Heloise Delacroix

Member of House of Delacroix, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

Heloise Delacroix was born in 1831 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and died in 1913 of a stroke, aged eighty-two, after sixty-seven years as a seamstress in the French Quarter of New Orleans. She belonged to the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes that stood between the Faulkner and Proctor bloodlines and kept the friendship of both. She never married. She raised one son, Sylvain Delacroix, born in 1865, who lived until 1933 and in 1887 married Nettie Faulkner of the Red Ledger, and so brought the two houses together once more. She was not a vampire hunter, and did not pretend to be. The family papers, in the old Delacroix way, do not name her son's father, and the silence is hers to keep. They record only that she was a very good seamstress, a very private woman and the owner of a needle that was, in the Quarter, a byword. Baton Rouge in 1831 was a small, hot bluff town above the delta, with a barracks, a steamboat landing and a market square, and it was a long way from the Vieux Carre in every sense that mattered to a Delacroix. Her branch of the family had been sent there a generation before, by a quarrel that nobody would explain, to keep a dry-goods store on the landing, and Heloise grew up in a house of cypress and brick behind it, among bolts of calico, crates of buttons and the creak of the river traffic. She was a small, dark, silent child with a pair of large eyes and a tendency to be found under tables. She learned to sew at five, because an aunt with a stocking to darn had found that a child with a needle was a child who did not wander, and she never afterward left off. At fourteen she was sent down the river. It was the year of annexation, when Texas came into the Union and the city filled with young men in borrowed uniforms, and her relations, who thought that the French Quarter was the best finishing school for a girl with clever hands, placed her with a dressmaker on Chartres Street. It was a long, bright workroom with six girls at a table and a window onto the street, and there she worked beside a tall, dark girl from the bayou, her distant cousin Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, who was a year her elder and three years ahead of her in the trade. The two sat side by side for a winter, pinned each other's hems and were not quite friends. Sarah, who talked, found Heloise very restful. Heloise, who did not, found Sarah very loud. It lasted the rest of their lives. The city she learned to work in was a city of small luxuries and large hazards. The war with Mexico, which began in the spring after her arrival, filled the Quarter with volunteers and contractors, and a seamstress could sew twenty shirts a day for a captain who would be in Matamoros by the end of the month. Then came the fevers. In 1847, 1853 and 1867 the yellow fever moved up the streets from the levee like a tide, and she lived, for six years altogether, in a room on Burgundy Street that looked out over a cistern and a graveyard. She survived them all, a thing that the Quarter put down to the quantity of vinegar she washed in. She sewed shrouds in the bad summers and wedding gowns in the good ones, and said, when asked which she preferred, that both were a matter of getting the hem right. She was thirty-four when her son was born in the last spring of the war. The city had been in Union hands for three years, the Quarter was half shut and half hungry, and the child arrived in a room over a milliner's shop, in a storm, with the midwife Madame Fortune's successor in attendance and three neighbours boiling water for want of anything better. The family papers do not say who the father was. She did not say either, to anyone, ever. She named the boy Sylvain, after a great-uncle whom nobody else remembered, took his name from her own, and that summer went back to work with the child in a basket on the cutting table. It was said in the Quarter that Heloise Delacroix had no husband and no shame, and that she would have been very surprised to hear either. She paid her rent on the first, kept her counsel and went to mass. She raised Sylvain in a pair of rooms on Burgundy Street, with a window full of geraniums. He was a thin, fair, watchful boy, unlike his mother in everything except the hands, and he grew up among the dresses, the pins and the dummies, and learned to read at the cutting table from old copies of the Picayune. He went to a parish school, and later to a counting house on Carondelet Street, where he became a clerk of the cotton exchange and, in time, a man of modest consequence. She had no ambitions for him that she could afford to express, except that he should not be a seamstress, and he was not. When he came home with his first wages, she took them, counted them, folded them into a handkerchief and gave them back. The Red Ledger made no claim on her, and she made none upon it, but the Delacroix house was a large and close one, and in the ordinary way she was of use. She sewed. The hunters of the Quarter, who were many, had coats that needed taking in, hems that had been torn on fences and a need for cloth that would be unremarkable in a crowd, and she mended them at her table, on the nights when a cousin came to the back door with a bundle and a half nod. She was, it was noticed, the quietest seamstress in the city. A seam that she made did not show and did not talk. She also provided, by the simple fact of her trade, a house that every woman of the Quarter visited, and through which, over the years, a number of quiet messages found their way to the right door. She never once asked what the messages said. In 1887, when Sylvain was twenty-two, he married Nettie Faulkner, a young woman of the Red Ledger's Louisiana line, in the church of the Treme, and his mother, who was fifty-six, made the bride's gown. It was white, plain, cut on the bias, with a long sleeve and a high collar, and the family remembers it for the curious detail that there were no seams visible anywhere. She wore her best grey silk to the wedding, and for the first time in twenty-two years she was seen to cry, briefly and with great economy, at the back of the church. It was the only occasion on which anyone was known to have caught her out. She sewed until her eyes would no longer let her, and then sat by the window and watched the street. The Quarter around her changed. The wharves grew, the railroads came down to the river and the old houses were divided into rooms, but she did not move, and she did not stop. She had a stroke in the spring of 1913, in her chair, with a scrap of black silk in her lap, and died two days later, at eighty-two, with her son at her side. He buried her in the Delacroix tomb in the cemetery on Esplanade, among the family who had not known her name, and put on the stone, at her request, a single line of thread. Heloise Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the seamstress of Burgundy Street, the cousin whose silence was as good as her stitching. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet hands of the Delacroix house, the women who asked nothing, who kept what they saw to themselves and who, without hunting anything at all, helped the long war to be fought in clean and well-fitting cloth.