Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  Mayor Laizer turns next to Constant’s brother, Yves. He is twenty-nine, educated, and unmarried. Laizer gives Yves the office of city clerk, making him a political fixer and functionary. Yves wants a life like that of family friend François Laizer. He wants a sinecure where fees can be pocketed, contracts written up for a charge, and money demanded. Tax money in Jefferson City comes from assessments on businesses, which Yves of God now collects. A dance hall pays $50 a year to operate, while a boardinghouse pays $10. A steamboat pays $25, a pharmacy $20, and a café that sells liquor $100. The money passes through the hands of Yves of God, and he accounts for it in ledgers that he alone maintains. It is a good formula for building wealth.

  * * *

  Constant Lecorgne, journeyman ship carpenter, is betrothed to Gabrielle Duchemin. If this were a piece of romance fiction, they would have been courting for years. The Laizer and Lecorgne households are long entwined. Marriage is promised, if money can be raised. And money is about to fall from the sky.

  Gabrielle Duchemin is nineteen, her grandmother Eleanor Labarriere, who brought Gabrielle from Cuba, sixty-eight. Grandmother Labarriere has lost her husband, and her own health is weak. In March 1855, Eleanor falls ill. She seems to know she is dying, because she dictates her will. François Laizer comes to the bedside, Eleanor delivers her testament, and she dies. The funeral comes, Gabrielle grieves.

  The will is read, and Gabrielle discovers she is to become an heiress. Not to an estate, but to a person. Her name is Lavinia, or “Lavinia, alias Fanny, a negro girl aged about fifteen years.”

  Lavinia, or Fanny, is the girl Gabrielle’s grandmother bought to serve the house when they first arrived in New Orleans. There is something else in the will. Eleanor Labarriere, on her deathbed, names Constant Lecorgne as Gabrielle’s “tutor ad hoc.” So they have been courting, if that is what power of attorney means.

  In Louisiana civil law, a tutor ad hoc supervises a minor, a role similar in English common law to guardian ad litem. Gabrielle is a minor, younger than twenty-one, and cannot possess or dispose of property—namely, Lavinia, alias Fanny—thus her fiancé is given the power.

  Constant and Gabrielle want to marry. Custom calls for white parents with money to endow their daughters, to give them a dowry. In addition to Gabrielle, their adoptive daughter, François and Adelaide Laizer have four children of their own, three of them girls. The idea of endowing a daughter who is not their natural child may be disagreeable. Or maybe Constant, the fiancé, is disagreeable. A gardener and charpentier de navire is not a perfect son-in-law for a city mayor. Gabrielle and Constant want to marry, but the bride’s dowry comes from elsewhere, namely, the black body of Fanny.

  Laizer brings in an appraiser, who says Fanny is worth $600, a sum ample enough for a wedding, with enough left over to buy a little house. It is summer 1855. Eleanor Labarriere is in the grave. Mayor François Laizer arranges a sheriff’s sale. Fanny is to be sold on the steps of the courthouse. The proceeds of the sale, minus expenses, go to Gabrielle’s tutor ad hoc, Constant Lecorgne.

  Here is how it looks to Constant. Lavinia, aka Fanny, age fifteen, is the first piece of property he has ever possessed. He looks at the girl and he sees gold.

  It is a wretched scene, really. On the morning of October 9, 1855, Lavinia stands on the steps of the Bouligny courthouse, the usual place for estate sales. I have to imagine that Fanny is frightened, sick with despair. Will she be sold, taken away from all she knows? Lavinia turns out to face a crowd of men. They hold cigars. They tilt back their heads, look at her from beneath their spectacles. Sold, for $500. She is yanked off the block and pushed into the hands of a man she has never met. Gabrielle may be able to say goodbye to Fanny, or she may not. I find nothing more about Fanny’s life. She is first made motherless and fatherless, then disappears to an unknown fate.

  Constant is disappointed. It should have been more. He wanted $600.

  The lovely couple move their lives forward. Cash in hand, they can marry.

  Gabrielle wants to marry in Cuba. She wants to be with her first family, in old Santiago. Her grandmother Eleanor is dead. Her mother, Joséphine Perdreau, is either dead or wandering. Alphonse Duchemin, her father, is incommunicado in Guadeloupe. Yet Gabrielle wants to be with the few left in Cuba, from her girlhood.

