Georgia Faulkner Whitfield

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

Georgia Faulkner Whitfield was born in 1854 in Natchez, Louisiana, on a river journey that her parents had not planned to be away for long, and she lived sixty-seven years as a laundress in the French Quarter of New Orleans, dying in 1921 of a fall. She was the younger daughter of the printer Albert Whitfield and the laundress Carrie Alden Faulkner, and the sister of Fanny Whitfield Faulkner. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, through the Red Ledger line of the House of Faulkner. She was not a vampire slayer and was never called. The Faulkners of New Orleans remember her as the woman who kept the wash clean for the chapter for nearly fifty years, and who knew better than anyone in the Quarter which shirts to send back unmended. The place of her birth is a small story in itself. In the spring of 1854 her father was asked by a newspaper in Natchez to come upriver for a season and set up a new cylinder press, a job that paid well and that he thought would take three weeks. Carrie, who was expecting the child in the summer, went with him because she did not like to be left in the house with a press she could not work, and because her husband said, with the innocence of a man who set type by the line, that there was time. There was not. The packet had barely tied up below the bluff at Natchez when her pains began, and the girl was born in a rented room over a chandler's shop, with a Methodist midwife, the landlady and a very alarmed compositor in attendance. She was a long, quiet, fair baby who looked about her without crying. Her father said that she seemed to be checking the room for errors. They took her home on the next packet, and she grew up behind the laundry on Rampart Street. It was a steamy, cheerful, bustling place, with coppers, tubs, ironing tables, lines of white linen strung across a brick yard and a great smell of soap and lye and starch. Her mother had taken over the business from her grandmother, who kept the herb garden and the laundry in the same yard, and Georgia took in the two trades together, the plain work of washing and the quieter work of knowing what a household was hiding by what it sent. A laundress sees everything. She sees who has been hurt and who has been ill, who has suddenly acquired a great many good shirts, whose collars carry a smear that will not quite come out. The women of the laundry had always talked, and the Faulkners had always listened. Georgia, who was silent from childhood, listened better than any of them. She was not her sister. Fanny was dark and quick, took to the copper at once and ran the irons like a general. Georgia was tall, fair and slow to speak, and she liked the quiet jobs, the sorting, the marking and the mending, and above all the marking. A laundry has to put its own mark on every piece so that nothing is lost, and the marks of the Rampart Street shop were small, neat and in a code of her grandmother's devising that looked like a housekeeper's ticket. She learned it by eight. By twelve she had found that the same marks, placed on a bundle in a certain order, told another Faulkner the state of a house, and it was she, not her mother, who first saw how the two systems could run together. She never said so. She simply did it. It was the work that made her useful to the Red Ledger. The chapter at New Orleans had hunters in every ward of the city and needed, more than any of them, a way to learn which houses were safe. A bundle of linen goes to a great many doors. It goes to the big houses of the Garden District, to the boarding houses on Esplanade, to the convents and the hotels and, in later years, the rooms of Storyville, and it goes out and comes back in a basket carried by a girl whom nobody notices. A slayer who wished to know if a house had been disturbed had only to look at the tickets. A Whitfield girl who noticed something in the wash could pin a note in a hem. It was an ordinary trade, she said, with an ordinary craft behind it, and nobody ever thought of her as anything but a laundress, which suited her. The war years she remembered only as a child, and they were not hard for her as they were for her father. She was eight when the Union fleet came up the river and the city fell, and what she recalled of the occupation was the sound of boots on the wharf and the extraordinary quantity of washing that the army produced. Her mother took in whole regiments of shirts. The laundry on Rampart Street was the busiest it had ever been, and the family, for once, had money. Reconstruction was the reverse. The city was poor, the wharves were slack, the houses sent less wash, and in the long fever summers of the 1870s and the great epidemic of 1878, when the bells tolled and the carts went through the Quarter, she and her mother boiled every sheet in the house and gave away bleach and lye to the neighbours who asked. She was twenty-four. She did not catch the fever, which her mother put down to soap. She never left the house on Rampart Street for long. The Whitfield daughters, it was understood, had their places. Fanny took the laundry and its accounts, and Georgia took the ticketing, the sorting and the long watch on the clothes of the Quarter. She was known in the neighbourhood as Miss Georgia, a tall, pale, unhurried woman with her hair in a plain knot and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, who could tell you what was in a bundle from across the room. The clerks of the cotton exchange sent their collars to her in bundles of a dozen, and one nervous young man, who had been told that she could read a shirt, tipped her a quarter to tell him nothing. She kept the coin in a tin on the shelf. Her father, who had set the notices of the Red Ledger for half a century, was a great presence in her life, and she was a good deal more like him than her sister. She had his fairness and his patience, and his habit of reading a thing three times, and he taught her her letters on the back of old proof sheets, sitting at the kitchen table with a pipe. He fell ill in 1900, the year Fanny died, and died in 1904, with Georgia and her mother in the room. After that the two women ran the house together. Her mother lived on until 1910, and Georgia, who had been the quieter of the daughters, found herself the keeper of the laundry, the ticket code and the garden, in the last years of a city that was changing around her. She lived through the Great War in the old house. The younger men of the family went into the army, and the laundry took in uniforms for the camp at Jackson Barracks, and the chapter sent fewer notices and more parcels. She was sixty-three. She worked a full day, as she always had, and took her meals at the long table in the kitchen, with the window open to the yard. In the winter of 1921 she went out on a morning of hard frost to take in a line of sheets that had frozen in the night, and slipped on the brick, and fell. She was sixty-seven. She was found by the girl who came for the wash. Georgia Faulkner Whitfield is remembered in the Faulkner family as the laundress of Rampart Street, the quiet daughter who could read a house by its linen. In the Slayerverse she stands for the ordinary hands of the Red Ledger, the women who washed, sorted and marked, and whose small tickets and clean sheets told the hunters of the city which doors were safe to knock on.