Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (18 page)

The woman who marries him
...

A poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart.

The meeting in Froissart's office could have continued with Granger and Bouille, of course, after the seconds were dismissed. And Shaw was the only one who would know that.

January folded the papers together, gazing out sightlessly into the early dark. Euphrasie Dreuze's ravings about the dead bat aside, it was quite possible that Lt. Shaw had looked over his notes and come to his own conclusions about just who had the most motive in An-gelique Crozat's death: the passionate son, or that powerful, courtly, white-bearded old man.

Maybe he only remembered with the memory of an idealistic young man, but it was his recollection that sixteen years ago, before he left Louisiana, had a white man murdered a free colored woman, the police would have investigated and the murderer been hanged. It had been a French city then, with the French understanding of who, and what, the free colored actually were: a race of not-quite-acknowledged cousins, neither African nor European, but property holders, artisans, citizens.

Shaw had, for a time, appeared to understand. But that was before he'd read these notes.

There was a difference between not quite trusting whites, and this. Being struck in the street had not been as shocking, or as painful, as the realization of what exactly the American regime meant.

“ 'Put them aside,' ” he quoted dryly, handing the folded sheets back to Dominique, “ 'in some safe place where they will not be seen.' It looks like this isn't any of our business anymore.”

And so the matter rested, until Euphrasie Dreuze took matters into her own grasping little ring-encrusted hands.

They were all raised to this world,
he had said to Madeleine Trepagier three nights ago, with the bands of greasy light falling through the window of Froissart's office onto her masked and painted face. To do things a certain way. They mostly know each other, and they all know the little tricks—who they can talk to and who not ...

January shook his head ironically at the memory of his words as he lounged up Rue DuMaine, with the lazy, almost conversational tapping of African drums growing louder before him beyond the iron palings of the fence around Congo Square.

You don't. Go home,
he had said. Go home right now.

Even with his papers in his pocket—the pocket of the shabby corduroy roundabout he'd bought for a couple of reales from a backstreet slop shop in the Irish Channel—he felt a twinge of uneasiness as he crossed the Rue des Ramparts.

Last night he had said to Dominique, This isn't any of our business anymore. Now who's being a fool?

He slipped his hand in his pocket, fingering the papers with a kind of angry distaste. Before he'd left for Paris, sixteen years ago, the assumption of his status had been unquestioned. He was a free man—black, white, or tea, as Andrew Jackson had said when he'd recruited him to fight the redcoats at Chalmette. He had been shocked when the official at the docks had looked at him oddly, and said, “Returnin” resident, eh? You might want to get yourself papers, boy. They's enough cheats and scum in this city who'd pounce on a likely lookin' boy, and you'd find yourself pickin' cotton in Natchez before you kin say Jack Robinson. Till you do, I'd stay out of barrooms.“ He had grown up being called ”boy" by white men, even as a grown man. It was something he'd half forgotten, like his wariness of authority. In any case what one accepts as a twenty-four-year-old musician is different from what one expects when one is forty and a member of the Paris College of Surgeons, though he hadn't practiced in ten years. But that at least was something he'd thought about on the boat from Le Havre.

His mother had confirmed that these days a man of color, no matter how well dressed and well spoken, needed to carry proof of his freedom—and a slave of his business—in order to walk the streets alone.

“That is how it has come, p'tit,” she said, while in her eyes he saw the reflection of his own blackness—part contempt, but part concern. “It is the Americans, moving in from all sides, with their new houses and their tawdry furniture and their loud women who have no manners. Now more and more they control this town. What do you expect of men who won't even free their own children when they get them on Negro women? They have no understanding of culture, of civilization. To them, we are no better than their slave bastards. If they could, they would lock us all in their barracoons and sell us to make a profit. It is all they think of, the cochons.”

She had been, he reflected now, more right than he knew.

