Effie Alden

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

Effie Alden was born in 1831 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-eight years as a milliner, with a hat shop on Magazine Street and a husband who was seldom at home. She married the circuit preacher Caleb Alden Faulkner, the son of the storekeeper and vampire slayer Caleb Thayer Faulkner, in 1854, and raised two children with him, Louisa Faulkner and Oscar Faulkner. She died in 1899 of a stroke, aged sixty-eight. She was not a hunter and was not born to the Faulkner line, though she married into it without a murmur and took to it with a good deal of quiet humour. The family remembers her as the woman whose hatboxes went where her husband's saddlebags could not, and who taught the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter that a message, to be safe, needs to be wrapped in something that a person would be pleased to receive. The Garden District in 1831 was not yet the Garden District. It was the high, sandy ground upriver from the old city, which the Americans had begun to lay out in lots and to plant with live oaks, and her father, a Massachusetts cotton factor called Josiah Alden, had bought three of them and built a white frame house with a gallery and a magnolia at the gate. He was a cheerful, methodical, unimaginative man who believed in ledgers, hymns and cold baths. Her mother, who was the prettier and the cleverer of the two, had a passion for bonnets. Whether the Garden District Aldens were kin to the Algiers Aldens, the shipwrights, was a question that nobody in either family was ever able to settle. It was said that they shared a great-great-grandfather at Plymouth, and Clara Alden, who became her mother-in-law, remarked dryly that if so the relationship was a good deal too distant to prevent anything. Her gift was for trimming. As a child she sat under the dining table with a box of her mother's ribbons and dressed the legs of the chairs. At eleven she had trimmed her first bonnet, for a cousin's wedding, and at thirteen she was being asked for by name in the shops on Canal Street. She had a fine, light, sure hand with straw, velvet and feather, a horror of anything that was overtrimmed, and an eye that saw at a glance what a face required. A woman with a long nose wanted a brim and not a bow. A woman with a hard mouth wanted flowers. She said that a hat was a short argument, and that the art was to make the face win it. At seventeen she was apprenticed to a milliner on Royal Street, and at twenty-two, with a small loan from her father and a larger one from her mother, she opened her own shop. She met Caleb Alden Faulkner in the year of the great fever, in the summer of 1853, at a sick-bed. She had been helping to nurse a neighbour's daughter, and he, who was then nineteen and kept a counter in his father's Treme store, came with his mother's tisane and a book of hymns. They were both young, both tired, both entirely out of patience with the dying, and they said so to each other at two in the morning over a basin of vinegar water. By the autumn he had asked her to marry him. He was a tall, dark, serious, bespectacled young man, with a beautiful voice, and he had just decided that what he wished to be was a preacher. She said that she would think about it. She thought for a month, and then said yes, on the condition that she need not give up the hats. They were married in the spring of 1854, in the Methodist chapel, and her mother-in-law, who did not flatter, said that the bride had good hands. Caleb rode circuit. He took a horse, a pair of saddlebags and a Bible, and from April to November he was in the river parishes, preaching in cane-field churches, brush arbours and front parlours, and coming home on the last Saturday of the month with a beard and a cough. The shop supported them while he preached. She kept it on Magazine Street, in a front room, with two girls and a window, and she sold hats to planters' wives, to the ladies of the cotton exchange and to a number of women whose names were not spoken in church but whose money was good. She made a great many friends. She had the rare trick of making a woman feel that she had chosen her own hat. Their children were born in the first years of the marriage. Louisa Faulkner was born in 1857, a tall, grave, pretty girl, who became a schoolteacher and lived until 1935, and Oscar Faulkner in 1858, a cheerful, lanky boy, who became a clerk at the cotton exchange and lived until 1931. Neither of them hunted. They were brought up in the rooms behind the shop, among the hat blocks and the feather dusters, and taught to tie a bow, to count change and to be silent when a customer mentioned a name. It was Caleb who first carried for the Ledger, and she who made it work. The Red Ledger's chapter in New Orleans had relations in every river parish, and in the 1850s it had few safe ways to reach them. A preacher, however, could go anywhere. Nobody searched a preacher's saddlebags, nobody asked why he called on certain families, and nobody thought it odd that a minister's wife should send a box to a parish cousin. She sent hatboxes. A box with a feather in it went to a cousin in St. Landry. A box with a veil in it went to a family at Plaquemine. A message, folded small, went into the crown of a bonnet, under the lining, where a customs man would have had to tear the thing apart, and a number of lists of names went up the river inside a hat. She knew what they were. She did not read them. Her husband was away, she said, for half of her life, and she had long since found that she liked it. She liked the quiet evenings, the long Saturdays and the stir of his return. She did not like the war. The capture of the city in 1862 put the Union fleet at the levee, and the shop, which had sold feathered hats to rebel ladies, was obliged to learn to sell plain bonnets to Union wives. She did it without a flicker. She sold a bonnet to a Union colonel's wife, and never mentioned it, and the ledger shows that the price was a fair one. Reconstruction was slower, the fevers returned in 1867 and 1878, and the shop survived because, as she said, a woman will always buy a hat in a bad year. It was a good deal cheaper than a divorce. She had a stroke in the spring of 1899, at her counter, in the act of pinning a rose to a brim. She was sixty-eight. She was carried upstairs, and lived for three days, and a hat that she was making for a bride was finished by her daughter, with the rose in the right place. Caleb, who was home from his circuit, sat beside her and sang, as he had on their wedding morning, the hymn that he liked least. He outlived her by two years and died in 1901, on the road, between two churches. Effie Alden is remembered in the Faulkner family as the milliner of Magazine Street, the preacher's wife who sent the Ledger's news by hatbox. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the ordinary trades who married into the Red Ledger and served it by wit and good manners, and who showed that a parcel, properly tied and prettily trimmed, will pass where a hunter never could.