Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  A mulâtre, or mulatto, is the child of a white man and a Negro or dark black woman.

  A quarteron, or quadroon, is the child of a white father and a mulatto woman.

  A grieff, or griffe, is the child of a Negro and a mulatto.

  A sang-mêlé, or mixed-blood, is the child of a white man and a quadroon.

  A métis is a mixed-race Native American, with one Indian parent and one white or colored parent.

  The words and labels sound strange now, in our world with its “white” and “black” continents of identity. But for Yves Le Corgne, words like “griffe” and “quadroon” are lenses through which he sees his intimates.

  * * *

  Marguerite Le Corgne works, she is not indolent. She helps to run the house and the kitchen, helps to keep everyone in clothes. Many whites, well over half, are workers and tradesmen, people who own neither land, nor people, nor real estate. They live from their sweat. They are petits blancs, the little whites. Marguerite and her people, the Zeringues, are a different caste. They are grands blancs, big whites. Slavery is the line that separates petits blancs from grands blancs. About one in four whites is a slaveholder. Marguerite’s grandparents, people named Zeringue, had two hundred acres and sixteen slaves. Grands blancs. The money trickles down from her parents to Marguerite Le Corgne, despite her marriage to a sailor who jumped ship.

  * * *

  Yves Le Corgne and Marguerite Zeringue make a family, or they try. Their firstborn is a girl, in May 1819. They call her Anne Marie. The child dies soon after birth. Anne Marie is followed by a boy, Yves, named for his father. He is born in January 1820. No doubt the parents hire a sage-femme, a midwife. Three years later, little Yves is dead, likely in an epidemic of fever that visits the city in 1823.

  Yellow fever is the disease. It killed most of the French soldiers in Haiti, the ones who sailed from Yves’s hometown. Whites believe yellow fever is caused by the wetlands behind the city, near Dauphine Street, “the pestilential miasma which rises from the swamps and marshes,” as a visitor puts it. In fact, yellow fever—common enough to have a nickname, Yellow Jack—is a mosquito-carried virus of the genus Flaviviridae, which also includes the viruses for dengue fever, encephalitis, West Nile fever, and Zika. To Yves and Marguerite, to whites in general, les nègres have an unfair advantage. When the fever comes, far more whites die than do blacks. A traveler describes the scene in New Orleans as “the most terrible, when from sixty to eighty persons are buried every day … whole streets cleared of their inhabitants, and the city one vast cemetery.” It is well-known that “creole, mulatto, and griffe women are the most skillful in the cure of the disease.” Experienced white doctors bury hundreds of people, like the three-year-old Yves, while “these old creole women commonly succeed in restoring their own patients.”

  What is it like, I wonder, to watch your boy die, and see that black people who take care of him, like your own Polly, are doing fine? I wonder if Yves and Marguerite have thoughts like this. The blacks live and live, they brush off the fevers. There is no justice in it. One day, the blacks will be held to account.

  In 1824, another girl is born to Yves and Marguerite. Her parents name her Marguerite, hoping her mother’s name will carry her. The child dies.

  In 1826, Yves and Marguerite have a boy. They call him Yves. He is the second baby they have named for his father. Yves is a seven-pound miracle to his parents, and they write it in his name, Yves Jean de Dieu Le Corgne—Yves John of God. The miracle baby is born nine years after his parents marry. Praise God, a boy who lives.

  I think of this one as “Yves of God.” He receives the love and learning his parents can afford. He is watched by Polly, the enslaved housekeeper. He is looked after by his mother and father. He is a dauphin, a prince, growing up on rue Dauphine, Princess Street.

  A year and a half later, in 1827, the boy is joined by a sister, named Constance, after her maternal grandmother. She dies as a toddler.

  In twelve years, Yves and Marguerite bury four children. It is hard to imagine. Wait a minute. It is hard to imagine Polly and her bitter portion.

