by Edward Ball
Wending from downtown to Jefferson City and back, the firemen’s march is a two-mile-long victory parade. “New Orleans turned out en masse to greet and crown her heroes,” says a reporter. One paper estimates the crowd on the banquettes to number one hundred thousand. If true, it is half the population of the city. Reporters say nothing about black spectators. African Americans, now a third of the population, seem conspicuous in absence.
The big crowd has something to do with fires, I think, and something with events at the Mechanics Institute. The en masse want to thank some of their fighters.
Home Hook & Ladder is “uniformed beautifully, in blue and white, with Old Stonewall, the company’s noble horse, walking proudly on, feeling monarch of all he surveys,” says a witness. At the end of the day, some firemen move on to banquets and dancing, others to receptions and barbecues. But the heroes and their fans have no rest between drinks, because the following day, Tuesday, is Mardi Gras.
People say the culmination of Carnival season, coming March 5, is late this year. It is the fault of the stars. Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, always falls forty days before Easter Sunday, and the date of Easter shifts with the astral calendar in logic no one understands.
The firemen who crowd the streets on Monday are out again Tuesday. But instead of marching, they carouse, many with their families. While the firemen’s parade was white, Carnival is black and white. Mardi Gras lowers the walls of difference and hostility between tribes, or at least so it is said by both species that crowd the streets.
On the big day, the Lecorgnes are probably in the mix with everyone, probably masking, costumed as one thing or another. Many people put on a character. Men and women dress as animals or plants, archangels or demons, princes or paupers, roles from a play or from folklore. If Constant and Gabrielle follow a common pattern, they drift from street to street with their children, everyone in an outfit, stopping for food and a laugh on a friend’s porch, or kissing to greet before sitting to drink at some sister’s silver-strewn dinner table.
It is common for a white woman or man to dress as one of them, les nègres. Probably several thousand whites wear blackface and dress as they think African Americans might, or should. To “black up” is a reassuring custom. To imitate the black race proves the gulf between the white and black worlds, a gap that must be shown again and again.
When whites pretend to be black, they do so on stage as well as in the street. It is the minstrel troupe that shows the Carnival crowds just how to play at color. Minstrelsy is the most popular of all forms of theater, from Louisiana to Atlanta, New York to Chicago. It is the nation’s schoolhouse for “niggering.” Everyone learns tricks from minstrel men—the loud dressing, the shucking and shuffling, the blackface and black talk, the singing like howling, all those things colored people do. All those things make superb material for masking at Mardi Gras. Whites pretend to be black as though pretending to be an animal or a character in myth.
I wonder whether the six Lecorgne siblings, Constant and his brothers and sisters, are blacked up. Maybe Constant wipes grease or the ash of burned cork on his face and pulls on a ragged pair of pants. It would not surprise me, and he would have much company.
On Mardi Gras, whites can black up, but black people do not dress as crackers at Carnival. To do so might be dangerous. It might cause trouble among the considerable number of crackers who do not see themselves as ridiculous, or like animals. It might bother the large number of whites who do not have a sense of humor.
Maybe Gabrielle and Constant are in light costume, with only a mask on the face. Constant might be wearing a plain “domino” mask, which covers the eyes and nose but leaves the lower half of the face exposed. The domino mask is the least disturbing of Carnival disguises. But it is possible that Constant wears a “moretta” mask, the one that is menacing to look at. Moretta masks cover the whole face, except for the nostrils and eyes. They are blank of expression and held in place by a button clenched between the teeth. With its empty coldness, and because it prevents the wearer from speaking, the moretta causes the most discomfort of any mask in a room. Most are entirely black. To wear one is to broadcast pure and monstrous blackness.
The six Lecorgne siblings—Yves of God, Ézilda, Constant, Joseph, Aurore, and Eliza—do not carouse with rich and pretentious whites. They are family people, parents in their thirties and forties, and they have drifted down from their old perch among the slaveholding elite. Their social circles are more plain, except for the starchy Yves of God, who keeps finer company. The Lecorgnes mask with hoi polloi, more common whites. They have little to do with the businessmen and moneychangers who float in the city’s richer class. Those families, or some of them, are pulled toward one Carnival group, to which the Lecorgnes do not belong, the Mistick Krewe of Comus.
