Leonard Washington

Spouse of Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Leonard Washington was born in 1959 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-five years as a diner cook in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of that city. He died in 2024 of heart failure, aged sixty-five. He was not born to any house of the Ledger and was entered in the family papers as unaffiliated, but in 1986 he married the bookkeeper and vampire slayer Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix, the daughter of the slayers Marius Delacroix and Clara Allen Faulkner, and so stood for thirty-eight years at the edge of the Faulkner bloodline, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. They raised two daughters, Clara Washington Faulkner, born in 1987, and Monica Faulkner, born in 1988, neither of whom was called. Leonard was never a hunter, never carried a pistol and never wished to. He was the man behind the flat-top at a lunch counter on Magazine Street who knew what every hunter in the room ate, and who once said, when asked what he did for the Ledger, that he made sure that the people who went out into the dark had had something hot. He was born at the back of a large house on a street of large houses, which is the way many of the Garden District's children were born in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. His mother kept house for a family of cotton brokers on Prytania Street, and his father, a streetcar motorman on the St Charles line, lived in two rooms behind the carriage house and walked to work through the oaks. The family papers do not give their names, in the usual manner of the Ledger when a family asks to stay out of it. Leonard was the middle child of five, a long, sleepy, large-handed boy who did not talk much and was usually to be found in someone's kitchen. At six he was allowed to shell peas on the back step for the cook of the house, a stout woman called Miss Odile, who taught him that a roux is made by standing still, and who said, when he had stood still for forty minutes without being told, that he would never starve. He went to a parochial school on Jackson Avenue, ate lunch at the counter of the same diner on Magazine Street for the first time when he was twelve, and took a job there at fifteen, in 1974, washing dishes after school for a dollar and a half an hour. The diner was called the Blue Plate, and it stood at the foot of a row of antique shops, a narrow room with a long counter, nine booths and a pass-through window that looked straight into the kitchen. It had a chilli of a certain reputation, a Sunday breakfast of grits and grillades that brought people from across the river, and two waitresses, in the years that Leonard knew them, who were daughters of the Red Ledger and slayers in their own right. He did not know it at first. He knew only that Monica Delacroix, who waited the mornings, drank her coffee black at four o'clock with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door, and that Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, who had the dinner shift, put her tips in a jar under the register marked with the name of a church. He was a grill man by 1978, the head of the line by 1982, and the owner, an old Sicilian called Mr Provenzano, said that the boy had hands that could tell a hot pan from a cold one through a glove. He met Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix in the winter of 1985, on a Tuesday, at the lunch counter. She was twenty-three, a bookkeeper at a firm of ship chandlers on Tchoupitoulas Street, the daughter of a bus driver who rode the St Charles line, and she came in every day at noon and ordered the red beans and a glass of milk and read the figures in a small notebook. He sent the beans out with an extra sausage, and she sent it back with a note that she had not ordered it. He sent it out again with the note that it was a mistake in her favour. She came in the following day with a figure on a card, the cost of an extra sausage across a year of lunches, and he said that a good cook could carry a small loss. They were married in 1986, in the church on the river that the Delacroix cousins used, with her father Marius in a brown suit, who spent the reception counting the guests, and Leonard's mother in a hat that had been in the house on Prytania for forty years. Marius, who was a slayer himself, took him aside after the cake and, with the air of a man reporting a fact about the weather, told him what his wife was. Leonard asked whether she would eat his food on the nights that she came home late. Marius said that she would eat anything, but that she liked it hot. The daughters came in 1987 and 1988. The elder was named for Cynthia's mother, Clara Allen Faulkner, who had died in 1962, and the younger for Cynthia's cousin Monica Delacroix, the waitress of the Blue Plate, who stood godmother to the child. The girls grew up above a small hardware store in the Irish Channel, in a house with a long kitchen and a back door that nobody locked. They went to school with the daughters of pilots and plumbers, and they were told the truth at fifteen, one at a time, at the kitchen table, and they took it as children of the Ledger usually do, with two sensible questions and a request for something to eat. Neither was called, and it was as plain to them as to anyone that this was a mercy. Their father, who had his own opinion on the point, said that a house needed a hot stove more than another pistol. What he gave the Ledger was the kitchen. In the thirty-odd years that he stood on the line, the Blue Plate was where the hunters of the Red Ledger came off a night, because it opened at five and asked nothing of anyone. They sat at the end of the counter. He knew from the way a man held a fork whether his hand had been hurt, and from the way a woman took off her coat whether it was blood on the cuff or only gravy, and he sent out, without being asked, a dish of the right sort: a bowl of gumbo for the cold, a plate of eggs for the shock and a cup of café au lait with three sugars for the ones who had been out in the water. He did not ask where they had been. In the summer of 1995, when Lorraine Trahan Faulkner's husband had been dead four years and she had come in at midnight white to the lips, he put a plate in front of her and said that it was on the house, and she ate it, and said at last that it was the first thing she had tasted in a week. In the attacks of September 2001, he was at the grill by six, and the diner, which had no television, filled by nine with people who had come in to have somewhere to sit, and he fed them, and when the last had gone he took the sign out of the window that said open and wrote under it, in marker, that the kitchen was staying open all day. In August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came up the coast and the levees failed, the Blue Plate, which stood on a ridge of a few feet, stayed dry. It was one of the few kitchens in the uptown streets that did. Leonard, who had taken his family to a cousin's house in Baton Rouge on the Sunday, drove back on the Wednesday through water, with a boat on a trailer and a case of ice, and cooked for nine days on a gas ring in the dark for the Guard, the linemen, the doctors from the church hospital and about two hundred people whom the city had forgotten. He lost eleven pounds. Cynthia, who was in the flood with her father, who was then sixty-nine and refused to leave, came across the neutral ground in a pirogue on the fourth day with Marius's notebook, and found her husband stirring a pot with an oar. His heart, which had been large for some time, gave him trouble in his fifties. He took the grill down to three days a week in 2019, and in 2022 to two, and kept a stool by the stove on which he did not sit. He died in the spring of 2024 of heart failure, at the counter, at sixty-five, a few minutes after the lunch rush, with the radio on and a sausage in the pan. Cynthia, who was living then and is living today, was summoned from her office by the waitress, and arrived, as the cousins said, in her bookkeeper's shoes. The Blue Plate closed for three days for the first time in its history. Ten hunters of the Red Ledger stood in the churchyard in their good coats with their hats in their hands, and one, who had come a long way, said that the dead of the city had never had a better friend. Leonard Washington is remembered in the Faulkner family as the cook of the Blue Plate, the unaffiliated husband who kept a hot plate at the end of the counter for any hunter that came off a night. In the Slayerverse he stands for the cooks and kitchen-keepers of the Red Ledger, who never took the field and never asked the cost, and who knew that a dish put quietly in front of a tired person is sometimes the only weapon that is wanted.