Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  Buffon’s digest of race stresses the high place of whiteness: “We behold the human form in its greatest perfection in Europe.” There is a pyramid of humanity, he says. Yet the layers of the pyramid have developed from one source, as the Bible makes clear, the idea of monogenesis. Because blacks and whites have sex and make children, they must be the same creature. Following the fable of Genesis, with Adam and Eve in Eden, Buffon is clear that all humans come from a single root. The Histoire naturelle encyclopedia is passed around, and Buffon becomes an authority on the same plane with Voltaire and Denis Diderot. The idea of a stack of races, with whites on the top and people of color on the bottom, spreads through northern Europe. It drifts like sediment into the unconscious of common whites, like Yves Le Corgne, the sailor.

  * * *

  Yves Le Corgne washes up in New Orleans, a town ninety years old. Compared with one-thousand-year-old Brest—rocky, cold, and strict, with a military hardness—New Orleans is new, ramshackle, and steaming. The city counts about twenty thousand, half of them white, half of them people of color. When French colonists come to live in the early 1700s, planting a foot between the Chickasaw and Choctaw, they call the place la Nouvelle Orléans. The name flatters the Duke of Orléans, regent of France. A century later, the Americans translate the name as “New Orleans.”

  People in New Orleans might call Yves a forçat, a label for a dubious exile. The word forçat dates from the time when many whites in Louisiana are people expelled from France—criminals, beggars, military deserters rounded up and deported. A lot of exiles are boatmen, like Yves. Women who are forçats are thrown out from French prisons or hospitals. Yves is doubtful, so are many.

  The city is one-half white and one-half nonwhite. In order merely to say that, I am using racial thought, four hundred years old, that divides humans into groups. But to continue: its population is 6,300 white men and women, 6,000 enslaved African Americans, and 5,000 free people of color. Free people of color—“f.p.c.” in legal papers, gens de couleur libres in French—are a group apart. They are neither white nor black, pas blanc, ni nègre. Many f.p.c.’s have white fathers and enslaved black mothers and acquire freedom when their father decides his children should not be his slave property.

  Yves Le Corgne has been in New Orleans only a short time when another war comes to his door. Now it is the United States that clashes with Britain, France’s old enemy. In the War of 1812, the majority of the fight takes place far from Louisiana—in Ohio, Michigan, Canada, and Maryland—but the final act of the war is closed at New Orleans. It is early January 1815 when several thousand British soldiers and a naval squadron arrive on the Mississippi River at a point five miles south of the city. There they meet an American army of five thousand whites and people of color commanded by forty-seven-year-old General Andrew Jackson. Yves Le Corgne, the new immigrant, might be in the fight, because he probably hates the British and because General Jackson wants veteran sailors to man a handful of gunships, but I find no record. The assault on New Orleans fails, the troops from England leave Louisiana, and the last war that Yves lives through is over.

  New Orleans is a murky town for Yves, one swirling with clans. A visitor describes the white men: “They are not capable of violent passions or strong exertions”—in other words, they do not care to work very hard. “They have few men of superior talents. The drawbacks of their character are an overruling passion for frivolous amusements—dance, food—and a tendency for the luxurious enjoyment of the other sex, without being selective of either the black or the white race.”

  Whether Yves sleeps with black women, or with white, there is no evidence. I have the impression he has little to do with les nègres, that he tries to get away from the blacks. He will find a white woman with money, and ask her to marry.

  3

  Marguerite Zeringue is the woman Yves finds. She is born in August 1798, on a plantation in southwest Louisiana, outside a village called Plattenville. The farm faces Bayou Lafourche, a sluggish stream that peels off the Mississippi, a day and a half by longboat from New Orleans.

