Nettie Faulkner Delacroix

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

Nettie Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1864 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-one years as a schoolroom teacher's daughter, a rosewood inlayer in her girlhood and, for most of her working life, a typist in the counting rooms and cotton offices around the French Quarter. She was the younger child of the carpenter Baptiste Delacroix and of the schoolteacher Georgia Faulkner, and the sister of Elias Faulkner Delacroix. In 1887 she married the streetcar conductor Sylvain Delacroix, and they raised two children, Clara Faulkner Delacroix and Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix. She died in 1925 of a fall, aged sixty-one. She was not a hunter, and she was not a vampire slayer, although she was born into the Red Ledger through her mother and married into the House of Delacroix through her husband. But for forty years she typed the Ledger's Louisiana correspondence in clean, exact, carbon-copied pages, and the family remembers her as the woman who never once made an error in a date. She was born in the middle of the war, in the upstairs rooms on Royal Street that her father had built over his shop, in a city that had been under Union occupation for two years and whose trade was mostly rumour. Her brother Elias was a year old and had already taken possession of the house. Nettie was a small, sharp-eyed, silent baby who stared at things until they explained themselves, and her mother, who taught school and did not flatter children, wrote in the family Bible that she was the most attentive infant she had ever met. She was brought up in the school on Ursulines Street, among the benches, in the smell of chalk and wet slates and warm wood, and she learned her letters by listening through the wall. Her father taught her the carpenter's trade, since he did not see why a daughter should not hold a plane. At fifteen she made a small, dovetailed, rosewood case with a secret spring, and it was kept in the family for a generation. It is worth saying that she was proudest of it for the wrong reason. She liked that the spring was invisible. All her life she preferred the small mechanism that did its work unseen, and the family has always said that it was this, and not any talent for hunting, that made her useful to the Ledger. The Ledger is a book of names and places, and what it needs, more than gunmen, is a steady supply of hands that can keep a secret and write a fair line. She began by teaching. For three years after 1882 she kept the youngest class at her mother's school and was thought a great success, although she said herself that she had no gift for noise. What she had was a gift for order. In 1885, when the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition opened on the old Upper City Park grounds and every cotton house in New Orleans wanted its circulars copied in a hurry, a factor on Carondelet Street who knew her brother hired her for a week to work one of the new typewriting machines. It was a Remington, black and gold, with a bell that rang at the end of each line. She sat down at it on a Monday morning, and by Friday she was the fastest operator in the building. She never went back to the classroom. The work suited her. A typewriter in 1885 was a thing that most clerks distrusted and most women were not yet permitted to touch, and she took the one as seriously as she took the other. She typed bills of lading, protests and cotton circulars in the day, and in the evening, at her mother's kitchen table or later at her own, she typed the fair copies of the Red Ledger's Louisiana notices. These were warnings to the cousins up the river, lists of lodgings that could be trusted, the route of a quarry, the name of a doctor who would ask no questions. The typewriter gave her one great advantage. She could make four carbon copies at a stroke, and she was the first person in the family to see what that meant. Until then a notice sent to three chapters had to be copied out three times by a tired printer or a cousin with a pen, and every copy had its own mistakes. After Nettie, there was one text, made at once, and it was right. She met her husband on the Canal Street line. Sylvain Delacroix, a thin, fair, watchful young clerk of twenty-one who had recently left a counting house for the mule cars, took her fare in the spring of 1886 and gave her, by mistake, the wrong change. She counted it in front of him. She said that it was four cents short. He said that she was probably right, and that she was the only passenger in a year who had checked. They were married in 1887 in the Church of the Treme, with his mother Heloise, a seamstress of fifty-six, making the dress, and Baptiste supplying, as a wedding present, a sewing table whose third drawer could only be opened by a person who knew which knob to lift. They lived for thirty years in a narrow house on Burgundy Street, not far from the old Delacroix courtyard, and their children were born in it. Clara Faulkner Delacroix arrived in 1889 and Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix in 1891, and neither was called to the work. Nettie, who had a great respect for a child's right to a quiet life, made no attempt to persuade them. She did not, however, see why they should not be useful, and both learned to type before they learned to skate. Clara took the typewriter; Baptiste, named for his grandfather, took the plane. The city changed around her. The mules gave way to electric cars in the 1890s, and Sylvain, who had taken to the platform as a duck takes to water, rode the new lines and learned every stop by the smell of it. The district behind Basin Street was walled off and named Storyville in 1897, and the cotton offices, the wharves and the Quarter went about their business within a few blocks of the brass bands that would presently make the place famous. The bands were heard through the office windows on hot evenings, and Nettie, who did not approve of most things, admitted that the cornets kept her up to time. She said that a good typist and a good cornetist had a great deal in common. The Ledger's cousins, who had been trained to regard the new district as a hunting ground and a hazard, sent her their questions in flat, anxious sentences, and she answered them on the machine, in sentences as flat and a good deal calmer. The Great War came in 1917 and emptied the offices of their young men. Nettie, who was fifty-three, took in the overflow of copying from three houses, and trained four younger women at her own kitchen table. The Ledger's pages went out steadily all through it. In the autumn of 1918 the influenza reached the city, and the funerals went by the window every morning. Her daughter Clara, who was twenty-nine, nursed a whole street of neighbours and was not ill herself. Nettie wrote, in a margin of the ledger, the single line that every household ought to have kept, which was that the dead were to be counted twice, once for the parish and once for the book. She died in the winter of 1925, on the back stair of the house on Burgundy Street, carrying a box of typed sheets down to the cart, at sixty-one. She had missed a step in the dark, and she was found within the hour, and she had not let go of the box. It was delivered to the Ledger that evening, by her son, every page in order, and the last sheet in the pile still held, as the cousins noted with some awe, the freshest carbon of all. She was buried in the Faulkner tomb in the cemetery of the Treme, in the row that her mother had bought. Nettie Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the typist of Burgundy Street, who turned the Red Ledger's scraps into clean pages and taught a household that an exact copy is a kind of courage. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and copyists of the old houses, the people who never carried a pistol and never wanted one, and who by the plain, unhurried labour of the fingers made certain that what the hunters knew was still known, and still right, after the hunters were gone.