Strange True Stories of Louisiana
Page 39
VI.
EVICTIONS.
The "Radical" party in Louisiana, gorged with private spoils and loathedand hated by the all but unbroken ranks of well-to-do society, though itheld a creed as righteous and reasonable as any political party everheld, was going to pieces by the sheer weakness of its own politicalcorruption. It was made mainly of the poor and weak elements of thepeople. Had it been ever so pure it could not have made headway againstthe strongest ranks of society concentrating against it with revolutionaryintent, when deserted by the power which had called it to responsibilityand--Come! this history of a house must not run into the history of agovernment. It is a fact in our story, however, that in the "Conservative"party there sprung up the "White League," purposing to wrest the Stategovernment from the "Radicals" by force of arms.
On the 14th of September, 1874, the White League met and defeated theMetropolitan Police in a hot and bloody engagement of infantry andartillery on the broad steamboat landing in the very middle of NewOrleans. But the Federal authority interfered. The "Radical" governmentresumed control. But the White League survived and grew in power. InNovember elections were held, and the State legislature was found to beRepublican by a majority of only two.
One bright, spring-like day in December, such as a northern March mightgive in its best mood, the school had gathered in the "haunted house" asusual, but the hour of duty had not yet struck. Two teachers sat in anupper class-room talking over the history of the house. The older of thetwo had lately heard of an odd new incident connected with it, and wastelling of it. A distinguished foreign visitor, she said, guest at adinner-party in the city the previous season, turned unexpectedly to hishostess, the talk being of quaint old New Orleans houses, and asked how tofind "the house where that celebrated tyrant had lived who was driven fromthe city by a mob for maltreating her slaves." The rest of the company sataghast, while the hostess silenced him by the severe coldness with whichshe replied that she "knew nothing about it." One of Madame Lalaurie'sdaughters was sitting there, a guest at the table.
When the teacher's story was told her companion made no comment. She hadnoticed a singular sound that was increasing in volume. It wasout-of-doors--seemed far away; but it was drawing nearer. She started up,for she recognized it now as a clamor of human voices, and remembered thatthe iron gates had not yet been locked for the day. They hurried to thewindow, looked down, and saw the narrow street full from wall to wall fora hundred yards with men coming towards them. The front of the crowd hadalready reached the place and was turning towards the iron gates.
The two women went quickly to the hall, and, looking down the spiralstaircase to the marble pavement of the entrance three stories below, sawthe men swarming in through the wide gateway and doorway by dozens. Whilethey still leaned over the balustrade, Marguerite, one of their pupils, ablue-eyed blonde girl of lovely complexion, with red, voluptuous lips, andbeautiful hair held by a carven shell comb, came and bent over thebalustrade with them. Suddenly her comb slipped from its hold, flasheddownward, and striking the marble pavement flew into pieces at the feet ofthe men who were about to ascend. Several of them looked quickly up.
"It was my mother's comb!" said Marguerite, turned ashy pale, and sunkdown in hysterics. The two teachers carried her to a remote room, thebed-chamber of the janitress, and then obeyed an order of the principalcalling her associates to the second floor. A band of men were coming upthe winding stair with measured, military tread towards the landing, wherethe principal, with her assistants gathered around her, stood to confrontthem.
She was young, beautiful, and of calm temper. Her skin, says one who waspresent, was of dazzling clearness, her abundant hair was golden auburn,and in happy hours her eyes were as "soft as velvet." But when the leaderof the band of men reached the stair-landing, threw his coat open, andshowed the badge of the White League, her face had blanched and hardenedto marble, and her eyes darkened to black as they glowed with indignation.
"We have come," said the White Leaguer, "to remove the colored pupils. Youwill call your school to order." To which the principal replied:
"You will permit me first to confer with my corps of associates." He was atrifle disconcerted.
"Oh, certainly."
The teachers gathered in the principal's private room. Some were dumb, onebroke into tears, another pleaded devotion to the principal, and one wasjust advising that the onus of all action be thrown upon the intruders,when the door was pushed open and the White Leaguer said:
"Ladies, we are waiting. Assemble the school; we are going to clean itout."
The pupils, many of them trembling, weeping, and terrified, were withdifficulty brought to order in the assembly room. This place had once beenMadame Lalaurie's dining-hall. A frieze of angels ran round its fourwalls, and, oddly, for some special past occasion, a legend in crimson andgold on the western side bore the words, "The Eye of God is on us."
"Gentlemen, the school is assembled," said the principal.
"Call the roll," was the reply, "and we will challenge each name."
It was done. As each name was called its young bearer rose and confrontedher inquisitors. And the inquisitors began to blunder. Accusations of thefatal taint were met with denials and withdrawn with apologies. Sometimesit was truth, and sometimes pure arrogance and falsehood, that triumphedover these champions of instinctive racial antagonism. One dark girl shotup haughtily at the call of her name--
"I am of Indian blood, and can prove it!"
"You will not be disturbed."
"Coralie----," the principal next called. A thin girl of mixed blood andfreckled face rose and said:
"My mother is white."
"Step aside!" commanded the White Leaguer.
"But by the law the color follows the mother, and so I am white."
"Step aside!" cried the man, in a fury. (In truth there was no such law.)
"Octavie ----."
