Good Man Friday (6 page)

Had he put out his hand to the side of his bunk, here in the blind stuffiness that smelled of lamp oil and badly-cured hides in the cargo hold and twenty voyages' worth of spilled chamber-pots, he would have touched the wall of trunks that filled most of the rest of the tiny chamber: petticoats, laces, pomades, ribbons, shawls.

As far as he knew, his pretty sister had never once expressed a wish that hadn't been granted.

He wondered if she'd ever had any that she hadn't dared to speak.

For it had been understood by all, from her birth, that she was expected to become a white man's mistress in her turn.

They landed in Baltimore on Tuesday, the twentieth of March, and on Thursday took the steam-train to Washington City. As in Louisiana, the colored cars were a higgledy-piggledy selection of local businessmen, barbers, clerks, slaves, sailors and prostitutes. Charmian clung to her mother's hand and gazed about her like an Italian princess kidnapped by gypsies. On shipboard she'd taken her meals in their cabin with her nurse Musette and Thèrése, Dominique's maid, and in the saloon she'd been made much of by the other passengers. This was her first experience with the filth and discomfort of hard benches, unswept floors, flying soot and drunken cursing at the back of the car. She looked as if she hadn't made up her mind whether to burst into tears or go over and investigate.

‘Pay no attention to them.' Thèrése glared at a couple of loud-voiced market-girls flirting with some sailors. ‘They are Americans: drunk as holes and crazy as sticks. You are not to speak to such as they.'

When they disembarked in Washington the noise was worse. Porters shouted, passengers cursed; the squeal of brakes and the rattle of wagons and cabs beyond the platform. A long coffle of slaves passed them, chained neck and ankle: Washington and Baltimore were collection points for the slave dealers who traveled the roads of Virginia, buying men from the old tobacco-plantations whose exhausted soil no longer produced crops enough to support large villages of slaves. In the faces of the chained men, January read the echo of his own childhood nightmare. Some wept; the young men joked with defiant bravado: ‘Oh, yeah? Well,
my
marse got nine hundred dollars for
me
…'

Most wore only the shuttered expression of silent despair.

Men loitered on the platform: rough-clothed white men whom January thought at first were waiting for work. But they didn't approach the gangs of stevedores, or speak to the bosses. Just spat tobacco and watched.

He thought it was on the black passengers that their gaze lingered.

Congress was in session, and every boarding house in town was full. Henri and Chloë – and Henri's valet Leopold and Chloë's maid Hèléne and fourteen trunks of books, dresses, waistcoats, hats, seashell collections, a microscope and a barometer – set off for the Indian Queen Hotel with an army of porters and cabs. January sought out the conductor who'd been in charge of their car on the journey, a solemn young man named Frank Preston, and handed him half a Spanish dollar: ‘You know a place where my family can get lodgings?'

‘I do, sir.' Preston had fetched a cup of water for Charmian during the stuffy, rattling journey and – when she'd thanked him – had replied in excellent French, ‘
Je vous en prie, Mademoiselle
.' ‘It's the place I live myself when I'm here in Washington.' He signed for a porter. ‘Take this gentleman's trunks to Trigg's on Eighteenth Street.'

‘I don't suppose,' said January resignedly, ‘that here in the nation's capital the likes of us are permitted to take a cab?'

‘No, sir.' The young man's mouth compressed, but he was well-trained to his job, and part of his job, January understood, was to express no opinions while in the uniform of the Baltimore and Washington Railroad. ‘But if the ladies don't mind –' he tipped his cap in the direction of Dominique, with whom he appeared to have fallen in love in the preceding hour and a half – ‘I'm sure Tim and Ollie here –' he nodded to the porters – ‘won't object to taking you up in their wagon.'

Thèrése looked as if she would rather walk three miles across a strange city on a warm spring afternoon rather than accept a ride in a goods wagon – and from Americans who were probably Protestants at that – but Minou at once held out her kid-gloved hands, first to Preston, and then to the two grubby porters, and beamed. ‘Thank you, M'ssieux! Charmian, say “thank you” to these gentlemen—'

In her precise little voice, the child said, ‘Thank you, M'sieu,' in English – she had every atom of Dominique's charm and more – and then, in French, to Preston, ‘Would you please ask them to take special care of my box?' And she held it up: a flat, sturdy rectangle which Rose had given her before they'd set out, lined with cotton, in which for the entirety of the sea voyage Charmian had collected and stored whatever spiders, fragments of seaweed, raveled bits of rope and chips of holystone she could find on shipboard.

Preston bowed deeply. ‘It will be my pleasure, Mademoiselle.'

January, Dominique, Charmian, Charmian's doll Philomène, and the two servants followed the procession of porters and trunks out of the station and within an hour were unpacking their things at the boarding house of Mrs Octavia Trigg.

‘W
e has breakfast in the dining room from six til nine.' The landlady's mannishly deep tones matched her towering stature and stern, rectangular face. ‘Dinner's on the table at six. I keeps some hot in the kitchen till eight. After that, you speak to me if you'll be in late and needin' somethin'. I don't have guests come into my kitchen scroungin' food in the middle of the night.'

Thèrése, bred to a world of midnight suppers and after-theater coffee, rolled her eyes at these plebeian strictures, but Dominique nodded and said, ‘
Bien sûr, Madame
.'

Charmian, clutching box and doll to herself behind her mother's skirts, tugged at Minou's hand and whispered, ‘Mama, is that a lady or a man?'

Mrs Trigg's dark eyes touched the child, and a smile softened the corners of her mouth. ‘Your little girl speak any English, Mrs Janvier?'

‘
Un petit peu
.' Dominique's fingers and thumb measured a quantity the size of a housefly.

