Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  New Orleans may be complicated, but things are more so on the islands.

  During the 1840s, Eleanor’s husband, Jean Labarriere, Gabrielle’s grandfather, leaves Cuba and moves to New Orleans, seemingly to clear a path for other family members to follow. Most of the French exiles in Santiago have already left it. Now, many years after the Haitian Revolution, the remaining few prepare to go. Meantime, Gabrielle Duchemin grows up in the colonial pattern. She attends school and studies French. She takes piano lessons, acquires Spanish. She learns knitting, crocheting, hemstitching, and makes her first communion in the church at the center of town, Santo Tomás el Apóstol (Saint Thomas the Apostle).

  In 1845, Eleanor and Joséphine, mother and daughter, are two women raising a little girl, with no man in the house. That year, Eleanor buys a forty-year-old woman named Julia to work as a maid and to help with mothering Gabrielle, now eight. The enslaved Julia (“una négresse” in the bill of sale), costs Eleanor 250 Cuban pesos, the going price of a middle-aged woman. For some reason, Eleanor is not available to sign the contract, and so she has her daughter Joséphine Perdreau sign on her behalf and take possession of Julia. An all-female household is complete: Eleanor, Joséphine, Gabrielle, and Julia. They seem to await word from New Orleans about when to leave.

  At this point, the paper trail in Cuba runs dry. Something happens to Gabrielle’s mother, Joséphine Perdreau, and she disappears from colonial records. Maybe Perdreau falls sick with a tropical disease—malaria or yellow fever are good candidates—and she dies, leaving Gabrielle with her grandmother and Julia. Or maybe Perdreau goes back to Guadeloupe. The result is the same: Gabrielle’s mother vanishes, and the girl has no parents. Gabrielle Duchemin is an orphan, left by both father and mother.

  When Gabrielle turns eleven, in 1847, she and Eleanor Labarriere board a ship to New Orleans. They do not bring Julia with them. By this time, U.S. law bans the arrival of enslaved people, “the import of slave property,” in the vile legal phrase. Grandmother and granddaughter travel alone. As for Julia, she stays behind, maybe at work for a relative of the Labarrieres, or maybe sold away again.

  The life of Gabrielle Duchemin is afloat, a piece of driftwood. But Julia is the one handed around like bread at the table.

  Gabrielle and Grandmother Eleanor, aboard the Orléans, project an image of security and ease. The passenger list describes the two of them, apparently dressed up and mannered, as “ladies, from France.” They are neither. It is a pleasing lie they tell.

  In New Orleans, Eleanor Labarriere does something white women do. Having left her housekeeper, Julia, in Cuba, she enslaves a new housekeeper. This time it is a child, a girl eight years old, named Lavinia. She appears in the record without mother, father, or siblings. She might be orphaned, like Gabrielle. It is more likely the girl has been sold away from her parents, purchased by Eleanor Labarriere. Lavinia, who goes by the name “Fanny,” is assigned to work as a companion and servant to Gabrielle.

  That is the way this world works.

  Gabrielle and her grandmother land in the house of François and Adelaide Laizer. Jean Labarriere, Eleanor’s husband, is already there. I do not know the relationship between the Labarrieres and the Laizers, but they are kin, probably. They know each other through shared family in the Caribbean, but evidence of the link is lacking.

  Gabrielle goes through schooling in New Orleans. I see some of the life of Gabrielle Duchemin in another girl. Around this time, a white child named Eliza Ripley is growing up in the city. Later in life, Eliza Ripley writes a memoir about her youth. Let it stand in for Gabrielle, for a moment.

  “Every girl had music lessons and every mother superintended the study and practice of the one branch deemed absolutely indispensable to the education of a demoiselle,” Ripley says. “The city was dotted all over with music teachers.” Gabrielle does, in fact, study music. Eventually she will earn an income giving piano lessons.

