Good Man Friday (5 page)

In fact, the color bar only appeared at mealtimes, but at least the Janvier family dined at a small table in the saloon at the same time as the white passengers, rather than being obliged to eat with the servants. On an American ship they'd have been sleeping in the cargo hold and eating with the crew.

‘I was telling M'sieu Janvier,' said Chloë, when Dominique dismissed her suitors and settled in an enormous sighing of lace petticoats on the sofa, ‘how poor M'sieu Singletary came to set sail for the United States after spending the first sixty-five years of his life adding up figures for Hurlstone and Ludd's Private Commercial Bank. He wrote to me from Baltimore in the first week of October, to say he had just set foot on American soil and was setting forth for Charlottesville by way of Washington the following day. But he never reached Charlottesville.'

‘Had he enemies?' Dominique, her many-colored teacup cradled in slender hands, leaned forward eagerly. ‘People who might have lain in wait for him? Or lured him to some private place where they could make away with him?'

In addition to gossip and millinery, Dominique was deeply fond of sensational fiction, of the Venetian daggers-in-the-dark variety. ‘As a man who audits the books for banks, he must have
thousands
of enemies!' The dim lamplight glowed in her lovely brown eyes. ‘Those who have embezzled money and fear detection; or whom business reverses have driven mad. And if the wife of one such man committed suicide from despair at their ruin, I can easily see that the husband would have followed him on shipboard, waiting for his chance—'

More reasonably, January inquired, ‘Did he know anyone in Washington or Charlottesville?'

‘Well, Dr Applegrove on the University board,' said Chloë. ‘Though they – like he and I – had never met. Another of his correspondents was a bookseller named Deaver in Charlottesville, whom I did know of to write to, when I didn't hear from M'sieu Singletary in three weeks. It wasn't like him, not to write. By the time M'sieu Deaver's reply reached me, saying that M'sieu Singletary had never arrived, I had also received letters from a Dr Woolmer, who runs a boys' school in Georgetown near Washington, and from a Mrs Bray, the married daughter of one of Mr Singletary's banker employers, asking if I, as another of his correspondents, had heard anything of him? It was at that point,' she said, her spectacle lenses flashing as she turned those large, pale-blue eyes back to January, ‘that Henri and I decided to speak to you. But by then he'd been missing for over ten weeks.'

‘Does he drink?'

‘Not that Uncle Veryl had ever heard of.'

‘I suppose,' said January thoughtfully, ‘that if he did, one of his correspondents – Applegrove, or Mrs Bray, or Dr Woolmer – would have mentioned it as a possible explanation for his disappearance. Did he have any illness that you know of? Something that might have flared up unexpectedly?'

Her smile was like the glint of chipped glass. ‘Considering the detail with which he described his
mal de mer
on the voyage over, I assume had anything else been amiss I would have heard of it.'

‘What about women?' asked Minou. January had been dying to bring the subject up, but it was not a question that even a white man could ask a white lady, let alone a black one. ‘You say he was one of those odd old bachelors, but you know, dearest – or maybe you don't …' She frowned worriedly. ‘About how old gentlemen turn into
complete
imbeciles over pretty young girls?'

Chloë tucked her smile away again, like a cat: ‘Only old gentlemen in someone else's family.' Her glance did not so much as flicker toward Herr Franck, whose snowy beard and numerous grandchildren did not deter him in the slightest from gallantries toward both women. Then the amusement faded from her eyes. ‘I'm not certain whether it's something he'd write to me about. I did ask Uncle Veryl about it – in Latin, to preserve the proprieties:
lascivia puella, et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri
– but he was horrified that I should even
think
of such a thing in connection with the President of the British Mathematical Society. And I did write to the Chief Constable of Washington, several times.'

‘And heard nothing?'

‘Congress is in session,' said Chloë, who was one of the few women January knew who read newspapers regularly, ‘and will be until June or July. Heaven knows what the town is like at such times. It is very close to the North.'

Yes
, he thought as he rose and offered Dominique his arm against the slow roll of the ship. It was very close to the North.

