Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (15 page)

The houses glittered with windows, the farthest dwellings imaginable from the sordid cabins of the Irish Channel just upriver from the French town, or the filth of the Girod
Street
Swamp. Not that his mother—or any of the old French planters—would admit that there was any difference in the quality of the inhabitants. “They are Americans,” Livia—or Xavier Peralta, for that matter —would say, with the tone Bouille had used of his opponent Granger, with the look in her eyes like the eyes behind those velvet masks regarding Shaw from the doorway of the Orleans ballroom last night.

He suspected that because they could afford such houses—because they owned so many steamship companies and banks, so much of the money that kept the old French planters going from sugar crop to sugar crop— only made the situation worse.

“Ma! The nigger music teacher's here!”

The small boy's bell-clear voice carried even through the shut back door of the house, and January felt his jaw muscles clench even as he schooled his face to a pleasant smile when the housemaid, wiping flour-covered hands on her apron, opened the kitchen door. The knowledge that the girls' white drawing master also had to come to the back door was of little comfort.

Franklin Culver was vice-president of a small bank on the American side of Canal Street. He owned four slaves: the housemaid Ruth, the yardman Jim, and two other men whose services he rented out to a lumberyard. January suspected that if any of the three daughters of the household knew that his given name was Benjamin, they'd call him by it instead of Mr. January. He could see that the matter still profoundly puzzled Charis, the youngest. “But slaves don't have last names,” she'd argued during the first lesson.

“Well, they do, Miss Charis,” pointed out January. “But anyway, I'm not a slave.”

Upon a later occasion she'd remarked that slaves didn't speak French—French evidently being something small girls learned with great labor and frustration from their governesses—so he could tell she was still unclear about the entire concept of a black man being free. He suspected that her father shared this deficiency. He didn't even try to explain that he wasn't black, but colored, a different matter entirely.

Still, the girls were very polite, unspoiled and charming, clearly kept up with their daily practicing, and four-fifty a week was four-fifty a week. Three dollars of that went to Livia, and two or three from what he earned teaching small classes in her parlor on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. They didn't have the passion, or the gift for music, that Madeleine Dubonnet had had, nor the secret bond of shared devotion, but he'd instructed far worse.

He occasionally asked himself what he was saving for, squirreling away small sums of money in his account at the Banque de Louisiane. A house of his own?

In New Orleans? Paris had been bad enough, knowing that he was a fully qualified surgeon who would never have his own practice—or never a paying one—sheerly because of the color of his skin. Even as a musician his size and color had made him something of a curiosity, but at least people on the streets of Paris did not treat him like an idiot or a potentially dangerous savage. At least he didn't have to alter his manner and his speech in the interests of making a living, of not running afoul of the Black Code. At least he could look any man in the eyes.

In the few months he had been back he had found himself keeping almost exclusively to the French town, among the Creoles, who had not been brought up with the assumption that all those not of pure European descent were or should be slaves.

But the thought of returning to Paris turned his heart cold. During the weeks after Ayasha's death he had nearly gone crazy, expecting to see her around every corner, striding up the cobbled hill of Montmartre or arguing with market women, a straw basket of apples and bread on her hip—looking for her, listening everywhere for her voice. One night he'd gone walking for hours in the rain, searching the streets, half persuading himself that she wasn't really dead. He'd ended up sobbing at three in the morning on the steps of Notre Dame, the blue-beaded rosary wrapped around his hands, incoherently praying to the Virgin for he knew not what. He knew then that he had to leave that city or go mad.

And where else was there for him to go?

He listened to Charis's careful simplifications of Mozart airs, to Penelope's mechanical cotillions, and Esther's studied, overemphatic mutilation of Childgrove; gave them exercises and new pieces to learn; watched and listened for patterns of mistakes. He was conscious of pacing himself, giving the attention and care necessary but offering nothing beyond. Weariness had caught up with him, between his early ride to Les Saules and the exhausting scene at the house on Rue des Ursulines, with no sleep the night before. As a result he felt a curious disori-entadon in this overdecorated room, with its fashionable German furniture of heavily carved black walnut and slick upholstery, its beaded lampshades and fussy break-fronts and printed green wallpaper—a very American house, unlike the pared simplicity of Les Saules or his mother's simple cottage on Rue Burgundy. Sixteen years ago, when he'd left, most of this land had been cane fields, and English was a language one seldom heard in New Orleans.