  It is a busy, full household in the Laizer place on Cadiz Street. An older couple, the Labarrieres; a middling one, the Laizers; the wayward and quiet Gabrielle; and a number of enslaved. Five minutes away by foot are the Lecorgnes, and soon the two families are entwined.

  * * *

  P.C. Lecorgne is a teenager in the 1840s, presumably at his books. I doubt he is reading the new black poetry, in Les Cenelles. Away from the classroom, he may find entertainment, along with a kind of instruction, in the theater. I would think that now and then P.C. puts himself in the audience at a minstrel theater. During the 1830s and ’40s, a form of stage comedy comes up in the Deep South that is based in a kind of tribal drag show. Minstrelsy, so-called. Minstrel theater offers white people who pretend to be black. In blackface minstrelsy, whites cake themselves in black powder from burned cork, then they dance, sing, and tell jokes. Louisiana is a deep source of it, with groups like the New Orleans Ethiopian Serenaders playing to packed houses. A Frenchman named Charles Duprez, native of Paris, has a troupe in New Orleans at this time, Duprez & Green’s Minstrels. When P.C. is growing up, the city begins to send out to the North these and other groups of whites who play banjo, “sing nigger,” and dance breaks like the ones they try to remember from Congo Square.

  It is a performance of blackness that whites want, not the real life of being black. They still want it, I think.

  The culture diet of the Lecorgne family, if out for the night, would be a minstrel show. It would not be legitimate theater or opera, both of which have a footprint in New Orleans. The tastes of the Lecorgnes have slipped a rung on the ladder from those of the grands blancs. They would find minstrel acts that make their way through jive talk and jigs at the Varieties Theater, on Gravier Street, or at the Camp Street Theater, or at a place called Dan Rice’s Amphitheater.

  Poster for an 1847 performance by a minstrel troupe, the New Orleans Ethiopian Serenaders

  When P.C. is sixteen, in 1848, one of the hit minstrel songs is “Dandy Broadway Swell.” It is published that year in Ethiopian Glee Books, a music script for white players trying to make money with a black act. “Dandy Broadway Swell” is about a ridiculous man who tries to pick up women. The lyrics, as transcribed by white hands—

  Dey may talk ob dandy niggers

  But dey neber see dis coon,

  A prombernarding Broadway

  On a Sunday afternoon.

  I’se de sole de-light ob yellow gals,

  De envy ob de men;

  Ob-serve dis child when he turn out

  And talk ob dand-dies den.

  For I’se de grit, de go, de cheese,

  As every one may tell;

  De dark fair sex

  I sure to please,

  I’se de dandy Broadway swell.

  Minstrel acts like the New Orleans Ethiopian Serenaders give white audiences the fun of watching their tribe ridicule another people, as well as (a different kind of pleasure) seeing their own people put on blackness and wear it for a time, like a robe. I suspect P.C. takes delight in minstrelsy, as whites all over America do, as hundreds of millions have done since, and as many do today, in the 2000s. Some things about the minstrel act have never really gone away.

  * * *

  In January 1850, in the city of Baton Rouge, a few hundred gather in front of the new state capitol building to see the inauguration of Joseph Walker, lately elected governor of Louisiana. I do not think the Lecorgnes are in the crowd. Baton Rouge is a daylong steamboat up the Mississippi, and at this point, politics is not their game.

  Governor Joseph Walker is a Democrat. The Democrats are the populist party, ever since President Andrew Jackson crashed the working white man into political power, in the late 1820s. On the opposing end from the Democrats are the Whigs, party of the rich and the educated. The Democrats are the slavery party, the Whigs not antislavery, but less proslavery. By electing the Democrat Joseph Walker to the office of governor, the white men of Louisiana send a message that they absolutely love their slaves. They love having them in thrall and exploiting them.


  Walker takes the oath of office. He places his hand on a Bible and swears, then steps to the podium for his speech. Governor Walker wants to talk about one thing on the minds of a lot of whites, namely, black people.