  In early March 1856, Constant and Gabrielle take bags to the New Orleans dock and board a steamship. They have money for Cuba, money for clothes, money for a dinner and gifts. The city of Havana lies on the northwest coast of Cuba and is tied to New Orleans by ship traffic; Santiago lies on the remote southeast coast, twice the distance. After two weeks at sea, they disembark. It has been eight years since Gabrielle left Santiago. She may still have relatives there. I wonder whether the enslaved Julia, who looked after Gabrielle when she was a girl, is on hand. I wonder if she greets the bride-to-be. It is not clear whether Julia would want to greet her.

  The church of Santo Tomás el Apóstol, giant and white, dominates the middle of town. On April 3, 1856, Gabrielle ascends the aisle. She is nineteen, a month shy of twenty. Constant is twenty-three, his birthday in three weeks. A priest named Manuel José Muira officiates. He writes the name of the groom in his register: “Don Le Corne Constantino Policarpo.”

  The sanctuary, as I imagine it, echoes in emptiness. Few remember Gabrielle. Of those who do, many have left Cuba for new lives. There is no sign of her mother. Three witnesses enter their names in the book of marriages. One of them does it as a favor to the priest, a man described as a clerigo tonsurado, a tonsured monk. The bride turns from the altar, new husband in grip.

  I think I can see myself in these two, the ship carpenter and the love child from Guadeloupe. They are a couple like any, married in the spring. And to me, they are my people. They are my grandmother’s grandparents. I pause for a moment to size them up. The Lecorgnes have more social capital than Gabrielle. Constant is marrying down, probably, as his mother sees it. The groom is our Klansman in the making. I take a moment with that fact. Gabrielle has more sense than her new husband. For her part, she also marries down.

  Man and wife board the schooner, the Elizabeth Segar, bound for New Orleans. The trip must pass slowly, in lust and grasping, to the rhythm of a rocking hull. Gabrielle’s mother was free about sex minus marriage: Gabrielle herself is evidence. I imagine Eleanor Labarriere kept a grip on her granddaughter’s appetites, and Gabrielle goes to the altar untouched. Not so Constant. His hometown of New Orleans is rich and varied in prostitution. Young white men avail themselves of women for hire, and Constant would be no exception.

  The Elizabeth Segar draws up to the dock on April 17. The last time Gabrielle set foot on this levee, she was a “lady.” Now the passenger list has her as “seamstress.” Constant is not a “gentleman,” but “carpenter.” The young husband is no longer the soft son of one of the rich families in a leafy and growing faubourg. He is a craftsman who cuts a hatch between decks and frames a bulkhead with mortise and tenon joints. Things are changed for Gabrielle. She is no more the coddled girl followed around by Fanny, her slave. She is a wage earner. A seamstress can make beautiful things, dresses of silk and shirred bombazine. More often she takes in piecework for slender pay, adding flounces to skirts, cutting necklines, folding cuffs on trousers.

  These two working people are not greeted by a black nurse. They sold “our nigger,” as Constant would call Fanny. They walk the gangplank into Bouligny.

  PART III

  TRIBES

  7

  I am sure Gabrielle and Constant Lecorgne never see him, never hear him talk. Still, they know the name of Frederick Douglass. Some people spit when they say it.

  The Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, asks the abolitionist Frederick Douglass to give a speech to mark Independence Day. Douglass is a newspaper publisher, ex-slave, and black. He agrees to talk about the meaning of July 4. Douglass will be seen and heard by just a few, but in years to come the speech in Rochester is remembered as the most ac
id description of America as a young slave empire.

  From the auditorium stage in a place called Corinthian Hall, in the 1850s, Douglass turns to his audience and calls it “you.”

  This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.… What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

  Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

  Frederick Douglass talks about New Orleans, the fulcrum of the slave trade. He wants to remind “you” the city is the domestic market that drags nearly a million of les nègres across the country, from Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas “down the river” to auction houses along the Mississippi River.

  Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now.… This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth.…

  Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! That gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.…

  Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie.

  After matrimony, a cozy home. The sale of Fanny pays for a wedding, but not enough is left for a house. Gabrielle and Constant sort their options and then move in with Gabrielle’s adoptive parents, François and Adelaide Laizer.

  The house on Cadiz Street is a crowded compound. The middle-aged Laizers occupy one corner of upstairs, while Gabrielle’s three teen stepsiblings take another. Enslaved housekeepers and a cook have a cabin behind the main house. There is only so much with in-laws a couple can sustain. But soon after they settle comes good news. Gabrielle has stopped her monthlies. She is enceinte, pregnant. If God wills, the child comes next summer. By then, they want to have a house.

