Sylvain Delacroix was born in 1865 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lived sixty-eight years as a clerk, a conductor and a fixture of the streetcar lines of New Orleans. He was the only son of the seamstress Heloise Delacroix, who never named his father, and in 1887 he married the typist Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, with whom he raised two children, Clara Faulkner Delacroix and Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix. He died in 1933 of a sudden collapse, aged sixty-eight. He was a streetcar conductor by trade and a member of the House of Delacroix by blood, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes that stood between the Faulkner and Proctor bloodlines. He was not a vampire slayer, and he never pretended to a craft, a gun or an alias. But for forty years he rode the lines of the city, and the family remembers him as the conductor who knew, better than any clerk or policeman, who got on at what stop, and who never once said so aloud.
He was born on the landing at Baton Rouge because his mother had gone home to have him. It was the last spring of the war, and New Orleans had been in Union hands for three years, the Quarter half shut and half hungry. Heloise, who was thirty-four and unmarried and did not intend to be asked questions, took a steamer upriver to the aunt who still kept the old dry-goods store on the bluff, and the boy was delivered in a room over a milliner's shop in a thunderstorm. The family papers do not name his father. Heloise brought her son down to the city in June, put him in a basket on her cutting table, and let the Quarter say what it liked. It said a good deal. Sylvain grew up with the remarkable self-possession of a child who has learned early that there are questions that a household does not answer.
He was a thin, fair, watchful boy, with his mother's quick hands and none of her silence. She raised him in two rooms on Burgundy Street, with a window full of geraniums, and he learned to read at the cutting table from old copies of the Picayune, which she collected from customers for the purpose. He went to the parish school, and at fourteen was sent to a counting house on Carondelet Street, where he swept, ran errands and gradually learned the cotton trade from the bottom. It was a world of bills of lading and sample bales, loud at noon and silent at five, and in six years he rose to the stool of a junior clerk. He was good with figures and better with people. He could tell in a minute whether a man who said he was short of money was telling the truth, and it was a gift that he would later find worth more on a streetcar than in any office.
In 1885 he left the counting house. It was the year of the great Exposition, and every clerk in the city was suddenly either overworked or unwanted, and Sylvain, who was twenty, had been told by his employer that there would be no rise. He went to the Canal Street line, where the company was hiring conductors for the mule cars, and he was taken on at once, because it was said that a man who could count a cotton ticket could certainly count a fare. He wore a blue cap and a nickel badge and carried a punch, and he stood on the rear platform with one hand on the brake, calling the streets in a voice that was a good deal more musical than he knew. By the end of the first month the regular passengers had learned his name.
It was on the Canal Street line that he met his wife. Nettie Faulkner, a young typist who boarded at the corner of Carondelet every morning, paid him a nickel in the spring of 1886, took her change, counted it and told him gravely that it was four cents short. It was. He was mortified, and delighted. He made a point, for the following three months, of being on the platform at her stop, and of giving her the right change, which she counted with great attention, and accepted. He proposed, at last, on the platform, between Rampart and Basin, with six passengers listening, and the whole car applauded at the answer. They were married in 1887, in the church of the Treme. His mother, who was fifty-six, made the dress.
The Red Ledger, in the matter of Sylvain, was wise in an odd way. He was a Delacroix, and the Delacroix had always been the cousins who stood between the great houses, and he married a Faulkner, which made the Ledger's Louisiana chapter his in-laws. But he was not a hunter, and they did not ask him to become one. What they asked was that he use his eyes. A conductor on a streetcar sees the whole city pass before him every day, the dock hands, the clerks, the nurses and the night people, and he is invited by no one to look at any of it, and so he is ignored. Sylvain looked. When a stranger got on at Canal and Claiborne at dusk, in a heavy coat in August, and sat in the back with his face turned away and did not move at the end of the line, Sylvain made a note in a small book, and gave it to his wife, who typed it, and sent it on. It was not much. It was, over forty years, a very great deal.
Their children were born in a narrow house on Burgundy Street. Clara Faulkner Delacroix arrived in 1889 and Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix in 1891. Neither was called. Sylvain, who had his own opinion of what the Ledger was worth and who did not hide it from his children, let them grow up knowing exactly what the family did and choosing, on the whole, to do something else. He taught them both to ride the cars for nothing, which is a privilege of a conductor's children, and in 1893, when the company electrified the Canal line and the mules were led off to a field in Gentilly, he took the little boy and the girl to the depot to see the last of them. His daughter Clara, who was four, cried. His son, who was two, waved. Sylvain said that these were the two proper responses.
The city changed around him, and he changed with it. The electric cars ran faster and the platforms were more crowded, and when Storyville was set out behind Basin Street in 1897 he began to see, in the dusk cars, a new kind of passenger, the sporting men, the musicians with their cases, the girls from the boarding houses, going one way at eight and the other at four. He liked the musicians. He said that a man with a cornet case was always civil to a conductor. When the Great War came in 1917 his son was of age, and went into the service as a carpenter, and came back in 1919 in one piece, which was as much as any father had a right to ask. The influenza of 1918 was worse. He worked the cars through it with a handkerchief tied over his face, and on two separate mornings had to put a man off in a state that he preferred not to describe.
Nettie died in 1925, on the back stair of the house, and he was sixty. He did not remarry. He kept the house, and kept the carbons in the kitchen drawer, and went on riding the cars until he was sixty-four, when the company, after the big strike of 1929, offered him a desk. He declined. He rode, as a passenger, for the last four years of his life, sitting at the back of the St. Charles car with his cap on his knee, and it was said that he still called the streets under his breath. He collapsed on a platform on Canal Street in the spring of 1933, at sixty-eight, and was dead before the car had stopped.
Sylvain Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the conductor of the Canal Street line, the boy without a father who became the man that everyone on the car was glad to see. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchers of the old houses, the ordinary people who stood at the door of a great city and saw everything that came in, and who had the judgment, which is rarer than courage, to write it down and say nothing.
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