A few businessmen set up “Comus” before the Civil War. (In the same love of alliteration that gives birth to the word “Ku-klux,” they coin the word “krewe.”) The Krewe of Comus takes its name from John Milton’s play Comus, in which the named character is the debauched god of revelry, who captures a woman, brings her to his palace, ties her to a chair, and tries to seduce her with flourishes of a large wand. (He fails.) The Krewe of Comus puts on a nighttime parade, a procession that moves by torchlight on Mardi Gras, with costumes and music and rolling floats decorated with scenery—tableaux roulants. It is a parade that ends in the ballroom of the Varieties Theater, on Gravier Street, where the Krewe puts on a bal masqué, masked ball, and members perform a tableau, a silent bit of costumed theater.
The Krewe of Comus marching on St. Charles Avenue, Mardi Gras 1867
It is all so tasteful and restrained. While most of Mardi Gras, both black and white, is louche and wanton.
Comus is bigger than the heads and wallets of the Lecorgnes. I imagine that Constant and family, like many in the city, watch on Mardi Gras night as the masked men of Comus guide their mule-drawn tableaux along St. Charles Avenue toward the theater. The Lecorgnes watch, and they wave. On one float, Constant might see a familiar face. Or he might see a familiar beard, because the face itself is masked. It is the face of Henry Hayes, sheriff of New Orleans, a man with a foot-long black beard. Hayes is the sheriff in the Mechanics Institute massacre, the man who deputizes ex-rebels to assist in the killing. He appears on a Comus wagon draped in a robe, mask, and half hood, an outfit that is becoming common Carnival gear. The hands of Henry Hayes are two of the bloodiest in the city. It is coincidence, of course, that the sheriff is president of the Mistick Krewe of Comus. Constant and Gabrielle wave as the tasteful and restrained leader of Mardi Gras revelry trundles past.
* * *
News of the outrage comes from Washington. The Radical Republican Congress pushes through the Reconstruction Act. The law removes the rebel legislatures from around the South and replaces them with military government. Voting by ex-rebels is cut, and the vote for black men is promised. President Andrew Johnson vetoes the bill in the afternoon, and the new Congress overrides the same day. The first Reconstruction Act is followed by three more. The four laws are Washington’s answer to the New Orleans massacre; they are a backlash and a crackdown. Congress requires each state in the South to approve the Fourteenth Amendment, the 435-word footnote to the Constitution that makes black people citizens; and Congress compels each state to write a new, black-friendly constitution.
Everyone thinks that whiteness is back on its throne, but Congress decides to throw it out of the temple.
Louisiana is placed, with Texas, in the so-called Fifth Military District. And the U.S. Army general Philip Sheridan is named regional chief. Sheridan takes command in New Orleans, dissolves the state legislature, and ejects the mayor and the governor from office. On May 1, 1867, Sheridan orders his officers to start registering black men for the vote.
Captains in Yankee blue uniforms take files and fan out from New Orleans. Blacks sign up by the tens of thousands, placing an X on the signature line. Most African Americans are illiterate, due to
the old law that barred enslaved people from school. All register as Republicans, the party of Lincoln the Emancipator. They register as Republicans, because they know the Democratic Party would prefer to see them in slave cabins.
* * *
Alcibiade DeBlanc, the Lecorgne friend who signed the secession order, is not happy. At this point, DeBlanc lives in the town of Franklin, in the rural pocket of St. Mary Parish, where he is part of a small white minority. He is in Franklin for a job as a district judge. It is the first time he has needed a job. An ex-slaveholder, and a lawyer, DeBlanc is accustomed to living from his wit in the courtroom and whip in the field. But the war took all of that away. The good judge Alcibiade DeBlanc regards “emancipation” as a personal theft.
In Franklin, Judge DeBlanc meets a newspaperman, Daniel Dennett, who runs a weekly called the Planters’ Banner. The pages of the Planters’ Banner are full of taunts aimed at Republicans and sarcasm about black rights. DeBlanc and Dennett become friends, each regarding the other as useful. Dennett the journalist is a gossip, Alcibiade the lawyer is an orator. They decide to form a talkers’ club. They want a place where men like themselves can say what they feel. The club, made up of war veterans, starts to meet in Franklin. Dennett and DeBlanc give their little guild a name, the Caucasian Club.
