Benjamin Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The telegraph key in the back office of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange clicked twelve thousand words a day in the 1880s, and a good part of them passed through the hands of Benjamin Faulkner. He was born in 1855 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of the farmer Edwin Rutledge and the seamstress Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, and he worked for more than forty years as a telegraph operator, sending and receiving the prices, orders and warnings of a cotton port. In 1877 he married the milliner Mary Cole, and they had two children, Georgia Cole Faulkner and Benjamin Cole Faulkner. He died in 1923 of a fall, aged sixty-eight. He was not a vampire hunter and never wanted to be one. He belonged to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger through his mother, and the family remembers him as the operator who carried its news at the speed of a wire and never once repeated a word of it. He took his surname from his mother, as the Faulkners often did, and his temperament from his father. He was a big, slow, fair boy, born in the house of his uncle Caleb's people in the Treme, where the women of the family went for their confinements, and taken home within the week to the cane and vegetable farm on the ridge. He was sent to the parish school and to the Sunday school of the Methodists, who were the only church his father would sit in, and he learned to read, cipher and keep quiet. He was not good with animals. Horses disliked him, and a hoe seemed to do more damage in his hands than the weeds. His father, who was patient, looked at the big hands and the careful eyes and said that the boy would make something, though he did not yet know what. It was the wire that found him out. In 1869, when he was fourteen, he was sent into the city with a wagon-load of cabbages and was kept waiting at the back of a commission house on Gravier Street, where a telegraph instrument stood on a counter. It was a small brass sounder on a mahogany base, and as he watched it, it began to click. He said afterward that it was not like a machine at all. It was like a bird that had something to say in a language he almost knew. He asked the clerk what it was saying. The clerk, who was busy, told him that it was a price of cotton in Liverpool, and Benjamin said, before he had thought, that it had said something else, and that the second word had been longer. The clerk, who was sharp, stopped and listened. The boy was right. He was sent as an apprentice the following year to an operator in the Western Union office on Camp Street. The work was harder than it looked. An operator of the period sat at a key with a sounder at his elbow and took messages by ear, writing them out in a fair clerkly hand as the dots and dashes arrived, at twenty words a minute for a beginner and forty for a master, and he had to be accurate, because a wrong word in a cotton message could ruin a broker. He learned to recognise the touch of the operators down the line, each of whom had a fist as individual as a signature, so that he knew, before the signature came, that the man in Vicksburg was tired and the one in Mobile had drunk his dinner. By twenty he was a first-class operator. By twenty-five he was one of the best in the city. It was in those years that he met his wife. Mary Cole, a milliner's apprentice from Algiers, across the river, who had been born in the same Algiers street as his sister Emma, in the same week, and had stayed her friend ever since, came to the house on the ridge one Sunday in 1875 to visit Emma, and stayed to dinner. Benjamin, who was twenty and six feet tall, said a dozen words in three hours, and she said, later, that they had been the best twelve words she had ever heard. They were married in 1877, in the church of the Treme, in a hat of her own making. They took two rooms in the old Quarter, on Dauphine Street, and she set up a bench in the front room by the window. She made hats. He sent telegrams. It was a very good arrangement, and they held to it for thirty-two years. The Faulkner secret, which he learned at the wedding from an uncle, came to him in a form that he was able to use. The New Orleans chapter of the Red Ledger wrote to its cousins by post and river, and since the 1850s had also used the wire, for urgent warnings, in a private set of phrases that looked, on the form, like commercial messages. "Cotton firm Liverpool" meant one thing, and "Sugar dull, Havana" another. The code had been devised by a cousin of his grandmother's, and it was Benjamin who, in his twenties, took it over. He was discreet by nature. In a long career he sent and received, in the course of ordinary traffic, many hundreds of messages that were not about cotton, and he kept them in his head, not in his files. He never asked who they were for. The office, which was run by a dry Scotsman, assumed that he had an exceptionally good memory. It was not entirely wrong. The yellow fever epidemic of 1878, the year after his marriage, was the worst time of his life. His father died that August, in the heat, of a stroke in the cane rows, and the fever was already in the city, and Benjamin, who was twenty-three, found himself sending the telegrams that told half of Louisiana what was happening. He worked twenty hours a day for three weeks. The wire carried the names of the dead to their families, and he copied them, one by one, in his best hand. He kept a separate sheet of the names that he had sent, and when the epidemic was over, he took it to the Treme church and left it on the altar. A priest, who did not know him, said a mass for the names on it. His children were born in the first decade of the marriage. Georgia Cole Faulkner came in 1879 and lived until 1933, a dark, practical, bright-eyed girl like her mother, who learned hat-making at the front-room bench. Benjamin Cole Faulkner was born in 1882 and lived until 1956, a big, placid boy after his grandfather, who followed his father onto the wire. Neither was a hunter, and both grew up in a house in which a telegraph sounder ticked on the shelf, as a kind of clock. Their father brought it home in the evenings, a spare he was allowed to keep, and sat at the table tapping out the news of the day for the children. They learned Morse before they learned to write. The city changed around him. After Reconstruction the wharves boomed, the railroads came into the depot and the cotton exchange built a new hall, and in the 1890s and 1900s the wire carried the news of Storyville, the district of pleasure that the city fathers laid out in 1897, and of the new music that came out of its halls and its funeral parades. He did not care for jazz, which he thought a great deal too busy, but he was said to have a soft spot for the trumpet. His wife's shop prospered. Her hats went to the wives of the brokers and to the ladies of the district, who were fine customers, and it was a joke in the house that the milliner and the operator between them knew everything about the city and told nobody. Mary died in 1909, of kidney failure, at fifty-two, and he was a widower for fourteen years. He retired in 1915, and moved in with his daughter, and spent his evenings at the window, listening, on a borrowed sounder, to a wire that nobody had asked him to read. He died in the winter of 1923, at sixty-eight, in a fall on the stair of his daughter's house. He had gone down to fetch the paper. The fall was a short one, and he was found at the bottom by the girl who brought the milk, with his hat on, and his hand still tapping, it was said, on the tread. Benjamin Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the operator who carried the Ledger's news on the wire and never added or dropped a word. In the Slayerverse he stands for the clerks and signalmen of the Red Ledger, the men whose trade was the quiet transmission of other people's secrets, and whose discretion was as good as a lock.