Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  The faubourg is named for Louis Bouligny, the man who owns much of the land and who is selling it piecemeal. Louis Bouligny hires a surveyor named Benjamin Buisson. Like Yves Le Corgne, Buisson is both a Frenchman and a veteran of the Grande Armée of Emperor Bonaparte. To honor the great man, Buisson names the main street of Bouligny “Napoleon Avenue” and gives streets on either side of the avenue the names of battles won by the emperor’s armies—Valence, Cadiz, Jena, Milan, Berlin, Jersey. The Le Corgnes’ street, Lyons (the Americans spell it with an s, the French without) marks the city in France where Napoleon, at the end of the empire in 1815, planned his return.

  The Le Corgnes are up and out of the French Quarter. While a new house is being built, they rent a place on a nearby street called Terpsichore.

  The family has a new baby, Marguerite Eliza, and the house is being built in Bouligny. It is fall 1840 when Yves falls ill.

  In Louisiana, when a white man comes down with fever in the fall, his family freezes in fear. You have malaria. You have typhoid fever. Poor sanitation gives rise to typhoid, an intestinal infection that lasts for months and often kills. And you have Yellow Jack. I do not know with certainty whether Yves catches yellow fever in 1840, but chances are pretty good that he does.

  Yellow Jack kills a white person in three or four days, and it is violent. The fever starts with chills, moves to agonizing back pain. The skin of a white patient turns yellow. Then comes a crust of black scum on the tongue, and finally, a day of delirium. The killing part is the expulsion of fluids. Diarrhea begins, resembling a syrup, and continues without end. Death is certain as victims curl up with knees to their face. The body seems to expel itself in vomit. The retching is so great that pieces of flesh come from the throat, and vomit appears nearly solid. Patients sometimes welcome death.

  Yves Le Corgne does not recover, and he dies November 18, 1840, at fifty-three.

  P.C. is a nine-year-old boy when he loses his father. It is an age when a child can be wrecked by the loss of a parent. And does P.C. watch his father die? Almost certainly.

  The death of the father is a disaster for most families. Marguerite Zeringue has six children; her parents are dead, and she has only one living sister. The networks of care have thinned. And yet, she enslaves six people—“my niggers,” I imagine she calls them. Marguerite’s slaves are the reason the family does not collapse. She will rent out her workers for income. Six slaves can run a house, keep everyone clothed, and pay all expenses. They can even comfort Madame in her grief. These are the kinds of things a white family asks a community of blacks to perform on their behalf.

  Maybe her children say this. Thank goodness Mother has her slaves. She treats them right, takes them to church, gets them baptized. She is good to them.

  Marguerite is a new matriarch. In records, the spelling of her name starts to change. The family ceases to be “Le Corgne.” It becomes Lecorgne. To the law, she is Veuve Lecorgne, “Widow Lecorgne.”

  Once again, an appraiser comes in. This one is named François Laizer. He is just twenty-three and a newcomer to New Orleans. He comes to Louisiana from Cuba, from the city of Santiago, on the eastern end of that island. Although no one knows it when he walks into the house on Terpsichore, Laizer will play an important part in the life of P.C. Lecorgne, our Klansman.

  François Laizer finishes business with the estate, Yves Le Corgne goes into his grave, and Widow Lecorgne finishes building the family house. She leases her people. She rents out Eulalie, who is fifty-nine. She rents Anna, forty. She rents Sylvie, also forty. Probably she keeps three people with her, at home, to run her life and raise her six children.

  The Lecorgnes are very, very rich next to most black people. They are rich next to most whites. Of the one-quarter of whites who possess slaves, about half of that group, or ten percent of the white population, enslave more than ten people. The Lecorgnes sit on a soft sofa in a high parlor of white society.

  I would also say that is not the way it looks to them. Compared with their cousin Camille Zeringue of Seven Oaks, the Lecorgnes’ money is trifling. Cousin Camille is a man with seventy slaves. I have to imagine the Lecorgnes envy him, and maybe they resent him, for his stupendous store of living and breathing capital.