  “The antislavery agitation in the Northern States which has long been a source of irritation to the south has within the last two years taken such a shape that fears are entertained by some that it is about to reach a crisis unfavorable to the stability of the union,” the new governor tells the crowd.

  Huzzahs and applause.

  The governor complains about the abolitionists in the North, the radical ministers and their black comrades. He complains about people like Frederick Douglass. He complains that radical whites and educated blacks want to end the blessed tradition of the South, the “divine institution,” as many in these parts call enslavement.

  “If, unhappily, the anti-slavery agitations which so long have been allowed to insult our feelings should be carried to the point of aggression upon our rights,” Walker says, pausing to stress, “then we are prepared to make common cause with our neighbors of the slaveholding states and pronounce the union at an end!”

  Governor Walker predicts that trouble with les nègres is going to break apart the United States. He points to the cracks.

  Huzzahs and applause.

  * * *

  François and Adelaide Laizer adopt Gabrielle. She now has parents who will not discard her.

  The Laizers live a short walk from the Lecorgnes. The two families pass on the street. They nod over the back of pews in church; eyes meet across the aisle. P.C. is seventeen, Gabrielle fourteen. He is finishing his schooling. To judge from his later years, he is a young man with little interest in study. It appears he is learning a trade, spending time in a carpentry shop somewhere in Bouligny. The orphan and the Lecorgne boy meet.

  François Laizer, Gabrielle’s adoptive father, now makes good money. The faubourgs are booming, and he is getting rich with real estate. In five years, Laizer buys and sells nine pieces of land, flipping lots. He buys several tracts in one deal, and for some reason, a seller throws in, along with the land, a slave child, a twelve-year-old girl. Maybe she is a sweetener. Laizer brings the child home, and suddenly, Gabrielle has a black companion, a girl named Caroline.

  I do not want to wring my hands again. This is everyday life, customary and familiar in white society. But once again we have a nice family—daddy in real estate, daughter studying piano—buying children. Twelve-year-old Caroline is probably taken from her mother, yanked from her arms. Gabrielle now has parents who want her, and then those parents turn around and seize somebody’s girl, tossing her parents aside. Caroline is dropped into the house in front of Gabrielle and handed a bucket and mop.

  It is an American pattern, and not just a Southern one. It is familiar in Washington, D.C., in St. Louis, in Philadelphia, and in New York. Slavery is withering. By 1850, it is gone in half the states, but the gist remains even in the “free” North: a black girl is taken from her family and put into a white household, where she is made to serve. It is not just my people who are doing it.

  * * *

  You have a line among the Creoles—black, colored, and white—Chacun sait ce qui bouille dans sa chaudière, “Everyone knows what boils in their own pot.” Meaning, you know what is going on at home, with your people. You know the hidden things. You know who you are, and you know what your people are. But what is this thing, whiteness? The Lecorgnes know about blackness, or think they do. They look at blackness and make their sense of it. Now they turn to whiteness with something like the same gaze.

  In the early 1850s, in Massachusetts, one of the states where slavery has ended, a novelist is musing on whiteness. He has just written a big book. Herman Melville is a writer living in the Berkshires, and he is an ex-roustabout on whaling ships. When Melville publishes Moby-Dick, in 1851, he inserts into it a kind of soliloquy—it is chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”—a stream of images in which whiteness appears to be both appalling and divine.

  [T]his pre-eminence [of whiteness] applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe … for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and … this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age … [I]n many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds;… by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull;… yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.… the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.

  New Orleans in 1845, the Lecorgne neighborhood of “Bouligny” at the upper left

  By the mid-1850s, the Lecorgnes spread onto several of the six lots they own. Marguerite, “Widow Lecorgne,” lives with her youngest daughter, as well as her slaves, on one lot. Yves of God, her firstborn, has built a house, and Joseph Lecorgne, the youngest brother, is starting another. A single Creole cottage has mushroomed into a compound. We can call it “Lecorgne row.”

