Fanny Whitfield Faulkner

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

Fanny Whitfield Faulkner was born in 1851 at Algiers, the ferry town on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived forty-nine years as a laundress's daughter, a clerk and, at the last, a typist in the offices of the city's Canal Street. She was the elder daughter of the printer Albert Whitfield and of the laundress Carrie Alden Faulkner, and the sister of the compositor Georgia Faulkner Whitfield. She belonged to the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger through her mother. She never married and had no children, and she died in 1900 of heart failure, aged forty-nine, in the same year that her father fell ill. She was not a hunter and did not wish to be one. She was a good, fast, accurate copyist in a city that was learning to write by machine, and she typed, in the evenings, the clean copy from which her father set the Red Ledger's notices. She was born at Algiers because her grandmother lived there. Clara Alden, the herbalist of the Treme store, had grown up across the river, in a cottage on the levee behind the ferry landing, and when her daughter Carrie was expecting her first child, in the last hot weeks of the summer of 1851, she insisted that the confinement should be in the house where she had been born. Carrie was twenty-one and had been married three years. She crossed on the ferry in the heat, with a basket of linen and an umbrella, and her husband, who could not leave the press, sent a message by the packet every day, asking whether there was news, in a hand so small that Clara said it needed a magnifying glass. The child arrived at last on an afternoon of thunder, in the back bedroom, among the bunches of drying thyme. Clara, who had delivered her own remedies to half the parish, pronounced her sound of wind and limb, and said that the child had an unusually alert expression, for a person who had been alive for nine minutes. She grew up on Rampart Street in the Treme, in the tall narrow house behind the hardware store that had been her grandfather's, with her mother's laundry in the yard and her grandmother's garden at the back. It was a warm, noisy, well-filled household. Her grandfather Caleb had a voice like a foghorn and a stock of nails that he counted twice a day. Her grandmother, a calm, tall woman with grey eyes, taught the girl the names of the plants. Her father was out all day at the printing shop on Chartres Street, and came home in the evenings, smelling of ink, and read her the news aloud while she sat on the floor and sorted buttons. The child took after her mother's side in nearly everything but one thing. She had, from the first, her father's eye for a mistake. At five she was found correcting the spelling on a neighbour's shop sign, with a stick of charcoal, in the gutter. The fever took the town in the summer of 1853, when she was two, and she remembered nothing of it but the noise of the carts in the night. She was carried, in the worst weeks, across the river to her grandmother's cottage at Algiers, and her mother stayed behind, in the house, nursing the neighbours with a pot of camphor and a boiled cloth across her face. The city lost some eight thousand people in that summer. The family lost none, and Clara Alden, who took the credit for it, said that it was a matter of good drains and bad temper. Then came the war, and then the years that followed it, and she grew up in both. In April 1862, when she was ten, the Union fleet steamed up the river and the city changed hands, and she was taken, by her father, to the levee, to see the flag. She remembered the ships. She remembered the silence of the crowd, and the noise of the soldiers' drums. She remembered the price of flour and the day that her father's presses were taken and the week that he came home with ink on his face, having found one that had been hidden in a cellar. Reconstruction brought the Freedmen's schools, the constitutional conventions, the great riot of 1866, the White League and the long, slow, sullen years of a city that had lost, in the space of a decade, its wealth, its government and its certainty. She was a teenager through all of it, at a convent school and then a public one, reading what she could get. She was put to her mother's laundry at sixteen, which is why the older cousins still remember her first as a laundress. She did it for three years. She was good at it, in the way that she was good at everything she was told to do, but she was a girl with ink in her blood, and after a day among the copper and the mangle she would climb to her father's workroom and sit at the end of the bench, with a proof. She read them. She read every one that came through the house, in the evening, three times, and found the errors that he had already corrected, and once one that he had missed. He said nothing. The next morning there was a stick of type on her plate. It was in 1874 that the Remington typewriter went on sale, the first practical machine that could put clean capitals on a page. The newspapers laughed at it. Her father, who was a printer and therefore suspicious of anything that made letters without lead, went to see one at a stationer's on Camp Street, and came home silent. A week later he said to his daughter, over supper, that if she were to learn to work it, she might earn her living in an office. She was twenty-three. She practised for a year on a second-hand machine, bought from a widow, in the back room over the shop, with a book of exercises and a metronome borrowed from a niece, and by 1877 she could do seventy words a minute. She took her first post the same spring, as a copyist in the office of a cotton factor on Carondelet Street, and was one of the first women in the city to be paid for the work. It was a good life, in its small way. She took the tram each morning to Canal Street and sat at a high desk in a room of clerks, with a machine that clattered like a loom, typing invoices, bills of lading, wills, bonds and the reports of lawyers who could not write. She wore a dark skirt and a plain blouse and a pair of steel spectacles, and she was known in the office, at the start, as a curiosity, and within a year as a fixture. The young men, who had never seen a woman in a counting house, took a long time to recover. She took no notice. She kept a clean desk, a sharp pencil and a short temper, and she was as fast as any man in the place, and more accurate. In the evenings she did her other work. The Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter had long sent its notices to the cousins in handwritten copies, which were then set by her father, and the handwriting was a constant source of error. Fanny typed them. She took the notices, in the original hands of a dozen hunters, and reduced them to a single clear page, and her father set from that. It was work that she did for twenty years, at the kitchen table, in the glow of a lamp, without being told what any of it was about. She was told only that the copy must be clean. She was a typist, she said, not a reader, and a person who reads what she types is a person who makes mistakes. She read every word. Nobody ever knew. Her sister Georgia, three years younger, was the quiet, tall, fair girl who became a compositor. The two lived together for a time in a small house in the Faubourg Marigny, and they were an odd pair: Fanny, who was dark and quick and talked a great deal, and Georgia, who was silent, and set type as if she were taking an exam. They got on well. They never married, either of them, and when they were asked why, Fanny said that she had met nobody who could type, and Georgia said that she had met nobody who could keep quiet. The city changed around her in the nineties. In 1897 the council set aside a district of the old Basin Street quarter for the trade in pleasure, and named it Storyville after the alderman who proposed it, and within a few years the streets on the far side of Canal were full of piano players, brass bands and music that nobody in her grandmother's house had ever heard. It came through her window on summer nights. She did not care for it, at first, and then she did. She stood at the casement on Saturdays and listened to a cornet, a long way off, working its way up the scale and back, and she remarked to her sister that it was the only thing in the city that did not need to be typed. Her heart, which had been weak since her thirties, began to fail in the spring of 1900. She continued at her desk, with a cushion at her back, until June, and then worked at home, at the kitchen table, with the machine on a tray. Her father fell ill in the same year, and the two of them sat, in the evenings, in the back room, he with his proofs and she with her copy, and did not say what they thought. She died in the autumn, of heart failure, at forty-nine, in her own bed, with her sister beside her and a sheet of paper still in the machine. Fanny Whitfield Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the first woman in the house to earn her living by machine, the typist who made the Ledger's notices clean. In the Slayerverse she stands for the copyists and clerks of the Red Ledger, the people who reduced a hunter's scrawl to a clear page and never once got it wrong.