Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (46 page)

“Are you sorry you went?” she asked. “Sorry you lived among these people? Sorry you remembered?”

He said, “No.”

“It's an injury,” she said. “A wound. There will be a scar, and the scar will hurt-mine certainly do-but wounds do heal.” Her long slim hand, cold within its glove, slipped into his.

Shortly after the New Year, January was passing a blacksmith's yard on the Rue St.-Pierre, coming home late from rehearsals with an opera company visiting from Italy, which would open in the Carnival season. The mist lay thick in the wet streets, and his head was filled with arias and duets and the precise placement of half-notes, but out of the dark he heard a man's single voice lifted in wailing, gentle song:

"They carry them down to the river,

They throw them in the stream.

They carry them down to the river,

They throw them in the stream."

He stepped into the torchlit yard, and saw the smithy brimming over with the warmth of lamps. A small broad-shouldered man bent over an anvil, like a bee in the center of a rose of crimson light, drawing out an iron bar flat for some future project, the forge-light edging his cropped gray hair with gold. From the yard gate January added his voice to the song:

'Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying,

Papa, I'm gonna die. . . . "

Mohammed looked up, and his teeth glinted in a smile. “Ben!” He laid his hammer aside, and his hand was rough and hard as the forged iron as it clasped January's. “I'm glad to see you well.”

“And I you.”

“It is still Ben, isn't it?” asked the smith. He'd grown a beard, which with the broken nose and the scars left by Duffy's beating altered the look of his face. “I go by the name of Moses these days. Moses LePas. M'sieu Theroux, that's the owner here, speaks of taking me on as a partner.”

“He couldn't get a better,” said January. “Man, it's good to see you. Are any of the others in town, do you know? Are they well?”

“Just about everyone's well,” the blacksmith said. “I heard from Herc only last week-he and Trinette are in New York. Ajax has his own gang of stevedores on the waterfront there, and Bumper and Nero are in school. They come home and teach Hope what they've learned, to read and to figure. Marquis-you remember how bad he was burned-he's got a little farm on Cane River, and a Chickasaw wife. Agamemnon's up there, too, working in a tavern; old M'am Pennydip cooks for him and keeps house. Quashie and Jeanette are expecting a child, over in Mobile.”

“And Kiki?” asked January, and the look Mohammed gave him, sidelong, told him what the blacksmith guessed.

“I've heard no word of her,” he answered. “Mostly everyone else, though. Not many are here in town, of course, for fear of running into Michie Esteban, but there's some. They all ask after you, you know.”

And what did they feel? January wondered. Did they feel that hideous, despairing sense that whatever they did, it would accomplish nothing? Did they feel hate every time they saw a white face, or wake in the night with memories that would be part of them forever?

But it would be forever, he thought. And it was a part of them, and a part of him as well, a blood-link that joined them. At that realization some of his anger shifted, and sorrow and understanding entered to ease a little of its pain. Joy warmed him at the,thought of all those friends, as if he'd received word of a family long lost.

“Tell them I'm well,” he said, smiling then. “Tell them I'm fine.” He filled the blacksmith in on what he'd heard of Esteban's activities, and those of Madame Fourchet. “Not bad,” he said, “for one who had to start all over again.”

“No.” Mohammed grinned. “No, that's a woman who'll go far. It was a good thing that you did, you know,” he went on. “I always meant to tell you at the time. So many men say to Allah, `Show me your will and I'll do it,' and then when Allah says, `Take this staff and go save that flock of sheep from wolves,' they say, `Show me your other will.' We weren't your sheep. You didn't know us at all. I wanted to tell you how proud your father would have been of you.”

January had been about to speak, to deprecate what he had done, but he found he could not. He stood with his breath indrawn, looking at the griot's face in the lamplight, unable to say a word.

Mohammed went on, “You are Jumah's son, aren't you?”

Jumah.

Up until that moment January had never recalled his father's name. It had been buried under the pain of losing him, under the terrors of being taken away from the only home he had known; under the fear of his mother being taken from him as well. But now the name came back to him, not as a new thing, but as something always there. He said, “Yes. Yes, Jumah was my father.”

