At half past eight on Thursday night, December 5, 1861, John Miller came home with a cowhide. He and Mary Jane Jackson, the woman New Orleans knew as Bricktop, had been living together for some time at a settlement called Freetown, near the city, and by the account the New Orleans True Delta printed two days later, he had decided she needed "a little domestic correction." She did not take it. She tore the whip out of his hands and laid it across his arm and shoulders. When he drew a knife, she caught his arm, wrenched the blade away, took him by the throat and stabbed him five times.
What she did next struck the reporter more than the stabbing. She seemed to regret it at once, the paper said, "for there had been a wild, lion-like love between them," and she put him to bed. Miller died there at four o'clock the next morning. She was arrested and locked in the jail at Gretna. Within ten days the story had been reprinted in the Richmond Dispatch under the headline "Fatal affray near New Orleans," carrying a line that summed up her name on both sides of the river: "Bricktop never yet was vanquished, in fair fight, by man or woman."
Miller has grown in the retelling. Later accounts make him a jailer, a prizefight manager and a killer in his own right who first met her while she was held in the Parish Prison, and in Herbert Asbury's 1936 history of the French Quarter he wears an iron ball and chain in place of a lost arm and swings it at her before the knife comes out. The True Delta, writing while the case was two days old, described none of that. Its version of the night has a cowhide, a knife, five wounds and a woman putting a dying man to bed.
She had been dangerous long before that night, though most of what is told about her earlier life comes from those later accounts. In them she was born on Girod Street in 1837 (some reference books say 1836), and she was called Bricktop for her red hair. She was working as a prostitute at thirteen and was a saloonkeeper's mistress at fourteen; when he left her three years later, she beat him so badly that he lost an ear and had his nose broken. She drifted from house to house, unable to get along with the other women, and danced at Archy Murphy's place on Gallatin Street, the roughest strip in New Orleans, until even Murphy judged her too rough to keep. Later she kept a house on Dauphine Street, where she worked with Delia Swift, known as Bridget Fury, and with Ellen Collins and America Williams.
The same accounts credit her with two killings in the 1850s. In 1856, at nineteen, she is said to have beaten a man to death for calling her a whore, and the next year to have stabbed a man nearly seven feet tall known as Long Charley. Neither victim is given a full name, and she was never tried for either death.
The first killing the city's papers tied to her by name came on November 7, 1859. She was in a saloon on Rampart Street with Ellen Collins and America Williams when a blacksmith named Laurent Fleury, sitting nearby, asked her to stop swearing. She swore louder. Fleury got up and slapped her, and the women stabbed him to death. The police found his trouser pocket and his money on her. The Crescent and the Delta followed the killing through the inquest, and the case went into court as the State against Americus Williams and Mary Jane Jackson, the papers spelling the other woman's name both ways. According to the later accounts, the autopsy could not establish how Fleury had died, and she went free.
Miller's death was different. For it she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years. Her timing, for once, was good. In the spring of 1862 Union forces took New Orleans, and the military governor, George F. Shepley, emptied the local prisons. Bricktop walked out after about nine months.
She did not stay out of the papers. In November 1862 the Sunday Delta reported that she had been accused of stabbing a sailor, and it revived an older story, never proved, that she had killed a husband in Cincinnati. The Delta's coverage that year also gave her the names Mary the Red and Red Mary.
After that the trail thins. Some accounts say she left New Orleans for a time and came back. A Louisiana death index lists a Mary Jane Jackson who died in New Orleans on December 20, 1897, and later reference works have given that date as hers, but hers was a common name and nothing in the entry ties it to the woman who stabbed John Miller.
1837: born on Girod Street, by later accounts (some reference books say 1836).
1856: later accounts say she beats a man to death for calling her a whore, and the next year stabs a man known as Long Charley; she is never tried for either death.
November 7, 1859: the blacksmith Laurent Fleury is stabbed to death in a saloon on Rampart Street; she is tried with Americus Williams and, by later accounts, goes free.
December 5, 1861: she stabs John Miller five times at Freetown, near New Orleans; he dies at four o'clock the next morning, and she is later convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years.
Spring 1862: after Union forces take New Orleans, the military governor, George F. Shepley, empties the local prisons and she walks out after about nine months.
November 1862: the Sunday Delta reports that she has been accused of stabbing a sailor.
December 20, 1897: a Louisiana death index lists the death of a Mary Jane Jackson in New Orleans, though nothing in the entry ties it to her.