a larger city-wide project to mark sites connected to the history of slavery.
An effort to make visible what has long been invisible, to acknowledge what has been denied.
But it is a small plaque, and most tourists hurry past it without reading on their way to restaurants or bars or antique shops, seeking the romantic version of New Orleans that the city sells to visitors.
A place of music and food and colorful architecture. Not a place built on the systematic exploitation of human beings.
Those who do stop to read the plaque sometimes ask questions.
Who was Celine? What happened to her? Is the diary available to read?
The answers are we don’t know for certain. We hope she survived but cannot prove it.
And yes, but you have to make an appointment with the archive and the material is fragile, so access is limited.
Sometimes late at night, people who work in the buildings near that site report hearing sounds, weeping, scraping, whispers in the darkness.
These stories circulate in the loosely organized community of New Orleans ghost tour guides and paranormal investigators.
The site is not on the official ghost tours because the history is too dark, too real, too raw for the kind of entertainment-focused storytelling that most tours provide.
But the stories persist anyway, passed along in the way that folk memory carries truth that official history tries to bury.
The stories say that the women who disappeared from that place left something behind.
Not just physical evidence in the form of scratches on walls and chains bolted to stone, but something less tangible.
A presence, a grief that soaked into the foundation and cannot be fully erased even by demolition and time.
I am not a believer in ghosts in the conventional sense.
But I do believe that places hold memories, that trauma leaves traces, that the past is never as buried as we would like to think.
I believe that when we walk through the French Quarter with its beauty and its music and its carefully maintained historical facades, we are walking over layer upon layer of suffering that has been paved over but not resolved.
Seline’s diary is one voice that managed to escape that burial.
Against all odds, her words survived. The women whose names she recorded, Josephine, Adeline, Celeste, and the 14 others who passed through those cells are not entirely forgotten because she remembered them.
Because she wrote them down. Because she hid that diary in a wall where it waited 90 years to be found.
This is why I tell this story. Not because it is entertaining or because it provides satisfying closure.
It does neither. I tell it because Celine asked that we remember.
Because in her final diary entry, facing her own disappearance into the machinery of trafficking, she asked that we acknowledge that she existed, that she mattered, that the women she witnessed being destroyed were real people with real lives.
We owe her that much. We owe them all that much.
The broader historical context of Celine’s story reveals how common her experience was, how systematic the exploitation she witnessed, and how deeply embedded in the economic and social structure of the antebellum South.
New Orleans in the 1832s was one of the wealthiest cities in America.
Its prosperity built almost entirely on the labor of enslaved people and the commerce of slavery.
The city was a major slave trading center with more than two dozen slave markets operating openly.
But alongside this legal trade operated an extensive illegal network.
The federal ban on importing enslaved people from Africa had been in effect since 1808, but smuggling continued through the port of New Orleans for decades afterward.
Additionally, the kidnapping and illegal enslavement of free black people was a documented problem throughout the South, particularly in cities with large free black populations like New Orleans.
The trafficking of women specifically for sexual exploitation, for domestic service, for forced passage arrangements was a subset of this illegal trade that has received less historical attention than other aspects of slavery.
But it existed, and it operated in precisely the way that Celine described, through networks of seemingly respectable individuals who maintained hidden facilities, who moved women through chains of transactions that left no legal paper trail, who exploited the legal vulnerability of both enslaved and free women of color.
Recent scholarship has begun to examine this history more directly.
Researchers have found evidence of similar operations in Charleston, Richmond, and Mobile.
Court records show occasional prosecutions for kidnapping free people of color, though successful prosecutions were rare and sentences light.
The testimony in these cases describe systems remarkably similar to what Celine witnessed.
Hidden cells, false promises, fraudulent bills of sale, transportation to foreign markets where victims could not be recovered.
What makes Celine’s diary extraordinary is not that it describes something unique, but that it provides detailed first-person testimony about a system that mostly operated invisibly.
Most victims of this trafficking left no record. Most perpetrators were never identified.
The system functioned through silence, through complicity, through the deliberate looking away that allowed prominent citizens to commit crimes in plain sight.
The diary also reveals the particular vulnerability of enslaved people who witnessed crimes.
Seline’s testimony would have had no legal weight in any court.
An enslaved person could not testify against a white person in Louisiana.
Even if she had managed to report what she witnessed, she would have had no protection from retaliation.
Her enslavement made her simultaneously the perfect witness. She saw everything and the most powerless witness, she could say nothing that would be officially heard.
This is why she wrote the diary. I think because writing was the only form of testimony available to her.
The diary was not meant to be read immediately, not meant to be presented as evidence in a court case.
It was meant to survive, to outlast her, to serve as a record for some future moment when perhaps it could be heard.
And 90 years later, it was found. And 190 years later, we are reading it.
We are hearing her voice. We are bearing witness to her testimony.
This is not justice. Justice would have been stopping the trafficking while it was happening, prosecuting Laval, freeing the women, providing redress and restitution.
But in the absence of justice, there is at least this memory, acknowledgement, the refusal to let the story be completely erased.
I want to end by returning to the question of beauty because it is central to Selina’s story in ways that are easy to overlook.
Seline was trafficked because she was beautiful. Her extraordinary appearance made her valuable as property and vulnerable to exploitation.
Throughout her diary, she returns again and again to this bitter irony that the thing about her that others praised, that was supposed to be a gift, was actually the source of her destruction.
But there is another dimension to beauty in her story.
Seline wrote beautifully. Her diary entries, even in their desperation, even in their horror, have a clarity and elegance of expression that transforms testimony into literature.
She took her trauma and shaped it into sentences that could survive, that could carry meaning across the decades.
This is its own kind of resistance. Under a system designed to reduce her to property, to deny her humanity, to erase her voice, she wrote.
She created something that could not be erased, a record that asserted her personhood more powerfully than any legal document.
The last line of her diary reads, “Please remember us.”
We are remembering. We are reading her words. We are speaking the name she recorded.
We are acknowledging that what happened in that house on Royal Street was real, was criminal, and was wrong.
Seline wanted to be more than property. She wanted to be seen as a person, a witness, a voice.
And now, nearly two centuries later, she is. Her diary sits in an archive where historians study it, where students read it, where it contributes to our understanding of how slavery operated, not just in the cotton fields, but in the hidden spaces of cities, in the basement of fine houses, in networks of exploitation that conventional histories often overlooked.
This is what survives, words on paper, testimony given to the future, beauty transformed from curse to resistance.
Remember Seline. Remember the women she witnessed being trafficked. Remember that this happened, that it was real, that it was part of the system of slavery that built the wealth of the American South, and whose consequences we are still grappling with today.
Remember that beneath the beautiful facades, beneath the carefully maintained historical surfaces, there are layers of suffering that demand acknowledgement.
Remember that every story we tell about the past is also a story about the present, about what we choose to see and what we choose to look away from, about whose voices we amplify and whose voices we silence.
Seline’s diary was hidden in a wall for 90 years, waiting to be found.
How many other testimonies are still hidden, still waiting, still trying to speak across the silence that systems of power create?
What are we still not seeing? What are we still not hearing?
What truths are buried beneath the surfaces we walk across every day?
These are the questions that Seline’s story leaves us with.
They are uncomfortable questions
