Albert Whitfield

Spouse of Carrie Alden Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Albert Whitfield was born in 1827 in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and lived seventy-seven years as a printer in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He married the laundress Carrie Alden Faulkner in 1848, raised two daughters with her, Fanny Whitfield Faulkner and Georgia Faulkner Whitfield, and died in 1904 after a long illness, aged seventy-seven. He was not a hunter, was not born to the Faulkner line, and never pretended to be anything but a man who set type. But for fifty years he set and printed, in a small back room on Chartres Street, the notices, warnings and route lists that the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter sent out to its cousins, and the family remembers him as the printer who worked in the same small, plain type as his wife's uncle and cousin, and who made certain that the chapter was never once short of paper. Thibodaux in 1827 was a young town on Bayou Lafourche, in the sugar parishes, a place of a few hundred people, a courthouse, a church and a great many cane fields, at the centre of a country in which French was the language of the kitchen and of the church and English was the language of the law. The Whitfields were a mixed Anglo-French family, the father a Georgia-born overseer who had married a local planter's daughter, and Albert, the third of six, grew up between two languages and two mentalities and was at ease in both. He was a slight, fair, rather fastidious boy, who could not be got to care about cane. He cared about words. He learned his letters at the parish school, and by nine he had read every book in the parish priest's house, including a Latin grammar, and by twelve he had begun, on a borrowed press, to print cards for the church fair. The priest, a Breton, who had seen how the boy handled the type, wrote to a newspaper in New Orleans, and at fourteen Albert was sent down the bayou by the packet boat to become an apprentice. The shop was in the Vieux Carre, a long, narrow, ink-black room on Chartres Street, in which a small French-language weekly was set and printed by a master, a journeyman and three boys. It was a hard apprenticeship. He swept the floors. He damped the paper. He carried the forms, washed the rollers and lived on bread and café au lait in a room under the stairs. He learned, at the case, to read a line of type upside down and backward, and by sixteen he could set a column in two languages without once looking at the copy. The master, who had trained a good many printers, said that he had never seen a boy with so little vanity and so much accuracy. He met his wife at the store of her father. It was in the winter of 1846. The shop on Chartres Street had been asked to print a price list for the hardware store of Caleb Thayer Faulkner in the Treme, and the master sent the apprentice to take the order. Caleb was out. In the front of the shop, at the counter, sorting a bundle of clean shirts, was a tall, calm, brown-haired girl of sixteen, with her mother's grey eyes, who looked at him, and at the proof that he had brought, and said that there was an error in the third line. He looked. There was. It was a matter of a transposed figure, and he would have been corrected by the master in any case, but he took it as a sign. This was Carrie Alden Faulkner, born in 1830 in the Treme, the daughter of Caleb and of Clara Alden the herbalist, who had taken over a small laundry behind the store, and who, as it turned out, was the only customer who had ever read his proofs. He called again. He called, in the course of the next year, on a great many pretexts, a proof, an order, a correction, a receipt, and each time he was given a cup of Clara Alden's tisane and a long stare by her father. In 1847 he finished his apprenticeship, took a room of his own and proposed to her on the gallery of the house behind the store, at night, in a voice that she said afterward was the quietest she had ever heard. She said yes before he had finished. They were married in the spring of 1848, in the church of the Treme, with both sets of relatives in the pews, and he moved into the house on Rampart with his new wife and a press. Caleb, who had had the boy watched, took him aside after the wedding. He was a practical man, and said what he had to in a few words. The Faulkners, he said, were a family of hunters, who had kept a book of their tallies for four hundred years, and of which he and his brothers were the latest in the line. The chapter in New Orleans needed a printer. The notices that it sent to its cousins, which listed the routes, the safe houses and the names of the untrustworthy, had been set for ten years by Caleb's nephew Milton, a printer's son in Kentucky, but Milton, who had just come down the river, was now minding the store. Would the young man care for the work? Albert said that he would be honoured. It was not quite the word he wanted, but he said that it would do. He set the notices for fifty-six years. He set them in the old, small face that Milton's father had used, on grey paper, in plain wrappers, with a line at the foot that said nothing in particular. They went by river and by road to the cousins of the Red Ledger from the Gulf to the Ohio, and Albert, who read every proof three times, did not make an error in half a century. He was not told, in most cases, who the notices were about. He was told only what they said. A man who was named in a notice, he observed, was usually a man who would be seen again, and a printer who remembered the names was a printer who was safe. Their daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Fanny Whitfield Faulkner was born in 1851 and lived until 1900, and was a dark, quick, cheerful girl, who took after her grandmother and became a laundress at her mother's shop and then one of the city's first typists. Georgia Faulkner Whitfield was born in 1854 and lived until 1921, and was a tall, silent, fair girl, who took after her father and became a laundress at her mother's shop and then one of the city's first typists. Neither was a hunter, and both knew from childhood what their parents did, and kept it. The war years were lean. The Confederate government requisitioned his presses for bonds and broadsides, and the Union authorities, when they came, confiscated three of them for the use of the army. He kept one, in a cellar, under a pile of coal. He printed on it, at night, the usual notices, and a small number of passes, which he gave to anyone who asked, and in this way he kept the Ledger's network running through four years in which all the other printers of the city were shut. He was questioned by the provost marshal once. He said that he had no press. The provost marshal, who had seen the ink on his hands, said that he must have been joking, and let him go. He lived through the great fever summers, and the floods, and the years of Reconstruction, and saw the French Quarter shrink and slow and go quiet. His shop, which had once been a room, became three, with a steam press, and then, in the 1880s, two presses and eight men, and he ran it with the same calm exactness with which he had run the work of a single font of type. His wife, who had a laundry of her own and kept her mother's garden, came and went, and the two of them sat, in the evenings, on the back gallery with a pot of coffee and a proof, and read one another the news. He became ill in 1900, the year his elder daughter died. It was a long illness, and he bore it with his usual quietness, working at the case until he could no longer stand and then at a small desk in the back room, reading proof. He died in the winter of 1904, at seventy-seven, in the house on Rampart Street, with his wife and his surviving daughter in the room. The last proof on his desk was a notice, and it was correct. Albert Whitfield is remembered in the Faulkner family as the printer of the New Orleans chapter, the son-in-law who never missed a comma. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people of the press who stood behind the Red Ledger, who took a name and set it, and who by the exactness of their work made it possible for strangers to trust a sheet of grey paper.