  Yves Le Corgne, the supercargo, works side by side with black sailors in the merchant marine. Most are free, some are literate. There is a chance that somewhere on a job, in the year 1830, Yves comes upon a little book. It is out of the hands of an African American seaman. The little book is a manifesto: David Walker’s Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the … United States.

  “Search the pages of history and see if any … has ever treated a set of human beings as the white Christians of America do us, the blacks, or Africans,” writes David Walker.

  David Walker is a man of about thirty-three. He is born in North Carolina, and tall. His mother was a free woman of color, his father a slave. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, for several years before moving to Boston. And there, in fall 1829, Walker publishes his manifesto, the Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens. Among other things, his little book demands that people like Yves and Marguerite be killed.

  “I do declare it, that one good black man can put to death six white men,” Walker writes. “I call men to witness that the destruction of the Americans is at hand and will be speedily consummated unless they repent.… They have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them.”

  David Walker smuggles his pamphlet into the slave cities of the South. He prints three editions in nine months. From his storefront in Boston, he sews the book into the linings of clothing that black sailors wear. Copies of the book turn up in New Orleans in 1830, brought by seamen on cargo ships.

  “The whites are dragging us around in chains and in handcuffs, to their new States and Territories, to work their mines and farms, to enrich them and their children,” David Walker tells readers. “It is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.”

  David Walker’s Appeal is one man’s attack, a call to ditch white domination.

  “The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and bloodthirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority … cutting each other’s throats, trying to subject each other to wretchedness and misery … deceitful and unmerciful,” he says.

  The state legislature of Louisiana has an answer to David Walker. After the Appeal is discovered on ships at the wharfs of New Orleans, lawmakers outlaw black literacy, making it a crime to teach a person of color to read.

  I wonder whether Yves encounters this message in the hold of one of his schooners—

  “They (the whites) know well—that there can be nothing in our hearts but death alone for them.… Remember, Americans … that some of you whites will yet curse the day that you ever were born.”

  * * *

  It is summer 1831. The Le Corgne household is full. Yves and Marguerite have a five-year-old son, Yves of God—and now a one-year-old daughter, Ézilda. They have two slaves, Polly and a forty-one-year-old man named Valentin, another human gift from Marguerite’s father. Polly and Valentin keep home and hearth clean and working. And Marguerite becomes pregnant, for the seventh time.

  New Orleans during these years is a city of epidemics. In 1832, as Marguerite comes close to giving birth, cholera comes to visit, carried on bad sanitation. The scene looks like a visit of Yellow Jack, as the city empties out. “There is not a breath of air to be felt,” a visitor writes. “A deep silence reigns … and most of the stores are shut up. No one is to be seen in the streets in the day time except negroes and people of color. And no carriage except the funeral hearse.” Those who can leave New Orleans flee, and Marguerite and Yves go to the Zeringue plantation up the river. More than ten thousand in the city proceed to die while pregnant Marguerite is out of town. It is the worst cull of any to date, close to twenty percent of the population.

  It is there that he is born, at the old Zeringue place, on April 28, 1832. The boy shows his face in the house where Marguerite grew up, her home. It i
s the same house where she once saw the heads of decapitated blacks.

  She gave her first boy who lived a churchy name, Yves of God. She gives this boy the name of a saint, Polycarp. The Le Corgnes are Catholic, as are most whites; for them, saints are virtually alive. This one, Polycarp, was a bishop during the second century, killed in old age, burned alive, and later sanctified. Perhaps Marguerite and Yves see themselves as long-suffering, or perhaps they expect the boy to die, like their other children.

  Polycarp is our Klansman.

  The little boy acquires a middle name, from his mother’s mother. She was called Anne Constant, and she has been dead five years. It is time to pay her respect.

  Polycarp Constant grows into a thin, small boy. He seems to get less attention and receive fewer lessons than his brother, Yves of God. It is a pattern that follows the brothers in life.

  The toddler Constant runs back and forth in the house. When he cries, Polly the slave tries to quiet him. His father Yves wants calm, so he can tutor his pupils, but there will be none of it.

