The Dignified Southern Woman

I am going to tell you something I do not often admit: I was bored.

This is not the sort of confession an Elder makes readily. It suggests a failure of imagination. But the years in New Orleans were the years I spent doing something I had not done before and have not done since: I settled. I put down what passed for roots. I played a role so convincing that I sometimes sat in the hours before dawn and had to remind myself which woman I was.

I was a French Creole of means. This is the accurate way to say it. New Orleans was founded in 1718 and it was French in the bone, French in the manner, French in the way it understood what a woman of standing was permitted to do and say and whom she was permitted to address. Spanish in name after 1762, when France sold what they could no longer hold to a Spain that did not entirely want it. But French in spirit: always French in spirit. There is no dignified southern woman here; that is a later invention the city would not have recognized. There is only the Creole society with its particular architecture of manners and its particular way of deciding who belongs.

I spoke French. I acquired the correct opinions about wine and music and the proper conduct of an argument. I wore the clothes. I hosted the evenings. I managed the man I had blood-bound into purchasing the plantation, and I managed the plantation, and I managed the appearance of being managed. Cher, you understand, one must appear to defer in certain rooms. One learns the art of the apparent deference.

I was good at it. I am good at most things I turn my attention to; this is not modesty but observation.

But the sea was always there. The sound of it, the smell of it, the particular quality of light on moving water at night. I had not been on a ship since the Sanguine Judge, and I found I missed it the way you miss a language you learned young: still in my hands, still in my body, and nothing I did in the parlors of New Orleans had any use for it.

The ennui of safety is a real thing. I recommend it to no one.

I stayed because staying was what the work required. I left the moment it did not.

When the news from the north made what came next obvious enough that even a deliberate woman could see it, I sold the land and the blood-bound contract and the whole comfortable fiction, and I walked out into a Louisiana November and felt the thing I always feel when I am about to leave somewhere I have been too long: a loosening in the chest, the body remembering it was made to move.

The war was coming. And Sings was coming.

I was ready for both.