  Her parents are in the land-and-slave class. Households named Zeringue have run plantations on Bayou Lafourche for generations. On the farm where Marguerite is born, enslaved women and men grow rice that her parents sell. Marguerite’s childhood is comfortable—the Zeringues are in the upper five percent—but not extravagant. The family is too fertile. Marguerite has four sisters in the house and twenty cousins within a few miles. Her father, the fourth of ten children, inherits little. And her mother is Acadienne, Acadian. By that I mean she is “Cajun,” one of ten thousand migrants who come down from eastern Canada with her parents when the English drive out the French.

  When Marguerite is seven years old, her parents move away from Bayou Lafourche, take their children and enslaved people, and resettle near New Orleans, buying a piece of land and a house on the Mississippi River, five miles upstream of the city. The new Zeringue plantation has two hundred yards of riverbank and runs away from the water about six hundred yards, ending at the swamp. The family lives in an eight-room house; near it stand four “negro cabins,” a corn house, a kitchen house, and a rice mill. Marguerite grows up here, a farm with ten acres of rice in the ground. She is not a grande princesse, but she knows black people as the folk who serve her day and night.

  The Zeringues do not name their slave farm the way the Americans put labels on land. Les Américains call their places all kinds of things. The Zeringue plantation is a nameless factory with workers and fields.

  The plantation of Marguerite’s cousin, “C. Zeringue,” lies across the Mississippi River from “Jefferson City.”

  In 1811, Marguerite is fourteen. She steps out to the water, where she can watch the riverboats. In midwinter, something big happens on the river, and a lot of blood flows. Thirty-five miles upstream from New Orleans, on the east bank of the Mississippi, there is an uprising of sugar workers. As you might expect, for what the people are put through.

  On January 8, 1811, near the home of the slaveholder Manuel Andry, between two hundred and three hundred people form a mob behind a pair of men. The leaders are named Quamana, an Asante born in West Africa, and Charles Deslondes, a Creole of color—a “mulatto,” the Americans say. Both men are enslaved on sugar plantations, and so are their followers. The mob seizes the house of Manuel Andry, where they kill the slaveholder’s young son. Armed with axes and farm tools, the troupe makes its way downriver, moving from plantation to plantation, heading south toward New Orleans, picking up recruits. They burn the houses of several sugar planters, then kill a man named François Trépagnier. Going along the riverbank, the army of maybe four hundred comes within a few miles of the Zeringue land, where young Marguerite looks out at the water.

  Slaves in Louisiana speak a language of their own; it is not French, not English, but a modified French some call Gombo. In Gombo, you have a saying that fits this occasion—Même bâton qui batte chein nouer-là, pé batte chein blanc-là, “The same stick that beats the tied-up dog can beat the white.”

  Les nègres are cruel and uncivilized, white people say. Like animals, they must be dealt with.

  The rebel army reaches a point ten miles upriver from the Zeringues, where companies of whites, armed and mounted, make the attack. Near the sugar plantation of Jacques Fortier, whites chase down and kill forty of the rebels. They capture another sixty or more.

  Everyone says the rising is the fruit of Saint-Domingue. Ever since Toussaint L’Ouverture and his armies faced down the French in Haiti and won, blacks have looked for a way to scalp the good white folks of Louisiana.

  Marguerite Zeringue, though just a girl, must know something about Haiti. She certainly knows when an army of blacks comes down the river, almost in sight.

  After three quick trials, dozens are executed by hanging, more by firing squad. The heads of the men are severed from their bodies and placed on stakes. Within a few days, some one hundred heads appear on tall posts, lining the river. They
stand every quarter mile or so, propped up like markers, starting at the riverbank in front of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, going upstream along the river road, ending at the starting point of the revolt.

  Marguerite Zeringue is a young woman, just into puberty. When she puts on her fresh linen, stands on the levee in front of her house, and looks across the river, what she sees are fence posts topped with black heads, their faces twisted in the agony of gruesome death.

  * * *

  Yves Le Corgne and Marguerite Zeringue marry and set up house. I find record of a rental where they come to live—rue Dauphine, #43—Dauphine Street, where children will be born.

