Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  At about 11:00 a.m., a Union advance squad comes to a wood where Colonel Leopold Armant commands two hundred men, Sergeant Terrance among them. The Yankees attack the rebel line and are met with rifle fire and artillery. Ten men fall dead. Another wave of white Union men is slowed by a thicket.

  The black unit, the Chasseurs d’Afrique, is a few miles away in another branch of the fight. Sergeant Terrance does not face them. The moment when a black company with guns faces a rebel company with him in the ranks will come, but not today.

  The Yankees fire artillery, Colonel Armant’s right flank disintegrates, and the fight turns against the rebels, shot and falling. A Union charge, Armant’s line breaks and runs. Sergeant Terrance’s company flees “like panic-stricken sheep,” as one soldier who witnesses the scene puts it.

  Union troops chase the retreating Yellowjackets for miles. By the next day, Company K has lost half of its men, killed, wounded, or captured. But Terrance is unharmed.

  The Yellowjackets make their way to the town of Opelousas, one hundred miles northwest. Then they withdraw another seventy miles, to Alexandria, Louisiana. A Yankee corps follows them, until finally, hunted like prey, the Yellowjackets retreat to Natchitoches, sixty miles further north.

  The Union goaded him back into the war, now les nègres chase Sergeant Terrance from pillar to post.

  11

  The Emancipation Proclamation is affirmed January 1, 1863, with a big change. The line about money is gone. Congress will not pay off slaveholders. Washington does not care to ransom four million captives.

  In New Orleans, the Lecorgne women hold things together. Constant’s younger sister, Eliza, goes to work as a schoolteacher. She is thirty and unmarried, and she lives with Yves of God. Eliza gets a job teaching in the boys’ department of the public schools in the city’s Second Ward, two miles east of Bouligny. She is one of twelve women in the neighborhood who teach, all of them white, all unmarried but one. Eliza earns $360 per year, about fifty percent more than the income she can take in by renting out her enslaved cook, thirty-eight-year-old Rachel.

  New Orleans has no fewer than 140 private secondary schools, plus 44 public schools—for whites. None admits blacks or gens de couleur. Half of white children attend public schools, half attend private academies or parochial schools run by the church. People of color who have money enough send their children to be educated in a convent for black nuns downtown, for good fees. The corridor to literacy for nonwhites is narrow.

  Eliza Lecorgne’s students are white, and I imagine she would not have it otherwise. When Eliza starts teaching, the Yankee occupiers are trying to smash open the education system, starting seven new public schools for blacks. By October 1863, New Orleans has 1,700 black students enrolled, with 20 teachers on staff. Most of the teachers are white women from the handful of families that support the Union. Most whites ostracize them. Eliza Lecorgne does not care to be ostracized, and she does not care to teach pickaninnies.

  Constant’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Gabrielle Duchemin, keeps the faith. Her husband is off in the fight. Her sons, Louis and Numa, are one and four years old. With Ovid gone, she leans on Caroline.

  Gabrielle watches the city fill up with blacks from the parishes, and the diarist Julia Le Grand writes down thoughts—

  “The suburbs and odd places in and about this city are crowded with a class of negroes never seen until the Federals came here, a class whose only support is theft and whose only occupation is strolling the streets, insulting white people, and living in the sun,” says Le Grand. “This is really the negro idea of liberty.”

  It is a disaster, as the women see it. Their right-thinking men are gone, the ghastly Yankees are in the streets, and the repellent blacks fill the gaps.

  Butler issues more abuse. He lets black people testify in court against white people, for the first time, and he integrates public transportation. There had been separate streetcars for people of color, ones painted with a big red star that is visible from a block away. Butler does away with the “star cars.”

  At a distance of 150 years, all of it seems mild, obvious, normal, and correct. To Gabrielle and family, it is one abomination after another.

  I hear the mind of Gabrielle in the thoughts of Julia Le Grand—

  “I once was as great an abolitionist as any in the North and in my unthinking fancy placed black and white upon the same plane. My sympathies blinded me. My experience with negroes has altered my way of thinking and reasoning. It was when we owned them in numbers that I thought they ought to be free, and now I think they are not fit for freedom.”

