Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  Marguerite dies during the day. That night, there is a wake in the house on Lecorgne row, and the next day comes the service. The Catholic church in Bouligny is St. Stephen. When the funeral comes, I suspect Marguerite’s children are not pleased that St. Stephen has assigned an Irish priest, Father Ryan, to bury their mother. The Irish immigrants keep coming. One thing that makes them undesirable, one fact, is that Irish immigrants are known to work with black people. The Irish are not good enough or, maybe, not quite white enough.

  The Lecorgnes follow the casket into the sanctuary. Father Ryan utters the memoriam—Requiescat in pace—and blesses the body. Marguerite’s slaves probably come to see her blessed and buried, or some of them. It is required.

  The family meets to divide the estate. Appraisers tally Marguerite’s land and houses, but most of the money is in people. At her death, Marguerite possessed more than a dozen, and the inventory lists them:

  Anna, age 50

  $300

  Sylvie, 50

  $500

  Rachel, 35

  $900

  Dorothy, 22 & her children

  $1,500

  Eugenie, 3 and

  Eugene, 18 mos.

  Ovid, 36

  $1,200

  Jack, 23

  $1,400

  Louise, 15

  $1,000

  Frank, 13

  $1,000

  Edward (“a mulatto”), 15

  $1,000

  Celestine, 17

  $1,000

  Caroline (“a mulatress”), 18

  $1,500

  Eulalie, 69

  (of no value)

  Marguerite’s people come in at $11,300.

  Eulalie, the woman “of no value,” grew up with Marguerite and served her for sixty years. She was the property of Marguerite’s parents. The dead woman inherited her.

  Ernest Commagere, the notary, writes up contracts. Constant gets Ovid, whom he already has. Ovid may no longer be un buck, a man who can carry a barrel on his shoulder, but he hoists a good load of bricks. Constant also takes Caroline, an eighteen-year-old “mulatress, appraised at $1500.” He takes a few pieces of furniture, and he takes an empty lot. He takes his portion.

  Yves of God takes the rest of the enslaved. He also takes his mother’s house, the furniture, and all her belongings. I look at the estate papers to figure out what happens. It seems Yves keeps the black men and gives the women to his sisters. Each of the Lecorgne women—Ézilda, Aurore, and Eliza—takes command of at least one black woman. The papers are unclear. Some of the outcome must be imagined. After the settlement, it appears that the enslaved women and men continue to live together. But the men are hired out in the city, and the women work for the Lecorgnes in their homes.

  Constant has reason to think he has been screwed. His brother, Yves of God, ends up with $8,000 in property and people. Constant comes away with one-third that amount.

  Caroline-the-mulatress, age eighteen, moves in with Constant and Gabrielle on Bellecastle Street. Rachel, the cook who cleans and who has worked for the couple since they married, moves out. She and her children go over to Constant’s sister Eliza. There is no way to tell, but the possibility is genuine that Constant wants more from Caroline-the-mulatress than food on the table, a clean house, and babysitting for his children. A part of life in the slave South, nearly a fixture of housekeeping, is that mixed-race women find themselves at the sexual mercy of their masters. Does the ship carpenter request Caroline from his mother’s estate? Caroline is appraised at $1,500, she is the most valuable. A high price for a young woman reflects her sexual capital.

  I am trying to peer into their lives. There is no evidence of what Caroline might meet at the hands of Mistress and Master Lecorgne. And little can be done to protect a vulnerable woman who is dead. Yet she knows, I am sure of it, that she enters a risky new place when she arrives at Constant’s house.

  The cracker men, you ain’t going to know what comes from them till it happens.

  As for the whites, they are content, and they are perturbed. Life is good and it is soft. They have what they need, even what they want. But the world is teetering. People seem to know it, black and white.

