by Edward Ball
Gabrielle, age sixty-five, and daughter Corinne, twenty-seven, raise the grandchildren together. They take in two boarders, a German-born laborer and a Louisiana-born streetcar driver. The boarding arrangement works for a little while, until it does not. To supplement, Gabrielle teaches piano, but this, too, is not enough. She looks for a job, because she can no longer pay the rent.
In a public school, Gabrielle finds work as a “portress.” A portress is a doorkeeper; also, some of the time, a female porter. Gabrielle is hired by a primary school at 926 Berlin Street, on the corner of Camp Street. The job is full-time, and the pay is slender, but the work comes with an important benefit, housing. Gabrielle, Corinne, and the three children move into an apartment in the back of the school. It is cramped, and the building is loud from the swarm of students during the day.
Gabrielle the portress greets the schoolchildren, keeps attendance, and makes sure the students stay in class all day. And, like a porter, she picks up a mop and broom.
The school building stands just behind the church, St. Stephen, where the Lecorgnes have baptized and buried one another for fifty years. To Gabrielle’s consternation, perhaps, it is a black public school. Everyone agrees the tribes are to be kept apart. But the black tribe needs portresses, just like the white. Gabrielle works at a black school, lives with black children all around her, every day. She is glad to have the work, to take care of her own. Or maybe she is disgusted to have work, when it is work of this kind.
Gabrielle must be glad that her husband is dead. She must be relieved that Constant cannot see his wife is a portress in a black school, looking over the burr-headed pickaninnies. It is 1905. She is seventy years old, then older. She works and works, and does not stop. She reaches for her mop to swab the floor, cleaning up after the black children.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
To write a life story from scattered and thin sources is like making a mosaic. A piece of tile here, a chip with color there, and something from the scrap bin—until you have a picture. Archaeologists work a similar process. Give me a shard and I will make a village, says the digger for old pots.
I began with bits of oral tradition and the casual research of a family historian, my aunt Maud. Why would a person go beyond them to fill out a portrait of a Klansman? Behavior is overdetermined.
Some of the sources are routine for historians: wills and probate records, census data, institutional ledgers and receipt books, sacramental records, tax filings, military archives, maps, city directories, memoirs, travel accounts from the period. What is missing is the voice of the Klansman.
No, that is not true. Archives about unfamous and unrich people are not “missing”: they are never made. One person in a thousand leaves a trail in personal paper (rather than in public records) that the living can follow. Almost no one keeps evidence of what they think, do, say, and dream. If they do, their children do not place it in a library. In the future, archives will differ. The accidental records of common people, traces of lives left in the digital mass brain, will be vast.
The voice of the Klansman is absent. In its place, you have a condition more promising for pleasurable prose, and that is the intermittent record. When the archive says little or nothing, it is a matter of developing trace evidence, using inference and implication. Documentation of a life that appears in bits—a legal contract, an arrest record, a single letter, marriage or divorce papers, a hospitalization record, a lawsuit, a newspaper article, or an obituary. From these threads are garments made.
I first took an interest in telling a story about “our Klansman” years ago. I began to write his life as a novel, and after twelve months, had one hundred pages. But the manuscript read as mediocre, an adventure plot here, a melodrama there. I realized that making things up robbed the story of too much truth. I put the fiction away and opened a nonfiction folder.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
Freedmen’s Bureau: Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands
LARC: Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans
Louisiana Division, NOPL: Louisiana Division/City Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans Public Library
Louisiana State Archives: Louisiana Secretary of State, Division of Archives, Records Management and History
LSU: Louisiana State University
NARA: National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Sacramental Records: Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans
PROLOGUE
Fred C. Trump, Klansman: arrest—“Warren Criticizes ‘Class’ Parades,” The New York Times, 1 Jun 1927, 16; reprise—Philip Bump, “In 1927 Donald Trump’s Father Was Arrested after a Klan Riot in Queens,” The Washington Post, 29 Feb 2016.