She had taken a certain amount of pains, those first few weeks, to introduce him to her friends among the more influential men of color, not only to let them know that he was a music master and in the market for pupils, but to remind them that he was her son, and a free man. For his part he noticed that in the years of his absence, those friends had almost entirely stopped speaking English. It was a way of setting themselves off by language, by style of dress, and mostly by attitude and actions from any association with either the slave blacks or the black American freedmen who worked as laborers in the city.

Another voice came back to him: He could no more pass himself for a gentleman than our doctor here can pass himself for a white man. . . .

Or a black one,
thought January, shaking his head at himself as he slipped through the gate into the open space of dirt and grass called Congo Square. He wondered whether his blackness, and the memories of a childhood long past, would be sufficient to let him pass for what his mother had been trying for years to get everyone to forget.

The drums beat quicker, two distinct voices, one deep, one high. Somebody laughed; there was a ripple of jokes. The drummers were mocking up a conversation, the deeper drum a man, the higher a woman, and January could almost hear the words: “Come on out behind my cabin, pretty girl?”

“Yeah, what's that gonna git me, 'sides sore heels and a round belly?”

“Got me some pretty beads here,” said the deep drum.

“You call them pretty?” laughed the higher drum. “I spit prettier out'n that watermelon I ate last week.” You could hear the inflection, the flick of the woman drum's eyelashes and the sway of her hips. More laughter at the deep drum's speculative grumble.

Many plantations —Bellefleur had been one of them —forbade slaves to have drums at all, and when old Joseph had played his reed flutes for dancing after work was done, rhythm was kept on sticks and spoons. There was something about that blood beat speaking across the miles of bayou, swamp, and silent, stifling cane fields in the night that made the owners uneasy. It reminded them of how isolated they were among the Africans they owned.

Those drums had not been making jokes about tussles in the grass behind the cabins.

The memories touched sore places inside him, and he pushed them aside. He didn't belong here. The fact that he looked as if he did troubled him for reasons he couldn't quite define.

January scanned their faces, moving, talking, listening in the just-turned slant of the afternoon light. Distantly, the clock on the cathedral spoke three, answered by the wail of a riverboat's whistle. Up the street, small parties of men and women—white, colored, free blacks, a few devout slaves—would be coming out of afternoon Mass at the Saint-Antoine chapel, holding their prayer books and rosaries tight and crossing Rue des Ramparts so as not to pass the square.

The people here ranged in color as widely as had the attendees at the funeral, though on the whole this crowd was darker. Some of them were almost as smartly dressed. Those would be the skilled slaves, the hairdressers and ironsmiths, the tailors and shoemakers, the carpenters and embroideresses, valets, cooks, and maids. They were outnumbered, however, by those in the coarse grays and browns of laborers and draymen, stablehands and yardmen, laundresses and ironers. The women's tignons were simple muslin or gaudy calico, rather than the silks worn by the women of color in mockery of the Black Code, but like all the colored women in the city they arranged them in fantastic variations of knots, folds, points.

And they all moved differently, spoke to each other differently, from the reserved, careful, soft-spoken members of colored society. The laughter was louder. The men smoked cigars, despite the law that neither black nor colored was permitted to do so in public. Many of the women flirted in a way the carefully reared Catholic young ladies of color never would have dared.

For no reason he remembered a morning, seven or eight weeks earlier, when he'd come to the chapel for early Mass, passing by this square and smelling blood. He had crossed the damp grass and found the beheaded body of a black rooster nailed to one of the oaks, its blood dripping down on the little plate of chickpeas and rice beside the tree's roots, surrounded by a ring of silver half-reale bits. His confessor had told him only a few days ago that he and the other priests would now and then find pieces of pound cake, cigars, or bits of candy at the feet of certain statues in the church.

The drums seemed to have reached an understanding. One could hear it, like the pounding of a lust-quick heart. A banjo joined in, sharp as crickets in summer trees, and a makeshift flute called a nightbird's rill.

“Calinda, calinda!”
called out someone. “Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!”

It was nothing like Rossini, nothing like Schubert. Nothing that had to do with Herr Kovald or Paris at all.

Already, men and women had begun to dance.

