Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (25 page)

“So I thought,” said the German girl frankly. She spoke French with an accent indistinguishable from the Creole ladies of Monsieur Hermann's ball last night. “Myself, I think there was a contagion of some sort among the servants. Monsieur Peralta kept the lot of them closed up behind doors for all of one day, until his new lot arrived in two wagons from his plantation on the lake. Then all piled into the wagons, all the old servants —stablemen, cook, laundress, maids, everyone—and left, early on Saturday morning. Did I not live along the street here I would not have seen it at all—I only did because I was coming early to do the accounts. Later in the morning the last few left with a carriage, I think containing Monsieur Galen, for I have not seen him either.”

She shrugged. “Me, I lived through the cholera last summer and the yellow fever—and two summers of my husband's sister predicting yellow fever that never came. I keep my eye on the newspapers, and listen to what the market women say, and I have heard nothing to frighten me. In any case it's the wrong time of year. So I assume it was something inconvenient, like measles or chicken pox, particularly now at Carnival time. Besides, Monsieur Xa-vier is still here, coming and going as if there had been no coming and going, if you take my meaning.”

Measles or chicken pox? thought January, as he turned his steps along Rue Chartres toward Canal Street and the American faubourg of St. Mary beyond. Or something someone heard or saw, that he or she was not supposed to see?

He remembered again the blood under Angelique's nails.

Tomorrow was Ash "Wednesday. Lent or no Lent, there were always small sociabilities on Ash Wednesday from which one could not absent oneself without comment. If he made arrangements this afternoon with Desdunes at the livery, he could leave tonight, after the Mardi Gras ball at the Theatre d'Orleans was over, riding by moonlight for Bayou Chien Mort.

With luck Xavier Peralta would not leave New Orleans until Thursday.

By then, he thought, he would see what he would see.

The Swamp lay at the upper end of Girod Street, just lakeside of the genteel American houses and wide streets of the faubourg of St. Mary. It was, quite literally, a swamp, for much of the land beyond Canal Street was undrained, and in fact many of the drains from the more respectable purlieus of American business farther down the road, though aimed at the turning basin of the canal not far away, petered out here. The unpaved streets lacked even the brick or packed-earth banquettes of the old city, and the buildings that fronted them—grog shops, gambling dens, brothels, and establishments that seemed to encompass all three—were crude, unpainted, and squalid beyond description. Most seemed to have been knocked together from lumber discarded by the sawmills or salvaged from dismanded flatboats. It was here, among these repellent shacks and transient men, that the yellow fever struck hardest, here that the cholera had claimed dozens a day. The air reeked of woodsmoke and sewage.

Mindful of Hannibal's philosophy of proper timing, January had paused at the market long enough to consume some gingerbread and coffee, hoping to be ahead of most of the Swamp's usual excitement. He hadn't reckoned on the stamina of Americans, however, and the effects, even here in the American sector, of the celebratory spirit of Mardi Gras. Most of the grog shops were open, barkeeps dispensing Injun whisky from barrels to long-haired flatboat men across planks laid on barrels, white men grouped around makeshift tables playing cards, and small groups of black men visible in alleyways, on their knees in the mud and weeds, shooting dice. In several cottages the long jalousies already stood open, revealing seedy rooms barely wider than the beds they contained, the women sitting on the doorsills with their petticoats up to their knees, smoking cigars or eating oranges, calling out to the men as they passed.

“Hey, Sambo,” yelled a mulatto woman, “you that big all over?” She gave him a broken-toothed smile and hiked her skirt up farther.

January grinned and raised his cap to her—he was wearing his roughest clothes and the sloppy cloth cap of a laborer—and shook his head. He started to move on but a bearded flatboat man was suddenly in front of him, piggy eyes glittering with a half-drunken hangover and tobacco crusted in his beard.

“You leave them hoors alone, boy.” He stepped close, crowding him; January stepped back. As usual, the Kentuckian wasn't by himself. They always seemed to travel in twos and threes, and his friends emerged from the nearest barroom door, like sullen dogs looking for something to do.

January was startled into replying, “I was,” which was a mistake, he realized a moment later. It hadn't been accompanied by a grin and bow.

The man smelled like a privy; the hair of his chest, hanging through his open shirt, was visibly alive with lice. “You was lookin',” he said, stepping forward again. “And you was thinkin'.”