CHAPTER 1
Ku-klux raid, indictment: The Morning Star and Catholic Messenger (New Orleans), 9 Mar 1873; The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 6, 7, 8, 13, 20, and 25 Mar 1873; New Orleans Republican, 6, 7, and 9 Mar 1873; The New-Orleans Times, 6 and 8 Mar 1873; “A Riot in New-Orleans,” The New York Times, 6 Mar 1873; “The New-Orleans Rioting” and “The New-Orleans Mob,” The New York Times, 7 Mar 1873; State of Louisiana v. Peter Duffy, et al., Indictment no. 5187, for Treason, and Violating the Enforcement Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act), 24 Mar 1873, First District Court, Orleans Parish, and Witness’ Bond, Recorder’s Office, Sixth District, City of New Orleans, 12 Mar 1873, Louisiana Division, NOPL.
CHAPTER 2
St. Louis Cathedral: Karl Postel, The Americans as They are; Described in a Tour Through the Valley of the Mississippi (London: Hurst, Chance, 1828), 154–56.
French prisoners of war, and deserters: Francis Abell, Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815; A Record of Their Lives, Their Romance and Their Sufferings (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), 208–13, 416, 445, 450; Patricia K. Crimmin, “Prisoners of War and British Port Communities, 1793–1815,” The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du nord 6, no. 4 (Oct 1996), 17–27; Paul Chamberlain, “The Release of Prisoners of War from Britain in 1813 and 1814,” Napoléonica. La Revue 21, no. 3 (2014), 118–29.
“Histoire naturelle (‘Natural History’)”: François Bernier, “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les différentes espèces ou races d’homme qui l’habitent” (“A New Division of the Earth, According to the Different Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It”), Journal des Sçavans 12 (1684), 148–55; Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 55, 85, 137.
Deserters in New Orleans: François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 349–402; retrocession of Louisiana, 1800—Alexander De Conde, “Napoleon and the Louisiana Purchase,” in Napoleon and America, ed. Robert B. Holtman (Pensacola, FL: Perdido Bay Press for the Louisiana State Museum, 1988), 110–30.
CHAPTER 3
Slaves speak a language, Gombo: Edward Larocque Tinker, Gombo, the Creole Dialect of Louisiana (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1936); “The same stick”: Lafcadio Hearn, “Gombo zhèbes”: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs (New York: W. H. Coleman, 1885), 25; Enslaved revolt, 1811: Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: Harper, 2011), 97ff., 147ff.
43 Dauphine Street, New Orleans: Sale of Property, John Longpre to A. Lassize, 16 Dec 1815, Michel De Armas, notary; “Vente de Propriété, John Longpré à Marie Hinard,” 4 Mar 1817, Marc Lafitte, notary; “Sale of Property, Marie Hinard to Jean Barbey,” 20 Apr 1847, Theodore Guyol, notary; “Testament de Delle Mariane Hinard,” 18 Mar 1842, Felix Grima, notary—all, New Orleans Notarial Archives Research Center; Yves César Le Corgne household: New Orleans, United States Census, 1830 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration); “Y.C. Lecorgne, teacher, 43 Dauphin,” Michel’s New Orleans Annual and Commercial Register (New Orleans: Gaux & Sol
lée, 1833).
Yves Le Corgne: work as teacher—Simone de la Souchère Deléry, Napoleon’s Soldiers in America (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1972), 41–42; family in France—Le Courrier (New Orleans) for 16 Dec 1831 cites letters to “C. Lecorgne” (César Le Corgne) at post office.
Free people of color / gens de couleur libres chronicled: Charles Barthelemy Roussève, The Negro in Louisiana; Aspects of His History and His Literature (New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937), 20–55; Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2001), 3–41.
Mixed-race terms: Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York, London: Dix & Edwards, Sampson Low, 1856), 583.
Children of Yves and Marguerite Le Corgne: Anne (b. 10 Apr 1819)—Sacramental Records; Yves Hypolite (b. 19 Jan 1820)—New Orleans, Louisiana, Birth Records Index, 1790–1915, Louisiana State Archives; Marguerite (b. 8 Feb 1824)—Sacramental Records; Yves Jean (b. 23 Jan 1826)—Sacramental Records; yellow fever—Karl Postel, The Americans as They Are, 192–94.
