Simone Delacroix

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

Simone Delacroix was born in 1930 at Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-six years as a laundry supervisor and as the mother of a slayer, a woman of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes, who served the Red Ledger with starch, steam and a very exact count of sheets. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she was clear about it all her life. She raised one son, the slayer Felix Delacroix, born in 1957 and dead in 1991, whose father the family papers do not name, and she lived to see him marry Lorraine Trahan Faulkner in 1981 and to bury him ten years after. She died in 2016 of a fall, aged eighty-six, in the house in Algiers where she had lived for sixty years. The Delacroix remember her as the supervisor who ran the largest laundry on the west bank and who could tell, from a basket of linen, which of her cousins had been out the night before and how badly it had gone. Algiers in 1930 was a town of railroad shops, dry docks, shotgun cottages and flooding springs, a place where the ferry whistle set the hours, and Simone was born in a rented cottage three streets back from the landing, on a morning of thin rain, into a branch of the family that did not often appear in the family book. Her parents are not named there at any length. They are recorded, in the tidy Delacroix manner, as respectable people of the parish who kept a pew, a vegetable patch and a rule of not discussing the work at table, and the child grew up in a house in which the most interesting subject was never mentioned. She was a thin, quiet, upright girl with strong wrists and a habit of folding things. At five she folded the tablecloth after Sunday dinner into a rectangle so exact that her aunt held it up to the window to look for a seam. At eight she was sent to the Delacroix cousins across the street to help with the washing, and was found, at the end of the first afternoon, to have sorted the whole of it by colour, by fabric and by owner, without being told that there were three ways of doing so. She was fifteen when the war ended and the city, which had been a port of embarkation for four years, began to empty. She took a place in the finishing room of a commercial laundry that served the hotels, the hospitals and the shipping lines, and she was put on the mangle with six other girls, in a room full of steam, among the noise of a dozen machines. It was hard work. She liked it. She liked the order of the sorting tables and the chalk marks on the bundles and the great canvas carts that rolled out at dawn to the Quarter. She had, her forewoman said, the one gift that a laundry could not teach, which was that she never lost a thing. A pillowcase that had been out of its place for a week came back to its owner with a pin in it and a note. The Delacroix cousins knew all this. A family that kept vampire slayers needed a laundry as a family that kept horses needed a farrier, and when Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix was killed under a barn in 1949 and her tubs went silent in the back house on Burgundy Street, the cousins found that the Ledger's wash had no one to wash it. Simone, who was nineteen, was asked to take it on. She did not ask what was in it. She took it in, a bundle at a time, with a number on a tag that did not match the customer's name, and she washed it with a good deal more care than the hotel sheets. The cuffs came back clean. The coats came back with the tears mended. She learned, by the weight of a collar and the colour of a stain, what the work had been, and she never put it into words, and when an older cousin finally said it to her, in the winter of 1951, over a cup of coffee in the kitchen of the Algiers drugstore, she said that she had known it for two years and that she preferred not to be told twice. She took no part in the hunting. This was a decision, and the cousins, who respected decisions, did not argue with it. She would carry nothing, she said, that she could not wash. But she kept the house at the end of the ferry run in a condition that no hunter could have bettered, with a lamp on the porch, a pot on the stove and a basket of clean towels at the foot of the stairs, and a man who came to the back door at three in the morning with his sleeve torn was never asked a single question. He was given a basin. The Korean War years, which sent a great many of the Delacroix boys across the Pacific and filled the Quarter with sailors, found her a supervisor of the night shift at twenty-two, with two hundred sheets an hour to account for, and a reputation, among the girls, for being fair. She never raised her voice. She tapped the table. Her son was born in 1957. The family papers record the father as unrecorded, in the careful phrasing that the Delacroix keep for matters that they have agreed to leave alone, and Simone, who was twenty-seven, raised the child in the cottage with the help of her aunt, her forewoman and a great many neighbours. Felix was a bright, quick, stubborn boy with her wrists and an uncanny sense of where people were. By ten he could tell, from the other end of a corridor, who had come in. She told him nothing, and found that she did not need to. The Delacroix cousins who ran the Ledger's Algiers circle took him in hand at sixteen, as they took in all the boys of the house, and she put a clean shirt on him every morning and a clean shirt in his bag every night. He was called to the work, and was a slayer of the House of Delacroix, and she was proud of him, and she said so once, at the door, in the autumn of 1974, and never again. Hurricane Betsy came up the river in September of 1965. The levees below the city failed, the lower wards filled with water, and the west bank, which was spared the worst, lost its power for four days. Simone, who was thirty-five, had the keys of the laundry. She started the old boiler on a coal fire, set up two mangles on a generator that she borrowed from a ferry captain, and washed for a week, without pay, the bedding of the Algiers school, the church hall and the parish shelter, as well as the clothes of the families who had been taken out of the Ninth Ward in rowing boats. She slept on a pile of towels. The hunters who were in the water that week, and there were several, came off the boats to a basin of hot water and a clean sheet, and nobody ever asked how the laundry had known to be ready. She said it was a laundry. Laundries were always ready. Felix married Lorraine Trahan Faulkner in 1981, in the church in Algiers, at a Mass that Simone attended in a blue dress that she had made herself. She had a daughter-in-law whom she liked at once, a tall, level-eyed young woman who, as it happened, came of a long line of slayers of the Red Ledger, and the two of them sat at the head of the table at the wedding breakfast and discussed the proper way to remove a bloodstain from a damask cloth. It was the happiest day, the cousins said, that anyone had seen her have. In the Vietnam years she had worried for the boys who were drafted, and in the oil bust of the eighties for the laundry, which lost its hotel contracts, and she kept it open by taking in the uniforms of a dozen new casinos and, in the end, of a hospital. She retired at sixty-five. By then she had supervised two thousand women, in fifty years. Felix died in 1991, at thirty-four, and she buried him in the Delacroix tomb, with a small stone that she had washed herself. She went on. She kept the house, and she cooked for the cousins on Sundays, and she wore the same dark blue dress to Mass for twenty-five years. In the spring of 2016 she fell on the back steps of the cottage, going out to take in a line of washing before the rain, and was found by a neighbour on her side, with the basket beside her and every sheet, as the neighbour said, folded. Simone Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the supervisor of the west-bank laundry, the woman who washed the Ledger's coats and never once asked what had been on them. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet keepers of the old houses, the ones who made the hunters' return possible with a clean sheet and a lit lamp, and who proved that a very exact count is a kind of courage.