  The city of New Orleans looks from the air like a box pushed against the bank of a river. The river washes one side of the town, while a swamp steams up the other. The French use the Native name for the giant river, Mississippi, and so too les Américains. North of the town, through five miles of cypress swamp, lies a big lake. The French named it Lake Pontchartrain, after one of their noblemen, the Count of Pontchartrain.

  The boxlike settlement between a river and a lake is a little grid, eleven blocks long as you walk beside the Mississippi, seven blocks deep as you walk away from it—sixty-six blocks of three hundred feet each. Yves and Marguerite marry about the time the Americans start to come in droves from the north and east—Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia. Things sprawl. A new suburb, or faubourg, appears just east of the rectangle. (The word faubourg, or suburb: faux / false + bourg / city = faubourg, “false city.”) It is faubourg Marigny, named for a man who divides his plantation land and sells building lots. Another suburb west of the old rectangle, faubourg St. Mary, is where the Americans move in. That neighborhood has flat façades and English-style windows and sash. Creoles call them fenêtres à la guillotine, guillotine windows. They slice up and down and are uglier than French windows, which open like a door into the room.

  Both faubourgs, St. Mary and Marigny, grow along the river. English is spoken in St. Mary. At some point, the Americans who live there call the older city the “French Quarter,” where Creoles and the foreign French live. When they move to Dauphine Street, Yves and Marguerite remain with their people in the Vieux Carré.

  The new Le Corgne house has problems. It stands a block from the maisons de tolérance, the brothels. A half-dozen houses where sex is on sale lie one hundred yards from the newlyweds’ front door, just where rue Douane (Custom House Street) meets rue Burgundy (Burgundy Street). Another problem is the flood. A few months earlier, water fills the streets that lie near the swamp behind the city—Dauphine is one—and most houses sit in water for a time before the flood recedes. A breach in the levee tripped the flood. The levee is the mound of dirt that lines the river and keeps the flow in its banks. Creoles have a word for a levee break, a “crevasse.” It happens a lot.

  * * *

  The colored people are everywhere, they own the neighborhood. Yves and Marguerite rent from a woman named Marie Hinard. She is a femme de couleur libre, a free woman of color, who owns two houses on Dauphine Street.

  I look for the house at 43 Dauphine, but it is gone. A record of the floor plan survives. The property comprised two buildings on a skinny lot—a so-called Creole cottage and, fifty feet behind it, a two-story kitchen house. In the 1800s, the cottage stood right against the street, lined in front by a wooden banquette, a sidewalk made of planks. When they move in, the Le Corgnes occupy the front building, and their wedding present, the enslaved Polly, lives in the kitchen house. The Creole cottage is one-and-a-half stories and nearly square, but Yves and Marguerite have only one side of it; Marie Hinard rents the other side to someone else. The Le Corgnes’ half cottage has two rooms downstairs and one room up. It is roomy, until children appear. Behind the cottage, Polly spends much of her life. Her kitchen house is a brick rectangle with a giant fireplace on the ground floor; she sleeps in a room above. Between the kitchen and the cottage, a courtyard. Maybe banana trees, a vegetable garden, a slop corner, bamboo, lizards, and cockroaches, les cafards. In the corner, a privy, a hole in the ground with a toilet seat and door. The place looks a lot like a compound in Havana, or in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, two sister cities of New Orleans. Also in the courtyard, a wooden cistern, a big barrel with four legs holding it aboveground. Open on top, the cistern awaits rainwater, used to drink and cook. Many drink from the Mississippi, but only after they let a pitcher of the river water sit for an hour, so that a bed of silt can settle.

  Yves stays in touch with his family back home in Brittany. He writes them, they write back. The newspapers tell him when his mail comes. He does not forget his family, but he never goes to France again.

  Aunt Maud tells me in her notes that Yves spent his prison months in England in the company of a talkative British officer, and that he learned English that way. It sounds a little twee, and I am skeptical. But I find a directory that says Yves works as un instituteur, a teacher in an institute. Probably he gives language lessons. About this time, an English educator named Joseph Lancaster develops a method he calls “reciprocal teaching,” and in America, hundreds of academies open to try it. In Louisiana, the method becomes enseignement mutuel, mutual learning: American students tell the French things in English, while French tell the Americans things in French. Yves Le Corgne looks on.