About THOSE women?
January wanted to say but knew the man—the men, all of them—were actively spoiling for a fight. He managed the bow, but the grin was difficult. “I wasn't thinkin' nuthin', sir, no sir,” he said, keeping his eyes down and reflecting that if he ended up in the Calabozo now, he was in serious trouble. There were those in the city guard who might decide his confession would be the shortest way out of everybody's problems, and the thought of what they might do to obtain it turned him cold inside.

He backed from the Americans, stepping with all appearance of an accident into the stream of sewage down the middle of the street. Hating himself, furious, knowing he could pick his assailant up and heave him through the nearest shed wall and not daring to raise his hand, he mocked a little jump of surprise, looked down at his boots, and cried, “Oh, Lordy, now my master gonna wear me out, gettin' my boots all nasty! Oh, Lordy . . .” He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and began to scrub at the filthy slop.

In contempt, the bearded man stepped forward and shoved him, throwing him full-length in the stream. January caught himself on his hands but rolled and sprawled, flinging up his legs to make the fall look worse than it was. He lay where he was, breathing hard, not daring to look up at the laughing circle of men who had gathered, knowing his eyes would betray him. It's an alternative to being beaten, he repeated to himself. It's an alternative to being hanged.

They moved on after a moment, whooping among themselves and shoving each other: “Lordy, Lordy, mah massa gwine wear me out. . . .”

He heard the whore's voice, “You sure put it to that black buck, handsome,” and, a moment later, the ringing sound of a slap and the smack of her body into the doorjamb behind her.

"You keep your bitchy eyes where they belong, nigger.

He got to his feet and moved on, as quietly and inconspicuously as he could. I will leave this place, he thought, his hair still prickling with anger that the only choice he had had was to let himself be struck, to degrade himself in order to get away. The world is wide . . .

. . . and contains nothing.

He shook away the old despair. At least most of the world doesn't contain Kentucky swine with their bellies over their belts and no more reading than Livia's cats have. A hundred and fifty dollars.

Provided, of course, that he survived this at all.

Past another row of cribs—only a few of which were open—he turned right down an alley, glancing behind him to make sure his erstwhile tormentors were not watching. A drunken Choctaw snored under a straggling cypress tree, naked as Adam without even a blanket to cover him. Someone had taken one of his moccasins, but evidently found it wanting—it had large holes in it—and discarded it in the weeds not far away. The other was still on the Indian's foot.

Came into town with his loads of pelts or fiU,
thought January, and spent last night drinking up the profits. He bent, checked the man for signs of exposure, but he was sleeping peacefully. With a shrug, January passed on. In the yard behind the cribs a small group of men were gathered, watching a cockfight. Freed slaves, January guessed, or the men who bought a kind of quasi-freedom from their owners by the day or the week, seeking employment as laborers where they could and preferring whatever sheds and alleyways they could find to sleeping in the cramped slave quarters constantly overlooked by the windows of the whites. A ragged little girl was watching the alleyway—at the first sign of police, the men could disperse leaving nothing but a splattering of chicken blood on the ground.

Whoever had given Shaw the task of running these men down wanted to keep him very busy.

January crossed the yard. The kitchen lay to his right, empty save for a huge mulatto woman nursing a baby while she cooked a panful of grits at the stove. He glanced briefly through the door: the room was alive with roaches and stank of rats, but the woman was crooning a little song about Compair Rabbit, and the child seemed quiet enough.

A rickety stair led up the back of the whorehouse to a ramshackle attic under the roof. January had to bend his tall height to edge through the narrow door, stoop even in the center of the pointed room under the ridgepole. At the far end, under one of the dusty dormers, he could make out books stacked against the wall and a mattress laid on the floor. Mice fled squeaking from the sound of his feet. Down below, he heard the thump and creak of a bed frame striking a flimsy wall and a man's piglike grunts.

“I don't know where they get the energy at this hour of the morning,” came Hannibal's voice plaintively from the mattress. “The Glutton—she's the second from the far end—has been at it since eight o'clock. Even at five cents a turn she has to be making a fortune. Nine of them so far. I've been married to women who didn't perform that much in a year.”