  4

  You release a little breath when you see the birth record of a relative—I mean, one who is dead. It is the sentimental sigh of people who peer into family history. The baptism register where the name “Polycarpe Constant Hypolite Le Corgne” shows up gives me this touch of recognition. And so, here he is. (The name is a mouthful. Let me call the boy “P.C.”) I feel a flicker of identification with P.C. Even though I know nightmares lie on the horizon, he is still, involuntarily, one of us. I want to wish him a good childhood.

  P.C. grows up around enslaved blacks. Polly and Valentin live in the kitchen house. They watch him, watch over him. On visits to the Zeringue plantation, P.C. plays with black children. It may seem strange that children of masters and children of field hands keep company, but that is what they do. They are playmates until the black boys and girls start work, about age six.

  What comes from the lips of whites is something like this. We love the blacks who are near us, they say. We love them like family. Some of them are so very good.

  They also say this: les nègres are like a different creature.

  P.C. is seven. His grandfather, Jean-Louis Zeringue, is widowed and alone. The grandchildren come around, slave children come around, too. In April 1839, Grandfather Jean-Louis brings some of his people to church to be baptized. P.C. and the rest of the Le Corgnes go to witness the christening of four black children. The service is planned for St. Louis Cathedral, where Yves and Marguerite married.

  The Code Noir, or Black Code, is the old law that regulates the lives of the enslaved. The law says the church will give its sacraments to people of color, baptisms and funerals, although not marriage. Since the coming of the Americans, the Code Noir is a relic, but by custom white Creoles still baptize black children. Jean-Louis brings to church his slaves, the mothers and their babies—Estelle, Frances, Joseph, and Agatha. They are to be blessed and splashed with holy water.

  The curate writes in his register.

  “Estelle, 14 months, daughter of Josephine.”

  P.C., at the baptismal font, sees the white clergyman in black cassock and white collar. His name is Father Aquarone.

  “Frances, five months, daughter of Henriette. Joseph Adam, three years, son of Rachel and Job.”

  Rachel’s partner, Job, must be on hand for this ceremony. Everyone crowds around as each child is blessed, and the curate thumbs the sign of the cross on each child’s forehead.

  “Agatha, six months, daughter of Rachel.”

  They are like family, the blacks. We love the ones near us. But they are so different.

  A pause in the rites. It is time for the prayer of exorcism. People know the prayer in the liturgy, and they know the need for the ritual cleansing. There is an epidemic of voodou among the blacks. It seems the people who come from Saint-Domingue are especially prone. And the ones who come from Africa—people from Benin, from Senegal, the Fon people, the Yoruba, the Wolof—carry the voodou in pure form. Father Aquarone sprinkles holy water on the children to protect them from its curse.

  “Almighty and ever-living God, cast out the spirit power of Satan, author of evil, from these children.”

  The ignorant blacks have their zinzin, their power amulets. They have all kinds of grisgris, powders and plants and animal parts. They believe their grisgris has power to move things in the dark spirit world. The whites know what the blacks believe, and they want to stamp it out. The blacks have their priests and priestesses, the vodouisants, servants of the spirits. They live out on Bayou Road, which winds into the swamp behind the city. It is there, in the back of town, that the conjurers draw the blacks to Satan. It is there that the unholy make them believe in diabolical blessings and evil spells.

  Father Aquarone prays out the voodou curse. He splashes the water. All rise, cross themselves, and the service ends. Little P.C. sits in the pew.

  * * *

  On Sundays it is over to Place Congo—Congo Square—to watch the dancing. The maps call it Circus Square, a big, empty field just north of the Vieux Carré. Congo Square lies on Rampart Street, where the walls of town once stood. The Senegambians and Angolans, the “Congos,” make it their own once a week.

  You can hear the thunder from a quarter mile. The square is four blocks from the Le Corgne house, and the sound of drums enters through the windows. The scene takes place the afternoon of the Sabbath. It is diabolical, fascinating, irresistible. Enslaved people start dancing at 3:00 p.m.—not a minute earlier, the city marshals say. When P.C. is a boy, the dancing is Sabbath entertainment for half of the city.