And something cracked inside him, like ice breaking on a river in spring. He put his hand to his mouth but could do nothing else. Only stand in the lamp light of the smithy, sudden tears running down his face.

Old scars hurting.
Dried wounds opening with lifegiving blood.
Old memories singing from out of his dreams.

“No,” said Mohammed gently. “Here, no, it's not a thing for tears, Ben. Your father was a good man, a righteous and upstanding one. He'd have done what you did.”

And January shook his head, his shoulders shuddering as he fought to steady his breath. “Why didn't he come?” he asked, when he could speak. “All those years. Bellefleur was only a few miles from town, an hour's walk at most. Why didn't he come?”

“But he did,” Mohammed said. “He came every week, whenever he could get a pass and many times when he couldn't. He'd walk into town and stand across the street, or around the corner, watching you come and go sometimes, or listening while you practiced on the piano. He said you played music like the spirits all praising God together, music like the sun coming up. He'd come back all glowing with it, and whether he spoke of it or not, we knew he'd been to see his son.”

“He never spoke!” The words came out of January like broken potsherds working up through the earth of a grave. “He could have stopped me on the street, he could have come around the corner. He didn't have to let my mother keep him away. I used to sit on the gallery behind the house, waiting for him at night. And he never came.”

“Ah, Ben.”
The smith spoke, not to the musician standing before him, with his new black coat and his music satchel, but to the child on the gallery, the child who dreamed of the tall naked man with the country marks on his face. “Ben, he would not have done that to you. `My son is a free man,' Jumah would say to us, those days when we'd ask him the same thing. `Ben has to learn to stand like a free man, and to look other men in the eye. He has to learn to speak like a free man, so that no one will even have to ask him to prove he's free. They'll know it. And he can't learn that from a father who's a slave.' ”

January was silent for a long time. Thinking about those nights, and the stillness and peace of the country.
The silence of the sunlight, lying on the cabin floor.

“What happened to him?” he asked at last. For he knew then that the griot would know.

“In time Fourchet had him moved up to Triomphe.”

“Because he'd run away all the time?”

Mohammed hesitated, then shook his head. A lie, but January understood. “I think he just wanted more hands there, or maybe it was after he sold Bellefleur. I don't remember.”

As if, thought January, there wasn't a lost pot or a cast horseshoe that Mohammed didn't know about the people of the quarters in thirty-three years.

“He ran away from Triomphe, and three days later they found his body in the cipriere. He'd been bit by a snake, and he died there underneath a sweet-gum tree, about a hundred feet from where Disappearing Willie had his house. By what we could tell, he'd made no effort to cut the wound, or suck the poison clean. He was just tired, and had lived enough, and so he fell asleep.”

January closed his eyes, the tears still running down his face.

“There's no call to weep,” said Mohammed gently again. His hard hand rubbed January's arm as if to remind him of his own bone and flesh. “It was a long time ago-nearly twenty-five years. He died a proud man, and a happy one.”

“He died a slave.”

“He died knowing his son was a free man, and a man who could make music that the angels in Heaven would sneak away from their work to listen to. He died in the wilderness, where it was quiet and green. We all sang a ring-shout for him, and laid him to rest, there on Triomphe, for his dust to mingle with the dust of his friends. How many other men die that happy?”

January nodded, and drew in his breath, remembering the burying-ground near the levee. Recalling those anonymous marker-boards, and the still silence where hundreds lay unmarked, reabsorbed into the womb of the earth. His father was buried, he realized, with Reuben and with Gilles, with those others who were little more than names-LIVINNIA and POSEY. He could say now to Olympe's children, This was your grandfather, a good and wonderful man. Maybe one day say it to a child of his own. He had seen his father's grave, and that gave him peace.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked Mohammed. “I couldn't have been eight years old when I left Bellefleur. You couldn't have known me.”

Mohammed almost laughed. “Ben,” he said, “you're the mirror of him, his living double. I knew your name was Ben. And like you he was a music-maker, with his hands and his voice and his heart.”

