Strange True Stories of Louisiana
Page 38
V.
A NEW USE.
The era of political reconstruction came. The victorious national powerdecreed that they who had once been master and slave should enter intopolitical partnership on terms of civil equality. The slaves grasped theboon; but the masters, trained for generations in the conviction thatpublic safety and private purity were possible only by the subjection ofthe black race under the white, loathed civil equality as but another namefor private companionship, and spurned, as dishonor and destruction inone, the restoration of their sovereignty at the price of politicalcopartnership with the groveling race they had bought and sold andsubjected easily to the leash and lash.
What followed took every one by surprise. The negro came at once into alarger share of power than it was ever intended he should or expected hewould attain. His master, related to him long and only under the imaginednecessities of plantation government, vowed the issue must and should be,not How shall the two races share public self-government in prosperousamity? but, Which race shall exclusively rule the other, race by race?
The necessities of national authority tipped the scale, and the powers oflegislation and government and the spoils of office tumbled, all together,into the freedman's ragged lap. Thereupon there fell upon New Orleans,never well governed at the best, a volcanic shower of corruption andmisrule.
And yet when history's calm summing-up and final judgment comes, theremust this be pointed out, which was very hard to see through the dust andsmoke of those days: that while plunder and fraud ran riot, yet no seriousattempt was ever made by the freedman or his allies to establish anyun-American principle of government, and for nothing else was he morefiercely, bloodily opposed than for measures approved by the world's bestthought and in full harmony with the national scheme of order. We shallsee now what these things have to do with our strange true story.
In New Orleans the American public school system, which recognizes freepublic instruction as a profitable investment of the public funds for thecommon public safety, had already long been established. The negro adoptedand enlarged it. He recognized the fact that the relation of pupils in thepublic schools is as distinctly a public and not a private relation asthat of the sidewalk, the market, the public park, or the street-car. Butrecognizing also the impracticabilities of place and time, he establishedseparate schools for whites and blacks. In one instance, however, owingmainly to smallness of numbers, it seemed more feasible to allow a commonenjoyment of the civil right of public instruction without separation byrace than to maintain two separate schools, one at least of which would bevery feeble for lack of numbers. Now, it being so decided, of all thebuildings in New Orleans which one was chosen for this experiment but the"haunted house" in Royal street!
I shall never forget the day--although marked by no startlingincident--when I sat in its lofty drawing-rooms and heard its classes intheir annual examination. It was June, and the teachers and pupils wereclad in recognition of the special occasion and in the light fabricsfitted to the season. The rooms were adorned with wreaths, garlands, andbouquets. Among the scholars many faces were beautiful, and all were freshand young. Much Gallic blood asserted itself in complexion and feature,generally of undoubted, unadulterated "Caucasian" purity, but sometimes ofvisible and now and then of preponderating African tincture. Only two orthree, unless I have forgotten, were of pure negro blood. There, in therooms that had once resounded with the screams of Madame Lalaurie's littleslave fleeing to her death, and with the hootings and maledictions of theenraged mob, was being tried the experiment of a common enjoyment ofpublic benefits by the daughters of two widely divergent races, withoutthe enforcement of private social companionship.
From such enforcement the school was as free as any school is or ought tobe. The daily discipline did not require any two pupils to be social, butonly every one to be civil, and civil to all. These pages are written,however, to tell a strange true story, and not to plead one cause oranother. Whatever the story itself pleads, let it plead. Outside the"haunted house," far and near, the whole community was divided into twofiercely hostile parties, often at actual war with each other, the onestriving to maintain government upon a co-citizenship regardless of racein all public relations, the other sworn to make race the supreme,sufficient, inexorable condition of supremacy on the one part andsubjection on the other. Yet for all this the school prospered.
Nevertheless, it suffered much internal unrest. Many a word was spokenthat struck like a club, many a smile stung like a whip-lash, many aglance stabbed like a knife; even in the midst of recitations a woundedone would sometimes break into sobs or silent tears while the aggressorcrimsoned and palpitated with the proud indignation of the master caste.The teachers met all such by-play with prompt, impartial repression andconcentration upon the appointed duties of the hour.
Sometimes another thing restored order. Few indeed of the pupils, ofwhatever racial purity or preponderance, but held more or less in awe theghostly traditions of the house; and at times it chanced to be just inthe midst of one of these ebullitions of scorn, grief, and resentful tearsthat noiselessly and majestically the great doors of the reception-rooms,untouched by visible hands, would slowly swing open, and the hushed girlswould call to mind Madame Lalaurie.
Not all who bore the tincture of the despised race suffered alike. Somewere fierce and sturdy, and played a savage tit-for-tat. Some wereinsensible. A few bore themselves inflexibly by dint of sheer nerve; whilemany, generally much more white than black, quivered and wincedcontinually under the contumely that fell, they felt, with peculiarinjustice and cruelty upon them.
Odd things happened from time to time to remind one of the house's earlyhistory. One day a deep hidden well that no one had suspected theexistence of was found in the basement of the main house. Anothertime--But we must be brief.
Matters went on thus for years. But at length there was a sudden andviolent change.