David Walker: David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), vii, xix–xx, 2, 7, 9–12, 16–21, 61, 62n, 71.
People enslaved by Yves and Marguerite Le Corgne and by Jean-Louis and Anne Constant Zeringue: Valentin—Jean-Louis Zeringue to Yves C. Le Corgne, sale of a slave, Valentin, age 40, 11 Feb 1830, Jefferson Parish Conveyances, Louisiana Division, NOPL; Zeringue slaves—Constance Anne Constant Zeringue, Succession no. 346, filed 15 Jul 1826, Jefferson Parish Succession and Probate Records, Louisiana Division, NOPL; further Zeringue slaves—Will of Jean-Louis Zeringue père (grandfather of Marguerite Zeringue Le Corgne), Jun 1813 (drafted), Jan 1824 (filed), Louisiana Division, NOPL.
Constant Le Corgne: “Constant Polycarpe Hypolite Le Corgne,” b. 28 Apr 1832, baptized 1 May 1833, Sacramental Records, St. Louis Cathedral, Baptisms, vol. 14, no. 385.
CHAPTER 4
P.C. grows up around enslaved blacks: By 1830, Yves and Marguerite have three children and three slaves, a man and two women—U.S. Census, 1830; baptisms of enslaved in Zeringue household—Sacramental Records, St. Louis Cathedral, Baptisms of Slaves and Free People of Color, no. 314 (27 Apr 1839); voodou, exorcism—Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992).
Congo Square: seen by—Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe: Journals 1799–1820, vol. 3, ed. Edward C. Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 202–203; seen by—Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage Through the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Through the Territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New-Orleans, Performed in the Years 1807 and 1808 (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968), 187–93; seen by—James R. Creecy, Scenes in the South, and Other Miscellaneous Pieces (Washington, D.C.: T. McGill, 1860), 20–23; imagined by—Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter; An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 239–43; imagined by—Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 63–68; described—Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans from Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008), 271–83.
Jean-Louis Zeringue estate: sixteen workers—Jean-Louis Zeringue, succession no. 6070 (filed 30 Oct 1839), Jefferson Parish Succession and Probate Records, Louisiana Division, NOPL; Camille Zeringue property—Conveyance, Jean-Louis Zeringue to Camille Zeringue, sale of habitation, 14 Jan 1830, Book BIS1, Act/page 5, Jefferson Parish Conveyances, Louisiana Division, NOPL; Camille Zeringue as slaveholder—advertisement for runaways Frank, Handison, and Jarret, New-Orleans Argus, 30 Jul 1828.
CHAPTER 5
Carnival / Mardi Gras: James Creecy, Scenes in the South, 43–46; Carol Clark, “Carnival,” in The Rabelais Encyclopedia, ed. Elizabeth A. Chesney (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 28–29; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 7–11; Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 41–48.
Caucasians: Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America, to Which Is Prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species (London: J. Dobson Simpkin, Marshall, 1839), 3–7, 8–9, 40.
Le Corgne family moves: land purchase—Joseph Vincent à Yves C. Le Corgne, 20 Apr 1840, Jefferson Parish conveyances, vol. 10, Louisiana Division, NOPL; City of Lafayette—Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945), 50–75; Bouligny development—Fred Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 1820–1840 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2005), 22–23; Terpsichore Street—New-Orleans Annual and Commercial Directory, for 1846 (New Orleans: E. A. Michel, 1846).
De Bow’s Review: idea of blackness—Josiah Nott, “The Negro,” De Bow’s Review (New Orleans) 3, no. 5 (May 1847), 419–22; “a distinct species”—Solon Robinson, “Negro Slavery at the South,” De Bow’s Review 7, no. 3 (Sep 1849), 206–25; on Solon Robinson—American Phrenological Journal 19 (1854), 99–101.