  The darkies walk the streets, and the white women commiserate. Good women take up the program of race thinking where the men left it off. Julia Le Grand shares her philosophy of color, one that is spun in rooms of thought much like the ones Gabrielle inhabits.

  The negro is the only race which labor does not degrade. We all know that white men and women are very different. The white race is distorted by labor; hair, features, complexion and shape all tell the tale of hardship and labor. Not so with the negro; they live so easily. White men generally struggle up to something higher, but not so the black man. They have no cares but physical ones and will not have for generations to come, if ever. The free black man is scarcely a higher animal. He has sensation, but his sensibility is not well awakened; he does not love or respect the social ties. His wild instincts are yet moving his coarse blood; he is servile if mastered, and brutal if given license; he cannot, either by force or persuasion, be imbued with a reverence for truth.

  The house on Bellecastle needs cleaning. Caroline is told to clean it.

  Julia Le Grand wraps her theory of race with musings about the difference between species, and how each must find the proper level—

  “What place is there in the scale of humanity but one of subjection for such a race as blacks? Slavery indeed cannot be considered a good school for the white man, but it should be remembered that we found these people mere animals in Africa.”

  There is at least one thing in her diary, a lament, which sounds about right. “America seems perishing of madness,” she says.

  * * *

  Sergeant Terrance Lecorgne spends two-and-a-half years with the Eighteenth Regiment. He and the Yellowjackets swarm around the state, going from fight to fight in a moving hell. They march over cratered and washed-out roads, often underfed, cut off from supplies, and underdressed. Occasionally their supply lines work, or they empty a smokehouse full of a farmer’s meat and leave a piece of paper with a word, “Requisitioned.” Sometimes the numbers of the Eighteenth go up to nine hundred; then they drop to seven hundred when the corps passes a town that men call home, and the desertion begins.

  In January 1863, Sergeant Terrance and the Eighteenth cease their wandering and return to camp. They make winter quarters at a place called Fausse Pointe. There is not much firm land around the spongy ground at “False Point.” The camp lies just east of New Iberia on Bayou Chêne, Oak Bayou. A hundred miles west of New Orleans, Bayou Chêne is out of reach of the Yankees. The Yellowjackets take February and March to sit still.

  The Yellowjackets call their winter encampment “Qui Vive” (Those Who Live), a redoubt in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Qui Vive has amenities, like mail. Despite the war, the post still comes up the Atchafalaya River. Despite the war, a man can get a letter to his wife, who waits behind enemy lines in New Orleans, and he can get a letter back.

  Colonel Alfred Mouton, Creole commander of the Yellowjackets, wants to please his men. He arranges for wives to come visit—at least wives with money to pay the way. Colonel Mouton is keen to bring wives to Qui Vive in hopes of cutting down on prostitutes, the camp amenity that causes more problems than it solves.

  In New Orleans, Gabrielle hears word from her husband, and she makes arrangements. It is easy for a woman to get out of the occupied city. A rebel woman does not alarm the Yankees as much as a man. Gabrielle leaves her children with family, books passage to Atchafa
laya, and leaves Caroline alone.

  Qui Vive lies deep in Acadian Louisiana, in the watery west of the state. Gabrielle boards a steamer. The boat powers down the Mississippi, out into the Gulf of Mexico. I imagine other wives of soldiers on the deck with Gabrielle. A starboard turn, and the steamer edges along the Gulf coast as far as the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. Turning north into the river, the boat pushes upstream, fighting the flow as far as Bayou Chêne. Gabrielle may get off here and board a flatboat, because the Chêne is shallow. A portside turn into the bayou and a straight run to Fausse Pointe.

  Gabrielle steps off. She is with him again, her fighting man, in the tents of the camp. Accommodations are thin, but she and Sergeant Terrance find a way to be alone. Her husband must know from her letters—Gabrielle is enceinte, pregnant. They made the baby in New Orleans last September, when Constant came home from the mutiny and court-martial. They must talk about it, and they must plan. Gabrielle is seven months along. She can deliver with her husband at her side. As armies clash, a soldier and his wife reunite, and together they can be redeemed by a birth.

