Mary Cole

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

A hat, in New Orleans in the 1880s, was a serious thing. It was built on a wire frame, covered in buckram and silk, trimmed with ribbon, flowers, feathers or a stuffed bird, and pinned to a head with a pair of pins as long as a knitting needle, and the woman who made it was as much an architect as a dressmaker. Mary Cole was one of the best hatmakers in the city. She was born in 1857 in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and she worked for some thirty-five years as a milliner in the French Quarter, in a shop that was also the front room of her house. In 1877 she married the telegraph operator Benjamin Faulkner, and they had two children, Georgia Cole Faulkner and Benjamin Cole Faulkner. She died in 1909 of kidney failure, aged fifty-two. She belonged to no slayer house and was never a hunter, but she was a Faulkner by marriage, and the family remembers her as the woman who delivered its messages in a hatbox. Algiers, when she was born, was a low, green, noisy village on the west bank, joined to the city by a ferry that ran every quarter of an hour, and a good deal less respectable than the people on the other side thought. It had a dry dock, a railroad yard, a levee lined with coal barges and a great many small, brightly painted cottages on streets that flooded. Mary was the third of four children of a river family of modest means. Her father worked on the docks, and her mother took in washing and kept a goat. She was a slender, dark-haired, small-handed girl with grey eyes and a fine sense of colour, and she first showed it at the age of six, when she was discovered on the gallery with a pile of scraps, a handful of dried flowers and a length of ribbon, making a bonnet for the goat. The goat, it was agreed, looked well. She was born in the same week, three doors down, as the daughter of a visiting family from the ridge, a small, dark, laughing baby called Emma Rutledge, and the two grew up as friends, in and out of each other's houses, whenever Emma's family came across the river. Emma's mother, Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, was a seamstress, and it was in her workroom that Mary first saw a real needle used as a craft. She was nine. She was allowed to hold the thread. By twelve she had been taken on, for a few pennies a week, by a milliner in Algiers who made hats for the wives of the railroad officers, and at fourteen she crossed the river on the ferry to begin an apprenticeship with a Frenchwoman on Canal Street, in a shop that smelled of steam, starch and violets. She learned everything. She learned to block a felt over a wooden form with a wet cloth and a hot iron. She learned to wire a brim so it held a line, to sew a veil so it hung straight and to put a bird on a hat in a way that looked alive, which required an unpleasant amount of work with needle and wire. She learned the language of the trade, in which a hat was a capote or a toque or a poke or a turban, and she learned the seasons, which were the same as the church's, with a great rush before Easter and a second before Mardi Gras. She was a quiet, exact, inventive worker, and by eighteen the Frenchwoman was giving her the customers who could not be satisfied. She said later that the best thing she had learned was to look at a woman's face for a full minute before she thought of the hat. She met Benjamin Faulkner in 1875, at Emma's house on the ridge, at a Sunday dinner. She had come across the river for the day, and had taken a hat of her own make, a small straw with a black ribbon, which her friend told her at the door was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The brother, who was twenty, six feet tall and as silent as a church, did not say a word through the soup, and she decided that he must be rude. He was not. He was, she found, a man who said nothing unless it was true, and who listened, and who could tell from the far end of a table that the ribbon on her hat had been put on with a stitch the wrong way. He had no idea about ribbons. He had noticed that she kept touching it. They were married in 1877, in the church of the Treme, in a hat of her own making, which was blue. It was the year that the last federal troops left the city and Reconstruction came to an end, and she said, with some pride, that she had been married on the day that history changed and had not noticed. The new couple took two rooms on Dauphine Street, and she set up her bench in the window. She was twenty. She had a box of tools, a block, a bolt of buckram and a great many ideas, and within three years she had fourteen customers, two girls and a card in the window, which said simply, "M. Faulkner, Milliner". She made hats for the wives of the cotton factors and for the nuns of the Ursuline convent, who did not ask for trimming, and for the ladies of the district in the years after 1897, who were extremely fond of feathers. She was known for restraint. A Mary Cole hat, said the Quarter, looked as though it had simply happened. She learned what her husband was in the first year, in the usual way, from an uncle at the wedding feast, and took it with composure. She was a practical woman, and she asked only two questions. The first was whether the Ledger's hunters were decent men, and the second was whether they would want hats. The answer to the first was yes, and to the second, no, but they would want a good many things carried, and she was in a position to carry them. A hatbox is the most innocent parcel in the world. It is large, it is light, it goes to the best houses and the worst, and no one looks inside. She carried, in the crown of her boxes, in the course of thirty years, letters, small parcels, silver shot wrapped in tissue, and more than once a pair of spectacles belonging to a hunter who could not see without them. Her husband's wire and her own boxes were the two fastest means of communication that the New Orleans chapter had. Her children were born in the first years of the marriage. Georgia Cole Faulkner came in 1879 and lived until 1933, a bright, brown-eyed girl, who was put on a stool at the bench at six and could make a flower from a scrap of silk at eight. Benjamin Cole Faulkner came in 1882 and lived until 1956, a large, calm baby who sat under the bench and went to sleep on the hat forms, and who later followed his father onto the wire. The yellow fever summers of the 1880s frightened her more than she let her husband see. She kept the children indoors, burned sulphur in the rooms and boiled the water, and sewed through the hottest weeks with a damp cloth on her neck. They all lived, which she attributed to the sulphur. She began to tire in her forties, and the kidneys, which had been weak since a fever of her girlhood, failed slowly. She kept the shop open until the last year. Her daughter did the fine work, at first under her direction and then alone, and she sat by the window in the front room, in a good chair, with a cushion and a block, blocking felt for an hour at a time. She died in the autumn of 1909, at fifty-two, in the back bedroom, with her husband and both children in the room. Her friend Emma Rutledge made the dress in which she was buried. It was grey, and the hat, which her daughter made, was a small straw with a black ribbon, sewn the right way. Mary Cole is remembered in the Faulkner family as the milliner of Dauphine Street, the wife who carried the Red Ledger's parcels in a hatbox and whose hats were never noticed for the right reasons. In the Slayerverse she stands for the tradeswomen and go-betweens of the Faulkner line, who had an eye for the thing that did not belong in a room, and who proved that a great secret can be carried by a person with a parcel and a smile.