by Edward Ball
Black people throughout the South are disarmed. In Louisiana, the Metropolitan Police and the state militia are dissolved and their guns collected. The rule of separate and unequal education is affirmed, and the schools legally segregated. Alcibiade DeBlanc, friend of the Lecorgnes and leader of the Knights of the White Camellia, is appointed to the Louisiana Supreme Court. When that happens, Yves of God, the politician in the family, acquires an ear in the state’s high councils. Race segregation is made stiff as concrete in “places of public accommodation”—transport, entertainment, food service, public spaces and parks, shopkeeping, and hotels. A divided society turns permanent, and so does the hand of white command.
There are things I cannot know about what one petit blanc in New Orleans thinks and feels during this aftermath. There is no evidence. But I do know that Constant is a person who lives through these events and leaves a chiseled mark on them. I do know that he experiences a pair of bad omens. Gabrielle and Constant’s new baby girl, Marie Constance, dies at eleven months, in November. The death record gives the cause as enteritis, an intestinal infection, probably started in contaminated food. Babies just die, even redeemed ones. With a second omen, a plague comes to the city. In summer 1878, Yellow Jack returns. The deaths mount—one thousand … two thousand … —and whites who can do so flee for the parishes. When the epidemic recedes, six months later, 3,800 are dead—mostly whites, as usual.
Constant and comrades are recruited into official power, as the White League turns into a government agency. In 1879, the League is transformed into the Louisiana National Guard, a state military force. The same happens in other Southern states, as ex-Ku-klux gangs are remade into regional military units. Companies of National Guard, paid soldiers in a local army, become strike forces run by Southern governors. And in state after state, new guard units are summoned to put down black resistance, especially efforts by African Americans to unionize and strike.
To prove it is worthy of a payroll, the Louisiana National Guard applies special violence when it is called out to crush a sugarcane workers’ strike. In November 1887, ten thousand black farmworkers are on strike around the town of Thibodaux, seat of Lafourche Parish. Organized by a union, the Knights of Labor, it is the largest collective action in agriculture anywhere in the United States. At Thibodaux, the Louisiana Guard begins its work by massacring some twenty African Americans, then transporting into the parish eight hundred contract workers from convict labor camps in Mississippi. A week later, a second massacre follows at the hands of local guerrillas, who no longer find it necessary to call themselves “White League” or “Ku-klux.” Another fifty black workers killed.
“Who is to rule?” one newspaper asks about the Thibodaux strike. “Either the nigger or the white man.”
27
If you hear a certain kind of sermon in church, or if you have a Bible that falls open to Exodus or Deuteronomy, you might encounter a promise about the way history spirals down to reckoning. It is a familiar forecast that goes like this—
I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation.
Exodus 20:5–6, Deuteronomy 5:9
Do the marauders of the Ku-klux bring down calamity on their children, their children’s children? Do we, does anyone, have hell to pay?
You have large numbers of people in white society who, with race identity as a motive, author violent acts of domination. We kill, we maim, and we rape. I refer to the gallant cohort of the White League and to their fellow travelers. Well short of the model they establish, we commonly use psychological torment against nonwhites, without admitting or knowing it. I refer to the plurality of Americans in possession of unconscious machines of entitlement. In the generations since the White League flourished, it is possible to name many perpetrators like them—and more continue to be made. White supremacy rises and falls, and rises again.
But back to the biblical question: Do the third and fourth generations take ownership of their fathers’ crimes? I page the Bible and find another verse, one with an answer of sorts. It is in Isaiah, the book of prophecies, and it is another nasty forecast.
Prepare a place to slaughter the sons for the sins of their forefathers; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.
Isaiah 14:21
It is an anachronistic question, really. The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the “I,” prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors. People may make their own lives, but we do under conditions we do not choose, with terms dictated from the past. We can never make out our personal links to the felonies of history. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” said a German philosopher.
* * *
In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court throws out what is left of black rights. The court rules the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, making discrimination in public places legal and opening the lock to a cascade of laws that complete the quarantine of the black tribe from the Aryan tribe. These so-called Jim Crow laws, named for a blackface character in minstrel theater, harden the iron vessels of race caste. Today, five or six generations later, what historians call segregation is ended as a matter of law. But a glance around churches and workplaces and barrooms, hotels and restaurants and parks and suburbs, living rooms and bedrooms, is enough to conclude that Jim Crow worked, that the vessels remain, invisible and only a little damaged.
Constant’s work is done, and he knows it. He tries to return to his measuring tapes and pencils, his saws and plane, his nails and notch drills. Yet he cannot. The census in 1880 says the carpenter spends half of his working year without any work at all. He is unemployed. Meanwhile, his brother Yves of God does well. Yves calls himself a plantation man. He buys land on the outskirts of New Orleans, near the old Seven Oaks place. It is only thirty acres, but that is more land than anyone else among the Lecorgnes owns. He hires eight black workers to dig the fields and tells these farmhands to plant him some rice. In past years, Yves has called himself a judge, an architect, and a builder. Now, when he puts a notice in the city directory, he is a “planter.” Yves is an absentee landlord with a single rice field, but he carries on like this in order to touch the old family glory.
