Alice Goodwin was born in 1892 in Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-three years as a seamstress, first in a back room near the Algiers ferry and later in a front room on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter. In 1914 she married the railway clerk Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix, and they raised two children, Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix and Howard Faulkner Delacroix, of whom the daughter became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger and the son did not. Alice died in 1945 of a long illness, aged fifty-three. She belonged to the Faulkner bloodline through a grandmother whom the family papers decline to name, she was attached to no great house, and she never carried a pistol, a craft or an alias. What she carried was a tape measure, and with it she made the coats, aprons and quiet repairs that kept a household of hunters presentable and a good deal of the Ledger's cloth in circulation.
Algiers in 1892 was a railway and shipyard town of sheds, drydocks and narrow frame houses, with a ferry that ran every quarter of an hour and a fine local contempt for the people on the other bank. The Goodwins were of the working sort, and the family papers, which are brisk about the people who did not hunt, give her father as a man who worked in the Southern Pacific shops and her mother as a woman who took in alterations. Alice was the middle girl of three, a small, fair, serious child with very quick fingers, who could thread a needle in the dark by the age of six and who was set, at eight, to hemming for a living. She did not mind. She said, much later, that she had always preferred a task with an edge to it, since an edge told you when you had finished.
She was apprenticed at fourteen to a dressmaker on Verret Street, a Mrs Ledoux who made mourning clothes for the whole of the west bank and who had, in the front window, a dressmaker's dummy that she called the Bishop. Mourning was good business in a river town. Alice learned to cut black crepe without a pattern, to take in a widow's dress overnight and to put a pocket into a coat so that it could not be seen. That last accomplishment was the beginning of her usefulness to the family. A cousin of the Ledger who had been told to look for a seamstress with a steady hand and a short memory found the girl in Mrs Ledoux's back room in the spring of 1910, and asked her whether she could put a long flat pocket under the lining of a man's coat, large enough for a stake and a folding knife. Alice asked which side he was left-handed on. The cousin said that this was the right question.
She was not told much, and she did not ask. She was told that there were men and women who went out at night, that they had enemies who did not appear in the newspapers, and that the Ledger would be obliged if their coats did not rattle. She made the coats. For four years she made them in the evenings, after the mourning work, for a list of customers that she knew only by their measurements, and it was a point of pride with her that she could have told you the shoulders of half the hunters on the Gulf coast and not one of their names.
She met her husband on the ferry, as people from Algiers do. It was a wet evening in the autumn of 1912, and she had a bolt of black bombazine under one arm and a parcel of buttons under the other, and the young man beside her at the rail, in a clerk's collar and a very neat grey suit, offered to hold the buttons. This was Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix, who had been born on Burgundy Street in 1891, the son of the conductor Sylvain Delacroix and the typist Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, and who was then a junior clerk in the freight office of the railway at the foot of Canal Street. He had taken his grandfather's name and, as a boy, his grandfather's plane, and had put the plane aside for a pen without regret. He held the buttons for the whole crossing, and when the ferry docked he gave them back, one at a time, and then asked whether he might carry the bombazine. She told him that it weighed nothing. He carried it anyway.
They were married in 1914, in the spring, at the church of the Treme, in a dress that she made in three weeks from the remains of a bridal order she had been forced to turn away. Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, who sat in the front pew with a letter in her handbag, had told the bride privately, a month before, what the Faulkners were. Alice had said that she had suspected as much from the pockets. They took rooms on Burgundy Street, a few doors from the old Delacroix house, and Alice set up her machine in the front window, where it stood for thirty years. She charged by the seam. Her husband, who was a patient, ordinary, humorous man and was never in his life seen to hurry, took the ferry to the freight office in the mornings and brought home, in the evenings, the railway's gossip, which was a good deal more informative than the newspapers about what had come into the city in a sealed car.
Their children came quickly. Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1915, in the year of the great September hurricane, in a house whose shutters Baptiste had nailed over the windows with the midwife already in the room, and Howard Faulkner Delacroix followed in 1917. Lorraine was dark, direct and unafraid of anything, and by her teens she was out at night with the Ledger's hunters and had been entered in the book as a slayer. Alice did not oppose it. She said only that if the girl was going to climb fire escapes, she would climb them in a skirt that allowed it, and made her a divided one that nobody noticed. In 1932 Lorraine married Xavier Delacroix, the hatter's son from the shop in the Quarter, and her mother sewed the dress and, in the hem, a line of the small flat pockets that she had been making for twenty years. Howard, who was a quiet boy with a head for figures and no wish to be anything else, was never called and never wanted to be. He took after his father and went, in time, into the railway offices.
The years of the Storyville closing, when the brass bands left for Chicago and the dressmakers of the Quarter lost half their trade overnight, taught her to take whatever sewing came. The Great War had brought her uniform buttons and mourning, in about equal measure. The influenza of 1918 brought her mostly shrouds, which she made at a price that her neighbours believed was a mistake, and which was not. She sewed through the Depression, when the ladies of the Garden District stopped ordering and began to ask whether a good gown could be turned, and she turned them. She said that a seamstress who could make a coat twice was a seamstress who would never be out of work, and that the second time was always the better.
She was ill for a long time at the end. It began in 1941, in the winter, as a tiredness that she attributed to the bad light, and by the time the city filled with soldiers she was sewing sitting down. She kept the machine in the window until the last spring. Lorraine came every evening from her own night's work and sat with her, and Baptiste, who had retired from nothing, sat on the other side with the freight office's newspaper. She died in the autumn of 1945, in the front room, with the machine covered, and was buried in the Faulkner tomb in the Treme. In the pocket of the dress she was buried in, the family found afterward, she had put a thimble, a spool of black thread and a small folded paper that said, in her upright hand, Hem to be let down.
Alice Goodwin is remembered in the Faulkner family as the seamstress of Burgundy Street, the woman who put a pocket where a hunter needed one and never once asked what went into it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the tailors and needlewomen of the Red Ledger, who never raised a stake and never let a coat fail, and whose small, exact, unseen work let better-known people do theirs.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
