Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1846 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-four years as a blacksmith in the French Quarter and along the wharves, a man of the House of Delacroix who carried the Faulkner name of his mother in the middle of his own. He was the youngest son of the farmer Hippolyte Delacroix and of Eliza Faulkner, a physician's widow of the Creole quarter, and the brother of Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, Effie Faulkner Delacroix and the slayer Augustus Faulkner. He married the midwife Elizabeth Cooke in 1866, raised two children, Sarah Delacroix and Warren Delacroix, and died in 1910 of a stroke, aged sixty-four. He was not a hunter and never wished to be one. For forty years he made and mended the iron of a great river port, and in the long war of the Red Ledger he was one of the people who stood behind the hunters with a hammer, a forge and an open door.
His own family had always said that he was born in the wrong place, and the family was right. The house was on Bayou Lafourche, and Eliza, who was forty-one in the winter of 1846 and had buried one husband and borne three children, had been told by a sensible old cousin that a woman of her age should not have her sixth confinement among the mosquitoes, forty miles from a doctor. She went down the bayou in the first week of December on a sugar boat and was put to bed in her brother Caleb's house in the Treme, in the back room that looked on the garden. The child came in the small hours, in a cold rain, with a midwife of the quarter holding the lamp, and was named for his father and for the Faulkners together. He was carried home to the bayou at six weeks in a basket. He said, when he was old, that he had been to New Orleans before he could walk, and had taken a great deal longer to get back.
He grew up on the cane land among his sisters and his father's cheerful noise. His brother Augustus, nine years his elder, was already a hunter, a quiet, dark young man who came and went with a lantern and a long coat and who taught the boy to tie a knot that would not slip. The child was fascinated by the sound from the lean-to beside the barn, where a travelling smith came every autumn to sharpen the mill knives and shoe the mules. He stood in the door for hours. The smith, a Breton with one eye, gave him a cold horseshoe nail to hold. It was the only toy that he wanted for a year, and he carried it everywhere, in his pocket, until the thing was bright.
His father's death in 1859, when he was thirteen, changed everything. The farm, in the family's account, passed to him as the youngest son, and he was in no position to work it and had no wish to. A cousin took the fields on shares. Eliza, who was fifty-four, packed up the house on the bayou, put the boy on a packet boat and went to live in the city, where she had old friends, and where she thought a clever boy might do better than he would in a cane field. She took a room on Dumaine Street and took in sewing. He went for a year to the school of the Christian Brothers and learned to write a clear hand. Then, at fourteen, she apprenticed him to a smith in the Rue Burgundy whom she knew from the days of her first marriage, a large, patient Alsatian called Bauer, who shod the drays of the cotton factors and made the wrought-iron brackets that held up half the balconies in the Quarter.
It was the right trade. He learned the fire first, then the hammer, then the steel. He learned to read the colour of a heat, which is to say to know by the shade of the glow when a bar is ready to take a weld, and he learned that iron, treated honestly, forgives a great deal. Bauer was a stern master, who believed that a boy should sweep for a year before he touched a tool, but he saw in a fortnight that the boy had the hands and the temper, and he put him at the small anvil by the door.
The Civil War reached the city in April 1862, when he was fifteen. Farragut's fleet came up the river under the forts, the Confederate garrison left, and the Union army under General Butler occupied the town with bands and proclamations. The smithy was commandeered. Bauer and his apprentice shod Union artillery horses, at a fixed rate, for three years, and the boy learned a good deal about cavalry, about the price of oats and about the mood of a city under occupation. He also learned, from the conversation of the soldiers who stood about the forge, that a hammer is a good deal more respectable than a sword. The fever summers took their toll on the trade, as on everyone else. In 1867 he was down with it himself, and was nursed through, and in 1878, when the great epidemic killed thousands, he and his wife turned their rooms over the forge into a ward.
He met Elizabeth Cooke in the Treme in the spring of 1865, at a door. He had been sent to hang a gate for a widow on Rampart Street, and a young woman in an apron came out and told him that it was hung crooked. He told her that it was hung exactly as the widow had asked. She said that the widow had asked for it to swing inward so that she could open it with her hip when she was carrying the washing, and he had hung it so that it swung out. He looked. She was right. He took it down and hung it again, and she stood on the step with her arms folded and watched him do it. She said afterwards that it was the first time that she had ever seen a man admit an error without being paid. They were married in 1866, in the spring, at St Augustine's in the Treme, with Eliza in the front pew in her best black and Bauer, who gave the bride away because the bride had no father to do it, blowing his nose like a trumpet.
They set up at the forge on Burgundy Street, which he took over from Bauer in 1870, with a house behind it, a yard, a shed and a good many children of the neighbourhood, who came to watch. Sarah Delacroix was born in 1868 and Warren Delacroix in 1871. The forge did well. He made the iron of the Reconstruction city: the railings of the new cotton exchange offices, the gates of the wharves, the brackets of the market stalls, the chains of the dray teams and the shoes of ten thousand horses. He did it cheerfully, at a fair price, and he had, as his father had, a reputation for honest weight. He sang at the anvil, in French, in a deep and not very tuneful baritone, and the boys in the street knew by the pitch whether he was working on a bracket or on something that had gone wrong.
He was not cut off from the work of his family. A Faulkner smith in a port city has a particular use, and the New Orleans chapter of the Red Ledger found it. He made hinges for doors that were meant to stay shut. He made the iron fittings of a chest, and the locks of a cellar, and the bands of a coffin that was to be buried deep. He never asked what they were for. A man in a long coat would come to the back door, after dark, with a drawing on a scrap of paper, and he would look at it and say that it would be ready on Thursday. It was, and it was always exactly right. His brother Augustus, who had the dark cloak of their grandmother and used the forge as a place to sit, told him once that he was the most useful man in the parish and had never pointed a gun at anyone. Hippolyte said that he had no objection to being useful.
The years of Reconstruction were hard, and in some respects dangerous. In September 1874 the White League fought the Metropolitan Police in the streets by the levee, and he closed the forge for two days and sat in it with his family, with the doors barred and the fire banked, while the firing went on outside. He took in, in those days, a wounded policeman and a frightened boy of the League, in the same room, and gave them the same soup. Neither spoke to the other. It was the kind of neutrality that a city forced upon a man who had no politics but his trade.
His mother, who lived with him in the house behind the forge for the last years of her life, died in 1877, and his brother Augustus in 1889. Both of them he buried himself, and both times he made the iron cross that stood over the grave. He went on working into his sixties. His son Warren, who had a good head and was not interested in a hammer, went into a business office, and his daughter Sarah, who had her mother's way with people, became a teacher. He sold the forge in 1907 to a young smith whom he had trained, and sat on the step, in the evening, and watched the drays go by.
He died on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1910, at sixty-four, of a stroke, in his chair by the stove, with his wife beside him and the tongs, which he had not put away, on the table at his hand. He was buried in the family tomb, in a cemetery of white plaster and black iron, and the gates of the tomb, which he had forged himself in the year of his marriage, swung inward, so that a woman carrying flowers could open them with her hip.
Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the blacksmith of Burgundy Street, the son who took his father's cheerfulness and his mother's stubbornness into the forge. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen who made the hunters' tools without asking what they were for, and whose honest iron held the doors of the old city shut.
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