His mind feeling thick and heavy, he dozed on the omnibus as it clopped its way down Nyades Street. The walk back to his mother's house revived him a little, and there was enough time, before his pupils arrived at four, to go back to the kitchen and beg a dish of beans and rice from Bella, the woman who had cooked and cleaned and done the laundry almost as long as his mother had lived there. After he ate he went into the parlor, where his mother was reading the newspaper, and played some Bach to clear his mind and warm up his hands. The children, ranging in ages from seven to fourteen and in colors from the clear medium brown of polished walnut to palest ivory, appeared a few minutes later, and he switched his mind over to the disciplines of teaching again, studying the way those small hands labored over the keys and guessing half instinctively how their minds interpreted what they were doing with rhythm and sound.

One was the child of a placee and a white man; the others, offspring of well-off artisans, merchants, leaders of the colored community who wanted their children to have a little more than they themselves might have had.

He wondered what Charis Culver—or her father— would have made of that.

When the last of them had gone he crossed the yard, climbed the narrow stair to his room above the kitchen, and slept, all the windows open against the heat that rose from below. But his dreams were uneasy, troubled by images of Madeleine Trepagier in her silly deerskin dress and cock feathers standing on an auction block, while masked men in rich satins called out bids for her in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hotel. He was aware of one figure moving at the rear of the group, a figure he could barely see, shrouded, with the bound jaw of a corpse. Every time that figure raised its hand the bidding halted for a moment, uneasily, and when it continued it flagged, as if none dared bid against that greenish, dreadful shape.

A crashing, thumping noise woke him, like giant's footfalls in the room beside his bed. Bella, he realized. She was hitting the ceiling of the kitchen with a broom handle to tell him it was seven o'clock. The Grand Ball of the Faubourg Treme Militia Company began in two hours. His head thick with the dissatisfied, incompleted ache of daytime sleep, he lay for a moment feeling the moist air from outside walking over his race, rippling silently at the thin white curtains. The smell of lost bread and coffee drifted up with the kitchen's warmth, and the ache, the longing, the wanting to wake up completely and find Ayasha still lying in the bed beside him passed over him as a dark wave would have passed across a sleeper on the beach, salt wetness lingering for hours after the drag and force were gone.

Somewhere in his mind an image lingered — part of a dream? — of the slave block in the St. Charles Hotel, empty save for a couple of black cock feathers and a lingering sense of despair.

Angelique's funeral was to be at noon.

Sipping what he hoped would be a restorative cup of cafe noir at one of the tables scattered under the market's brick arcade and listening to the cathedral clock chime four-thirty, January wondered if he'd be able to sneak in some sleep before then.

“Maybe they're both terrible shots,” said Hannibal, dusting powdered sugar from the beignets off his sleeves. New Orleans had one of the best systems of street lighting in the country, and even beyond the arcade the sooty predawn murk was streaked and blotted with amber where iron lanterns hung high above the banquettes. “Maybe they'll just miss each other and we can all go home.”

"Maybe somebody'll discover I'm the long-lost heir to the throne of France, and I can give up teaching piano.

January glanced uneasily around him. Curfew was seldom enforced during Carnival, and for the most part the city guardsmen only bothered those who were obviously slaves or poor, but still he felt wary, unprotected, to be abroad this late.

“Creoles will end a swordfight after first blood— everybody in town is each other's cousins anyway. With bullets it's hard to tell.” He shrugged. “With Americans it's hard to tell. Mostly they shoot to kill.”

