Emma Rutledge

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

There is a coat in the Faulkner archive at New Orleans, in dark grey wool, with eleven pockets, that has been worn by four generations of hunters and is still in good repair, and the lining of the left sleeve is marked in small red stitches E.R. The initials are Emma Rutledge's. She was born in 1857 in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of the farmer Edwin Rutledge and the seamstress Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, and the younger sister of Benjamin Faulkner. She lived eighty years as a seamstress in the Quarter, never married, and died in 1937 of heart failure. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, through the Red Ledger line of the House of Faulkner, and she was not a hunter. She was the woman who made their coats, and the family has never had a better one. Her birthplace was a matter of a bad summer. In 1857 the fever was in the Treme, where the women of the Faulkners traditionally went for their confinements, and her mother, who was heavily pregnant, was sent across the river to Algiers, to stay with kin of the herbalist Clara Alden, her mother's aunt by marriage. Algiers was then a country village with a ferry, a railroad depot, a dry dock and a great many chickens, and the house was a low cypress cottage with a gallery and a fig tree in the yard. Emma came into the world in the bedroom, on a hot night in August, in the same week as the daughter of a neighbour three doors down. The neighbour's child was called Mary Cole. The two babies, it was said, were put into the same cradle to stop them crying, and the two girls remained friends for as long as Mary lived. She grew up between the ridge farm and her mother's sewing table. Her father's land lay on the flat country above the city, in the beans and the sweet potatoes, and she spent her summers shelling peas on the back step and her winters at the machine, a Wheeler and Wilson treadle that her mother had bought on the instalment plan and which was the best thing in the house. She was a small, dark, sharp, laughing girl, who took to a needle as her brother took to a key, and at five she was making doll's clothes from scraps. At nine she was taught to put in a sleeve. At twelve she was hemming, at fourteen pressing, and at sixteen she could cut a bodice from a pattern and alter it to a customer's figure by eye, which her mother had said could not be taught and which she had taught herself by watching. The pockets came to her by an accident. When she was seventeen, in 1874, a cousin of the family who was a hunter came into the house one evening with his coat ripped from collar to hem and a look that forbade questions. Her mother, who had sewn for the Ledger for twenty years, handed it to Emma and said, without a smile, that it was time she learned. The coat was a Faulkner coat. It had a deep pocket inside the skirt for a stake, a flat one across the chest for a knife, an oiled-silk lining for damp, and a loop at the hip. It had been built, she learned, on a pattern passed down from a seamstress at Frankfort in Kentucky, by way of the Kentucky Faulkners. She unpicked it and looked at it for a week. Then she made a better one. She moved the stake pocket four inches, so that it could be reached with the left hand, and put a second, deeper pocket into the skirt for a cartridge box, and she made the whole thing lighter. Her mother looked at it, turned it inside out and said nothing, which was high praise. Her father's death in the summer of 1878 was the turning point. She was twenty-one. The farm on the ridge was sold to a neighbour, the wagon went to her brother, and her mother, who was forty-eight and had lost her husband, took a set of rooms in the Quarter, on Royal Street, with a front parlour that looked on to the street and a back one that served as a workroom. Emma went with her. The two women set up as dressmakers, and it was agreed, without discussion, that Emma would not marry. She had had a proposal, from a young clerk at the cotton exchange, and had refused it, but it was the lack of a second one that was remarked on. She did not seem to mind. She said that she had a shop, a mother and a great many friends, and that a husband would only get in the way of the pockets. The shop on Royal Street lasted for fifty years. It was an elegant, old-fashioned, lamp-lit room, with bolts of silk on the shelves, a cutting table the size of a door and a long mirror in which the ladies of the Garden District and the Creole families of the Quarter were pinned, tucked, altered and sent home. She made wedding dresses, christening gowns and mourning, and in the carnival season a great many costumes for the balls of the krewes, which she made in a fortnight with a dozen girls and a glue pot. She was known for fit. A woman who had been fitted by Miss Emma was said to stand up straighter for a year. She was also known for the coats, which were never advertised, and were made, in the third week of every month, in the back room, with the door shut, on the orders of the chapter. It was a quiet partnership. A hunter came to the back door with a length of cloth and a name, and Emma, who had measured every Faulkner in the city, took the measurements and made the coat. It took three weeks. She sewed in the pockets herself, by hand, and stitched the initials into the left sleeve. She added a small change for each hunter's craft. A slayer who sat still in a tower was given a deeper collar, and a slayer who ran was given a looser cut in the shoulder, and a man with a limp, who could not turn quickly, was given a pocket on each side. She took a fee that was half of what it should have been, and in some cases nothing, and the chapter, which understood that it was a great kindness, sent her every Christmas a case of claret and an enormous ham. Her mother lived on, beside her, for thirty-four years after the farm was sold. Sarah Delacroix Faulkner died in 1912, at eighty-two, in her sleep, in the back bedroom, with her daughter at the bedside. Emma, who was fifty-five, went on alone. She kept the shop and the rooms, and her brother and his family, who lived a few streets away, were constant visitors. She loved the niece and the nephew, Georgia Cole Faulkner and Benjamin Cole Faulkner, who came to the shop as children and played under the cutting table, and who in time brought their own children to sit in the same place. She was the aunt with the pins in her mouth. Her friend Mary Cole, whom she had known in the cradle and who had married her brother, died in 1909, and Emma made the dress in which she was buried. The Storyville years and the rise of jazz brought her trade from an unexpected quarter. The ladies of the district, who could pay and were shut out of the respectable shops, came to Miss Emma's by the back stairs, and she served them, with a perfectly straight face, at the same rate as the bankers' wives. She said that a hem was a hem. She took a dim view of the music, which came up through the floor at night from the dance hall next door, and once sent a message, by her errand girl, asking whether the cornetist could possibly play in a different key. The next evening he did. The Great War, which took a good many of the young cousins to France, filled her rooms with Red Cross work, and she sat at the machine for three years, turning out hospital shirts by the hundred. She was sixty. She retired from the shop in 1930, and lived in the upstairs rooms with a cat and the treadle machine, which she refused to replace. She died in the spring of 1937, at eighty, of heart failure, in the chair by the window, with a half-finished coat across her knees. It was found to be a man's coat, of dark grey wool, with eleven pockets. Emma Rutledge is remembered in the Faulkner family as the seamstress of Royal Street, the aunt who made the coats and never sewed a pocket in the wrong place. In the Slayerverse she stands for the craftswomen of the Red Ledger, whose needles, cloth and exact measurements put a hunter's tools where his hand expected to find them, and who armed the family one seam at a time.