Wilma Faulkner Cormier

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

Wilma Faulkner Cormier was born in 1902 in Thibodaux, Louisiana, on Bayou Lafourche, and lived eighty-three years, forty of them as a telephone operator on the switchboards of New Orleans. She was the second daughter of the cotton factor Milton Cormier and of Clara Faulkner, the keeper of a boarding house near the district the city later called Storyville, and the sister of Nettie Cormier, Lucius Faulkner and Ralph Cormier Faulkner. In 1925 she married the telegraph operator Alexander Sumner, and they had one child, Ethel Sumner Faulkner, born in 1926 and dead in 2015. She died in 1985 of a stroke, aged eighty-three, the last of her generation. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, though she was born into the Red Ledger through her mother and spent her working life at the one post in the city through which every urgent call had to pass. The Faulkners remember her as the loud one, the sister who knew everybody's number and most of their business, and who could put a call through to a hunter on a river steamer in the dark and have him answer on the second ring. She was born at Thibodaux because her mother had gone down the bayou for the summer. It was July of 1902, the boarding house behind Basin Street was hot, full and loud, and Clara Faulkner, who had a three-year-old, a lodger who had to be moved and a husband who was working a cotton crisis at the exchange, took the Southern Pacific train to Thibodaux to stay with a cousin of the Red Ledger who kept a house in the cane country, a long, shady place with a gallery and a mule in the yard. The baby was born on the gallery on a hot afternoon, in the middle of a thunderstorm, in a rocking chair, which the cousin had refused to let anyone move. She arrived, as the family has always put it, in the middle of an argument. Nobody could afterwards recall what it was about. She was brought home to New Orleans at six weeks, in a basket on the train, shouting, and the conductor, who had been warned, put her on the shady side. She was a loud child. It was not a bad temper, for she was a good-natured girl, but a natural volume, as though she had been built for a larger room, and she talked from the cradle to the grave, in two languages, to anyone who held still. She was quick, with her father's gift for figures and her mother's gift for noticing, and she could repeat a conversation that she had overheard in the next room, word for word, at the age of four. Her father, Milton, who was a silent man himself, took a certain amount of pleasure in this, and said that his second daughter was a natural clerk. Her sister Nettie, who was a deliberate, careful, grey-eyed child, said that Wilma had no use for a silence, and used to put a hand over her mouth in church. It did not work. She was, at eight, in the habit of reporting the lodgers' conversations to her mother in the kitchen, in a voice that carried to the cellar, and was told that she would one day be useful, if she could learn to lower it. Her father died in 1916, when she was fourteen, and she took it with a good deal of noise, then silence, then a decision. She left school at sixteen, in the middle of the influenza, and went to work in the kitchen of the boarding house, which had been turned into a hospital for the lodgers. She cooked, in that autumn, for thirty sick people, in two enormous pots, and learned that a girl who could make broth for thirty could do anything. Her mother, who had been waiting for a reason, said that she would have to find a trade. She found it, at eighteen, in the spring of 1920, by answering an advertisement in the Times-Picayune for girls with good voices and quick hands. The exchange on Carondelet Street was a long room full of young women with headsets, sitting at a tall brass-and-wood board with a field of plugs and little lamps, and it was the most exciting place that Wilma had ever been. She was taught to listen, to answer in a single bright phrase, to find the line by touch and to say nothing about what she had heard. The last was the hardest. A telephone operator, in those years, could hear a great deal, and the company kept a strict rule that nothing was repeated, and Wilma, who was the loudest girl in the building, kept it faithfully for forty years. It was, she said later, the only secret that she had ever been able to keep, and she kept it because it was a rule and because she had been told it was the job. She was good at it, so good that within two years she was on the long-distance board, handling the calls to Baton Rouge, Houston and Memphis, which were the ones that the hunters of the Red Ledger used. She was told what her mother was in the spring of 1922, in the kitchen, with Nettie, over a pot of coffee, in the same flat voice in which Clara had told her own husband twenty-five years before. She listened. She said that she had suspected for years, and that she had always wondered why the cousins who stayed three nights were so particular about the numbers they asked for. Then she asked what she could do. Clara said that it was possible that she could do a good deal, without leaving her desk. It was a considerable service. A hunter on the road, in a parish that had no telegraph and one telephone, at the back of a store or a doctor's house, could ring the long-distance board of New Orleans and ask for a number that would be given as an order for dry goods. Wilma, who knew the code, put him through. She knew whom to ring when a cousin was late. She could put the right three people on the line at once, without a word, in half a minute, and she had a habit of leaving the key open for the first thirty seconds of a certain kind of call, so that the board would hear it and make a note. She did not, she said, listen. She made sure that the call was not interrupted. She met Alexander Sumner in the summer of 1924, when a message came from her exchange to be sent by wire to Houston, and he rang to ask for the address, which was missing. She told him that the address was a matter of principle. He sent it as written. The next night she rang him to ask whether it had arrived, and they talked for twelve minutes, which was long enough, in Wilma's experience, for a man to give himself away. She said that he did not. They were married in 1925, in the spring, and the exchange gave her a wedding present, which was a rule against married women on the long-distance board and a special exemption for her, after her supervisor's protest, on account of her record. Her daughter Ethel Sumner Faulkner was born in 1926. She took the Faulkner name, at her grandmother's request. The great Mississippi flood of the spring of 1927 was her finest hour. The river was rising for six weeks, the telephone lines went down in the parishes one by one, and the exchange became the nerve of the city. Wilma worked sixteen-hour shifts for three days, taking calls from the levee boards, the Red Cross, the sheriffs of St. Bernard and Plaquemines, and the families whose houses were going under. She put through the call that told the cousins at Pointe a la Hache to take the children out. She could be heard from the other end of the room. The supervisor, who had said in 1920 that she was too loud for the board, said in May of 1927 that it was the only voice in the building that could be heard over the water. She and Alexander, who was on the telegraph for the levee boards, did not see each other for four days, and talked, in the intervals, through the clipped affectionate abbreviations of two people on duty. The Depression years she spent on the board, and the war years, when New Orleans filled with shipyard hands, soldiers and sailors, she spent at a board that had doubled in size and would have doubled again. She rose to chief operator in 1943. She trained eighty girls, and told every one of them the same thing, which was that a voice at the other end of a line was a person who might be having the worst night of her life. She was proud that none of her girls had ever left a call unanswered. When her mother, Clara, died in 1944, it was Wilma who sat up with her, and who was given, afterwards, a small leather notebook full of telephone numbers, some of which were still in service. She retired in 1960, with a gold watch and a speech that ran, for the first time in her career, short. Her husband died in 1971, of a long illness, and she was a widow for fourteen years. She kept up with every number she had ever known. She said that the Korean War had brought nothing new, but that she had been sorry to see the girls at the exchange turn to the new dial telephones, which needed no voice. She had a stroke in the winter of 1985, at home in the house in the neighbourhood that she and Alexander had kept for sixty years, in the middle of a telephone call to her daughter, who heard her say, with great clarity, that she was putting her through. Ethel waited for a minute with the line open and then went round. Wilma Faulkner Cormier is remembered in the Faulkner family as the voice on the board, the operator who put through the Red Ledger's calls and heard, and kept, every one. In the Slayerverse she stands for the switchboard women and message-carriers of the hunting houses, who made the connection when a hunter needed one and who proved that the loudest voice in the room can be the safest keeper of a secret.