The era of political reconstruction came. The victorious national power
decreed that they who had once been master and slave should enter into
political partnership on terms of civil equality. The slaves grasped the
boon; but the masters, trained for generations in the conviction that
public safety and private purity were possible only by the subjection of
the black race under the white, loathed civil equality as but another name
for private companionship, and spurned, as dishonor and destruction in
one, the restoration of their sovereignty at the price of political
copartnership with the groveling race they had bought and sold and
subjected easily to the leash and lash.
What followed took every one by surprise. The negro came at once into a
larger share of power than it was ever intended he should or expected he
would attain. His master, related to him long and only under the imagined
necessities of plantation government, vowed the issue must and should be,
not How shall the two races share public self-government in prosperous
amity? but, Which race shall exclusively rule the other, race by race?
The necessities of national authority tipped the scale, and the powers of
legislation and government and the spoils of office tumbled, all together,
into the freedman's ragged lap. Thereupon there fell upon New Orleans,
never well governed at the best, a volcanic shower of corruption and
misrule.
And yet when history's calm summing-up and final judgment comes, there
must this be pointed out, which was very hard to see through the dust and
smoke of those days: that while plunder and fraud ran riot, yet no serious
attempt was ever made by the freedman or his allies to establish any
un-American principle of government, and for nothing else was he more
fiercely, bloodily opposed than for measures approved by the world's best
thought and in full harmony with the national scheme of order. We shall
see now what these things have to do with our strange true story.
In New Orleans the American public school system, which recognizes free
public instruction as a profitable investment of the public funds for the
common public safety, had already long been established. The negro adopted
and enlarged it. He recognized the fact that the relation of pupils in the
public schools is as distinctly a public and not a private relation as
that of the sidewalk, the market, the public park, or the street-car. But
recognizing also the impracticabilities of place and time, he established
separate schools for whites and blacks. In one instance, however, owing
mainly to smallness of numbers, it seemed more feasible to allow a common
enjoyment of the civil right of public instruction without separation by
race than to maintain two separate schools, one at least of which would be
very feeble for lack of numbers. Now, it being so decided, of all the
buildings in New Orleans which one was chosen for this experiment but the
"haunted house" in Royal street!
I shall never forget the day--although marked by no startling
incident--when I sat in its lofty drawing-rooms and heard its classes in
their annual examination. It was June, and the teachers and pupils were
clad in recognition of the special occasion and in the light fabrics
fitted to the season. The rooms were adorned with wreaths, garlands, and
bouquets. Among the scholars many faces were beautiful, and all were fresh
and young. Much Gallic blood asserted itself in complexion and feature,
generally of undoubted, unadulterated "Caucasian" purity, but sometimes of
visible and now and then of preponderating African tincture. Only two or
three, unless I have forgotten, were of pure negro blood. There, in the
rooms that had once resounded with the screams of Madame Lalaurie's little
slave fleeing to her death, and with the hootings and maledictions of the
enraged mob, was being tried the experiment of a common enjoyment of
public benefits by the daughters of two widely divergent races, without
the enforcement of private social companionship.
From such enforcement the school was as free as any school is or ought to
be. The daily discipline did not require any two pupils to be social, but
only every one to be civil, and civil to all. These pages are written,
however, to tell a strange true story, and not to plead one cause or
another. Whatever the story itself pleads, let it plead. Outside the
"haunted house," far and near, the whole community was divided into two
fiercely hostile parties, often at actual war with each other, the one
striving to maintain government upon a co-citizenship regardless of race
in all public relations, the other sworn to make race the supreme,
sufficient, inexorable condition of supremacy on the one part and
subjection on the other. Yet for all this the school prospered.
Nevertheless, it suffered much internal unrest. Many a word was spoken
that struck like a club, many a smile stung like a whip-lash, many a
glance stabbed like a knife; even in the midst of recitations a wounded
one would sometimes break into sobs or silent tears while the aggressor
crimsoned and palpitated with the proud indignation of the master caste.
The teachers met all such by-play with prompt, impartial repression and
concentration upon the appointed duties of the hour.
Sometimes another thing restored order. Few indeed of the pupils, of
whatever racial purity or preponderance, but held more or less in awe the
ghostly traditions of the house; and at times it chanced to be just in
the midst of one of these ebullitions of scorn, grief, and resentful tears
that noiselessly and majestically the great doors of the reception-rooms,
untouched by visible hands, would slowly swing open, and the hushed girls
would call to mind Madame Lalaurie.
Not all who bore the tincture of the despised race suffered alike. Some
were fierce and sturdy, and played a savage tit-for-tat. Some were
insensible. A few bore themselves inflexibly by dint of sheer nerve; while
many, generally much more white than black, quivered and winced
continually under the contumely that fell, they felt, with peculiar
injustice and cruelty upon them.
Odd things happened from time to time to remind one of the house's early
history. One day a deep hidden well that no one had suspected the
existence of was found in the basement of the main house. Another
time--But we must be brief.
Matters went on thus for years. But at length there was a sudden and
violent change.