  It looks as though P.C. is the unfavored child. You can see it—he is less bright than brother Yves. He is less good with people, not as oily. P.C. is not suited to work indoors at a desk, where you have to show care with what you say. The middle brother makes his way into the trades. He will be an outside man, hammer and plane in hand.

  “Lecorgne row”—Lyon Street, between Jersey and “Tchapitoulas”

  The Lecorgne sisters have their lives. Ézilda, two years older than P.C., lives a few blocks away with her husband, François Fazende. P.C.’s sister Marguerite, fourteen and living with her mother on Lecorgne row, is getting schooled. His sister Aurore marries a man named Numa Leche in 1852, when she is sixteen and Numa twenty-one. Aurore and her husband have a baby and live with their toddler a few blocks away. The proximity of everyone is normal. Anyone of importance to the Lecorgnes seems to live just a few blocks away.

  P.C. is twenty and half-made. He earns money for himself in yardwork, advertising as a gardener. A man who gardens for hire makes pretty the houses of the rich, digging the pretty plantings in front of their pretty mansions, which are sprouting along Napoleon Avenue. And here is a crack in the porcelain. Marguerite Lecorgne has raised up her children to aspire to the grands blancs. But her middle son is planting hedgerows. It must be galling.

  P.C. makes a better living in wood, as a carpenter’s assistant. His father, Yves, had a life in the merchant marine. It appears that this experience leads P.C. to the water, to the Mississippi. The trade that he learns is on riverboats. He trains to be a ship carpenter, un charpentier de navire, repairing and maintaining barges and schooners that ply the river. Slightly, but only slightly, less galling.

  As an apprentice, P.C. is asked to do the hardest work, hewing beams and laying the bottom frames on barges. He cuts the bulkhead and fixes the gunwales, builds the trusses in the hull and lays decking over them. He does not earn much, yet. He jumps to the orders from other shipwrights, takes their wage, hopes for more.

  He is not a carrier of water, but he is a hewer of wood.

  To judge from written traces, about this time young man Lecorgne discards nicknames. Polycarp Constant Lecorgne is no longer “P.C.” when he signs his name to things, he is Constant Lecorgne.

  * * *

  In 1853, yellow fever returns to New Orleans in the worst epidemic the city sees in the nineteenth century. A commission to study the disease says that the first cases of Yellow Jack appear at the edge of Jefferson City, among passengers coming off ships and into boar
dinghouses a few blocks from Lecorgne row. They “die with the black vomit,” and the disease spreads. By midsummer, the neighborhood of Bouligny is half-empty, as white people flee once again. I assume the Lecorgnes and at least some of their slaves retreat to the old Zeringue farm across the river, or to Camille Zeringue’s place, Seven Oaks. Back in Bouligny, interments at the neighborhood’s Lafayette Cemetery rise from 69 in one month at the beginning of the year to 469 in July and 1,177 in August. In six months, one in fifteen people in New Orleans is dead.

  The fever consumes several around the Lecorgnes. A cousin dies here, a nephew dies there. Constant’s brother-in-law, Numa Leche, is killed at twenty-three. He and his wife, Aurore, have been married for eighteen months, and they have a baby. When her husband dies, Aurore moves with her infant into the back room of the house owned by her brother, Yves of God.

  In testimony about the epidemic, a prominent doctor blames it on les nègres. “As many have contended,” he says, “yellow fever is an imported African disease.” It is a strange hypothesis. An official report says the fever kills 5,293 white men and 2,475 white women. But it kills only 38 people of color.

  * * *

  In 1856, Gabrielle’s adoptive father, François Laizer, goes into politics. He is elected mayor of Jefferson City, the municipality around Bouligny. Laizer is a Democrat, a man of “the Democracy,” as people call the Democratic Party. As Mayor Laizer enters office, he appoints a new city treasurer, a Creole named Émile Chevalley. Chevalley lives across the street from Lecorgne row. He is older than Constant, but the two are friendly. In a few years, Émile Chevalley and Constant will find themselves locking arms in a white gang, when together they maraud with the Ku-klux.