Marguerite Delacroix

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

Marguerite Delacroix was born in 1937 at Mobile, Louisiana, the railway halt and flour store in the river country that is not the port in Alabama, and lived eighty-two years as a diner waitress in New Orleans and, from 1970, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes. The family book knows her as The Cold Falcon and classes her as a Broker, a hunter who deals in information, favours and the weaknesses of other people's schedules, who buys a fact on Monday and sells it on Thursday. Her craft was Second Line Cover, the use of the city's brass-band funeral parades as a screen for movement, and her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She raised one child, the slayer Rosalie Delacroix, born in 1966, whose father the family papers do not name, and who in 1984 married the slayer Neil Butler Faulkner of the Red Ledger. Marguerite died in 2019 of a stroke, aged eighty-two, three years after her daughter. Her parents are not named in the papers either, and she said once that she had been told to be known by what she did and not by whom she came from, and that she had taken the advice about as far as it would go. She had three rules for a waitress, and the cousins quoted them for fifty years. The first was that a customer who is sitting down wants to be listened to, and should be. The second was that a good waitress sees the room in the mirror behind the pie case without looking at it. The third, which she kept for the younger girls, was that a tip is paid for what you have not said. She learned them in the dining room of a Canal Street lunch counter, at sixteen, in 1953, in a pink uniform with a pocket for her pencil, and she worked in diners for sixty-five years, on Canal Street, on Rampart, on Claiborne and for the last thirty on a corner of the Treme where she was known as the only woman in town who could carry six plates, remember four orders and tell a man to his face that he had had enough. She was a short, narrow, dark, straight-backed woman with grey eyes and a quick way of turning her head. The Delacroix who watched her said she was like a bird that has seen something in the grass. Mobile, Louisiana, was the home of a branch of her family that had kept the flour and the stamps for sixty years, and she was born in the back room of the store in the winter, with the rain on the tin roof and the train for the coast running late. Her mother took her south to New Orleans within a year, to a cousin's house off Magazine Street, and the household grew up in the shadow of the Korean War. She was thirteen when the war began, and one of her uncles, a cousin of the House, was killed in it, and it was her first notice, she said, of how a thing that the grown people were not discussing could be read in the way that they looked at the mail. She left school at sixteen and went straight into the diner. A diner at that hour was the best listening post in the district. Every night shift of printers and bus drivers, every sailor, every young cop and every woman coming off a hospital ward ate between midnight and four, and each told her more than they would have told a priest. She was a Broker before she was a hunter, and in the Delacroix book that is a kind of nobility. She did not sell a secret. She traded in what she called the weather, in who was out late and who had stopped coming, in whose husband had a new coat, which house had the lamp lit at the wrong hour and what the milk delivery had said about the new tenants. She wrote none of it down. She sold it, now and then, to the cousins of the House, in exchange for favours, and a Delacroix cousin on Royal Street who bought her weather in the nineteen-fifties said that it was worth three detectives. She was never paid in cash. She was paid in doors that opened, and in being told that a certain man was not to be trusted, and once, in the autumn of 1965, in a roof, when Hurricane Betsy took the one over her mother's house and a Delacroix cousin who sold roofing put a new one on in a week. Her daughter was born in 1966. Rosalie's father was a man of the Quarter, a musician, according to one account, and a merchant seaman, according to another, and Marguerite gave neither account and let both stand. She did not marry him. She brought the child up in two rooms over a barber's shop on Rampart Street, with a hot plate, a window on the street and a neighbour who was a trumpeter and worked nights. Rosalie slept to the sound of a trumpet through the wall. Marguerite worked double shifts to pay for school shoes and a piano lesson, and in the long run the child had the shoes and, as an adult, no talent for the piano. They were very close. The Vietnam years passed over the two of them with no more than the usual grief, and by the end of them she had saved enough to buy the barber's building, which she did at a sheriff's sale for eleven hundred dollars and a promise to the barber that he could stay. She was called in the autumn of 1970. She was driving back at dusk from a funeral in a back parish in a friend's borrowed car, through the cane country below the lake, when the car stopped at a crossroads with a flat tyre. It was an empty place of ditches, a cattle gate and a leaning sign. At the far side of the crossroads stood a tinker's cart, an old-fashioned knife-grinder's wagon with a wheel and a stone, such as still worked the back parishes in those years, and the horse in the shafts was standing with its head down. She got out to ask the way. She laid her hand on the horse's neck, out of habit, and found that it was warm, and breathing, and a long way from being tired. On the box of the cart sat the tinker, upright, with the reins slack in his hands, and she saw, as she came round to the step, that his collar was black and that the whole of the man had been emptied out of it like a sack. He was perfectly cold. She stood for a long moment in the dusk with the warm horse and the dry man and did what she did best, which was to look at the scene as a waitress looks at a room, and to ask who it was that had left. The marks in the dust at the roadside were of a man's boots, bare of any dirt, going one way, and she followed them as far as the next field. Then she went back, got in the car and sat with her hands on the wheel for twenty minutes, and drove to the Delacroix cousin on Royal Street, who had been waiting for her, he said, for ten years. The craft that she made of it was Second Line Cover. Her kinsman Xavier Delacroix, the druggist of Algiers, who had been the first to use the parade as a screen for the hunt, took her on in the winter of 1970 and taught her what he knew, which was a great deal. A funeral band leads the dead to the grave with a dirge, and on the way home plays something loud, and the second line, the neighbours and strangers who follow, dance. Nobody looks at faces. Xavier had taught the House to walk in the crowd. Marguerite, who had a waitress's eye for a room, taught it to read one. She could stand at the edge of a second line with a plate of red beans in her hand, as though she were taking dinner to a relative, and pick out of three hundred dancers the one who was not breathing, and walk beside it, in step, until the band turned a corner and the crowd closed behind them. She did it nineteen times, by her count. The cousins called her The Cold Falcon for her eyes and her manner. She was proudest of Rosalie, who was called in 1999, at thirty-three, and who, in 1984, married Neil Butler Faulkner, the son of the nurse Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, at a wedding in the church in the Faubourg, where the two mothers stood side by side in hats and agreed on everything. Josephine, who was an old hand at the work of waiting, took Marguerite's arm. They remained friends, in the way of two women who had both listened to a great deal, until Josephine died in 2010. When Rosalie died in 2016, Marguerite put her apron on the following morning and served the breakfast. She said afterwards that it was the only thing that she could think to do with her hands. She worked until she was eighty-one. The stroke came in 2019, at the counter, with a coffee pot in her hand, and she was held up by the cook until the ambulance came. Her last words, by the cook's account, were that table six wanted a refill. Marguerite Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Cold Falcon, the waitress who watched the room in the mirror behind the pie case and who could walk a dead man out of a parade without breaking step. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet brokers of the old houses, the women who listened for a living and who turned the gossip of a counter into the hunt's best intelligence.