  The Eighteenth Louisiana has not moved in two months. From New Orleans comes word that the Union is sending gunboats and thousands of men up Bayou Teche, to the east. If the Yellowjackets do not cut them off, the Yankees will slice through the state. The war warms up, the first fight is expected in days. It is a pastoral picture, two parents who plan to share a birth in wartime, and now it dims. Gabrielle and Sergeant Terrance improvise. They make their way a few miles north, up to the town of St. Martinville. Compared with other places, St. Martinville, one of the old and pretty French towns, is an island of calm. Here are boardinghouses and doctors, churches and priests, slave nurses and midwives. Gabrielle is to have the baby in St. Martinville, while Terrance goes back to the front.

  In April 1863, Gabrielle is thirty-nine weeks pregnant, in a war zone with her husband. And then she is alone in St. Martinville.

  Sergeant Terrance leaves to join the Yellowjackets. Colonel Alfred Mouton, the rebel commander, has pulled together four thousand men for the battle, and still he is outnumbered. The rebels line up along the east bank of Bayou Teche at a garrison called Fort Bisland. Sergeant Terrance takes his position. Here the rebels will stop the Yankee advance up the bayou. As they wait for the attack, the Yellowjackets receive an unexpected gift. The command has arranged a surprise delivery, a cargo of fresh uniforms. It is the first set of new clothes that many have had in a year. The uniforms go on their backs, and they look like new recruits.

  The fresh-looking regiment prepares to die. On April 12, the Yankees arrive, with artillery. In twenty-four hours, the rebels lose 450 in dead and wounded. The Union has casualties of 230. Terrance is again untouched.

  The next day, the Union swarms Fort Bisland. About noon, Company H of the Yellowjackets is surrounded and surrenders. Terrance’s unit, Company K, is pushed into the cypress woods beside the fort, where some of them fight hand to hand, with fixed bayonets. When night falls, Colonel Mouton sees that a Union company has reached the back of the fort and that his men are going to be cut off. He orders them out. Terrance flees with his company to the town of Franklin, five miles upstream. He survives another fight in which he sees many of his comrades killed.

  A few miles north, in St. Martinville, Gabrielle goes into labor. The Yellowjackets make a slog back to camp. They arrive at Qui Vive on April 15.

  On the same day in St. Martinville, a midwife helps Gabrielle through the birth. She delivers a little girl. Gabrielle has two young sons, Numa and Louis. Her daughter Mathilde is two years dead. The girl is her fourth child. Making his way from Qui Vive to St. Martinville, Terrance is one day late to his wife’s childbed. I imagine Gabrielle waits until he arrives before the two decide on the name for the baby. He turns up unscathed, a blessing for his wife. The parents call the girl Marie Estelle.

  They have a few days with their newborn. They take her to be christened. Estelle is baptized at St. Martin de Tours, a drafty and majestic church in the middle of St. Martinville. A week later, Sergeant Terrance is called back to the fight, and he is gone.

  Gabrielle retraces her steps to New Orleans, Estelle at her breast. She and the baby board a steamer downstream, out to the Gulf, and up the Mississippi.

  I feel empathy for them. Every discovery about their lives is a little piece of tile, and the bunches of detail collect into a mosaic. Their lives look hard. One child dead at nineteen months, a father who loses his work to war. A woman who crosses enemy lines to be with her man and have their baby, a soldier who pushes through muck and watches hundreds die around him. Their trials are awful. And for what? So that Cousin Camille can keep his slaves at Seven Oaks? So that Sergeant Terrance can go home to see Caroline-the-mulatress?

  * * *

  In spring 1863, the Yankees get approval from Washington to enlist blacks in Louisiana. The Chasseurs d’Afrique are already in uniform, but they are only one thousand, a small group. The recruitment comes in like a tide. In six months, the Union Army raises ten thousand black troops in eighteen regiments. Some are former slaves who have fled to the Union side, and some are gens de couleur.

