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."