Alcibiade DeBlanc, something of a father figure to Constant, dies in St. Martin Parish in November 1883, age sixty-two. A newspaper drapes the marauder-in-chief with velvet praise, calling him “a man of heroic courage, whose magnanimity divested him of all selfishness and made him champion of the rights of others.”
I am trying to open a small window into U.S. history. I am trying to bring whiteness up from its unconscious storage place into nascence, which is that feeling just short of consciousness.
The years pass, the rains come. The planting season arrives, the cotton and rice and sugar harvests land on the docks.
Gabrielle and her husband watch their children marry. Numa, the oldest, is a tinsmith, cutting and stamping sheets of tin to roll onto ceilings. In 1881, at twenty-four, he moves out to marry a woman named Odile Livaudais. Gabrielle and Constant see their son Louis grow up. He graduates from the Jesuit Academy, and in September 1885, when he turns twenty-four, he marries a twenty-one-year-old named Annie Miller, who works as a hatmaker.
The Lecorgne boys marry white women. To do otherwise is illegal. More, if you peer into the mind, it is unthinkable.
Louis and Annie set up housekeeping on Berlin Street, in Bouligny, a few blocks from Lecorgne row. Louis works as a carpenter, like his father. The couple has a daughter, named Edna Lecorgne, and another, named Maud, and they have a son, Albert, the siblings I knew as a boy.
There are various templates of race talk. One of them is the sentimental, which sounds like this. How nice it is that we can see each other as humans, and that we can like each other. Another template is the past tense, in which racial processe
s are placed in the bad old days. It sounds like this. We are different from our grandparents and great-grandparents. They lived with the old prejudices, the old consciousness. Race is the way it used to be, and is not now.
Gabrielle and Constant make do. The rewards of the race war are hard to detect when you are poor and feel wounded. A few months after son Louis marries, Fred Ogden, leader of the White League, dies from liver cancer, age forty-nine. I imagine Constant and friends from the guerrilla days are in the pews when an Episcopal bishop performs services at the Church of the Annunciation, on Camp Street.
The year 1886 brings an unforgettable season for the Lecorgnes. It begins with Ézilda, Constant’s older sister. She is fifty-five and married to a man named François Fazende, who runs a horse stable for a streetcar company. They have four grown children and live on Felicity Street. In April, Ézilda dies of cancer.
The next one taken is a son. Gabrielle and Constant have as their youngest a boy named Stephen, who is thirteen. When Stephen Lecorgne develops a temperature, in September 1886, his parents treat it with the customary fear of an autumn fever. But he worsens quickly, and he dies. The death record names spinal meningitis, a bacterial infection of the membranes that envelop the brain and spinal cord. Stephen is the fifth child his parents bury of the nine who are born to them. Gabrielle and Constant are familiar with children who die, but I do not think they are used to it.
Constant Lecorgne in late life
Two weeks after Stephen’s funeral, Constant decides to go on a hunting trip. He wants distraction, or maybe he still has no work, I do not know. Gabrielle lets him go. Maybe she wants to be alone with her grief and with the rest of the children. According to the family story, Constant goes into the state of Mississippi—not that far, two days round-trip—and brings his gun. He goes with friends, other veterans of the old gangs. It is mid-October 1886. He hunts, he returns home, and he is sick. He crawls into bed.
Family tradition, as told by my aunt Maud Lecorgne, is that Constant is ill from “bad water.” He drinks contaminated water while on his hunt in the woods. Within a week, Constant is dead. He dies October 24, 1886, age fifty-four.
A doctor cites “malarial fever.” It is not contaminated water, in fact, but fever that comes for him. Fevers have seized him before. Fevers of rage, fevers of white power. This time it is a fever that cannot be avoided, unlike those other kinds. The end for a man taken by malaria is quiet. His death is conveyed by the anopheles mosquito, which carries the parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Malaria comes with trembling and a bath of sweat. As he wilts in bed, part of Gabrielle might be thankful for a husband who shrinks toward death, rather than rages to it. After decades with guns and fighting, Constant is gone in a few groans.
He dies in Bouligny in yet another rental, one-half of a shotgun house on Napoleon Avenue. The physician who comes to the house to examine the body says Constant is “white,” “married,” and “a carpenter by occupation.” The three features of an American identity, in order of importance: race, sex life, and job. The next day, Gabrielle walks with her children to the funeral at St. Stephen Church, across the street. It is the second time in a month that she buries one of her own.
Do his comrades from the white militias come? I suspect some do. But “our Klansman,” as my aunt Maud teaches me to call him, is not given the celebration that rises around leaders of the fight for supremacy, saviors of the race, like Ogden and DeBlanc. He receives no notice in the newspapers, no obituary. The priest delivers a perfunctory eulogy, but that is all.
* * *
During the 1900s, the Lecorgnes stay put in New Orleans. The divide in the family between Yves Lecorgne, the man of property and the law, and his plainer siblings, including Constant, seems to carry on and harden. Some rise into the white bourgeoisie—the descendants of Yves of God. Some remain in the working class—the progeny of Constant.