Meetings are one night a week. Ten or twenty men drink and grieve for the lost cause of the Confederacy. For a month or two, it is enough to grouse about the Radicals and Reconstruction. But the Caucasians want more.
Alcibiade DeBlanc is ten years older than Constant. The two men are like cousins, but they are not close. DeBlanc is educated and commanding. In Constant’s eyes, DeBlanc is another of the more successful men who crowd his life and make him small.
The Caucasian Club grows. Membership is held to whites with a strong sense of the tribe, whites who see themselves as a people with destiny. DeBlanc dominates the room full of resentful veterans. He is intelligent and cunning, a man of parts. Sometime in summer 1867, DeBlanc renames the guild. The “Caucasian Club” is too limiting. The group needs a name that reflects an ambition.
In the Deep South, pretentious names for groups filled with angry men are not in short supply. DeBlanc knows of a particular name that has seen good use: the Knights of the Golden Circle. The Knights of the Golden Circle is a secret society that comes to life in Texas and Louisiana during the 1840s. Its members are Southern nationalists. The Golden Circle numbers ten thousand by the time of the Civil War and stretches from Virginia to Texas. Its members are rich, a chivalry of Southern elites, and secretive, like a Masonic order.
During the years before the Civil War, when slavery is coming under threat, the Knights of the Golden Circle devise an ambitious plan to defend it. The Knights will extend the scope of the South by annexing Cuba and Central America. The idea is to invade the countries of the Caribbean in order to create a slave empire, a “Golden Circle” that consists of the slave areas of the United States, plus territories around the Gulf of Mexico. With the defeat of the Confederacy, the dream of a slave empire decays to dust. Yet Judge Alcibiade DeBlanc knows all about the Knights of the Golden Circle and their failed plans. It is even possible he once took part himself, during the good old days, in the grand Golden Circle scheme.
DeBlanc changes the name of the Caucasian Club. From here forward, it is the Knights of the White Camellia. The new name of the guild is valiant and medieval, it sounds like a roundtable of men in armor. The camellia flower will be its symbol, a flower that is lavish, white, and stuns with a sweet fragrance. Because Judge DeBlanc is a Creole, like the Lecorgnes, the club must have a twin name in French—les Chevaliers du Camélia Blanc.
The Democratic politician John Ellis is a founding member of the Knights of the White Camellia, or KWC. About this time, Ellis writes in his diary that the purpose of the KWC is “to protect our race from amalgamation and miscegenation and other degradations.” The mixing of the black and white species, Ellis says, and the decay of the white tribe, are things that the “dominant radical party,” the Republicans, want to force on embattled Caucasians. The White Camellia will not allow it.
18
There is a saying in the black French of the day—Faut jamais porté déil avant défunt soit dans cerkeil, “Never wear mourning before the dead man is in his coffin.” Do not expect white rule is dead until it is buried.
Constant is thirty-five, Gabrielle thirty-one. They have four young children—Numa, Louis, Estelle, and George. The last one, George, is a year old, a boy born during the month of the Mechanics Institute massacre. Gabrielle minds her four without the help of black hands. The economy is recovering. Cotton is high again in the fields upriver, and money spills into the city. If you are a carpenter, there should be work for the taking. Constant, the charpentier de navire, looks for jobs and picks up a few things. Add a porch to a house, mend a staircase in a boatyard. Meanwhile, Yves of God, comptroller for Jefferson City, hands out work to friends. Yves is a man with tax money to spread around. I find a bit of evidence that Constant does things for Yves, like repairing a few blocks of the banquettes, the wooden sidewalks in Bouligny. Gabrielle tries to make up for her husband’s indifferent earnings. She is good with a needle, and I imagine she takes in piecework. There is some evidence that she earns money with music. A capable pianist, Gabrielle pads the small family income by teaching keyboard to young pupils.
Gabrielle and Constant scratch for money, but some of the Lecorgnes rake it in. With Yankees all around with their cash, Lecorgnes take advantage by flipping pieces of land.