  “Every stranger should visit Congo Square in its glory,” writes a traveler who comes through in the 1830s, when P.C. is growing up. The sound of bones beating on a barrel starts the dancing. The sound turns to drumming, and there is no break till sunset, five hours later.

  Marguerite and Yves and the children make their way down Dauphine Street. Two blocks, then turn left, two blocks along Orleans Street, and there it is. I imagine that their slaves, Valentin and Polly, take a different path. “Going up the street and approaching the corner I heard a most extraordinary noise, like horses trampling on a wooden floor,” another white visitor writes in his journal.

  When you reach the square, you see five or six hundred black women and men dancing—in dozens of circles—and you see the drums.

  The dancers are not sang-mêlés. Congo Square is not a place where Creoles of color meet. The Le Corgne landlord, Marie Hinard, is not to be found. The dance is a beautiful thing, but the free people of color feel it is beneath them.

  P.C. watches from the edge, with other whites. What he sees is ten or twenty clusters of dance. Inside every circle, drummers pound on pigskin, and two or three dancers command a dirt stage. A white visitor from P.C.’s boyhood named Benjamin Latrobe describes the scene.

  “A man sits astride a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, and beats it with incredible quickness with his hands and fingers.… [Dancers] in their movements, gyrations, and attitudinizing exhibitions, keep the most perfect time, making the beats with the feet, head, or hands, or all, as correctly as a well-regulated metronome.”

  Latrobe is fascinated by black music, especially black drums, which stun him. “They make an incredible noise,” he says. He draws pictures in his journal. The sketches are good. And they should be: Benjamin Latrobe is an architect and well-known, having recently overseen the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C.

  “Drums at Congo Square,” drawn by Benjamin Latrobe in 1819

  The drum of choice is the bamboula. Three feet tall, a cone-like cylinder small on the bottom and wide at the top, the bamboula stands between the knees of a seated drummer. Its business end is animal skin, the bottom left open to amplify it.

  Another, larger drum lies on its side. A man sits on it and plays. A third drum, square, looks like a stool. Beat it with a mallet for the deepest bass. For treble sounds there is a rasp, a yard-long bat with lines chiseled along
the side that scratch and rattle when raked with a drumstick.

  The square has been freshened up, grass and sycamores planted. The grands blancs dislike clouds of dust during the city’s big show. They want things nicer for white eyes. They also want the festival to continue. The authorities know that Congo Square soaks up the desire and the frustration and the anger of thousands of black people. If they do not have an outlet like this, things could be worse.

  Benjamin Latrobe describes more instruments—triangles, violins, jawbones. He is curious about one instrument with strings. It has a calabash for a body, and out from the round gourd a long fingerboard emerges, with several strings held tight by pegs. It is the banzas, from Senegambia. In a few years the banzas enters white music. It is enlarged and modified, it turns into the American banjo.

  The women on Congo Square wear the tignon, a kerchief wrapped and tied on the head. The children wear shifts, neck-to-knee robes of coarse muslin. There are tables around the edge of the square with cotton awnings for shade from the sun. Sellers peddle drinks—ginger beer, lemonade, alcohol. Healers sell amulets and elixirs and grisgris.

  P.C. sees it all from the perimeter.

  The square feeds the devil’s work, the churchmen say. Close it down, push out the vodouisants. It is grotesque. Sunday belongs to the Lord, and the blacks pollute it.

  The bamboula is a drum, and it is the name of a dance in which one man plays star. He flexes to the middle of the circle. The bamboula lets him leap. Around the circle, women sway from side to side, chanting a dirge a hundred times, singing a verse another hundred. The bamboula dancer lures one woman into the circle, drums with his legs, swings her. The calinda is another dance with a man in a circle of women. Calinda dancers wear fantastic ornaments, ropes of cowrie shells, the tails of raccoons, sometimes a hundred feathers.