VI.
EVICTIONS.
The "Radical" party in Louisiana, gorged with private spoils and loathed and hated by the all but unbroken ranks of well-to-do society, though it held a creed as righteous and reasonable as any political party ever held, was going to pieces by the sheer weakness of its own political corruption. It was made mainly of the poor and weak elements of the people. Had it been ever so pure it could not have made headway against the strongest ranks of society concentrating against it with revolutionary intent, when deserted by the power which had called it to responsibility and—Come! this history of a house must not run into the history of a government. It is a fact in our story, however, that in the "Conservative" party there sprung up the "White League," purposing to wrest the State government from the "Radicals" by force of arms.
On the 14th of September, 1874, the White League met and defeated the Metropolitan Police in a hot and bloody engagement of infantry and artillery on the broad steamboat landing in the very middle of New Orleans. But the Federal authority interfered. The "Radical" government resumed control. But the White League survived and grew in power. In November elections were held, and the State legislature was found to be Republican by a majority of only two.
One bright, spring-like day in December, such as a northern March might give in its best mood, the school had gathered in the "haunted house" as usual, but the hour of duty had not yet struck. Two teachers sat in an upper class-room talking over the history of the house. The older of the two had lately heard of an odd new incident connected with it, and was telling of it. A distinguished foreign visitor, she said, guest at a dinner-party in the city the previous season, turned unexpectedly to his hostess, the talk being of quaint old New Orleans houses, and asked how to find "the house where that celebrated tyrant had lived who was driven from the city by a mob for maltreating her slaves." The rest of the company sat aghast, while the hostess silenced him by the severe coldness with which she replied that she "knew nothing about it." One of Madame Lalaurie's daughters was sitting there, a guest at the table.
When the teacher's story was told her companion made no comment. She had noticed a singular sound that was increasing in volume. It was out-of-doors—seemed far away; but it was drawing nearer. She started up, for she recognized it now as a clamor of human voices, and remembered that the iron gates had not yet been locked for the day. They hurried to the window, looked down, and saw the narrow street full from wall to wall for a hundred yards with men coming towards them. The front of the crowd had already reached the place and was turning towards the iron gates.
The two women went quickly to the hall, and, looking down the spiral staircase to the marble pavement of the entrance three stories below, saw the men swarming in through the wide gateway and doorway by dozens. While they still leaned over the balustrade, Marguerite, one of their pupils, a blue-eyed blonde girl of lovely complexion, with red, voluptuous lips, and beautiful hair held by a carven shell comb, came and bent over the balustrade with them. Suddenly her comb slipped from its hold, flashed downward, and striking the marble pavement flew into pieces at the feet of the men who were about to ascend. Several of them looked quickly up.
"It was my mother's comb!" said Marguerite, turned ashy pale, and sunk down in hysterics. The two teachers carried her to a remote room, the bed-chamber of the janitress, and then obeyed an order of the principal calling her associates to the second floor. A band of men were coming up the winding stair with measured, military tread towards the landing, where the principal, with her assistants gathered around her, stood to confront them.
She was young, beautiful, and of calm temper. Her skin, says one who was present, was of dazzling clearness, her abundant hair was golden auburn, and in happy hours her eyes were as "soft as velvet." But when the leader of the band of men reached the stair-landing, threw his coat open, and showed the badge of the White League, her face had blanched and hardened to marble, and her eyes darkened to black as they glowed with indignation.
"We have come," said the White Leaguer, "to remove the colored pupils. You will call your school to order." To which the principal replied:
"You will permit me first to confer with my corps of associates." He was a trifle disconcerted.
"Oh, certainly."
The teachers gathered in the principal's private room. Some were dumb, one broke into tears, another pleaded devotion to the principal, and one was just advising that the onus of all action be thrown upon the intruders, when the door was pushed open and the White Leaguer said:
"Ladies, we are waiting. Assemble the school; we are going to clean it out."
The pupils, many of them trembling, weeping, and terrified, were with difficulty brought to order in the assembly room. This place had once been Madame Lalaurie's dining-hall. A frieze of angels ran round its four walls, and, oddly, for some special past occasion, a legend in crimson and gold on the western side bore the words, "The Eye of God is on us."
"Gentlemen, the school is assembled," said the principal.
"Call the roll," was the reply, "and we will challenge each name."
It was done. As each name was called its young bearer rose and confronted her inquisitors. And the inquisitors began to blunder. Accusations of the fatal taint were met with denials and withdrawn with apologies. Sometimes it was truth, and sometimes pure arrogance and falsehood, that triumphed over these champions of instinctive racial antagonism. One dark girl shot up haughtily at the call of her name—
"I am of Indian blood, and can prove it!"
"You will not be disturbed."
"Coralie——," the principal next called. A thin girl of mixed blood and freckled face rose and said:
"My mother is white."
"Step aside!" commanded the White Leaguer.
"But by the law the color follows the mother, and so I am white."
"Step aside!" cried the man, in a fury. (In truth there was no such law.)
"Octavie ——."
A pretty, Oriental looking girl rises, silent, pale, but self-controlled.
