Marie Laveau

Marie Laveau was born a free woman of color in New Orleans around 1801 — a status that set her apart in a city where the lines between freedom and enslavement, between power and powerlessness, were drawn in brutal clarity.

She was the daughter of a wealthy French Creole planter and a free woman of African and Native American descent, raised in a city that was already one of the most complex cultural crossroads in the world.