He had been to Europe, and he had been to Mexico, nations where, to one degree or another, he had been regarded as a man among other men and not twelve hundred dollars' worth of cotton hand walking around asking to be kidnapped.

He doubted he could return to France. Even after almost five years back in Louisiana, the pain of the loss that he had suffered there – the death of his first wife in the great cholera, which had torn the heart out of him in ways that he suspected might never be healed – was still too great to face, even with Rose at his side. And in Mexico, that land of peril and violence, he had learned that though there was no slavery, black men were almost as little regarded as they were in the United States. It was not a land in which he wanted to bring up his children.

Increasingly, neither was Louisiana.

As he made his way through rainy blackness to the companionway, clinging to the guy rope stretched along the waist of the ship with one hand and to Dominique's slender waist with the other, he thought about the North.

The other half of the United States. The world of factories and traders, where men either worked their own farms or paid a wage for the labor of others. The world where slavery had been outlawed. Where men of color, if they were not permitted to vote or serve on juries or hold office, at least were permitted to choose their own jobs and raise their families without fear of being sold off like cattle when ‘Michie' needed some extra cash.

Where he did not know a soul.

Rain smote his face. The ship fled on into darkness.

W
hen January was not quite eight years old, the smallest of the other boys in the ‘hogmeat gang' on Bellefleur Plantation had come running out to the chicken runs where the gang was assigned to clean that day – it was spring, and already hot. He could still smell the reek of chicken guano. The boy had said, ‘That man's buyin' your mama, Ben!'

He'd seen ‘that man' arrive two days before, a sugar broker from New Orleans, St-Denis Janvier. January – only his name had not been that then, only Ben, or Livy's Ben – knew he'd be whipped for leaving his chores but he'd run to the house anyway, sick with dread. On the back gallery he'd found Senja the cook, and she'd confirmed it: Michie Fourchet had sent for Livy from her work in the laundry, and the three of them were in the plantation office. ‘Don't worry, Ben.' Senja had hugged him, a compact woman of Yoruba ancestry, smelling of sweat and molasses. She had a kindness for Ben because he'd cut kindling for her and never seriously tried to steal food. ‘Michie Janvier live in New Orleans. That's just a little ways down the river. You can walk it 'fore sunrise an' be back home for breakfast.'

Desperately, he pushed back the tears that burned his eyes. All his short life he'd lived in terror of this moment. Obscurely, he knew, in his heart, that once his mother was gone she'd never bother to walk the short distance from New Orleans out to Bellefleur. She was like a cat, which in her leggy disinterested grace she resembled. Give her her dinner, and she wouldn't pine long if you drowned her kittens.

When she'd emerged from the office – one of the line of
cabinets
that extended from the back of the main house to form a U that funneled the river-breeze – he'd had enough sense of self-preservation not to run to her there. Instead he'd gone roundabout to the two-room cabin they shared with three other families and found her lugging water up from the bayou to wash.

She'd said, ‘Ben, fetch your sister,' as she dumped the water into the trough outside the cabin.

‘Did he buy you?' Ben had fought to keep the agony from his voice.

She'd pulled off her tignon, regarded him with those enormous brown eyes, like a sibyl's. Dense brown hair, the hue of the hulls of hazelnuts, braided around her face. Her father had been white – presumably a sailor on the ship that had brought her mother from Africa – and she was proud as Lucifer of the sharper features, the higher cheekbones he'd bequeathed her. She worked in the laundry, having displeased Michie Fourchet in some fashion, but Ben knew Fourchet still bulled her and lent her freely to his guests. She was the most beautiful woman on the place.

‘Don't be a baby,' she said. ‘'Course he bought me. Go get your sister.'

Ben thought the command merely meant that she was going to say goodby to them – Bandy Joe was saddling up the visitor's horse in the yard outside the stables – and considered simply running away into the
ciprière
and hiding, to weep until she was gone. But by all accounts New Orleans was a big place, with lots of streets and houses, and he didn't know where in it she'd be or how he'd find her. So he ran as fast as he could to Granny Ya's, where the children too small even to clean chicken coops were kept, and found Olympe, who had already tried to run away and had been retrieved, covered with bayou mud and thrashing like a pissed-off alligator. By the time he and Granny got her to the cabin, his mother had washed and gone on up to the house. Ben had to wash Olympe himself – no small chore – and drag her up to the house, he thought, to see his mother one last time.