  Teaching pads the income, but most of Yves’s work is on the water. At any time, two hundred schooners, barges, and sloops tie up at the wharfs of the Mississippi. Aunt Maud says that Yves makes his main living as a purser and supercargo on ships in the merchant marine.

  Businesspeople in the seagoing trade hire a man known as a supercargo to travel with their goods from port to port. A client in New Orleans ships a load of sugar in barrels to Mobile, Alabama, and Yves goes with the cargo. He sees that it stays dry, and he collects the money. A supercargo brings his own small payload on a ship that hires him, and makes little deals on the side. I suspect Yves takes full opportunity to order around the black men who unload his boat. Back in New Orleans, waiting for the next shipment, he teaches in the institute.

  * * *

  The working hands at home belong to Polly. She is twenty-five in the year 1820. If she has a partner or family, she leaves them behind on the Zeringue plantation, across the river. The place is not far, two hours by foot and ferry. Maybe Polly sees her people two or three days a month, when she can talk her way there and get free of the Le Corgnes. Her domain is the courtyard. She is the factotum who empties the night soil of the chamber pots into the courtyard latrine. She is the laundry worker. She boils water in a vat in the courtyard, dips the madame’s white things, the monsieur’s shirts, the sheets, uses lye to make them white, hangs them to dry, heats the flatiron in the fire, mixes the cornstarch, damps the wrinkles, flattens them with the iron. Polly does the laundry on Mondays, and it takes all day. She cooks while everything dries.

  Polly manages the food, keeps everyone eating. She goes to the covered market on Levee Street at St. Anne Street and returns with huîtres and crevettes, oysters and shrimp. There is no evidence about how Yves and Marguerite relate to Polly, but in the custom, the three spend ten or twelve hours a day within earshot. When Marguerite and Yves have sex, Polly probably hears them.

  Polly wants things, but I do not know many of what they are. She is enchained to the parents of our Klansman. That is what I know about her.

  The Le Corgnes’ landlord, Marie Hinard, is Franco-African, a French-speaking woman of color. In one important way, Marie Hinard is better off than Yves and Marguerite. She owns real estate. I wonder how her tenants feel about renting from Marie Hinard. To Yves and Marguerite, she is not a négresse; she is different from les nègres. They may resent her. When Marie Hinard buys another house on Dauphine Street, she owns property on both sides of the Le Corgnes. The colored woman throws shade.

  * * *

  New Orleans is divided into groups. About one in four is white and speaks French; one in four is white and speaks English. One in four is mixed-race and free. On
e in four is black and enslaved, speaking French or English, and sometimes a dialect of a West African language—Wolof, Mandinka, or Umbundu. Whites have names for nonwhites. “Quashee” is slang that names a defiant slave, a person who says no to her master.

  Black people also have names for whites. “Buckra” is a good one. Buckra count their money all the time. Buckra do not tire of taking themselves to church. I want to hear what enslaved people sound like talking about whites, but of course I cannot.

  Another name for whites: “ofay.” You will not hear the word “ofay” on the lips of the Le Corgnes. Ofay likes it when his Creole women are bright. Ofay wants you to call him maître, master. Polly might have such things to say.

  Some part of the population, white and black, speaks Spanish, held over from the forty years Louisiana was a colony of Spain. There are also Native Americans, who have survived a century of invasion. Native people number maybe one thousand in the city and live in its margins. The largest group, the Houmas, come to New Orleans to sell goods at city markets before retreating to villages in the western parishes, Lafourche and Terrebonne.

  The factions—free white, enslaved black, free people of color, Native—have words for one another. A large number are race terms that whites use to label gens de couleur. Yves Le Corgne uses them, these words that fix who and what you are—