Elizabeth Cooke

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

Elizabeth Cooke was born in 1846 in the Treme, the old free quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-one years, most of them as a midwife in the French Quarter and the back streets behind it. She married the blacksmith Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix in 1866, raised two children with him, Sarah Delacroix and Warren Delacroix, and died in 1927 of kidney failure, aged eighty-one. She was not a hunter and was not born into any of the great houses, and the family papers say so plainly, but by marriage she belonged to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger, and for sixty years she did the work that the Ledger could least afford to lose: she was present, at the hour when it mattered, in the rooms where New Orleans was born, and she noticed what came in with the children. The Treme in the year of her birth was a crowded, cheerful, low-roofed district behind the Rampart Street boundary of the Quarter, a place of cottages and shotgun houses with deep galleries, where free people of colour, Irish labourers, German bakers and Creole shopkeepers lived within calling distance of one another and mostly minded their own business. The Cookes were a small family of no particular fortune. Her father, who had worked on the levee, died when she was four, and her mother, a quick, spare woman who took in nursing and sewing, brought her up in two rooms on a side street, with a cistern in the yard and a fig tree. The child was the kind who watched. She had been told, at six, to sit in the corner while her mother attended a neighbour, and she sat there for eleven hours, without speaking, and at the end of it announced to the assembled women that the baby was a girl and that nobody had thought to wash the basin. The midwife of the street, a stout, flat-voiced woman of sixty named in the family papers only as Madame Celeste, took a liking to her and put her to work. At nine she was boiling water. At twelve she was folding linen, and at fourteen she could tell, by laying her hand on a woman's side, how a child was lying. She learned what a midwife needs, which is a great deal of patience, a pair of clean hands and a capacity for being unimpressed. She learned herbs. She learned prayers, in two languages. She learned above all the two laws of the trade: that it is better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing, and that a midwife sees, on the first night of a life, every sign of what that life will be. It was Madame Celeste who taught her to look at the newborn. She told her to look at the eyes, the skin and the breathing, in that order, and to note, without any excitement, anything that was not as it should be, a cold that did not warm, an appetite that would not come, a child who did not cry when the lamp was brought close. The Red Ledger, which had a correspondent in every part of the quarter, had long used the old midwives of the Treme as its eyes at the cradle. Some things, it held, were passed on at birth, and some arrived later in the night. Elizabeth did not know, until she was seventeen, what she was being trained for. She was told by Madame Celeste, in the same tone in which she was told to boil the water, on a night when a door had been left open and a child had been found on the wrong side of it. The war went through the city in her sixteenth year. In April 1862 the Union fleet came up the river and New Orleans was occupied, and the quarter changed around her, with soldiers on every corner, shortages in every shop and rumour at every door. She worked through it. The births did not stop for the war. A midwife was sent for by night, by both sides, and she went, in the dark, with her bag, past the pickets, who came in time to know her and to let her pass. She delivered the child of a Confederate officer's wife and of a Union sergeant's on the same night, one street apart, and said afterwards that the babies had looked exactly alike. She met Hippolyte Delacroix in 1865, at a gate. He was a journeyman of the Burgundy Street forge, a big, sunburned young man of eighteen with a thick neck and a hopeful expression, sent to hang a gate for a widow in the next street. She had been visiting the widow's daughter, who was near her time, and she had seen at once that the gate would not do. She told him. He argued, and she showed him, with the aid of a basket of washing, and he took the gate down and hung it again without another word. She said later that she had married him for it. She was nineteen and he was eighteen, and she was a good deal more sure of herself, and he was a good deal more sure of his hammer, and they suited each other very well. They married in 1866, in the spring, at St Augustine's. It was a hard year in which to begin, for in July the city saw the riot at the Mechanics Institute, in which a convention of Republicans was attacked in the street by a mob and by the police, and some forty people died, and she spent three days in a back room on Dryades Street tending wounded men with a pair of kitchen scissors and a shawl. The bride had no father to give her away, and the master of the forge, a large Alsatian, did it for her, at some cost to his handkerchief. She moved into the rooms behind the forge. She put up a small sign on the gate, which said in French and English that a midwife lived within, and the work came in from the first week. Her husband's family had a long history with the Faulkners, and she was absorbed into it, without ceremony, as the wives of the line generally were. His mother Eliza, who lived with them in later years, told her on the first Sunday. Elizabeth said that she had supposed it was something of that kind. She was, she said, a midwife, and there was very little that she had not supposed. She never hunted. But the Red Ledger, in New Orleans, had long needed a woman who could go anywhere, at any hour, and be believed, and she became its midwife, in the sense in which the Ledger used the word: one who is sent for, who goes and who reports. She delivered, in sixty years, some four thousand children. She entered in a small notebook the address and the date of every one that came into the world wrong, and she took the notebook, once a month, to a cousin of her husband's in the Treme, and sat for half an hour with a cup of coffee, saying nothing. Her own children came in the first years of the marriage. Sarah Delacroix was born in 1868 and lived until 1935, and Warren Delacroix in 1871, who lived until 1918. She delivered neither herself, and always said so, on the ground that a midwife's hands were no use to her own. Both were delivered by Madame Celeste's successor, and both were brought up among the smell of hot iron and of camphor, and neither was a hunter. The yellow fever summers were the heaviest labour of her life. She had been a child for 1853, which she remembered as a long, hot noise of carts, and a young woman for 1867, and in 1878, when the epidemic took thousands, she was thirty-two, with two children and a forge to run, and she went out in it. She had a rule, which she held to, that a fever could not be nursed from a distance. She was ill herself for nine days, and survived, and was spared thereafter, as the people of the quarter said, by the fever's respect. She went on attending the sick until the frost came. The Ledger made a note in the margin of its book that a midwife of the Treme had done the work of four hunters without once carrying a gun. She kept on delivering until she was past seventy. She had the great advantage, in a city as long as New Orleans in memory, of having brought into it the mothers of half her patients. She saw the Quarter grow poorer and stranger and more musical, and she heard, in the years after 1900, the brass bands going by on Sundays, to funerals and from them. She was widowed in 1910, when Hippolyte died in his chair, and lived on for seventeen years in the little house on Burgundy Street, with a granddaughter to fetch and carry, and was asked for, by name, until she could no longer climb a stair. She died in 1927, of kidney failure, at eighty-one, in her own bed, with the window open onto the yard. The last delivery that she attended, as it happened, was that of a great-niece, in 1922, and she said at the end of it that she thought she would stop. Elizabeth Cooke is remembered in the Faulkner family as the midwife of the Treme, the wife who was always sent for and always came. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the cradle and the sickroom, who kept the Red Ledger's first watch, at the beginning of a life, with clean hands and open eyes.