Leaning against the iron palings of the fence, hands in his pockets and uneasy shame in his heart, January searched the crowd.

The woman he was looking for he hadn't seen in sixteen years.

Dark faces under bright tignons, white smiles gleaming. Shabby skirts swirling, moving, breasts swaying under white blouses, arms weaving. A smell of sweat came off the crowd, and with it the memory of nearly forgotten nights sitting on the step of his mother's cabin, watching the other slaves dance by the smoky blaze of pine knots. Considering how much there had been to do on Bellefleur, the endless weeding and chopping at the heavy cane, repairing barns and outbuildings, cutting cypress, digging mud for levees and causeways, he still wondered how any of them had had the energy to dance, how he himself had managed, even with the wild energy of a child.

More and more were joining in, though, even as they had then. People were shouting, singing, wild and pagan and utterly unlike the music he had been trained to make. Tunes and fragments of tunes unwound like dizzy pinwheels, reeling off into space. A thin girl with a red tignon coiled high like a many-knotted turban danced near him, teasing and inviting, and the brass rattles she wore on her ankles clattered in alien music. He grinned, shook his head. She flashed him a glimpse of calf and petticoat and spun on her way. Across the crowd a face seemed to emerge, half familiar—he realized with a shock it was Romulus Valle, and looked quickly away.

How many others were here?
he wondered in momentary panic. Bella—would Bella come here on her Sunday afternoons? His mother's cook? He realized he didn't even know if she was still a slave, or had been freed. It had never occurred to him to ask. She was part of his mother's household from time immemorial. ... In either case she'd never let him hear the end of this if she saw him.

He wondered suddenly if the girl Judith would be here, and what he could possibly say to her about the thing he carried in his pocket.

“Her-on mandt, Her-on mande, Ti-gui li papa!”

Thin, whining, almost hypnotic, the voices rose from deeper in the crowd. More and more were dancing, to the counterpoint rhythm of the drums, the sweet, metallic jangle of ankle clappers. January's mind groped at the meaning of the words, but they were as much African as French—and bad French at that.

"Her-on mandt,

Ti-gui li papa!

Her-on mande,

Her-on mande,

Do-se dan do-go!"

Other voices rose up, only slightly more comprehensible:

"They seek to frighten me,

Those people must be crazy.

They don't see their misfortune

Or else they must be drunk.

"I, the Voodoo queen,

With my lovely handkerchief

Am not afraid of tomcat shrieks
—

I drink serpent venom!"

Someone shouted, “Marie! Marie!” Turning his head, January saw that a woman had mounted a sort of platform made of packing boxes in the center of the square. She was tall and would have topped many in the crowd even had she not been standing on the makeshift dais— handsome rather than beautiful, with strong cheekbones and very dark eyes. Gold earrings flashed in the torrent of black hair that streamed on her shoulders, and jewels— possibly glass and possibly real—glittered on her white blouse and tempestuous blue skirt. Even without moving her feet she was dancing, body rippling snakelike, eyes closed in a kind of curious ecstasy, though her face was impassive in the long, brazen light.

"I walk on pins,

I walk on needles,

I walk on gilded splinters,

I want to see what they can do . . ."

Other voices were shouting, “Zombi! Papa Limba!” and January's eyes passed quickly across the faces of those who crowded near. The woman had a snake in her arms, the biggest king snake he had ever seen, six feet long and thick as a man's wrist. It coiled around her neck and over her shoulders as she danced, and the droning voices rose against the driving heartbeat of the drums. Through the pickets around the square he could see white faces looking in, women in simple calicoes or the fancier twills and silks, men in the coarse clothing of laborers or the frock coats of artisans or merchants. At the square's four gates, policemen looked on impassively.

How could they?
January wondered. How could they simply watch? Did they not feel what these people felt, what he himself felt against his will? The music was electric, drawing the mind and body to it with a force beyond that of childhood memory. It drew at the blood, and even from here, halfway across the square, he could sense the power of the woman with the snake.