Naomi Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Naomi Faulkner was born in 1827 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-six years as a schoolteacher in Louisville and in the Treme quarter. She was the younger child of the printer Lewis Thayer Faulkner and the seamstress Naomi Kincaid, the sister of the storekeeper Milton Kincaid Faulkner, and a descendant, through a long line of hunters, of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. She never married. She was not a hunter, and held that one was quite enough in any family to count as a disturbance, but she taught the children of the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter for forty years, and she died in 1903 of cancer, at seventy-six, in the rooms over her brother's old store, after a career that had taken her from a dame school on a steamboat landing to one of the public schools of the city. She was born in New Orleans, like her brother, by the custom of the Faulkner women. Her parents lived at Frankfort, Kentucky, in the little house over the dress shop, but her mother, who did not trust any midwife who had not delivered a Faulkner, took the steamboat south in the winter of 1826 with a trunk, a letter and a four-year-old son, and was received once more in the house on the edge of the quarter where her husband's father, Silas Faulkner, had lived since 1804. Silas's daughter Eliza, who was twenty-two and engaged to no one in particular, looked after her. The child was born in the first week of the new year, in the back room, with the same Treme midwife in attendance, and was named for her mother. Her brother Milton, who was told that he had a sister, asked whether she would be able to read. He was told that in time she would. She grew up in Frankfort and then in Louisville, in a household of type cases and bolts of cloth, and in the long evenings of her childhood she learned to read from the proofs that her father brought home and to sew from the scraps that her mother saved. She was a small, brisk, fair girl, with her mother's grey eyes and a tongue that was, at nine, considered alarming. She corrected the grammar of the preacher. She corrected the grammar of the editor. She corrected, once, in a letter that her father was obliged to post with an apology, the arithmetic of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and she was delighted to learn, when the legislature replied, that she had been right. Her brother Milton, who was four years older and a great deal quieter, was her confidant. He taught her to set type, which she took up with a zeal that her mother found unladylike, and she, in return, taught him to dance. They were a pair. When she was eleven she was sent to a girls' academy on Jefferson Street, and she took, in the course of four years, the whole of its curriculum, and was given a prize for French, a prize for mathematics and a polite note from the headmistress suggesting that she should be kept away from the geography class, where she had caused trouble by demonstrating that the textbook had the Ohio in the wrong place. It was in the printing shop that she was told. She was sixteen. Her father, who had been putting off the conversation for years, took her into the composing room one evening, and in the smell of ink and lamp oil, in the same small, throat-clearing way in which he had explained the matter to Milton, told her about the Red Ledger, about the hunters in the family and about his own father and brothers. She listened without a word. At the end she asked whether there was anything that she could do. Her father said that a person who could teach was worth a dozen who could shoot. She said that she had always thought so. She opened her own school in 1845, at eighteen, in the front room of a house on Third Street in Louisville, with twelve pupils, a slate apiece and a blackboard that she had painted herself, and she ran it for eight years. It was not a fashionable school. It took the daughters of boatmen, of clerks and of the steamboat stewards, and it taught them to read, to write a good hand, to cast a column of figures and to find their way about on a map. She was a strict, amusing, impatient teacher, who said that a child who could not spell could not be trusted, and who did not allow the word impossible in the room. Her pupils remembered her as the only adult they had ever met who said she did not know. In 1853 she came to New Orleans, in the year of the great yellow fever summer, to keep house for her brother. It was a difficult season to arrive. The epidemic took eight thousand lives in a city of a hundred and fifty thousand, and the streets of the Treme were hung with black. She nursed in a ward, beside her aunt Clara Alden, the herbalist, and learned in a month a good deal more about the fever than she had wished to, and when the cold came in November she rented a room on Rampart Street and opened, in the spring, a day school, for the children of the quarter. It was a mixed, noisy, cheerful place, in which French, English, Spanish and a fair amount of German were spoken before the first bell, and in which she was obliged to learn at least a little of all of them. She was a person whom the Faulkners of the city depended on. Her cousins' children, the grandchildren of Caleb and of Eliza, came to her for their letters, and she taught them, in the school hours, the lessons of the schoolroom, and in the evenings, in the back room of the store, the other lesson, of which the family did not speak. She taught them a code of small marks, for the margins of letters. She taught them to note who had come to the door, at what hour and what he had been carrying. She taught them to be accurate. A hunter's child, she said, was a witness from the age of seven, and a good witness was a person who had been taught to look. The war came. The city fell in the spring of 1862, the schools were closed by the Confederate authorities and then reopened by the Union ones, and she went on teaching, in whatever room she could find, to whichever children came. She taught a class of orphans in a church basement, for no pay, through the worst winter of the occupation. She did not take sides in public. In private, she gave a good deal of money to the Union hospital and to the Ledger's cousins, and she kept the accounts of both. Her brother, who was forty, stayed in his shop. They dined together every evening, in the rooms above it, and he read her the news, and she corrected it. After the war she taught in a public school. New Orleans, in the years of Reconstruction, had for a time the only mixed public schools in the South, and in the early 1870s she was one of the white teachers who took a class of mixed children in a building on Dumaine Street, and stayed. It was a dangerous, unpopular and, she said, thoroughly satisfactory choice. When the schools were resegregated at the end of the decade she kept teaching where she could. She was a small grey woman in a black dress, with a pointer, who did not raise her voice and did not need to, and three generations of the Treme remembered that she had taught them to spell necessary. Her brother died in 1899, and she took over the ledger, closed the books on the store and moved the last of his papers into her own rooms. She was by then seventy-two. The cancer, which she had known about for two years and had told no one except her cousin Carrie, who nursed her, took four years to do its work. She taught until seventy, and went on keeping a class in her sitting room, for the sake of a few who could not pay, to within a few months of the end. She died in the spring of 1903, at seventy-six, in the bedroom above the store, with the blackboard still on the wall and, in her hand, a piece of chalk. Naomi Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the schoolteacher of the Treme, the sister who taught the cousins to look. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers of the Red Ledger, who never fired a shot and never missed a mistake, and who sent generations of children into a dangerous world with a good hand, a clear head and a taste for accuracy.