  The first combat by the recruits is an attack on the town of Port Hudson, just north of Baton Rouge. It is late May, and thirty-two are killed. One of them, Captain André Cailloux, a cigar maker, is taken up as a hero by African Americans in New Orleans. After the Battle of Port Hudson, Creoles of color around Paul Trévigne and his newspaper, L’Union, agitate for the right to vote. The occupation army in New Orleans talks about holding an election for governor, sometime soon. The first meetings take place in June 1863 at an auditorium called Economy Hall, and the editor of L’Union, Nelson Fouché, serves as chair. At the meeting, several stand up to make the argument that illiterate white men can sign a voting register with an X and cast a ballot, but educated Creoles of color, like the martyred Captain André Cailloux, and like the poets who contribute to Les Cenelles, are prohibited from voting. It is unfair.

  At the rally, one of the colored soldiers in the crowd, Captain Pinckney Pinchback, puts the argument plain. “We do not ask for social equality, and do not expect it,” Pinchback says, “but we demand political rights.” Outside of the Yankee-held part of the state, in rebel or Confederate Louisiana, enslaved people are still captive workers. Rebel whites are hearing none of the Emancipation Proclamation. Within occupied New Orleans (and this part may sound weird), enslaved people also remain slaves. But with the Union Army running things, the policing of black people is a lot less harsh, and everybody knows the locks are eventually coming off.

  * * *

  I do not know exactly when it happens, but it appears that Gabrielle reaches the city and arrives at the Lecorgne house on Bellecastle, where she finds that Caroline is gone. Circumstantial evidence tells the story. Caroline disappears from the record during the war. It seems she uses the absence of “Missus Lecorgne” and the presence of the Yankee army as two good reasons to leave. She merely follows the example of thousands in New Orleans who do the same. Caroline is not heard from again.

  When Gabrielle finds that her indispensable woman of color has fled, the diarist in the neighborhood, Julia Le Grand, again opens a window onto her mind—

  “A relative saw my slave in the street today. She did not speak but watched her closely. She left during the summer, having stolen money from the box. We had so spoiled her that she would not take the trouble to answer unless she pleased. She pouted always, and passed all of her time in the street. She had been with us a long time and was consequently associated with much that is past and dear.”

  Caroline, at twenty-one, has worked for Gabrielle and her husband three years before she vanishes.

  “The day she ran away was as unhappy a one as I ever passed,” Julia Le Grand says about her own experience as a white mistress. “We made every effort to bring her up as a high-toned woman, but she preferred lying to confidence, stealing to asking, and a life of vagrancy to a comfortab
le and respectable one. I have learned this lesson—negroes only respect those they fear.”

  If she does what many enslaved in the city do, Caroline leaves and walks upstream on the levee for five miles, as far as Camp Parapet. There, a general named John Phelps runs the U.S. Army camp. Phelps is a white soldier who is antislavery, which makes him more militant than most of his Union comrades. He keeps the camp gate open for “runaways,” people who emancipate themselves. The army calls the refugees who come to Camp Parapet “contraband,” as in pilfered property. And Parapet is one of the first “contraband camps.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Terrance and his comrades march for months, covering hundreds of miles, crisscrossing the state. They pass through towns with Old World names, like Alexandria and Jena; towns with Native American names, like Coushatta and Natchitoches; towns named for politicians, like Winnsboro and Monroe. One officer on the march describes the path of the Yellowjackets as “incomprehensible wandering.” The new clothes from Fort Bisland come to grief. In June, an officer in another unit sees the men and says that “they have lost their clothing and their tents, and their shoes have worn out. Many have no pants, others no shirts.”

  After one skirmish near the town of Brashear City, Terrance’s unit seizes a store of Yankee uniforms. They discard their tattered gray and put on the dark blue. Now they must be careful not to get shot by their own side. In 1864, rebel companies in a state of desperation, like this one, are typical. For Sergeant Terrance, the war moves in sick rhythms. A day of terror, then weeks of boredom. A ten-mile march to a plantation, corn scraps in a barn for dinner. A morning bath in a stream, an afternoon of fear, and a night under tarred canvas in rain.