Baptiste Delacroix

Spouse of Georgia Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from the House of Delacroix.

Baptiste Delacroix was born in 1838 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-four years as a carpenter and joiner of the French Quarter, in a shop on Royal Street and, later, on the edge of the levee. He was the only child of the herbalist Zoe Delacroix of the old Delacroix house, and he married the schoolteacher Georgia Faulkner in 1860, thereby joining the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre to the Red Ledger of the Faulkners. They raised two children, Elias Faulkner Delacroix and Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, neither of whom became a hunter. He died in 1922 of kidney failure, aged eighty-four. He was not a slayer, although he came of a house of slayers and married into another, and he never claimed a craft, a gun or an alias. But for sixty years he built, mended and hid things in wood for the cousins of the Red Ledger, and the family remembers him as the carpenter who could make a wall that had more room in it than it seemed to, and who was not once, in six decades, asked to explain the extra space. The family papers are silent about his father, and the silence has always been treated as his mother's to keep. What they say of his mother is enough. Zoe Delacroix kept a physic garden in a courtyard off Royal Street, and Baptiste was born in the house above it in a hot week in August, in the middle of a minor fever summer, with a jar of vervain on the shelf above the bed and, by the later testimony of a neighbour, a great deal of unwanted advice from the street. He was a big, placid, fair infant who did not cry. His mother, who had a low opinion of babies as a class, pronounced him unusually sensible. She put him down in the courtyard in a basket, among the herbs, and he spent most of his first three years there, watching the lizards. He showed no interest in the garden, which disappointed her slightly and did not surprise her at all. What he liked was the workshop next door. The adjoining house belonged to a master joiner named Achille Thibault, a stout, grey-bearded Creole who had built half the shutters in the Quarter, and the boy, from the age of four, found his way through a gap in the courtyard wall and sat among the shavings. The old man gave him a scrap of cypress and a small plane. By seven he had made a box. By nine he could cut a mortise, and by eleven he was making, for his mother, a set of shelves for her jars, which she said were the first shelves in the house that did not lean. Thibault, who had no son, took him on as an apprentice at twelve, in a formal indenture signed in the parlour, and Zoe watched the signing with her hands folded, with the look of a person who has been proved right by the weather. The apprenticeship was the usual one, seven years, and it was thorough. The Quarter's houses were old, damp, crooked and full of things that needed mending, and a joiner learned to do everything. He learned to hang a shutter so that it closed against a hurricane. He learned to repair a gallery, to frame a stair, to hang a door that had warped, and to make the long, narrow, louvred blinds on which the city's comfort depended. He learned the woods, the cypress for wet places, the pine for carcasses, the mahogany and cedar that came in on the ships, and he learned how to work round the damp, the termite and the flood. He learned, too, the trick, particular to that old city, of making a cupboard that was also a door. The Quarter's houses had a great many of these, made in the days of the Spanish governors, and Thibault, who had repaired most of them, taught him how they worked. He learned what the Delacroix house did in the usual way, from his mother, at sixteen, in the courtyard, at the kitchen table. She told it plainly. The Delacroix were slayers, she said, and some of them had been for four hundred years, and though she had never held a gun, she had spent her life passing information to those who did. She would not tell him what she knew of his father. She said that she had told him everything that mattered. He said that it would do. He asked her what she wanted of him, and she said that she wanted him to be a carpenter, and to be a good one, and to say yes if he was asked to build something odd. He said that he thought it was the only thing he was fit for. He was asked soon enough. The first commission came in 1856, through a cousin of the Faulkners, who wanted a bench that could be turned into a bed and a cupboard that could be turned into a stair. He built them in a week. It was a modest job, done for the price of the wood, and the cousin recommended him to another, and the other to a third. By twenty he had a reputation in the Ledger's Louisiana chapter for a particular kind of order. A cupboard with a false back was a matter of routine. He could build a hiding place in a cellar, a sliding floor in a parlour, a pew with a locker under the seat, a coffin with a second bottom, a gallery rail that held a hunter's gear in its hollow balusters and a long box in the wall behind the stove. He never wrote down where he had built any of them. He said that he knew, and the wood knew, and that was the extent of the company. He met Georgia Faulkner in the spring of 1856, in his mother's courtyard, among the herbs. She was sixteen, a tall, quiet, grave young woman from a river family in Kentucky, who had been born in the house, it turned out, in the same back bedroom above the garden in which he had been born two years before, when her parents' flatboat was laid up in the city for the winter. She had come back to study the healing plants with Zoe, and he was mending a trellis. He nearly put his chisel through his hand. She looked up from a bed of boneset, and said that it was a pleasant trellis, and that she had been looking for something to do for a week and would be glad to hold the other end. They were married on the third of May in 1860, after a patient courtship that their mothers had regarded, from opposite ends of the river, with great interest. Zoe, who gave them the house and the garden, moved to a small place on a nearby street. Their children were born in the first years of the marriage. Elias Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1863 and lived until 1914. Nettie Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1864 and lived until 1925. Neither was called to the work, and both knew what the family did from childhood. He taught them both the trade, since he did not see why a daughter should not hold a plane, and Nettie, who turned out to have a fine hand for an inlay, made at fifteen a small, dovetailed, rosewood case with a secret spring that was kept in the family for a generation and in which, for some reason, nobody ever put anything. The war was a difficult time for a joiner. The Union fleet took the city in April 1862, the building trade collapsed, the cotton exchange stood empty, and the Quarter filled with hungry people, soldiers and rumour. He took what work he could. He made coffins, in the fever months, at a price that he would not name, and he repaired the floors of a dozen requisitioned houses, and when his father-in-law, the boatman Charles Eaton, died that year upriver, he could not go up the blockaded river to the funeral, and Georgia wrote to her mother instead. In the years of Reconstruction the building trade picked up again, and he took a great deal more work than he could do alone. He hired two journeymen and a boy, and the shop grew to a place of a dozen benches, in which free men of colour and white joiners worked side by side, which was a commonplace in the old Creole trade and a matter of some irritation to the newcomers. The yellow fever epidemic of 1878, which was the last of the great ones, found him at forty with a family of his own to keep. He built cots, bier-boards and, in the worst fortnight, forty coffins in an afternoon, and did it, as he did everything, without haste. Georgia, who had been teaching school in the Quarter since the year of her marriage, closed it for the summer and worked beside Zoe's old friend Clara Alden in a fever ward. Both of them survived. Their son Elias, who was fifteen, was sent upriver to his grandmother's in Louisville, and came back in October taller by three inches and with a lasting interest in cooperage. His wife died in 1908, of a stroke. He was seventy. He went on working, in a reduced way, for another ten years, at the old bench, in the old shop, making things for his grandchildren, among them a rocking horse that was said to have a cavity in its body for a pistol, though no member of the family admitted it. He gave up tools at eighty. He lived on in the house on Royal Street until the autumn of 1922, reading, looking at the courtyard and saying very little. He died of kidney failure, at eighty-four, in the bed in which he had been born. The garden, which he had kept for his mother and his wife, was still in flower. Baptiste Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the joiner of Royal Street, the carpenter who built the hollow places in the walls. In the Slayerverse he stands for the makers of the Red Ledger's hidden spaces, the tradesmen who married the houses of the two families together with a dovetail and never told a soul where the extra room was.