  After a year or two on Terpsichore, Marguerite and the household move to Lyons Street, in Bouligny. Their house is a Creole cottage, much like their old one. One-and-a-half stories, four rooms downstairs and two up, with two front doors facing the street, on the left and right. There is a kitchen house in the backyard and a cabin for the enslaved. The black women run the kitchen. An acre all around for a garden and fruit trees, with room for more houses, when the children grow up.

  Marguerite has a new worker, Ovid, named for the Roman poet. Ovid is sixteen, and the record makes no mention of his parents or siblings. Probably Marguerite went to the slave market in the City Exchange Hotel and bought the boy away from his family. It is a guess, but that is the way a nice widowed lady might do things.

  P.C. Lecorgne comes of age in faubourg Bouligny. He and his brothers and sisters have a mother but no father, and they live in a house where black people are continually present. P.C. knows that “they” are born to work. He knows whites like him are born to be worked for. On Sunday at St. Stephen, the Lecorgnes’ new church on Napoleon Avenue, P.C. may hear a sermon from a priest that explains how the world works, how it has all been engineered by the Lord. The priest would share words from the Bible. God’s word is full and clear on the subject of slaves and masters. The book of Joshua, in the Old Testament, teaches that there “shall none be freed from being slaves, and hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

  Widow Lecorgne pays to educate her children: there are no free schools. She sends her girls and boys to academies in town. The girls finish education at age sixteen, or near it; the boys a bit later, except for one, Yves of God. The largest portion of Marguerite’s money goes to fill the mind of Yves, her oldest son. Primogeniture is alive and well among Creoles, and the firstborn gets the most.

  Yves is a good learner, and ambitious. He wants to get into the law, and he wants to get into the land market that is booming around the faubourg. He wants to be a slaveholder, as do almost all whites. These things will happen. P.C., the middle son, is less good at his lessons. It seems his math is poor, and his writing—except his penmanship, perhaps. The evidence is thin, but you can read what survives in reverse. His actions as an adult imply he is not a learner as a child. He wants things, probably; he wants to influence and maybe to dominate the people near him. I am reading again in reverse. He, too, wants to hold slaves. All that he wants will come to him, at least for a time.

  * * *

  I am sure the Lecorgne children see it, at least the brothers do. A new magazine starts up in New Orleans, De Bow’s Review. It is a little beacon for the mental life of the grands blancs. With offices on Camp Street, near the French Quarter, De Bow’s Review is the creation of a lawyer-turned-journalist, James De Bow. He has the idea of blending social comment with business talk.

  The Lecorgnes read the French newspapers, L’Abeille (the Bee) and Le Courrier de la Louisiane (Louisiana Courier). They might read the English papers, the Crescent, the Bulletin, and the Picayune. I am sure that some take a subscription to De Bow’s Review, the magazine for the thoughtful white South. Soon after he arrives in Louisiana—in 1845, from Charleston—James De Bow becomes a thought leader in New Orleans. His Review comes out four times a year and is loaded like a barge with economics, history, and argumentative talk. De Bow publishes figures about trade in the region, gives farming advice, and predicts the cotton market. He runs editorials about black people and how to control them. White businesspeople read him avidly. Creoles of color probably leave De Bow on the rack. The majority of black people have no choice in the matter. It is illegal to teach an enslaved person to read. Much of the population is illiterate, by law.

  About the time the Lecorgne sons are finishing their education, De Bow decides he must enl
arge the minds of his readers by offering them some of the new science. In 1847, he publishes a feature called “The Negro,” an essay whose title implies that its author possesses a panoramic understanding of the subject. “When the Caucasian and the negro are compared,” the magazine says, “one of the most striking points of difference is seen in the conformation of the head.” The writer is a local scientist, Josiah Nott.

  “The head of the negro is smaller by a full tenth than the white,” Josiah Nott says. “The forehead is narrower and more receding, in consequence of which the anterior or intellectual portion of the brain is defective. In other portions of the skeleton … the arm of the African is much longer in proportion than in the white man.…”

  De Bow’s Review is a channel for race thought. It spreads into the city and into the heads of its white citizens. The Review takes up scientists like Samuel Morton, the skull collector in Philadelphia. It explains the tribal behavior of whites and blacks and delivers it in pithy summaries. “Negroes are a thriftless, thoughtless people,” readers learn, “and have to be restricted in many points essential to their constitutions and health. Left to themselves they will over eat, walk half the night, sleep on the ground, sleep anywhere.”