  Yves of God, city clerk and judge, has two feet in politics. In 1860, the political fight grows loud enough to take over almost all public speech. The newspapers are shrill about the threat from the abolitionists in the North. The priests are lecturing their congregations. They talk about the divisions in the country. Father Ryan, the Irishman at St. Stephen, sometimes preaches. Father Ryan says the election this year is dangerous. It could be fatal to Louisiana and to the whole South. The bow is drawn, and our way of life the target.

  The Lecorgnes attend St. Stephen and hear all kinds of things. Benjamin Palmer, a Presbyterian minister, is not in the Roman church, but he speaks the truth to his flock in New Orleans. A sermon by Reverend Palmer is passed from hand to hand.

  “What is the providential trust of the South?” Palmer says from his pulpit at First Presbyterian on Thanksgiving Day. “I answer that it is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.”

  Reverend Palmer seems to have been reading Samuel Morton, maybe Josiah Nott. He knows about Arthur Gobineau and does not miss an issue of De Bow’s Review. Palmer understands the darkies, he says. “Every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude, and thus we are the constituted guardians of the slaves themselves.”

  Sounds of rustling in the pews, and the God-fearing nod in agreement. In the big churches, whites sit below, black worshippers in the balcony above. People call the loft where people of color pray “the crows’ nest.” Up in the balcony, the blacks in Palmer’s congregation do not appear to nod.

  “The spirit of abolition, the folly of freedom for negroes, is undeniably atheistic,” Palmer says. “The negroes belong here with us, in the presence of the vigorous Saxon race!”

  Palmer the clergyman points at tribal lines. You have the Anglo-Saxons, the English-speaking race, and the Saxons of Gaul, of northern France. You have les nègres, the benighted and dependent African Americans. The fanatical moralists who do not understand science, let alone the will of God, threaten their balance.

  Reverend Benjamin Palmer’s Thanksgiving sermon is published in an edition of fifty thousand and sells everywhere in the South. I do not doubt that the Lecorgnes see it, read it, agree with it.

  * * *

  When the French sailor Yves Le Corgne first washes ashore in New Orleans, about 1814, the place is a muddy town, population 20,000. Forty-five years on, in 1860, it is the biggest city in the lower half of the United States, with 170,000 people. New Orleans dominates the states of Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama, and throws shade over the rest of the South.

  The city feeds on the giant commerce of the river, and on the sugar and cotton plantations of the Mississippi Valley. Sugar, the first big slave crop, comes to the docks in casks of brown crystal and in five-hundred-pound barrels of molasses, called hogsheads. Sugar rolls out on the new railroad lines that thread the state. The boom in cotton is more important, it builds the city. Cotton plantations start to spread through the South, just as the first Yves Le Corgne sets foot in New Orleans. Fifty years later, more than a million enslaved grow the white fleece on a thousand cotton plantations and send it downstream to New Orleans, where it is weighed, taxed, and sold. Cotton is the biggest U.S. export, sailing out through the mouth of the Mississippi to the world.

  Yves of God acquires yet another office, becoming election commissioner for Jefferson City. He counts ballots and announces the result. It is a further good job in politics.

  The Lecorgnes—all of them, as far as I can see—are Democrats, and a skinny democracy it is. In Louisiana in 1860, just 83,900 possess the right to vote, white men above twenty-one. Of this electorate, about three out of five vote, which means that seven percent of the population picks the government.

  The Lecorgnes are not W
higs. The Whig Party, old club of the thoughtful rich, has vanished, and another club arisen in its place, the Republicans. The Republican Party is born in 1854 in Illinois. Its principles might be summed up in six words: more commerce, more work, and less slavery. The party attracts Christians more than agnostics, city people more than country people, white women more than white men. Though they cannot vote, many women are nevertheless active in Republican politics. Women argue in favor of abolition and against liquor.

  When the Mexican-American War ends in 1848, the United States seizes half of the territory of Mexico, and when they arrive, the Republicans take a stand on a new barrier: no slavery in the looted western lands. Whites in the South, poor and rich, detest the Republican Party. To white Southerners, the Republicans are righteous, and they are nouveau riche. More, they do not know the word of the Lord, whose Bible is full of slaves. They do not hear the sound of the money that tinkles in the slave fields.