Across the street the shutters of the Caft du Levee were still flung wide, the saffron light blurred by river mist but the forms within still visible: the elderly men who had fled the revolution in Santo Domingo and younger men who were their sons, playing cards, drinking absinthe or coffee, denouncing the filthy traitorous Bonapartists and lamenting the better life that had existed before atheism, rationalism, and les americains. Many wore fancy dress, coming in as one by one the balls and dances around the French town wound to conclusion, and all around January at the tables beneath the arcade, men—and a scattering of women—in evening clothes or masquerade garb rubbed elbows with market women and stevedores just starting their day as the revelers were ending theirs. Pralinieres and sellers of beignets or callas moved among them, peddling their wares fresh from the oven out of rush baskets; a coffee-stand sent white steam billowing into the misty dark. If some few of the gentlemen at the other tables looked askance at Hannibal for eating with a colored man, the lateness of the hour and the laxness of Carnival season kept them quiet about it. In any case, Hannibal was well enough known that few people commented on his behavior anymore.

Beyond the arcade's brick pillars dyed gold by lamplight, past the dark lift of the levee, the black chimneys of steamboats clustered like a fire-blasted forest in the dark, spiked crowns glowing saffron with the fire reflected within and glints of that feral light catching the gilded trim of flagstaffs and pilothouses. The thin fog tasted of ash, and drifting smuts had already left streaks on the two men's shirtfronts and cuffs. “Monsieur Janvier.”

Augustus Mayerling appeared in the shadows of the arcade. He had removed his mask but wore the Elizabethan doublet of black-and-green leather he'd had on for Thursday night's ball. Despite his short-cropped hair and the four saber scars that marked the left side of his face and must, January reflected, make shaving a nightmare for him, the high-worked ruff and the odd glare of the cafe's lights gave his beaky features an equivocal cast, almost feminine in the iron gloom. “Hannibal, my friend. I had not looked to see you.”

“What, and miss a duel?” As usual for this hour of the morning the fiddler looked as if he'd been pulled through a sieve, but his dark eyes sparkled with irony. “The single, solitary chance of an entire lifetime to see a Creole and an American actually taking potshots at each other? Heaven forfend.” He raised the backs of his fingers to his forehead in the manner of a diva quailing before circumstances too awful to endure. “It's all a matter of timing,” he explained and went back to the dregs of his coffee.

"When now Aurora, daughter of the dawn, With rosy luster purpled o'er the lawn . . .

“The very hour, my friends, when the sporting establishments in the Swamp customarily close their doors and disgorge the flatboat crews into the—er—I suppose I have to call it a street. They'll still be drunk, but not drunk enough yet to pass out, and they don't go back to work until sunrise. If I come along to the duel I only have to worry about one bullet.”

“I like to see a man who is provident as well as talented.” Mayerling nodded gravely, then held out a gloved hand to January. “Thank you again for agreeing to accompany us. It's a nuisance, and cuts into your rest —and mine, I might add—but they seem to think their manhood will fall off in the dirt if they are deprived of the chance at least to put their lives in danger to prove the veracity of their claims. You're familiar with their quarrel?”

“Only that it's the biggest shouting match since that last mayoral election when the editors of the Argus and the Courier got into that fistfight in the Cafe Hewlett,” said Hannibal cheerfully.

“I gather Granger started out by accusing Bouille of deliberately voting against the proposed streetcar route of his LaFayette company in favor of another one that he says would favor the French population.”

January finished the last scrap of beignet, and he and Hannibal followed the Prussian through the clutter of tables and patrons toward the street. “Bouille came back saying Granger was only angry because he, Bouille, hadn't accepted the bribes offered by the LaFayette and Pontchartrain railway, and from there they went on to accuse each other of cowardice, bastardy, enticing young girls to run away from convents in order to lead them to ruin, infamous personal habits, and accepting a slap in the face from the mayor without demanding retribution.”

January tucked his music satchel under his arm and sprang lightly across the gutter, the weight of his black leather medical bag a weirdly familiar ballast in his hand.

“I am armed with more than complete steel,”
quoted Hannibal expansively. “The justice of my quarrel.”

“My mother says she can't believe Bouille didn't accept whatever bribes Granger was handing out because Bouille's palm is greasier than a candlemaker's apron, but that Granger makes his money stealing cows in St. Charles Parish and selling them back to their owners, so what does he care about his silly streetcar line anyway? I'd forgotten,” he added reminiscently, “how much I loved New Orleans politics.”