"Are you colored?"
"Yes; I am colored." She moves aside.
"Marie O ——."
A girl very fair, but with crinkling hair and other signs of negro extraction, stands up and says:
"I am the sister of the Hon.——," naming a high Democratic official, "and I shall not leave this school."
"You may remain; your case will be investigated."
"Eugénie ——."
A modest girl, visibly of mixed race, rises, weeping silently.
"Step aside."
"Marcelline V——."
A bold-eyed girl of much African blood stands up and answers:
"I am not colored! We are Spanish, and my brother will call on you and prove it." She is allowed to stay.
At length the roll-call is done. "Now, madam, you will dismiss these pupils that we have set aside, at once. We will go down and wait to see that they come out." The men tramped out of the room, went down-stairs, and rejoined the impatient crowd that was clamoring in the street.
Then followed a wild scene within the old house. Restraint was lost. Terror ruled. The girls who had been ordered into the street sobbed and shrieked and begged:
"Oh, save us! We cannot go out there; the mob will kill us! What shall we do?"
One girl of grand and noble air, as dark and handsome as an East Indian princess, and standing first in her class for scholarship, threw herself at her teacher's feet, crying, "Have pity on me, Miss ——!"
"My poor Léontine," replied the teacher, "what can I do? There are good 'colored' schools in the city; would it not have been wiser for your father to send you to one of them?"
But the girl rose up and answered:
"Must I go to school with my own servants to escape an unmerited disdain?" And the teacher was silent, while the confusion increased.
"The shame of it will kill me!" cried gentle Eugénie L——. And thereupon, at last, a teacher, commonly one of the sternest in discipline, exclaimed:
"If Eugénie goes, Marcelline shall go, if I have to put her out myself! Spanish, indeed! And Eugénie a pearl by the side of her!"
Just then Eugénie's father came. He had forced his way through the press in the street, and now stood bidding his child have courage and return with him the way he had come.
"Tie your veil close, Eugénie," said the teacher, "and they will not know you." And so they went, the father and the daughter. But they went alone. None followed. This roused the crowd to noisy anger.
"Why don't the rest come?" it howled. But the teachers tried in vain to inspire the panic-stricken girls with courage to face the mob, and were in despair, when a school official arrived, and with calm and confident authority bade the expelled girls gather in ranks and follow him through the crowd. So they went out through the iron gates, the great leaves of which closed after them with a rasping of their key and shooting of their bolts, while a teacher said:
"Come; the reporters will soon be here. Let us go and see after Marguerite."
They found her in the room of the janitress, shut in and fast asleep.
"Do you think," one asked of the janitress, "that mere fright and the loss of that comb made this strong girl ill?"
"No. I think she must have guessed those men's errand, and her eye met the eye of some one who knew her."
"But what of that?"
"She is 'colored.'"
"Impossible!"
"I tell you, yes!"
"Why, I thought her as pure German as her name."
"No, the mixture is there; though the only trace of it is on her lips. Her mother—she is dead now—was a beautiful quadroon. A German sea-captain loved her. The law stood between them. He opened a vein in his arm, forced in some of her blood, went to court, swore he had African blood, got his license, and married her. Marguerite is engaged to be married to a white man, a gentleman who does not know this. It was like life and death, so to speak, for her not to let those men turn her out of here."
The teacher turned away, pondering.
The eviction did not, at that time, hold good. The political struggle went on, fierce and bitter. The "Radical" government was doomed, but not dead. A few weeks after the scene just described the evicted girls were reinstated. A long term of suspense followed. The new year became the old and went out. Twice this happened. In 1877 there were two governors and two governments in Louisiana. In sight from the belvedere of the "haunted house," eight squares away up Royal street, in the State House, the de facto government was shut up under close military siege by the de jure government, and the Girls' High School in Madame Lalaurie's old house, continuing faithfully their daily sessions, knew with as little certainty to which of the two they belonged as though New Orleans had been some Italian city of the fifteenth century. But to guess the White League, was not far from right, and in April the Radical government expired.
A Democratic school-board came in. June brought Commencement day, and some of the same girls who had been evicted in 1874 were graduated by the new Board in 1877. During the summer the schools and school-laws were overhauled, and in September or October the high school was removed to another place, where each pupil suspected of mixed blood was examined officially behind closed doors and only those who could prove white or Indian ancestry were allowed to stay. A "colored" high school was opened in Madame Lalaurie's house with a few pupils. It lasted one session, maybe two, and then perished.
In 1882 the "haunted house" had become a Conservatory of Music. Chamber concerts were frequent in Madame Lalaurie's old dining-hall. On a certain sweet evening in the spring of that year there sat among those who had gathered to hear the haunted place filled with a deluge of sweet sounds one who had been a teacher there when the house had been, as some one—Conservative or Radical, who can tell which?—said on the spot, "for the second time purged of its iniquities." The scene was "much changed," says the auditor; but the ghosts were all there, walking on the waves of harmony. And thickest and fastest they trooped in and out when a passionate song thrilled the air with the promise that
"Some day—some day
Eyes clearer grown the truth may see."