  The readership of De Bow’s Review swells. The thinking men of New Orleans are proud of him, proud of his work. I presume that Camille Zeringue is a subscriber. Everyone knows the truth in what the journal has to say.

  P.C. Lecorgne is seventeen when De Bow publishes an essay called “Negro Slavery at the South.” Constant may wonder why Valentin holds a hoe in the garden and the Lecorgne boys have textbooks at their desks. The key that unlocks the enigma is here. “Ethiopians,” says the magazine—the word is a synonym for black Africans—are a separate species of human. The writer, this time, is a man named Solon Robinson. “The scientific anatomist has demonstrated that the brain proper is smaller in them [in blacks] than in other races of men,” Robinson says. “The occipital foramen, the medulla oblongata and spinal marrow, and the nerves of organic life are much larger.… The difference in organization is so great that … many men believe the Ethiopian race is a distinct species of mankind.”

  Absorb the basic truths. Intelligent men and women throughout the Mississippi River valley—and hardworking pupils in the uptown faubourgs—let them read and learn.

  * * *

  By 1850, the city of New Orleans is home to some ten thousand free people of color. Most of them are the children of white men and black women. Most are gens de couleur, French-speaking. Creoles of color are like a third people. Many are educated, many own small businesses. They are carpenters, seamstresses, landlords, bricklayers, tailors, other trades. Their numbers are down by a third from ten years before. Many are leaving, as les Américains pass laws that strip them of power. And some, I think, are passing from black into white society.

  In 1845, Creoles of color claim a place in race and in literature. Their initial voice is slender, an anthology of poetry called Les Cenelles, “The Hollyberries.” The book carries verses by seventeen men who identify as gens de couleur. The fruit of a hawthorn shrub are cenelles. It is a hardy plant that makes sweet berries in harsh conditions—and there is your metaphor. Les Cenelles is the first collection of poetry published by a group of nonwhites in the United States. That fact makes it one of the founding texts of black identity.

  The year Les Cenelles appears is the same year De Bow’s Review begins publication. I do not know what explains the black and white synchrony. Maybe the poems answer De Bow’s trumpet blast.

  The compiler and editor of Les Cenelles is named Armand Lanusse. He is headmaster of a school for girls of color. Lanusse subtitles his book Choix de poésies indigènes, a selection of indigenous poems. “Indigenous”—meaning Creole, meaning native to Louisiana. During the mid-1800s, when nearly all black Southerners cannot read, Creoles of color read, teach, write, and publish poetry.

  Are the Lecorgnes aware of Les Cenelles? I doubt it. An edition of a few hundred circulates privately in black life, and few in white society notice.

  When it comes to public speech, people of color breathe stifling air. Before the Civil War, there is no air at all for black voices. Any speech that summons nonwhite identity is choked, any language that resists the order of race is attacked. The poems of Les Cenelles are not political, though in some few verses I detect a disguised politics. The collection of eighty-four poems contains love poetry, pastoral poems, poems about death, and five poems about suicide.

  Contributors to Les Cenelles are men from the free colored business class. The cigar maker Nicol Riquet is one, and a mason who calls himself Auguste Populus is another. Camille Thierry, the heir to a liquor wholesale business, is a third.

  There are odes to the past and poems by men about desiring women; poems about hats (two), about jealousy (two); and pastoral poems, like “Au Bord du Lac” (“Edge of the Lake”). There is an ode to Mardi Gras, “Le Carnaval,” which ends on the hopeful line “Tout est permis en Carnaval” (“All is permitted in Carnival”). Would that it were.

  The mental world looks out of balance to me. On one side, you have Creoles of color who pioneer black identity with gentle poems of observation. On the other, you have thinking whites who see the world as collections of species. This is the one our Klansman inhabits. I wonder whether it is also the one we inhabit—we among the living.

