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Examples
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For our third entree, we went for a Cajun (and Southern) staple: fried chicken with macque choux and collard greens.
Candy Sagon on Mokomandy: Unusual partners make a nice team Candy Sagon 2010
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No girls can meet the expenses in a big parlor-house and keep a man at the same time, even if the landladies would stand for a macque in the house, which they won't.
Madeleine: An Autobiography Madeleine 1919
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No girls can meet the expenses in a big parlor-house and keep a man at the same time, even if the landladies would stand for a macque in the house, which they won't. "
Madeleine An Autobiography Anonymous 1919
chained_bear commented on the word macque
"... pimps did sometimes siphon off the profits from illicit love, especially from foreigners who spoke little or no English. 'While many prostitutes in their isolated cabins practiced the profession quite independently, there were also some white slave girls, mostly Belgians,' Martha Black noted. 'These had been brought in and were managed by men known as macques, who not only lived "off the avails," but first demanded repayment of the passage money of their victims. Let it be always to the credit of the Northwest Mounted Police that they spared no efforts to bring these men of "fancy dress and patent leather shoes" to justice. They were ruthlessly rounded up, brought to trial, and, if proven guilty, given a blue ticket, which meant shoved aboard a boat and told to "get the hell out of the country and never come back".'"
--Lael Morgan, Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush (Fairbanks, Alaska and Seattle: Epicenter Press, 1998), p. 92
Note: Martha Black was speaking/writing in 1938 of her years in the Klondike around 1900.
Also...
"According to the ordinance, a prostitute could answer to a lover or business manager, but that was her choice. Pimps (also called 'macques') were forbidden to reside on the Line, and since prostitution was quasi-legal, pimps could not control women by threatening to turn them in to the authorities. If a girl was mistreated by a pimp, she could easily get rid of him by having him arrested. Plenty of customers found their own way to the restricted district without pimps luring them there; local bartenders would refer more customers for a reasonable commission, a service performed by taxi drivers in later years. So for the first time, perhaps in the history of the United States, it was possible for a common prostitute to survive on her own, with a real chance of building a better life."
--same book, page 192
January 31, 2017