“Thank you,” said January softly. “I didn't know all that. And I'm glad now that I can tell my sister and her children.”

“That's good,” said the smith, nodding. “He'd want his grandchildren to know his name.”

January stepped into the dense lapis midnight of the streets, and though he'd spent the evening playing Bellini's bright flamboyant airs-and those airs still resonated golden within him-as he walked he raised his voice in a wailing field-holler with all the joy in his heart. And as he passed each dark alleyway, each slaveyard or carriageway, voices answered him, as they would have out in the cane-fields, lifting in harmony, catching and twirling his notes like a dancer. The reverberance of sorrow and joy echoed around him, and followed him all the way home.

All accounts of travel through the Deep South in the 1830s make mention that the slaves sang as they worked in the cane-fields. When it came to researching this book, the question of what exactly they sang proved to be a difficult one.

Until almost the eve of the Civil War, most rural plantation slaves were only nominally Christian, if that. House-servants were probably given some instruction in Christianity, depending on the master. Many urban slaves attended Christian worship, though in New Orleans particularly, the legally mandated Catholicism was frequently blended with voodoo. In the countryside, most small slaveowners-not of the planter class-who owned one, two, or possibly half a dozen slaves who divided their duties between farm work and the house, might convert, or instruct, their bondsmen.

But the majority of rural slaves-and a goodly number of urban ones-did not become Christians in any real sense of the word until the Evangelical movement of the 1840s. Up to the 1830s many whites refused to tolerate black congregations, arguing that any gathering of blacks would provide a seedbed of rebellion and pointing out that the two great leaders of early nineteenth-century rebellions, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, were both preachers.

Spirituals-the quintessential form (with blues) of black music in America-did not exist until the late 1840s or 1850s.

So what did they sing?

I've done the best I can in assembling what phonetic fragments of presumably African songs survive in the works of such writers as George Washington Cable, and the old Creole songs that were popular then. There are contemporary or near-contemporary (1840s and 1850s) accounts of both ring-shouts and the field hollers, and the similarity of these hollers to descriptions of street-vendors' cries is striking.

Descriptions agree that the songs were extremely odd and frequently unpleasant to Western ears: words like wailing, monotonous, and caterwauling are used, and frequent reference is made to the call-and-response form that was later absorbed into spirituals. Accounts agree on the very African emphasis on rhythm-in fact on many plantations possession of a drum was a whipping offense.

What is clear is that music played a critical part in the lives of the displaced Africans; that it was a vital link to the world from which they, or their parents or grandparents, had been ripped. When plantation blacks did come to Christianity, either through campmeetings in the 1840s or through the often-secret efforts of preachers from urban black congregations, they naturally adapted Protestant hymns to African needs and African modes of song, giving rise to spirituals in the same way that European cotillions and Irish clog dancing morphed into characteristic black dance.

Field Work Songs hollers blended imperceptibly into the blues, the casual weaving of songs from and into everyday activities. “Playing the dozens,” the game of insults and counter-insults, is attested to in slave-related literature well back into the eighteenth century.

What struck me most clearly, in reading first-person accounts of slavery, is the enormous variety of personal experiences in what was by definition a hideously dysfunctional relationship. Some masters were very nice to their slaves. Some slaves were maliciously rebellious and manipulative. Some masters nailed their slaves up in barrels and rolled them down hills. Some masters sold families as units and others didn't think twice about splitting them up. Some slaves poisoned their masters, sabotaged farm equipment (though the word “sabotage” didn't exist until the early twentieth century), deliberately injured work animals or their masters' children.

In some ways, Gone With the Wind is as accurate as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Men and women, both white and black, reacted to these conditions with the entire conceivable (and in some cases inconceivable) spectrum of emotions and behaviors: loyalty, resentment, kindness, patronization, uncaring.

The critical thing about all these accounts is, that if you were a slave, you could just as easily get one sort of master, and treatment, as you could another. What happened to you was entirely arbitrary.