  6

  I hesitate to tell this part. It makes me uneasy, because it sounds romantic, and romance does not fit here. But this is the way it happens. In May 1847, a girl arrives in New Orleans on a passenger ship, a two-masted brig, the Orléans. She is eleven years old and traveling with her grandmother. The girl’s name is Gabrielle Duchemin. She comes from Cuba. Gabrielle Duchemin washes in from the city of Santiago, on the eastern end of the island. She is white. She speaks French and, I am sure, also Spanish. She accompanies a sixty-year-old woman named Eleanor Labarriere. The passenger list describes the grandmother and the girl as “ladies.” Eleanor Labarriere and her granddaughter arrive from Cuba to live in New Orleans.

  The older woman is doing what she can for the child. Gabrielle has lost her parents and is now an orphan. Eleanor Labarriere and Gabrielle Duchemin plan to move in with a young couple, their distant relations François and Adelaide Laizer. We have met François Laizer before. He is the appraiser who wrapped up the estate of the late Yves Le Corgne. When the “ladies” set foot on the dock, they make their way to the Laizer house, in Bouligny, on Cadiz Street, three blocks east of the Lecorgnes.

  The suburb where all these people live has a new name—Jefferson City. The faubourg of Bouligny is now part of Jefferson City, which has its own courts, taxes, and sheriff. François Laizer is a thirty-year-old clerk of court in Jefferson City, and he is getting rich in the law.

  François Laizer and his wife, twenty-six-year-old Adelaide Bienvenu, have been trying to make a family. They marry in January 1840, and at the end of that year Adelaide has a boy. Ten months later, the child is dead. The following spring Adelaide has a second son. He dies at age two. In August 1843, François and Adelaide have a third boy. He dies two years later, at the end of 1845. I have to lay down some empathy at this. The Le Corgne couple lost their first three children, and now the Laizers.

  François and Adelaide Laizer know Marguerite, who got through a string of funerals and has a herd of six. The Laizers look at the Lecorgne household and marvel. No one knows the will of God. How long will our marriage bed be vexed? When Gabrielle Duchemin and Eleanor Labarriere make their way to the house from the Orléans, Gabrielle arrives in the role of adopted daughter for the childless Laizers.

  Eleven-year-old Gabrielle Duchemin is not Cuban, but French. She is a child from the eastern Caribbean, the island of Guadeloupe. A sugar colony of France, Guadeloupe is a droplet in the Antilles, two hundred miles north of Venezuela, and a place where three-quarters of the people are black and enslaved. It is here, in the capital city of Guadeloupe, Pointe-à-Pitre, on April 25, 1836, tha
t Marie Léonide Gabrielle Duchemin is born.

  Her father is Alphonse Duchemin, a thirty-year-old huissier, or constable in the French colonial court. He is a cop. Her mother is a woman named Joséphine Perdreau, age twenty-five. Registers give no profession for Perdreau, which is not unusual for women in official pages. Gabrielle’s parents are white and unmarried. Gabrielle appears to be a love child, maybe an unwanted child.

  At some point early in life, Gabrielle moves with her mother to Santiago, Cuba, five hundred miles west of Guadeloupe. Her father stays in Pointe-à-Pitre and carries on with his life. The name Alphonse Duchemin continues to appear in legal papers in Guadeloupe, while the name of his lover, Joséphine Perdreau, surfaces in Cuban records. Gabrielle’s father evidently disappears from her life. Perdreau has family in Cuba. Her parents are there. Joséphine Perdreau and her love child, Gabrielle, move to Cuba and in with them. Their names—Jean and Eleanor Labarriere.

  The story is legible, familiar, sad: a woman away from home is seduced by an appealing man. She becomes pregnant, and the appealing man, the cop in Guadeloupe, sends her packing. The seduced and abandoned woman returns to her parents, and the three raise the child.

  Cuba is a colony of Spain, but the port city of Santiago, on the eastern end of the island, is home to a large French population. During the Haitian Revolution, tens of thousands of French-speaking whites and free people of color flee the revolt in Saint-Domingue and land in Cuba. The city of Santiago gathers in many because it lies near Saint-Domingue, three hundred miles across a channel. Two of the exiles who make their way to Santiago appear to have been Eleanor Labarriere and her husband, Jean. When little Gabrielle and her mother, Joséphine, move to Santiago from Guadeloupe, about 1840, they arrive at a French enclave on a Spanish-speaking island.