  In 1860, slavery is on the national ballot. The Lecorgnes are prosperous, but they are no longer among the grands blancs, the big whites. The family is not influential. They pay attention but do not campaign for things. They know, as everyone knows, the Republicans are for the blacks, and they are traitors to the white tribe.

  In May in Chicago, Republicans put up their presidential candidate, a lawyer born in Kentucky who works in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, a longtime opponent of slavery’s expansion, a man who has been in and out of both the Illinois Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives. By this time, an antislavery line is enough to lift politicians in the North—among some whites but not all. Democrats, both in the North and in the South, call Lincoln the “Black Republican.”

  Most whites throughout the United States either support enslavement or are indifferent to it. If a newspaper asks five whites living outside the South, What is to be done about slavery?, most of them would prevaricate. Enslavement is too bad for the blacks, one would say. We people have a hard time, too, says another. Things could be better, but slavery is the system we have got in America. The majority white view, both in the North and in the South, is that slavery might be troubling, but it works: just look at the money from cotton. Constant, I think—and his brothers, and probably his sisters—would take a hard line.

  Between May and August, the party of “the Democracy” holds one convention, and then another. Democrats name a candidate, John Breckinridge, a thirty-eight-year-old Kentuckian, pretty in the face. Breckinridge threatens that the South will withdraw from the United States and break up the country if slavery is not left alone. Working whites and the middle rich, like the Lecorgnes, side with Breckinridge. A Northern faction of Democrats names a different candidate, Stephen Douglas, bibulous senator from Illinois. A new party, the Unionists, names a proslavery member of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Bell. With all these candidates, the result is a divided field of candidates for the fall of 1860: three proslavery politicians running for president, and one antislavery, Lincoln.

  * * *

  Constant and Gabrielle have two toddlers, Numa and Mathilde. They have Caroline-the-mulatress to serve them, and they have Ovid. The Republicans want to steal Caroline and Ovid. The Constitution lists rights. Guns are a right, slaves a right. If Abraham Lincoln is elected, he and his righteous columns will take away the family’s rights.

  I do not know what Constant and Gabrielle are thinking. I do not know what they say they are thinking, or what they tell themselves they are feeling. I especially do not know what they actually feel, behind their stated opinions. However, I do know what happens next: they put their man Ovid up for sale.

  Chances are good that Ovid, a thirty-five-year-old craftsman, does not want to be sold. He has spent six years with these buckra and done a lot of hard work. I would like to think Ovid has a full life. He lives in a city with a giant and varied black world, churches on one street corner and barrooms on the next, licit and illicit pleasures. Ovid makes love, probably, and he worships. His life might have children in it. His life, possibly, has music and dance. Ovid does not want to be sold, because he knows that to pass through the gauntlet of the slave market is to lose everything. To be sold means to lose your partner and the people you know, lose your home, your pleasure, and go into mourning. Ovid knows that he could end up on a cotton field, five hundred miles distant, with nothing but hoeing and picking and tears in the cruel heat.

  Constant does not go to one of the slave traders in New Orleans. With the growth of cotton, the slave market has spilled out of the St. Louis Hotel, and the city has dozens of independent auctioneers, men with offices and showrooms and jails to house their inventory. They cluster on Esplanade Avenue and Moreau Street, at the eastern edge of the Vieux Carré. They form a line of storefronts along Gravier Street and Baronne Street, at the western edge of the French Quarter. There are plenty of places to go, but Constant wants to make a private sale, away from the “nigger traders.”

  He talks to a family friend, a man named Valsin Gourdain. The Lecorgnes and the Gourdains both live in Bouligny. Gourdain is forty-six, and he has been friendly with the Lecorgnes for at least a decade. An appraiser puts Ovid’s value at $1,200, and the sale is on. Constant, Gabrielle, and Gourdain make their way to the office of a notary, a man named Amédée Ducatel. Ovid, the property being transferred, is not on hand. Negotiations go badly for the Lecorgnes. Before they sign, Ovid is knocked down to $1,000, a twenty percent discount. The Lecorgnes take the deal.

