Ethel Sumner Faulkner

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

Every Tuesday and Friday for forty years a delivery van with a green door and the words Sumner Hand Laundry in gold on the panel went round the hotels, the boarding houses and the back doors of the jazz clubs of New Orleans, and in the pillowcases of its drivers there was often more than linen. The woman who ran it was Ethel Sumner Faulkner, born in 1926 in Thibodaux, Louisiana, who died in 2015 of a fall, aged eighty-nine. She was a laundress, a daughter of the Faulkner bloodline and the House of Faulkner, and she was neither a hunter nor a vampire slayer. She was the only child of the telegraph operator Alexander Sumner and the telephone operator Wilma Faulkner Cormier, and she never married and had no children of her own. She lived and worked in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of modern New Orleans, and she served the Red Ledger as her father and mother had, by seeing that a message got where it was going, although she did it on a basket and not on a wire. The Faulkners remember her as the laundress whose bundles went everywhere and were never opened, and whose route, they say, was the best-kept secret in the city. She was born at Thibodaux because her mother went down the bayou for the end of the summer, as she herself had been born there twenty-four years before. It was the last week of August 1926, and Wilma, who was twenty-four and eight months gone, loud and uncomplaining at her switchboard until a supervisor sent her home, took the train to the cane country and the same long, shady house with the gallery, kept by the same elderly cousin of the Red Ledger, who had been waiting. A thunderstorm came up as it had before. Alexander Sumner, who had a relief shift at the central telegraph office that could not be changed, arrived on the Sunday train with a bunch of canna lilies and a cardboard box in which, as it proved, he had brought a practice key. He tapped out the child's name on the bedpost, in Morse, and the child, who was four days old and screaming, stopped, listened and began again at a slower pace. The cousin, who had seen a good many births, said that it was the first time she had known a baby to take dictation. They were home in New Orleans by the middle of September. She grew up in a double shotgun house in the neighbourhood that her parents kept for sixty years, in a street of cypress gates and magnolias, within a mile of the house behind Basin Street in which her grandmother Clara Faulkner still kept the lodgers. It was a loud, loving, well-organised household. Her father, who said very little, rapped the dots and dashes on the edge of her high chair, and her mother, who said a great deal, taught her the numbers of the whole of New Orleans by heart. At three she could recite her aunt Nettie's shop number, her uncle Lucius's, her uncle Ralph's and the long-distance exchange. Nettie Cormier, who kept the stationery shop in the Vieux Carre, spoiled her with coloured pencils and a ruler with her name engraved on it, and taught her to keep her eye on the end of a line and not on her hand. The great flood of 1927 found her eight months old, asleep in a laundry basket on a high shelf of a Faulkner cousin's house, while her mother worked the other end of a conversation at the exchange and her father sat for three nights at a key. The family was poor in the Depression, as everyone was, in the way of people with steady jobs, which is to say without bread to spare. At ten she began to take in ironing from the neighbours at a nickel a shirt, and at twelve, when a cousin in the trade needed a girl for the packing table at a steam laundry on Tchoupitoulas Street, she was lent to it for the summer. She discovered the thing that she was to spend her life doing. A steam laundry was an enormous machine for dealing with the secrets of strangers. Every piece that came in had a mark, every bundle had a ticket, and a girl at the sorting table could tell, from the pile in front of her, who in the city had money, who was ill, who had been drinking and who had not been home. She did not repeat what she saw. She had the Sumner silence, which was an inherited trade, and the Cormier ear, which was a gift. She could take a sheet off a line, in the dark, by touch, and say how many people had slept in it. The Ledger came to her at fifteen. Her grandmother Clara, who by then was seventy-three, took her into the back room of the boarding house one Sunday afternoon in 1941 and told her, in the plain flat way of the family, about the Red Ledger and the White, about her uncles Lucius and Ralph, who were slayers, and about the cousins who stayed the night and went out before it was light. Ethel said that she had supposed as much. She was not called, and she knew by sixteen that she was not going to be, because the thing that would have called her had not come. She asked whether she would be of any use as she was. Clara, who was a woman of great and unsentimental shrewdness, looked at her for a minute and said that she was of a good deal more use than most. She said that the Ledger had hunters enough in every generation and not nearly enough people who could be trusted to carry a parcel. She set up on her own in 1946, after four years at Higgins Industries, where she had washed overalls for the shipyard in the war years, in a rented shed on the corner of a street in the neighbourhood, with two secondhand machines, a mangle and a girl to help. It was a hand laundry, and it did the fine work. She took the hotels on Canal Street, the better boarding houses and a number of the clubs on Bourbon and Rampart, the linen of the bands and the shirts of the men who played in them, and she took the vestments of three parishes, in a trade that thrived in the Korean War, when the city was full of sailors with money to spend on shirts. She had a van and two drivers by 1950, and she knew where every one of them was at every hour. What she carried was never written down. A bundle that went to a certain hotel on a Tuesday carried a collar-box with a card in it, in her father's code, and a bundle that came back on a Friday carried the answer. A hunter on the move could leave a word at any back door on the route, with the doorman or the head waiter or the old woman who ran the linen room, and be sure that it would reach its man. It went by the sheets. It was the neatest courier service in the city, because nothing in it looked like anything. The police, who occasionally stopped her vans, found sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, white coats and starched collars, and apologised for the delay. Her cousins, who used it to an extent that she never calculated, said that it was like sending a letter by the tide. She said that it was only her mother's switchboard with a different kind of plug. The Ledger lost a great many of its people in her time, and she washed for all of them. When her aunt Nettie died in 1953, at her counter, it was Ethel who took the shop's blank ledgers home in a laundry bag. When her cousin Milton Faulkner's wife, the typist and slayer Beatrice Seneca, died in the autumn of 1965, weeks after Hurricane Betsy had flooded the Ninth Ward and half of Gentilly and put three of her machines under four feet of brown water, she took the two children for a week, and sent the funeral linen round in the van without charge. She did it again for Milton in 1978 and for his son Leonard in 1981. She was by then a woman of fifty-five, grey, tall and stooped, with hands like folded paper, and it was said of her in the Ledger that she had dressed more of its dead than any undertaker in the parish. She never married. She said that she had been married to the mangle since the age of twelve, and that it was a more reliable partner than most. She had suitors, and a cousin said that there had been one, a sailor, in the war, but she never spoke of it. She lived for most of her life in a flat three streets from her parents, and after her father's death in 1971 and her mother's in 1985 she kept the old house too, and lived in it with her typewriter, her radio and a telegraph key on the kitchen table, on which, at the end of the day, she tapped out, to nobody, the numbers of her whole family. In the Vietnam years she took the firm into the hotels' contracts, and in the eighties she sold the machines, kept the van, and ran a small mending service for old customers. She retired, as far as she retired at all, in 1990. She died in the October of 2015, at eighty-nine, in her own yard, of a fall. She had gone out in the morning to peg a sheet to the line, as she did every Tuesday, in the sun, with the radio on, and had reached for the far corner, and missed her footing on a wet step. A neighbour found her on the grass with the sheet in her hand, pegged at one corner and trailing. They said that it was a beautiful sheet. It was white and starched and pegged with her usual exactness, and in the pocket of her apron, written in pencil on the back of a ticket, in the old code, was a message that nobody was ever able to read. Ethel Sumner Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the laundress whose bundles went everywhere and were never opened, the cousin who could send a letter by the tide. In the Slayerverse she stands for the carriers and couriers of the Red Ledger, the women who never drew a pistol, who delivered every word as it was given them, and who proved that a clean sheet on a van can carry a warning farther than any wire.