Most of the older whites in town hate the newer whites, the ones from up North. These are people from Ohio or Pennsylvania, Connecticut or New York, especially New York. Maybe five thousand come to New Orleans alone. The older whites in town call the new ones who get into politics “carpetbaggers.” Carpetbaggers are said to travel with cheap luggage, bags made from old rugs, sewn up into sacks—“carpetbags.” They are operators, and they eat away at the power of decent Creoles. The Northern men and women also siphon money. They make deals, they start businesses, they lease plantations. Half look for land to buy or cotton to sell. The other half—the carpetbaggers—hunt favors in the courthouse, spread graft in the statehouse, or run for offices they don’t deserve. At least, that is what the good local whites say.
For the Lecorgnes, however, the money spread around by Northerners helps them to forget. In one year, Constant’s sister Eliza sells two pieces of land to a man named Swords and two more to a man named Hotard. Yves of God sells one piece of land to a man named Andre and two to a man named Kimball. New whites every one.
Constant and Gabrielle regard these deals skeptically, maybe enviously. They have no cash to buy even one building lot for themselves, much less seven lots to unload on Yankees.
Sister Eliza Lecorgne is twenty-eight. She is the Lecorgne who teaches in the public schools, until she marries. In 1866, Eliza marries a man named Charles Lagroue, and she is asked to leave her job, because schoolteachers, if they are women, are expected to be single. Charles Lagroue is a plantation overseer who makes decent money. Eliza has a one-year-old daughter, Adelaide, her first child.
In September 1867, Eliza Lecorgne makes a pile of money, earning more cash in one land deal than any of the men in the family has ever made. And she does it with the biggest carpetbagger of all, the Yankee invader, the U.S. Army. Worse, she does it by making a deal that helps les nègres.
Eliza owns land in Shrewsbury, a settlement just outside the city. Shrewsbury lies eight miles upstream, next to the U.S. Army garrison, Camp Parapet. Camp Parapet is two things: it is a refugee camp, with a city of tents that is a destination for perhaps ten thousand blacks, and it is headquarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the relief operation for ex-slaves, run by the army. In Shrewsbury, Eliza Lecorgne owns five acres and two houses on Arlington Road, which forms the border of Camp Parapet. General Absalom Baird, the camp commander, wants to build new barracks and expand the army’s relief operation
. Baird says he needs the Lecorgne land, and the U.S. Army offers Eliza $4,000.
Eliza Lecorgne is lucky, and she is smart. It is her name on the deed, not that of her husband, Charles Lagroue. She takes the deal. To make $4,000, her brother Constant would have to build forty houses. To Constant, Eliza must look like a disgrace to the family. The money comes from the dirty hand of the U.S. Army, his former enemy in the war, and now carpetbagger-in-chief. In the end, however, Constant deflects. When Eliza asks him to cosign the sale contract, Constant goes down to the courthouse with his sister and does it. She is his blood, after all.
* * *
It is a year since the massacre, and the black tide is rising. The first election in which men of color can vote is set for October. In Bouligny, the firemen of Home Hook & Ladder believe it is time for another fight. On September 28, a Saturday, several men from Home Hook walk the streets, looking for trouble. They come to the Jefferson City Courthouse. Republican canvassers stand at a table outside, showing black voters how to use their first paper ballots. At this point, the year 1867, voting is not yet a private act; there is no such thing as a secret ballot. To vote Democrat requires a ballot printed by the Democrats. To vote Republican takes a ballot handed out by the Republicans. When you vote, everyone watches you stuff these garish pieces of paper into ballot boxes at the polling station.
Constant may be on the street when the Home Hook men walk up to the Republican table in front of the courthouse. Newspapers describe what happens. A Home Hook fireman named Harry Rolande stares down the black voters around the table. Rolande snatches a ballot from one of the canvass men, tears it up, and curses. I imagine he says something gentle, like “Fucking niggers cannot even read the thing.” Standing with Rolande is another fireman, Henry Reese. The shouting starts, a brawl follows, and guns come out. A report says forty shots are fired. Several white and black bystanders are wounded, as well as two policemen who run to the scene.