Steamboats carried commercial goods but also wealthy travelers, including hundreds of New Orleans natives looking to start over somewhere new but with cultural memories of home. This was especially true during the years after the war—which was when the Mittie Stephens crashed—but had been going on for some time. That was how the story of Penelope Deschamps started and almost ended. She was a poor little thing, Marcus said, born Penny Deckard in Acadia Parish to a white sharecropping family. Her daddy was an angry man, doing the work of niggers and falling farther behind every Christmas. He drank steadily and with only one son to work the fields with him, he saw in Penny merely another mouth to feed and set about finding a way to marry her off. He spent money he didn’t have on copies of Ladies’ Magazine he sent away for and ordered Penny to study them cover to cover, to teach herself to be a lady. “Lord knows you ain’t got a lick of that from your mama. She might could show you how to bleed a hog, but that ain’t gon’ get you out of this house.”

Penny was a quick study. She took to bathing more than once every two weeks, started pinning her hair in a chignon, a style she could neither spell nor pronounce—she was functionally illiterate and leaned heavily on the pretty drawings in the magazines—and soon she was ordering her family and the few church friends she had to call her Penelope. Left free of the fieldwork and useless in the kitchen, she began taking constitutionals around the perimeter of the old plantation where her family lived in a cabin that was away from the slaves but hardly any bigger than theirs and with the same dirt floor. She walked from the plantation’s schoolhouse, which doubled as the church, to the royal oak around the side of the big house and back again, often carrying books as either props or tools to improve her posture. Her daddy whipped her when he saw her walking around with books on her head like a damn nigger carrying water from the well. “You stop that foolishness this instant.” No one knows to what degree Penelope knew what she was doing or how much luck played a part in it, but when the master’s son returned from a single semester at Louisiana State University in the winter of 1857, he took one look at Penelope and declared himself done for. Louis Deschamps didn’t bother to ask Penelope’s father for her hand in marriage, never spoke to him before the wedding. He simply announced his intentions to his own father, seeking his blessing, and then told Penelope to prepare herself for matrimony.