Carrie Alden Faulkner was born in 1830 in the Treme quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty years as a laundress, the keeper of a wash-house behind the Rampart Street house that she shared with her husband for fifty-six years. She was the elder child of the storekeeper and vampire slayer Caleb Thayer Faulkner, called The Narrow Yoke, and of the herbalist Clara Alden, and the sister of Caleb Alden Faulkner, born in 1834. She married the printer Albert Whitfield in 1848, raised two daughters, Fanny Whitfield Faulkner and Georgia Faulkner Whitfield, and died in 1910 of a fall, aged eighty. She was not a hunter and never wished to be one. But for the better part of sixty years the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter sent a good deal of its most delicate business to the French Quarter and the wharves in the bottoms of her laundry baskets, and the family holds that not one parcel was ever wet, lost or opened.
She was born, as her mother had been confined, in the small house behind her father's hardware store, on the edge of the Treme, in the same season as her cousin Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, who came into the world a few streets away in the same year and was for the rest of her life the nearest thing Carrie had to a twin. The Treme in 1830 was a quarter of small Creole cottages, market gardens, free people of colour, sugar carts and ditches full of frogs, and the house smelled, as it always did, of drying leaves, boiled roots and hot iron. Her father sold lamps and rope. Her mother dosed the neighbourhood. She grew up in the space between the two, a tall, calm, brown-haired child with her mother's grey eyes, who was said to have learned to fold a sheet before she learned to read and to have held strong views on both.
Her girlhood was a matter of water. The laundry that she took over from a widow in her early teens stood in a yard behind the store, with a cistern, a row of tubs, a copper for boiling and lines strung from the fig tree to the privy wall, and it served the boarding houses of the Vieux Carre, the clerks of the cotton exchange and the stewards of the steamboats that tied up at the levee. Laundry in a river city in the 1840s was hard, hot and never finished. Shirts came in grey with coal smoke and went out white. Collars were starched by the dozen, napkins mangled by the hundred, and every bundle had to be marked, counted and taken back to the right door, at the right hour, by the right girl. She did it with an exactness that her father, who had not wished his daughter to work at a trade, admitted was better than his own at the counter.
She met Albert Whitfield in the winter of 1846, over a price list with an error in its third line, and married him in the spring of 1848, in the church of the Treme, at eighteen. She did not leave the laundry. She moved it to the Rampart Street house, to which Albert brought his press, and ran the two businesses back to back, the ink in the front rooms and the soap in the yard, with a cistern between them. Their daughters came in the next six years. Fanny Whitfield Faulkner was born in 1851 and was a dark, quick, cheerful girl who took to the tubs, and Georgia Faulkner Whitfield was born in 1854, a tall, silent, fair child who took to her father's case of type and became one of the first women compositors in the city. Neither hunted, and Carrie, who said so whenever she was asked, added that in a family with so many guns she had thought one sensible household might do without.
What a laundress knows is not to be underrated. A washerwoman handles what a man wears closest to his skin and sees, in a week, which collars are torn, which cuffs are stained with what, and which customers have begun, since the summer, to send out one shirt where they used to send three. Carrie saw all of it. She noticed the bloodless stain on a cuff, the two small punctures at the neckband of a nightgown, the gentleman who stopped wearing white and the family whose washing was done after dark. She noted them on a slate in the wash-house and told her father, and afterwards her husband's cousins, and it is recorded in the Ledger's Louisiana pages that some eleven hunts between 1852 and 1890 began with something found in a laundry basket on Rampart Street. She also carried. A bundle of clean linen with a folded note in the hem could cross the whole city in the hands of a girl in an apron and not one watchman in ten would look twice at it. A silver spoon wrapped in a towel, a map in the lining of a pillowcase, a list of names under a stack of napkins, all of them went out on her rounds.
The fever summers cost her dearly. In 1853 the yellow fever came early and stayed until the first frost, and the quarter where she worked lost one household in five. She and her mother nursed the sick from dawn to midnight, bathing the fevered in vinegar water and boiling the linen of the dying in the copper because there was no other way to make it safe. She boiled it until her hands cracked. She lost neighbours and customers, and in the winter that followed she lost, for a time, her voice. Her mother said that it was the only occasion on which she had ever known Carrie to be quiet, and that it had done her good. The fever came again in 1867 and 1878, and each time the wash-house became an infirmary, with the tubs put away and the cots carried in.
She lived through the annexation of Texas, which she remembered as a matter of wagons and recruits, the occupation of the city in 1862, which she remembered as a matter of soap, since the Union officers washed a great deal and paid in good coin, and Reconstruction, which she remembered chiefly as the years her husband's presses were so busy that she sent her own daughters to help. After her father died in 1871 and her mother in 1893, she took charge of the garden behind the store, which she had always tended, and kept the labels on the stoneware jars in her mother's own hand. Fanny's death in 1900 was the great grief of her middle age, and Albert's death four years later the great emptiness of her old one, though she continued to rise at five, light the copper and count the linen as though there were nothing else to be done.
She died in 1910, of a fall on the back steps of the gallery, on a wet morning in February, in the act of carrying a basket to the yard. She was eighty. She was found by her daughter Georgia, with the basket upright beside her, every shirt still folded. The family noted, without comment, that the steps had been scrubbed the evening before, and that nobody had scrubbed them but Carrie.
Carrie Alden Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the laundress of Rampart Street, the woman who noticed what others wore and carried what others could not. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the ordinary trades of the Red Ledger, the women of the tub, the line and the clean folded bundle, who knew a great deal about the night from what it left on a collar, and who passed the news along in a basket, without spilling a drop.
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