The Crescent Spy (10 page)

J
osephine used the trip to the
Crescent
to regain her confidence. She picked up a copy of the paper, plus one of its rivals, the
Picayune
, before leaving the Paris Hotel. A cab carried her away from the hotel, driven by a striking man wearing a long black coat with tails and a top hat that made him look like a young mulatto Abraham Lincoln.

It had rained during the night, which had cleared some of the filth from the gutters, and the air was fresh enough that she was able to lower her kerchief from her mouth and nose as they clopped up the street, so she could concentrate on reading the news.

The date was August 20, 1861—yesterday’s papers. The rebels had apparently won a significant battle in Missouri on the tenth, which had reversed Union gains in the border state. The
Crescent
crowed that Missouri was about to join the Confederacy, but this sounded fanciful. In the east, the nearest she could parse through the sneers and false rumors, General McClellan had organized and strengthened the Union Army of the Potomac and was preparing another push south toward Richmond. The US Navy had captured two forts in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, tightening the blockade.

In short, the stalemate continued. Four months since Fort Sumter and the men on both sides of the Mason–Dixon who had boasted of a short war now looked like fools. It was hard to imagine the conflict ending any time soon. Maybe it would last all the way through 1862 and take several more bloody battles before the South came to its senses.

Twenty minutes later her hands were dirty with newsprint, and as she entered the big open room of the
New Orleans Daily Crescent
, she felt immediately at home. The clip-clip-clip sound of the presses hummed through the building. Men hunched over tables, scribbling furiously with ink-stained fingers. Others gave dictation to women with notepads. A man with round glasses thumbed through line drawings with an artist chewing on his pencil. Others were writing ad copy or hauling bundles of paper tied with twine.

Josephine decided that the man with the round glasses was in charge, and walked over to wait until he was done with the artist.

“He looks dead,” he told the artist, slapping down one drawing, which showed a man lying in the street, with bystanders surrounding him. “I want him drunk. Put an empty bottle of whiskey in his hand; make these people more amused than shocked. Put a few whores in the crowd.”

“The alderman was found on the levee,” the artist complained, “not the Irish Channel.”

“I know that. It says so in the confounded article. But that doesn’t matter. Make it
look
like the Irish Channel. It’s more lurid, will get the outrage flowing.”

Josephine had apparently found David Barnhart’s New Orleans counterpart. Scandal sold papers everywhere.

The artist hurried off, and she cleared her throat.

The man pushed back his glasses. He had dark, curly hair, a face smudged with ink and newsprint, and a sharp gaze that ranged over her with a skeptical look.

“Are you the new stenographer? Jenkins’s girl? So help me God, you had better be faster than that Irish woman. That was an insult.”

“I’ve come for a writing job.”

“Oh, you have, have you? And what makes you think you’re qualified?”

“My name is Josephine Breaux,” she said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

The man’s mouth dropped open. Conversation stopped in the tables nearby, and from there, whispers rippled across the newsroom. Soon, everyone was staring.

The sudden attention made her nervous, but at the same time her heart was pumping with excitement. This was the reception she’d hoped to earn up north, an entire newsroom dropping their work to swoon when she entered. If only it were for her writing and not this other thing. This false reputation she’d earned.

The man adjusted his glasses again. “
The
Josephine Breaux?”

“The same,” she said, and raised an eyebrow and glanced around the room at the gaping men, mostly young, who rose from their seats and edged over. “I seem to have lost my employment up north and am wondering if you have a reporter position available on staff.”

“Well, I’ll be a whiskered catfish. Josephine Breaux.” He wiped his hand and held it out. “I’m Solomon Fein, publisher of this rag. And of course you’ve got a spot. Hell, if I need to, I’ll fire one of these hacks.”

She took his hand for a vigorous shake and found herself grinning back at his smile and enthusiasm.

There was a bit of New York in his accent, mingled with a trace of old Europe. German, maybe? New Orleans was a mélange of immigrants, creoles, free blacks, and Northerners, in addition to the usual fire-breather secessionists, but if there was any hesitation about the war, it wasn’t coming from this publisher. The partisanship in the
Crescent
had made her old paper, the
Morning Clarion
, seem like a paragon of impartial reporting.

“In fact,” Fein said, “I’ve got work for you right now, if you’re up to a boat ride downriver. There’s business at Fort Jackson I need to cover. How fast can you grab your personal effects?”

At the fort? This was almost too perfect. Franklin had wanted her at the fort posing as a nurse. This would be even better.

“Fast enough.”

“Very good. Very good.” Fein looked across the newsroom. “Delaney, you’re off the hanging. You’ll be on the murdered Spaniard who turned up in the Algiers Canal. His landlady owns that boarding house above the gin mill on Gallatin.”

“Ah, come on, boss,” a young man protested. “Last time I went to Gallatin I almost got knifed.”

“What, you think I’d send a lady into that filth hole? It’s her first day! Go now, when all the drunks are sleeping it off, and you’ll be fine. Now get to it. Quick as a cat. The rest of you monkeys, back to work. We’ve got a deadline.”

Fein took Josephine’s arm and led her back toward the pressroom. The humming presses shuddered to a stop, and the last paper came off the press for the folders, who were busy supplying a crowd of dirty, print-stained newsboys for their last haul of the day. They came and went through the back doors into the alley behind, hauling wheelbarrows filled with paper bundles tied in twine. Confederate dollars changed hands between the men running the press and the newsboys. Nobody paid Fein and Josephine any attention.

