Effie Faulkner Delacroix

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

Effie Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1835 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-two years, forty-four of them as a schoolteacher in the French Quarter. She was the second daughter of the cane farmer Hippolyte Delacroix and of Eliza Faulkner, a physician's widow of the Creole quarter before her second marriage, and she belonged to the House of Delacroix by her father's name and to the Red Ledger by her mother's. She never married and had no children of her own, a fact that she described, when asked, as a matter of arithmetic, since she had taught some two thousand. She died in 1907 of pneumonia, aged seventy-two. She was not a hunter, though her brother Augustus Faulkner was, and she never claimed a craft. But for four decades she kept a schoolroom on Rue Dauphine where the children of the Quarter learned their letters and, by a quiet arrangement, the Ledger's cousins learned who had moved into the neighbourhood, and the family remembers her as the teacher who could tell from the back of a child's head whether something was wrong at home. She was born in the Treme, in the house of her uncle Caleb Thayer Faulkner, because that was where the women of the family went to be confined. The house behind the hardware store had a good midwife next door, a herbalist on the premises and a loaded pistol over the kitchen door, and her mother, who had grown up in it, would not have gone anywhere else. Her elder sister Sarah Delacroix Faulkner had been born there five years before, and the pattern was set. Eliza carried her daughter home to Bayou Lafourche at a month old, by sugar packet, and Effie grew up, like her siblings, in the long raised cottage on the bank that had belonged to her grandmother, the midwife and slayer Adele Delacroix. The cottage looked out on cane, and behind the cane on cypress, and from the gallery, on a clear evening, a child could see the smoke of the sugar house a mile away and hear the frogs begin. She was a quiet, straight-backed, observant child who was forever making lists. She listed the ducks. She listed the days of the week, the kinds of cane, the contents of her grandmother's medicine chest and the times at which the household went to bed. Her father, a large, sunburned, humming man, thought this a wonderful accomplishment and taught her to keep the farm accounts at ten. Her mother, who had been married once before and was a good deal less amused by the world than her husband, taught her to sew, to hold her tongue and to know the difference between a problem and a nuisance. Her grandmother Adele, who died when Effie was five, was a dark cloaked figure at the edge of the lamplight, who held the child's chin once and said that she would do for a listener. Schooling came from the nuns. At twelve she was sent down the bayou and up the river to the Ursulines in the Quarter, where she boarded for four years and learned French grammar, arithmetic, English composition and a close acquaintance with the Sisters' way of observing a room. The Sisters noticed at once that she could keep forty girls quiet by looking at them, and by fifteen she was helping to teach the little ones. She also discovered, in the same years, a fact about herself which she set down in a letter to her sister with the same flat honesty that she brought to a column of figures. She did not wish to marry. She wished to teach, to live in the city, and to be left to arrange her own days. Her sister replied that she could not imagine how she would manage it, and Effie replied that she would manage it the way a person manages everything, which is by doing one thing on Monday. The great yellow fever summer of 1853 fell in her eighteenth year, and she stayed in the city through it. She worked with Clara Alden and with Zoe Delacroix, nursing in the fever wards that had been set up in rented houses in the Quarter, and saw what there was to see. She lost a third of her school friends. It was in that year that she began her own school, in two rooms at the back of a house on Rue Dauphine that belonged to an elderly widow, who charged her almost nothing and sat in on the lessons in a rocking chair. There were nine pupils. There were thirty by the next Christmas, and by the end of the decade it had to be moved to a proper building with a proper bell. Her brother Augustus was the hunter of the family, and she was, from girlhood, the one who told him what she had heard. He was two years younger, a lean, cheerful, reckless boy who had taken up their grandmother's dark cloak as soon as he was grown, and he came to her rooms on Dauphine on his nights in the city to eat supper and to learn what was going round the Quarter. She knew it all. Teachers hear the news of a neighbourhood from the smallest mouths. A child who said that the man next door did not come out in the day, or that his uncle had gone away and another uncle had come in his place, was listened to and thanked, and a note went to the cousins that evening. She never followed anyone into an alley, and she never had a gun in the house. She had a slate and a good memory, and the Ledger found both extremely useful. The war came in her twenty-sixth year. The Union fleet took the city in April 1862, the private schools emptied, the money vanished and the price of candles was a scandal. She kept her school open on whatever the parents could bring, which in the worst months was a bag of rice, a few eggs, or a basket of mending. She taught Union officers' children English in the mornings and the children of the Creole families French in the afternoon, and regarded both as a legitimate branch of her trade. In the years of Reconstruction she added an evening class at a church schoolroom on the edge of the Treme for adults who had never been allowed to learn to read. It met three nights a week by lamplight and was full from the first night. She said it was the most rewarding teaching she had ever done, and the quietest, because every person in the room had waited a long time for the chance and was not about to waste it in talking. Her father died in 1859, and her brother Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix, born in 1846, took over the farm, where their mother lived on until 1877. Effie went up the bayou every summer, in the school vacation, and sat with Eliza on the gallery in the evenings, the two of them saying very little in a companionable way. Her sister Sarah, who had married a farmer named Edwin Rutledge, lived nearby and raised a family, and Effie was a generous and exacting aunt. She paid for books, insisted on neat handwriting and taught the nephews and nieces to keep accounts. Her mother's death she took with a composure that frightened her friends and then took a week in bed. She returned to the school on the Monday after the funeral, since there were thirty children waiting. The later years were spent in the Quarter in a narrow house with a green door, her school a small, famous, rather stern institution that turned out girls who could write a letter, balance a ledger and recognise a lie. She lived through the fever year of 1878 and the lean years after it, and her pupils began to bring their own children. She retired from the classroom in 1897, at sixty-two, but could not stop. She taught the nephews' children to read at her own table. Augustus had died in 1889, and she kept his cloak in a cedar chest and aired it every spring. She died in the winter of 1907, of pneumonia, in the house with the green door. The funeral was attended by three generations of former pupils, who stood in the street in the rain in very good order, because they could not do otherwise. Her will left her books to the church school on the Treme and her slate, in a small ceremony that was much talked of, to the youngest child in her last class. Effie Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the schoolmistress of Rue Dauphine, the daughter of the bayou who would not marry and did not need to. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers of the Ledger's cities, the women who were told by a child what the night had done and who wrote it down on a slate before it could be rubbed out.