Les Cenelles anthology: Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes (New Orleans: H. Lauve, 1845); Armand Lanusse, Creole Voices: Poems in French by Free Men of Color, ed. Edward Maceo Coleman (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1945); about Les Cenelles—Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Nos hommes et notre histoire (Montréal: Arbour et Dupont, 1911), 13–94; Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History, trans. and ed. Sister Dorothea Olga McCants (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1973), 10–25.
CHAPTER 6
Gabrielle Duchemin: arrives New Orleans—“Louisiana, New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820–1945,” database with images, FamilySearch, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKNP-9BQS, 13 Mar 2018, Eléonore Labarrière, 60, and Marie Labarrière, 11 (1847), citing ship Orléans, affiliate film no. 026, NARA microfilm M259 and T905 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), FHL microfilm 200, 156; Gabrielle Duchemin lives with Laizer family—“G. Duchemin, age 14, F,” U.S. Census, 1850 (Jefferson Parish); Laizer household—François Laizer and family live at Cadiz and Jersey streets in 1858, where they possess four slaves and eight building lots, making theirs the richest household in Bouligny—Jefferson City, Assessors’ Office Tax Rolls, vols. 1–5 (1850–61), Louisiana Division, NOPL.
Gabrielle Duchemin: birth—“Marie Léonide Gabrielle, fille de Joséphine Perdreaux … et Alphonse Duchemin,” b. 4 May 1836, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, État Civil 1836, Archives d’Outre-Mer, Archives Nationales de France, http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr; Alphonse Duchemin in Guadeloupe—“Alphonse Duchemin, 44, propriétaire” is witness to a marriage in 1850: marriage no. 87 (Clément Moko and Angèle Abiakona), 20 Dec 1850, Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, État Civil 1850, Archives d’Outre-Mer, Archives Nationales de France, http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr.
Joséphine Perdreau: In Cuba, Perdreau is named in the purchase of Julia, enslaved, by her grandmother—Sale of a slave, Julia, Victoria Moreau à Eléonore Labarrière, n.d. Apr 1844, Archivos Coloniales, Santiago, Cuba; Jean Labarrière in New Orleans—“J. Labarriere,” New Orleans, Ward 1, Orleans Parish, U.S. Census, 1840; Caribbean migration to New Orleans, 1800–1850—Paul F. Lachance, “The Foreign French,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992), 101–30.
Gabrielle Duchemin: imagined youth—Eliza Ripley, Social Life in New Orleans, Being R
ecollections of My Girlhood (New York: D. Appleton, 1912), 11–12.
Minstrelsy in Louisiana: John Smith Kendall, “New Orleans’ Negro Minstrels,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Jan 1947), 128–48; “Dandy Broadway Swell,” in Rudi Blesh and Harriet Grossman Janis, They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 85–86.
Louisiana governor Joseph Walker: on slavery—Sidney J. Romero, “My Fellow Citizens—”: The Inaugural Addresses of Louisiana’s Governors (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1980), 102.
Sale of Caroline, enslaved: Joseph Michel to François Laizer, 10 Apr 1849 (five lots of land and a twelve-year-old girl, Caroline), Jefferson Parish Conveyances, Louisiana Division, NOPL; real estate—François J. Laizer and various sellers/buyers, nine transactions, 1843–55, Jefferson Parish Conveyance Books, 1827–1900, vols. 12–15, Louisiana Division, NOPL.
Lecorgnes close together: marriage of Aurore Lecorgne—Sacramental Records, Diocese of Louisiana, L. A. Numa Leche and Marie Aurore Le Corgne, 9 Oct 1852; Constant Lecorgne, work—Gardner & Wharton’s New Orleans Directory for 1858 (New Orleans: Edward Wharton, 1858).
Yellow fever epidemic: New Orleans Sanitary Commission, E. H. Barton, and New Orleans City Council, Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853 (New Orleans, 1854), 3–10, 104, 246, 460 (insert), 480; Edgar Leche, infant—Sacramental Records, Parish of St. Stephen, Baptisms and Marriages, vol. 1, no. 46 (18 Aug 1853); Numa Leche, death—Sacramental Records, Parish of St. Stephen, Funerals, 1851–60, vol. 1, no. 8 (20 Jun 1854).