Zoe Delacroix

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

Zoe Delacroix was born in 1803 in New Orleans, in the year of the Louisiana Purchase, and lived seventy-one years as an herbalist of the French Quarter. She belonged to the House of Delacroix, the old New Orleans family that stood between the Faulkner and Proctor lines and kept the friendship of both. She was not a slayer. She raised a single son, Baptiste Delacroix, born in 1838, who lived until 1922 and in 1860 married Georgia Faulkner, joining the two houses in a marriage that the family still tells. She died in 1874 of kidney failure, at seventy-one, in a small house on a Quarter street, in a room hung with drying leaves. The identity of her child's father is not recorded, and the family has always treated the silence as hers to keep. New Orleans in 1803 was a city that had changed flags three times in forty years and was about to change them again. It was a small, crowded, walled port of some eight thousand people, ranged along a bend of the Mississippi, and its streets, laid out by the French engineers a century before, ran in a neat grid behind the levee, the Place d'Armes at the centre and the cathedral beside it. The houses were low, stuccoed, pastel and shuttered, with iron balconies, tiled roofs and inner courtyards full of banana trees, and the air was heavy with river mud, coffee, sugar, tar and jasmine. In that year the Spanish hauled down their flag, the French raised theirs for three weeks, and the Americans raised theirs, and the city, which had been told nothing, went on with its business. The Delacroix family had come to Louisiana from France a generation earlier, and had stayed through every change of government by the simple method of being indispensable. They were merchants, planters, notaries and doctors, and the women of the house had a particular reputation for what the Creoles called the science of the garden. Zoe's grandmother had kept a physic garden in a courtyard off Rue Royale, and her mother had kept it after her, and the knowledge of which leaf would bring down a fever, which root would settle a stomach and which berry was best left alone, passed from woman to woman like a set of house keys. Zoe was given hers at six, with a trowel and a small clay pot. She learned the garden as a language. Her mother, a tall, brisk, unsmiling woman, took her out before the heat, when the dew was still on the leaves, and named each plant in French, in Latin and in the speech of the Africans who had brought much of the knowledge across the ocean. Bouillon blanc for the chest. Boneset for the fever. Sassafras for the spring tonic, mallow for the burn and the sting, rue for the headache, and the pale green leaf of the vervain for what the old people called the evil eye, and what Zoe's mother called nerves. She taught her to pick a leaf at the right hour, to dry it in the shade, to grind it, to steep it, to make a tincture in brandy and a salve in lard, and she taught her to keep each in a labelled jar, because, she said, the difference between a cure and a poison was nearly always a matter of a line on a label. In the Quarter, in those years, an herbalist was a person of consequence. There were physicians, but they were few, costly and inclined to bleed a patient until he agreed with them, and the great majority of the city's sick went first to a woman with a garden. She served the free and the enslaved, the rich and the poor, the Creole and the American, and she did it from a doorway on a side street, with a shelf of jars behind her and a rope of drying herbs over her head. Zoe set up her own door at twenty, in the lower Quarter, near the old Ursuline convent, and within a few years she had the custom of half the district. She was a small, straight, dark-eyed woman, with a low voice and a manner that put the most frightened customer at ease. She never raised that voice, and she never hurried. She examined a patient's tongue, eyes and pulse, asked about his sleep and his appetite, and listened carefully to the answer. She had an instinct, sometimes remarked on, for the thing that had not been said. A man who came for a cough and mentioned, in passing, that he had not been able to go out after dark, or a woman who asked for a remedy for a child that would not wake in the daytime, might find that Mrs Delacroix's questions shifted quietly into another key. It was through these questions that she came into the orbit of the hunters. The Faulkners of New Orleans, the Red Ledger's branch in the lower river, had been using the Delacroix house as a point of contact since before she was born, and they knew her family well. She never carried a weapon and never asked to, and she never took a tally. But she was in a position to see what a hunter could not. A night patrol might walk the Quarter for a month and find nothing. A herbalist, in the same month, would hear from a dozen households that a particular visitor had been calling, that a certain well-to-do house had drawn its shutters and that a new sickness, anaemic and strangely pale, was going through a particular street. She passed what she knew to the cousins, at first by word of mouth and later in careful notes, and more than one hunt began at the door of her shop. Her gifts as a healer were put to a harder use during the great fever summers. New Orleans was the most unhealthy city in North America. Yellow fever, brought by ships from the Caribbean, came every few years, and in the worst of them, the epidemics of the 1830s and 1850s, it carried off thousands. The city shut itself up, the bells tolled, the carts went round at dawn, and the people who could afford it fled to the lakeshore and the country. The herbalists stayed. Zoe worked through the summers of 1833, 1847 and 1853, going from house to house with her basket, bathing fevered foreheads, brewing teas, boiling the water and, for want of any better remedy, simply sitting up with the dying. She lost patients, as everyone did. She also, by the testimony of a good many families, saved some, and in the summer of 1853, when a fifth of the people in her own street were buried, she was visited on two successive evenings by a man in the dark coat of a priest, who thanked her, blessed her and went away, and whom nobody else remembered seeing. Her son was born in 1838. The family papers give his name, Baptiste, and his dates, and say nothing of his father. It was not unusual in the old Creole city for such a silence to cover an arrangement that the parties preferred to keep private, and the Delacroix women had a long tradition of keeping their own counsel. Zoe raised him in the house on Royale Street and taught him the garden. He did not become a hunter, and he had no particular taste for herbs, but he was a gifted joiner, and he built up, over the following decades, a prosperous carpentry and joinery shop near the levee, making cases and chests for coffee, sugar and medicinal plants. He inherited his mother's composure and her knack of inspiring confidence. It was Baptiste who married Georgia Faulkner, in 1860. The match was a happy surprise to both families. The Faulkners, the Red Ledger cousins of the lower river, had known the Delacroix for generations, and Georgia, a spirited young woman of the Kentucky branch, had come to the house as a girl to learn from Zoe about the healing plants. She and Baptiste had met in the courtyard among the herbs. Zoe, who watched it, said nothing at the time, and afterwards remarked to a friend that she had been hoping for it for four years. She gave the young couple the house and the garden as a wedding present, and moved herself to a small place on a nearby street, with a window on a courtyard of her own. The annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico, in the 1840s, passed over the Quarter in a rattle of drums and a great deal of speech, and brought to the city a flood of soldiers and adventurers, who brought in their turn a good many complaints for her to treat. She was less touched by the wars of politics than by the war of the 1860s, which came for New Orleans in the spring of 1862, when the Union fleet ran the forts below the city and Farragut's guns were trained on the levee. The occupation that followed was orderly but hard, the port was closed, the cotton exchange stood empty and the wharves, which had been the busiest in America, lay silent and weed-grown. There was hunger. Zoe opened her door each morning to a queue. She treated soldiers and civilians alike, Union and Confederate, for the same complaints, at the same prices, which were whatever the patient could pay. She was seventy when the work began to slow her, and seventy-one when she died, in the early winter of 1874, of kidney failure, in the small room with the window on the courtyard. Her daughter-in-law Georgia nursed her. Baptiste sat by the bed. She asked, near the end, for the jar of vervain from the top shelf, and held it in her hands without opening it. She was buried in the family tomb in the old cemetery on Basin Street, among the white vaults and the dusty wreaths, in the city's custom, above the ground. Zoe Delacroix is remembered as the herbalist of the French Quarter, the quiet woman whose shop was a listening post. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers who kept the hunters' secrets and the city's sick alive, the House of Delacroix's gift to the long war, and the keepers of the small green knowledge that never made a tally.