A pretty, Oriental looking girl rises, silent, pale, but self-controlled.
"Are you colored?"
"Yes; I am colored." She moves aside.
"Marie O ----."
A girl very fair, but with crinkling hair and other signs of negroextraction, stands up and says:
"I am the sister of the Hon.----," naming a high Democratic official, "andI shall not leave this school."
"You may remain; your case will be investigated."
"Eugenie ----."
A modest girl, visibly of mixed race, rises, weeping silently.
"Step aside."
"Marcelline V----."
A bold-eyed girl of much African blood stands up and answers:
"I am not colored! We are Spanish, and _my brother will call on you andprove it."_ She is allowed to stay.
At length the roll-call is done. "Now, madam, you will dismiss thesepupils that we have set aside, at once. We will go down and wait to seethat they come out." The men tramped out of the room, went down-stairs,and rejoined the impatient crowd that was clamoring in the street.
Then followed a wild scene within the old house. Restraint was lost.Terror ruled. The girls who had been ordered into the street sobbed andshrieked and begged:
"Oh, save us! We cannot go out there; the mob will kill us! What shall wedo?"
One girl of grand and noble air, as dark and handsome as an East Indianprincess, and standing first in her class for scholarship, threw herselfat her teacher's feet, crying, "Have pity on me, Miss ----!"
"My poor Leontine," replied the teacher, "what can I do? There are good'colored' schools in the city; would it not have been wiser for yourfather to send you to one of them?"
But the girl rose up and answered:
"Must I go to school with my own servants to escape an unmerited disdain?"And the teacher was silent, while the confusion increased.
"The shame of it will kill me!" cried gentle Eugenie L----. And thereupon,at last, a teacher, commonly one of the sternest in discipline, exclaimed:
"If Eugenie goes, Marcelline shall go, if I h
ave to put her out myself!Spanish, indeed! And Eugenie a pearl by the side of her!"
Just then Eugenie's father came. He had forced his way through the pressin the street, and now stood bidding his child have courage and returnwith him the way he had come.
"Tie your veil close, Eugenie," said the teacher, "and they will not knowyou." And so they went, the father and the daughter. But they went alone.None followed. This roused the crowd to noisy anger.
"Why don't the rest come?" it howled. But the teachers tried in vain toinspire the panic-stricken girls with courage to face the mob, and were indespair, when a school official arrived, and with calm and confidentauthority bade the expelled girls gather in ranks and follow him throughthe crowd. So they went out through the iron gates, the great leaves ofwhich closed after them with a rasping of their key and shooting of theirbolts, while a teacher said:
"Come; the reporters will soon be here. Let us go and see afterMarguerite."
They found her in the room of the janitress, shut in and fast asleep.
"Do you think," one asked of the janitress, "that mere fright and the lossof that comb made this strong girl ill?"
"No. I think she must have guessed those men's errand, and her eye met theeye of some one who knew her."
"But what of that?"
"She is 'colored.'"
"Impossible!"
"I tell you, yes!"
"Why, I thought her as pure German as her name."
"No, the mixture is there; though the only trace of it is on her lips. Hermother--she is dead now--was a beautiful quadroon. A German sea-captainloved her. The law stood between them. He opened a vein in his arm, forcedin some of her blood, went to court, swore he had African blood, got hislicense, and married her. Marguerite is engaged to be married to a whiteman, a gentleman who does not know this. It was like life and death, so tospeak, for her not to let those men turn her out of here."
The teacher turned away, pondering.
The eviction did not, at that time, hold good. The political struggle wenton, fierce and bitter. The "Radical" government was doomed, but not dead.A few weeks after the scene just described the evicted girls werereinstated. A long term of suspense followed. The new year became the oldand went out. Twice this happened. In 1877 there were two governors andtwo governments in Louisiana. In sight from the belvedere of the "hauntedhouse," eight squares away up Royal street, in the State House, the _defacto_ government was shut up under close military siege by the _de jure_government, and the Girls' High School in Madame Lalaurie's old house,continuing faithfully their daily sessions, knew with as little certaintyto which of the two they belonged as though New Orleans had been someItalian city of the fifteenth century. But to guess the White League, wasnot far from right, and in April the Radical government expired.
A Democratic school-board came in. June brought Commencement day, and someof the same girls who had been evicted in 1874 were graduated by the newBoard in 1877. During the summer the schools and school-laws wereoverhauled, and in September or October the high school was removed toanother place, where each pupil suspected of mixed blood was examinedofficially behind closed doors and only those who could prove white or_Indian_ ancestry were allowed to stay. A "colored" high school was openedin Madame Lalaurie's house with a few pupils. It lasted one session, maybetwo, and then perished.
In 1882 the "haunted house" had become a Conservatory of Music. Chamberconcerts were frequent in Madame Lalaurie's old dining-hall. On a certainsweet evening in the spring of that year there sat among those who hadgathered to hear the haunted place filled with a deluge of sweet soundsone who had been a teacher there when the house had been, as someone--Conservative or Radical, who can tell which?--said on the spot, "forthe second time purged of its iniquities." The scene was "much changed,"says the auditor; but the ghosts were all there, walking on the waves ofharmony. And thickest and fastest they trooped in and out when apassionate song thrilled the air with the promise that
"Some day--some day Eyes clearer grown the truth may see."