January knelt beside the mattress. In the dusty light the fiddler looked awful, his face ghastly white and sunken in the dark frame of his long hair. Blood spotted the sheet over him and blotched the rags thrown down near a water pitcher not far away, and the threadbare nightshirt he wore was damp with sweat. His pulse was steady, however, and his nails, when pinched, returned to color quickly, and when January put his ear to his friend's chest he heard none of the telltale rattle of pneumonia.

“I'm sorry I missed the Hermanns' ball,” said Hannibal, when January sat up again. “Did you get someone to replace me?”

“Bichet's nephew Johnnie.”

“Then I completely abase myself. That's the best you could do? The boy couldn't keep time with a clock in his hand to help him. I'll be there tonight, I promise.”

January looked gravely down at him, the bled-out pallor and shaky hands. “You sure?”

“ 'How has he the leisure to be sick, in such a justling time?' I'll be there. I need the money.”

More thumping and rattling below. A man cried out, as if startled or hurt. Hannibal shut his eyes.

“Besides, this place was bad enough last night. Tonight's Mardi Gras, and I'd much rather be at the Theatre d'Orleans snabbling oysters than here listening to the bedstead symphony and the fights in the barroom. The Butcher came up and sat with me a little last night—she's the one who brought me the water—but they'll all be busy tonight, so I'd just as soon brush up my good coat and make my appearance in society. Which reminds me, I don't know what French privies are like, but in this country we go into them from the top, not the bottom.”

January looked down at his coat and laughed bitterly. “Evidently not in Kentucky,” he said, and Hannibal looked quickly away.

“Ah. I should have . . . Well.”

“My mama'd tell me that's what you get when you go past Canal Street and mix with the Americans. She—”

The outside door opened. The big woman entered, having replaced the baby with a bowl of grits and gravy in one enormous hand, two cups of coffee on saucers balanced easily in the other. In spite of her size and girth —coupling with her would be like mounting a plow horse, thought January admiringly—she was beautiful, if one had not been raised to believe white skin and delicate features constituted all of beauty.

“I saw you was up here, Ben,” she said, kneeling beside him and handing him the cup. It wasn't clean, but he'd drunk from far worse, and the coffee was strong enough to kill cholera, yellow fever, or such of this woman's customers as survived the woman herself. “How you feelin', Hannibal?”

“Ready to imitate the action of the tigers.” He sat up a little, poked at the contents of the dish, and ate a few mouthfuls without much enthusiasm. The woman reached into her dress pocket and produced a small bottle. “I found this in Nancy's room. There ain't much left, but if you water it some it may last you.”

Hannibal held the bottle to the light, and January smelled the swoony alcohol bitterness of laudanum. The fiddler's mouth quirked—evidently Nancy had consumed most of the contents—but he said, “Thank you, Mary. At least I've been into every pawnshop in town enough that most of the pawnbrokers won't take my violin anymore,” he added philosophically. “So the girls have quit hocking it. And of course the books are perfectly safe.”

“I went down by Tia Hojie and got you this,” Mary went on. She produced a small bag of red flannel from the same pocket, put it around Hannibal's neck on a long, dirty ribbon. “Don't you open it,” she added, as he made a move to do so. “It's healin' juju—a black cat bone and mouse heads and I don't know what all else. You just wear it and it'll help you. I got a green candle to burn here, too.”

“Thank you,” said Hannibal, reaching out to take the woman's hands. “That's good of you, truly. What'll Big Mag say about having a candle up here? She took away the lamp I had to read by,” he added to January. “When it gets dark, all I can do is lie here and listen to the fights downstairs.”

“I'll put it in a glass jar,” promised Mary. “Besides, Big Mag gonna be busy tonight; she won't know nuthin'. I'll put the mark on your shoes and burn this here candle while you're gone, and you feel better in the mornin'.”

Hannibal coughed, fighting the spasm, then managed a smile. “I'll feel better knowing I can pay Mag her rent money,” he said. “Thank you.”

The woman collected the blood-crusted rags, checked to see there was water in the pitcher, and departed. Hannibal sank back on the mattress with the barely touched bowl of grits next to his hand and fell almost immediately to sleep. January shook his head, covered the bowl with the saucer, and descended the stairs. On a sudden thought he crossed the kitchen yard, to where Fat Mary was fussing around the kitchen once more. As he had suspected, there was a residue of brick dust on the kitchen steps, and a little smear of ochre on the doorsill.