Sarah Delacroix Faulkner

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

Sarah Delacroix Faulkner lived eighty-two years and sewed for seventy of them. She was born in 1830 in New Orleans, Louisiana, in her uncle Caleb's house in the Treme, worked as a seamstress in the French Quarter and later at her own table on the Metairie ridge, and died in 1912 of pneumonia, aged eighty-two. She was the eldest child of the cane farmer Hippolyte Delacroix and Eliza Faulkner, a physician's widow of the Creole quarter, and the sister of Effie Faulkner Delacroix, the vampire slayer Augustus Faulkner and Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix. She married the farmer Edwin Rutledge in 1854 and raised two children, Benjamin Faulkner and Emma Rutledge. She was not a hunter. But she cut, fitted and mended the coats in which a good many hunters of the Red Ledger went out at night, and it was said in the family that nobody in the Quarter could put a pocket where a pocket was needed and make it look like a fold. She was born in the city by family custom rather than by accident. Her mother, who had been raised among hunters and believed in taking no chances, came in from the bayou for her confinements and went to her brother Caleb Thayer Faulkner's house in the Treme, where Clara Alden, the herbalist, presided over the birth with a pot of something hot and a strong opinion, and where, in the same season, Clara's own daughter Carrie was born. The two girls were cousins, neighbours by the week and close friends by the year, and Sarah spent her childhood on Bayou Lafourche and her summers in the Treme, between the cane, the bayou French of her father's house and the gentle mockery of her cousin Carrie, who held that a girl who could sew could always be told from a girl who could only embroider. Her mother taught her to sew, at four, in the gallery of the raised cottage above Thibodaux, with a needle too big for her fingers and a length of ticking. By ten she could turn a hem. By thirteen she was running up shirts for the field hands, and at fifteen, when her grandmother's old friends in the Quarter heard that the Delacroix girl had a finer stitch than most of the shops, she was sent to New Orleans and bound to a dressmaker on Chartres Street, a stout Frenchwoman who taught her to cut on the bias, to set a sleeve and to hold a pin in her lips without speaking for an hour. It was a long, crowded, bright workroom, with six girls at a table and a window onto the street, and it was there, in the fever-ridden, cheerful city of the late 1840s, that Sarah learned that the people of the town could be read by what they asked for. A bride wanted white. A widow wanted black and to be told that it suited her. A gentleman of the exchange wanted a coat that would hide the weight of a purse. She met Edwin Rutledge at the French Market, where she spent her Saturdays helping a cousin at a stall of thread and ribbon. He sold vegetables at the next one, a big, sunburned, slow-spoken Baton Rouge man who took off his hat to cheat nobody. The courtship took six years, conducted over bean baskets, and ended in the spring of 1854 in the church of the Treme. Her father, who was failing, had given his blessing and lived to see the house on the ridge. Hippolyte Delacroix died in 1859. Her mother Eliza lived on until 1877, on the bayou farm that her youngest son inherited, and came down to the city for the feast days and sat at her daughter's table in the black she had worn since her first widowhood in the Creole quarter. Sarah's children were born in the first years of the marriage. Benjamin Faulkner Rutledge came in 1855, a large, fair, slow boy like his father, who became a farmer and a wagon-maker. Emma Rutledge came in 1857, a dark, quick, laughing girl who married a cotton broker. Neither hunted. It was her brother Augustus who brought her the work. He was a river pilot and a slayer, and he came in from the boats one evening in 1856 with a coat that had torn along a seam and a request that she should say nothing about why. She mended it. She noticed the depth of the pocket, which held a revolver, and the loop inside the lining, which held a flask, and she said at once what was wrong with both. The next coat she made for him was cut on her own design. It hung, as all her coats did, a little heavy on the left. It had a double lining that held a string of silver-cast shot so that it would not clink, a long inner pocket for a stake and cuffs that could be turned back to show a clean edge when the wearer was stopped by the watch. By the time of the war she had fitted a dozen men, all of them cousins or friends of cousins, and she was known in the Ledger's Louisiana pages as the tailor who could be trusted. She was also, in the ordinary way, a shop. She took in sewing for the wives of the planters and the clerks of the exchange, altered uniforms for both armies and in the lean years of Reconstruction made up a great many mourning gowns. In the fever summers, of which she lived through five, she sewed shrouds. In the worst of them, in 1878, the same year her husband died of a stroke in his own cane rows, she worked with her daughter Emma through the nights, cutting unbleached cotton into winding sheets by lamplight, at the same table at which she had made a wedding dress two springs before. The work, she said afterward, had been the only thing that kept her hands from shaking. She was a widow for thirty-four years. She did not remarry, sold the wagon to Benjamin and took in a great deal of sewing, and she lived in the house on the ridge with a pair of spectacles, a cat and a tailor's dummy that her grandchildren called Madame. She sewed until the last winter, long after her eyes had failed, by feel, and was found to have made, in the week before she died, a small, plain coat for a great-grandson, with a pocket in the lining that could not have been asked for by anyone. She died in 1912 of pneumonia, at eighty-two, in her own bed, with her daughter at her side. Sarah Delacroix Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the tailor of the Red Ledger, the cousin who put the pocket where it was needed. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the needle, who clothed the long war in plain cloth, who let out the seams of a slayer's coat when he came back heavier and took them in when he did not, and whose stitches held long after the names of their hunters had faded from the tally.