“Your salary is four bucks a week. You cover a murder or enter the Irish Alley, the swamp, or have to run the gauntlet at Girod or Gallatin Street, you get a bonus of two bits.”

“Make it eight dollars. Plus bonuses and expenses.”

Fein’s eyes widened behind his round glasses. “Is that what they paid you in Washington?”

“No. They paid four fifty. But that was in silver. I figure you’ll be paying in greybacks. Four Confederate dollars is about two bucks up north. Anyway, I’m worth more than I was three weeks ago. You get something smuggled past the blockade, you’ve got to pay a premium.”

“So much for Josephine Breaux, patriot and heroine of the Southern cause.”

“Says the New York Jew who has doubled the price of his paper since I was last in New Orleans.”

“Touché.” Far from looking irritated, Fein seemed delighted by her banter. He dodged a moving cart of newspapers. “Eight dollars? It’s piracy. Wartime profiteering.”

“I could check the other papers, see who’s hiring.”

“Hah. I’d sell my business to Abe Lincoln himself before I’d see your byline pop up on the
Picayune
. Very well, Miss Breaux. Eight dollars a week, all expenses approved in advance.”

“Good.” She shook his hand.

“Now I’d better get back there and knock heads, make sure not a word of this is breathed on the street until your first story comes off the press. Then I’m going to personally deliver a copy to those lying, illiterate fools at the
Picayune
. I can’t wait to see the look on Ludd’s face when he sees who I’ve snagged. You’ve got what you need? Deadline is midnight tomorrow. I had a steamer arranged to drop off Delaney and another to pick him up tomorrow—you can take his place.”

“What kind of writing do you want? Straight facts or something more embellished?”

“Gimme real rabble-rousing, the kind of press that makes old ladies trade their silver for worthless bonds, and sends Quaker ministers running to the nearest recruiter. You weren’t just a spy, you can actually write?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“The most important question of all.”

“When your friend Ludd reads my piece, he’ll fold up his rag and surrender his press to his creditors.”

Fein grinned. “I like you, Breaux. You’ll go far on this paper.” He pumped her hand again. “Now get downriver and cover that hanging. I want to see every drop of sweat on the scoundrel’s forehead when he swings.”

S
he traveled on an outgoing side-wheel blockade-runner carrying bales of cotton. They huffed downriver seventy miles, reaching the forts by afternoon. Fort St. Philip appeared first, on the east bank. It stretched along the waterfront, made of stone and brick, the walls covered in sod. She’d spotted it when passing with the runner but now paid it closer attention. It bristled with at least three dozen guns that she could count. Men watched from the walls beneath a Confederate battle flag, which hung limp in the still, humid air.

The half mile of river between St. Philip and the larger fort downriver was filled with dozens of boats: flatboats drifting in the current, keelboats closer to the bank, poling their way laboriously upriver, and a pair of steamboats whose side-wheels left a distinctive hatched wake trailing behind them. But there were no gunboats of any kind. No fire rafts to come roaring with the current to burn enemy ships to the waterline. And no chain barricade to block the river. A strong Union fleet could have steamed right up from the delta and passed them on its way toward New Orleans.

The boatmen put her to shore at the docks upriver from the second of the two forts. This was Fort Jackson, set roughly a hundred yards back from the levee. It had stone bastions radiating outward to provide the widest possible angles for its cannons, which jutted like dark snouts from the casemates.

Josephine took in the defensive posture of the fort as she approached on foot, and was unimpressed. Even from a distance she could see that the cannons were small and old, which meant they were likely smoothbore and not rifled. They’d be no match for Union gunboats. The earthworks were partially eroded by time and the elements, and the embrasures and parapets had extensive unrepaired damage. Josephine had personally toured the fortifications being built in northern Virginia and in and around Washington, and what she saw here was inferior. It brought to mind the unprepared state of national defense in the days before the war began.

She followed an oxcart through the marshy land surrounding the fort and, as the road passed through a thicket of swamp grass, came upon a team of slaves digging a defensive moat beneath the watchful eye of an overseer on horseback. Other than that, she saw few efforts to reinforce the fortifications. Even more shamefully
,
there were only a handful of men at the lookout points, and nobody challenged her as she strolled across the drawbridge and into the center of the fort. A crude gallows stood in the middle of the yard. It had no platform and was little more than a single wooden hook with a dangling noose.

Josephine hadn’t known what she’d find at the fort—Solomon Fein hadn’t given her many instructions—but she’d assumed that the military command would be expecting someone from the
Crescent.
Apparently not.

A pair of sweating young guards finally appeared and demanded to see a pass. Further questioning revealed that the pair had never heard of Josephine Breaux, had never read or even heard of the
Crescent
, and knew little about the hanging. One of them said there were two men, a white and a black. The other insisted it was just a black man. Was he slave or free? Nobody knew.

She was getting frustrated when a handsome young officer appeared, dressed in a cadet gray frock coat that draped to his knees. He gave his name as Major Dunbar. She pegged his accent from upriver, probably Illinois, but loyalties had become fluid. He was polite when she said she was from the
Crescent
, and allowed that she could witness the hanging in the morning. When she pressed for details, he grew reticent.