Two horses waited in the yard, Michie Janvier's thick-boned gray gelding (whom Ben later learned was named Gustav) and the Bellefleur overseer's scrubby piebald. In the plantation office, his mother waited, with the white man Ben had seen around the house for the past two days: she standing, he sitting in one of the bent-willow chairs. He was a chubby little man, dark hair already thinning and cut short in the latest fashion instead of braided back in a queue. He had a kindly serious face.

‘Ben, Olympe—' She dropped the words almost carelessly. ‘Make your reverence to Michie Janvier. He was kind enough to buy you, as well as me. We're all going to go live in New Orleans now, and be free.'

She spoke as if she had always known that it was her due to no longer be a slave. But Ben stared up at that lumpy, sallow face, those pleasant dark eyes, dazzled. He wouldn't lose her. That was what ‘free' meant. And he wouldn't lose Olympe, ever …

But it came to him then that he would lose everyone else he knew.

Even at seven and a half, he knew freedom was worth it. But looking out at the saddled horses – knowing that they were leaving
now
, without even going back to gather up their belongings from the cabin (‘
What the hell you think we'll need, of that trash?
' He could almost hear his mother saying it) or say goodby to his father or Auntie Jeanne or Granny Ya or his friends Quash and Rufe – he felt the tears flood to his eyes, his throat close on the thanks he knew he should utter. Grief swallowed him, like a minor chord of the music that he had not yet heard.

Olympe ran up, spat on Michie Janvier's shoes, and ran from the room as if the devil were in pursuit.

In the cramped dark of the cabin on the
Anne Marie
, January listened to the hellish roundelay of creaking ropes and squealing timbers, the muffled crash of tons of water against the frail wooden wall beside his cheek, and thought about St-Denis Janvier.

Dominique's father.

His mother's lover for nearly twenty years.

Among the several properties Janvier had owned in New Orleans was a cottage on Rue Burgundy, at the sparsely-settled rear of the walled town. This he sold to a free colored labor-contractor named Trouvet, who in turn presented it to Livia, it being against the law for a white man to give property to a person of color. It was also against the law for a white person to marry any person of color, so all over the city, transactions like these went on between wealthy white gentlemen and the
librée
women who ‘placed' themselves under their protection. Through similar channels, Janvier arranged for Livia to be paid an annuity and had her two children put in school, Olympe in the Ursuline Convent and Ben in the Acadèmie St Louis for Boys, meaning, Boys of Color.

Ben – though wearing shoes and speaking proper French came difficult for him at first – understood and deeply appreciated these gifts. For her part, Livia Janvier – as she soon came to be called – regarded her new position as a job, and did it thoroughly. She took advice at once on proper dress and deportment, and spent thousands of dollars, over the years, on skin creams, hairdressers, a jaw-dropping wardrobe of gowns and shoes, and the finest in food, wines, and cigars for her lover when he came to visit. For the first few years he lived with her as husband and wife. When January was twelve, Janvier married the widow of a wealthy wine-merchant whose stock and business connections could be of use to the white Janvier family business, but continued to keep Livia as his mistress. This was the custom of the country. In that year of 1807 most of Livia's neighbors on Rue Burgundy were also plaçées.

When January was sixteen – in 1811 – Livia bore St-Denis Janvier a daughter, who from the moment she drew breath was the joy of his existence, the princess of his world: petted, indulged, beloved.

It still astonished January that Dominique wasn't spoiled as well. She easily could have been: she was the only one of Livia Janvier's children upon whom Livia lavished attention and care. In the cabin's pitchy blackness, January could have reached up and touched the ropes of her bunk a few feet above his face; once he heard Charmian wake with a soft cry of ‘
Maman
…' and, a moment later, Minou's voice, crooning a lullaby January remembered their mother singing to her, one evening when he'd been crossing the cottage yard in the dusk from his own room in the
garçonnière
above the kitchen.