Take three of the grandchildren of Constant, Maud and Edna and Albert, whom I remember. Maud becomes a teacher in the white public schools, Edna a homemaker and then a bookkeeper, Albert another carpenter. It is Maud who becomes the carrier of the story of the White League, the story I first heard when I was a boy, in New Orleans. It is not that long ago, really.
* * *
Constant was a man with little skill for money, and when he dies, he leaves a poor widow. Gabrielle has next to nothing, and she cannot afford a marker for her husband’s grave. There is no sign of his interment. He lies in an unmarked grave for more than seventy years. In the 1950s, a stone is placed to mark this insignificant and yet calamitous, strange but common life. It appears during the lifetime of Maud Lecorgne, the dead man’s granddaughter, and thanks in part to her. My aunt Maud wishes to memorialize her grandfather, the petit blanc warrior for the Redemption.
Gabrielle, “Widow Lecorgne,” carries on as a single mother. She has two children to finish, fifteen-year-old Corinne and twenty-year-old George. George becomes a breadwinner, going to work as a junior carpenter. Gabrielle takes in work as a seamstress. But it is not much, and she and the children live on thin means. Maybe Yves of God shares a few dollars. In a couple of years, son George marries and moves out. Daughter Corinne marries at age nineteen to a man named Emile Jacob, and she moves out. Gabrielle is alone.
The year after Corinne marries, the victory monument goes up. It has been seventeen years since the triumph in the Battle of Canal Street, in 1874. The aging men of the White League want to celebrate themselves with a memorial. A thirty-foot granite obelisk goes up at Canal and Royal streets, the intersection where the guerrillas turned back “negro domination.” It is November 1891. When she sees it, Gabrielle must wish that her husband were with her.
The stone monument is popular among whites, widely detested among blacks. An inscription is eventually added to the plinth beneath the obelisk. It reads: “The national election in November 1876 recognized white supremacy and gave us our state.” One hundred forty-three years after the Battle of Canal Street, in the summer of 2017, the city of New Orleans decides to remove the monument to the White League. It is dismantled and stored.
Monument to the White League in New Orleans, and the author
After Reconstruction collapses, after Constant dies, lynching becomes a preferred form of white mob violence. In New Orleans, the lynching years begin differently from other places, with a gang killing of Italian Americans, in 1891. Eleven “Dagoes,” as the papers put it, accused of killing a sheriff—they are men who are chiefly guilty of being born in southern Europe, a place less than fully white—are themselves murdered by guerrillas who break into the city jail. After this massacre, almost all lynch mobs target African Americans. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia are the states with the highest number of black lynching victims in the period 1880–1940, when the killings are most popular among whites. Lafourche Parish, southwest of New Orleans, has the greatest number, with fifty-two African Americans put to death by the noose.
As Gabrielle grows older, the straitjacket of whiteness tightens. Meantime, Creoles of color make futile efforts to untie it. In 1890, eighteen men in New Orleans form the Comité des Citoyens, the Citizens’ Committee, to try to loosen the legal knot that binds black identity. They come together to fight the “exaggerated fanaticism about caste and segregation,” as one of its members puts it. The Citizens’ Committee takes aim at Act 111, the most severe segregation law, approved by the Louisiana State Assembly in 1890.
In 1892, the Comité des Citoyens sends a shoemaker named Homer Plessy to board a segregated railcar belonging to the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy climbs into a white car at the Press Street Depot, east of the French Quarter. The battlefield involves no guns and no terrain, just a single wooden seat on a train, five miles from Bouligny and Lecorgne row.
Plessy is arrested and tried. When Plessy v. Ferguson is argued in New Orleans, Judge John Ferguson of the criminal district court for Orleans Parish hears the case. The prosecution argues that quarantine of black people is necessary on the
basis of contact-répugnant, or “repellent intimacy.” White passengers, the state says, are deeply inconvenienced by the odor of people of color. Judge Ferguson agrees, and the law is affirmed. The Citizens’ Committee appeals, and for four years, the case rises through layers of the judiciary, emerging in the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 1896, the thoughtful justices of the high court, men who help to clarify national standards for everyone, determine that “repellent intimacy” is a persuasive argument. The law of quarantine is affirmed.
“We think the enforced separation of the races … neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws,” writes associate justice Henry B. Brown in a 7–1 ruling. The main point, says Justice Brown, is that “legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts.”
The encirclement is complete. Race quarantine becomes the custom in all the land. White supremacy is acclaimed in habit, in thought, and in law.
* * *
Yves of God dies January 1, 1896, at seventy. He leaves life contented and well served. With her rich brother-in-law dead, Gabrielle’s money worries appear to grow. When Gabrielle’s son-in-law Emile dies young, in 1898, her widowed daughter Corinne moves back in with her three children. The household is somewhat desperate. To alleviate the strain, Gabrielle applies for her husband’s Confederate pension. The state of Louisiana runs a program that pays Civil War veterans, or their widows, a monthly stipend. It is a thank-you for good service during the rebellion. Gabrielle is given a pension, $5 a month for Constant’s service in the long-ago war, the war that went badly, but which the South seems eventually to have won.