  The handwriting is gentle where “Gabrielle Le Corgne” writes her name. The penmanship is dramatically important where “P.C. Le Corgne” signs.

  Ovid might have his own explanation for what is happening—Bon blanc mouri; mauvais rêté, “The good white men die; the bad remain.” He is taken from the Lecorgne place on Bellecastle Street—in cuffs and chains, or in an agreeable walk, there is no way to know—and marched to the home of Valsin Gourdain.

  The timing of the sale of Ovid is suspicious. It might be that Constant and Gabrielle decide to cash in their most valuable possession before the election, in case the Black Republican wins. Or it might be they just want money to buy some bonds, or to smarten up the house.

  * * *

  One month later, on November 8, Abraham Lincoln wins the White House. The three proslavery candidates—Breckinridge, Douglas, and Bell—split the vote of the majority of white people, North and South, who stand by enslavement. That is why Lincoln wins. Lincoln receives no votes at all in Louisiana. That is because election officials in the state have made sure his name does not appear on the ballot. Maybe the election commissioner Yves of God plays some role in the magical act of making a candidate go missing. I think he would enjoy having that influence.

  It is time for shooting. November 1860 comes to an end just as rifle clubs and musket gangs take shape in New Orleans and in the rural parishes. Around the state, and around the South, guns come from closets to be lovingly cleaned.

  There is little evidence that says what black people think and feel during these events. African Americans are a smaller part of the city population. Some fifteen thousand are enslaved, another eleven thousand free people of color. Life for the gens de couleur libres has been worsening for years, and many have left the state. I have to think that both enslaved and free feel competing emotions. One emotion is a gathering dread. What, after all, are the angry ofay going to do? Another emotion is the feeling of raised expectations. If there is war, it could mean that the vise of white rule might begin to come loose.

  The state of South Carolina is the first to withdraw from the United States, on December 20. Louisiana’s new governor, a Democrat, calls for a “secession convention” to follow suit. Christmas passes offstage. You have rallies and speeches, marches and mobilization instead.

  A lawyer named Judah Benjamin is one of Louisiana’s two senators in Washington. He owns a sugar plantation, Bellechasse, with more than a hundred slaves. Benjamin is a Democrat, as are nearly all politicians in the South by this time, and the fi
rst Jew to be elected to the U.S. Senate. At the end of December, Benjamin stands in the well of the Senate chamber and gives a lyric and righteous-sounding speech, musing on the war everyone knows is coming.

  “You may carry desolation to our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flames,” he says, “but you never can subjugate us.” He finishes with the real subject, the presence in his mind of two tribes. “You never, never can degrade us to the level of an inferior, and servile race, never! Never!!”

  9

  Carnival season starts every year in early January, but in 1861, many pay only desultory attention to the parties and costumes before Mardi Gras, preferring to use their time planning for war. The vote counter Yves of God, for instance, helps with a snap election. A secession convention is set for the end of January, and Yves helps with the recruiting and election of 128 delegates.

  Constant and Gabrielle have less room in their heads for the talk of rebellion. At least for the moment, they pay less attention to the masculine theatrics. They are distracted by a very sick baby. Their son, Numa, is three, daughter Mathilde a year and a half. As I imagine her, Mathilde has begun to talk. She has some French, and her parents teach her bits of English, because she has to get along. She starts to walk, teeters across the room. Sometime in January, the wet winter cold, Mathilde falls sick. When a baby is ill, parents burn with fear. In this place and time, one of three children does not reach five years. Mathilde’s parents turn inward, preoccupied with nursing their baby. In the third week of the month, she gets worse. Is it pneumonia? Fever? The medical trail is absent, but the disaster is not. The little girl, nineteen months old, dies January 22.