  François Laizer is mayor by day and land hustler on the side. Despite their money—tax records say the Laizers are the richest people in Bouligny—Gabrielle’s parents do not open their pocketbook. After the Laizers, the next richest is Constant’s mother, Marguerite, Veuve Lecorgne. Marguerite has her block of lots on Lyons Street, Lecorgne row, and a barracks of slaves for hire.

  In the barracks, there is another word on people’s lips, “cracker.” It is a word that comes with the Americans. Cracker woman will sell a black man in a minute, somebody might say. Everybody knows a slave is walking money.

  Marguerite declines to offer land or money to the newlyweds. Constant, it appears, is not the beloved son. He may have a pretty wife, picked like fruit. But something is wrong. His reputation is weak. Nothing is forthcoming.

  There is money left from the Fanny dowry to buy a single lot. Gabrielle, pregnant and swelling, eases herself down the stairs at the Laizer house, and the couple makes plans to build. In early 1857, Constant buys a scrap of land, $150 for something on Soniat Street, from a woman named Louise Avart, who is retailing bits of her inheritance. It is two blocks from Lecorgne row. The idea is that Constant can put up a little house before the baby comes.

  Time is short, Marguerite steps forward. In her stable of human livestock is thirty-three-year-old Ovid. Marguerite looks forward to the appearance of a grandchild, courtesy of Gabrielle. Constant’s mother decides to loan her son the sweat of vigorous and capable Ovid.

  Two builders can put up a two-room house in half a year. Constant and Ovid start to work. Ovid is older than his new master, probably more experienced. Constant is still learning the cuts. He knows barges and riverboats, not houses. He knows steamboat men, not joiners and roofers and glaziers. Ovid and Constant take lumber down to the little lot on Soniat. They sweat, raise the studs and beams, frame the roof.

  Marguerite has two other sons, Yves of God and Joseph, thirty-one and twenty. The brothers inspect the activity on Soniat Street, and it inspires them. Two months after Constant and Ovid start work, they buy a lot of their own. Their tract lies on Jersey Street, around the corner from Marguerite. Their plan is to put up a house and share it. To buy the land and build, the brothers borrow money from their mother. Marguerite loans Yves of God and Joseph the cash that Constant does not see.

  The year 1857 is passing, and Gabrielle is dangerously pregnant. At the end of the summer, the place on Soniat Street is unfinished. The baby comes September 2. The parents name him Joseph Gabriel Numa Lecorgne. Joseph is the name of Constant’s younger brother, Numa the name of sister Aurore’s husband—the brother-in-law killed by Yellow Jack—and baby Gabriel reflects the glory of his mother, Gabrielle. But the half-finished house molders in the rain.

  * * *

  When the scientist Samuel Morton brought out Crania Americana, twenty years ago in Philadelphia, he proved the facts of race variety. Whites and blacks are different species. Now, here at home in New Orleans, as elsewhere, science develops its knowledge.


  James De Bow, editor and publisher, keeps up the discussion in the quality journal that carries his name, De Bow’s Review. For ten years the quarterly has circulated to businessmen and hustlers, slaveholders and would-be bosses. It is the tonic of the intelligentsia in the South. De Bow’s Review pursues the science of race, beginning in 1847, with a thought piece called “The Negro.” It continues in 1849 with “Negro Slavery at the South,” an elaboration of slavery’s benefits. De Bow runs articles that refine the understanding of whiteness and blackness, both for the good people of New Orleans and for its region.

  James De Bow has a comrade in the race theory business. His name is Josiah Nott. Dr. Josiah Nott is a professor of anatomy at the University of Louisiana, the state’s sole institution of higher education. (In the future, the school changes its name, to become Tulane University.) A man with blue eyes and straight hair, Josiah C. Nott is a convert to the idea of polygenesis, the fact of the separate origin of the races. During the 1850s, Dr. Nott is an opinion maker on race and identity—what makes a white person white, a black person black. Nott’s book, Indigenous Races of the Earth, boils down to a few truths about the nature of human identity. Nott is not stupid, however, and he knows that only a few read a fat monograph. So the professor gives public lectures, and the anatomist spreads his ideas in the pages of De Bow’s Review.

  Categories of human, “Races of the Earth,” illustrated by Josiah Nott in 1857