‘You want to watch out for her.' The smile disappeared, and the gaze that met Dominique's eyes – and traveled on to January's – was suddenly somber. ‘And for yourself, m'am, if I may say it. Washington's no safe town for black folks. There's four or five dealers here that don't care where they gets their stock from. Now there's railroads out to Baltimore, a man can disappear in this town and be on a boat bound for New Orleans before his family knows he's late comin' home from work. Police curfew's at ten. These days it pays you be careful where you walk in the day. Get that good-for-nothing husband of mine –' she threw a glance toward the small and dapper Mr Trigg, just descending the stair to the wide front hall – ‘to show you round one day, if he gets out of bed 'fore noon …'

‘Might I remind you, woman, that those days I get out of bed
after
noon is when I've been working like a ditch-digger—'

‘Workin' for some rich man who don't mind if you steals his champagne.' Her smile sparkled in her eyes but didn't touch that unyielding mouth. Half-concealed behind the parlor door, four children of stair-step heights and their mother's coal-dark complexion giggled. There was a fifth girl among them, of much lighter hue and completely different build – Ife, January guessed, compact and small. ‘My husband is a musician,' the landlady explained, and Trigg came forward and shook hands all around. ‘Seems the white folks in this town doesn't want the black ones around the streets at night unless
they
want somethin' – like a ride home, or someone to serve 'em oysters, or music for their guests to dance …'

January assumed an expression of horror. ‘I have never heard of such a thing!'

Trigg grinned.

The rooms to which Trigg showed them – two large connecting chambers on the second floor – were spotlessly clean, the furniture comfortable, and – January found out that evening – the cooking was up to the best he'd had in New Orleans. A Methodist preacher and his family had a similar arrangement across the hall, the third floor being reserved for the single men: Frank Preston and two other conductors on the Baltimore and Washington line, a cab driver, two waiters, and in solitary state at the back a single white gentleman hiding out from his creditors. The four Trigg children helped serve dinner in the long dining-room (the white gentleman had his own small salon across the hall) and Darius Trigg was a fountainhead of information about the town.

‘Was that who those men were on the railway platform this morning?' asked January, when the guests (with the exception of the white gentleman) gathered for tea and coffee after dinner in the lamplit double parlor. ‘Slave stealers?'

‘They
say
–' Trigg took his music satchel from a shelf, sat on the piano stool to sort its contents – ‘they're watchin' for runaways. And given that dealers like Klephert and Birch are handing out cash for any man or boy they lay hand to, a lot of 'em
are
runaways.'

‘Sometimes they'll come aboard and search the trains.' Frank Preston looked up from the
Washington Intelligencer
, issues of which lay on the parlor's round marble-topped table, along with the New York
Herald
, the
Colored American
, and school books for the children. ‘City constables don't take any notice, no more than they stopped the Irish, three years ago, from burning down Negro churches and Negro businesses …'

‘Congress has now adopted a ruling that legislation concerning slavery cannot be discussed in its sessions.' The Reverend Horace Perkins grimaced. ‘Except of course where it involves more effective pursuit of runaways …'

Then he glanced, almost apologetically, toward his stout little wife Clarice, who sat with Dominique watching over the children as they played pick up sticks, as if to remind everyone that politics ought not to be discussed in mixed company.

Mrs Trigg had informed Dominique that
all
guests beneath her roof were welcome both at her table and in the parlor, so Thèrése – though she had little good to say in private about American Protestant blacks (and she herself, she was quick to point out, was NOT black, but
colored
) – sat a little apart, graciously accepting compliments from a growing court of admiring bachelor boarders.

Trigg took from the top of the bookshelf a leather case which contained a ten-key Steitwolf flute, and for a time he and January talked music, while Dominique started a game of euchre with the Reverend. Under cover of this chatter, January said in a lowered voice, ‘I've spoken to a few runaways in New Orleans.'

More than a few, over the past year and a half, who'd spent the night in the secret room under January's house, waiting to be smuggled out of town and on to the long freedom-trail that led north.

‘Have you, now?' A smile lifted one corner of Trigg's neat little mustache, as if he read the secret in his voice.

‘I have.'

Their eyes met. ‘Well, well … Honored to have you under my roof, sir. I've spoken to a few runaways myself.' He turned his head quickly at the sound of a knock on the outside door. ‘And that,' he said, ‘will be my boys. There's a ball tonight at Mr Corcoran's – the banker, you know, or maybe you don't – and every Senator in the city will be turning up on his doorstep because his cook is the best in town except for Octavia.' He threw a glance and a grin in the direction of the dining room, now empty and lighted only by the lingering twilight in the windows and the lamp glow from the kitchen beyond. ‘We make it a practice to walk over there together once dark falls, and if I was you, sir, I'd make it your practice as well.'

‘I shall.' January nodded toward the parlor piano. ‘Some evening when you're not stealing some white banker's champagne, maybe you and I could play a little together? That's a fine instrument there.'

Trigg settled his silk-fine beaver hat on to his pomaded hair. ‘I'd be more than pleased.'

‘You're seeing the town at its best,' said Frank Preston the following morning as he escorted the Janvier party – January, Dominique, Charmian, Musette, and Thèrése – down Connecticut Avenue toward the handsome houses of Lafayette Square.

‘
Tiens
!' Minou gazed around her at the vacant fields. Cows grazed peacefully between widely-scattered houses, pigs rooted in roadside ditches. Even this close to the center of Washington – a roughly built-up rectangle that stretched from the President's House to a bit beyond the Capitol two miles away – the houses were countrified, set back from the unpaved streets and surrounded by chicken coops, cow barns, vegetable gardens and orchards. ‘And what is it like at its worst,
enfin
? No, darling, this isn't the day we collect insects, you'll get your frock dirty—'

Charmian gazed in agonized regret at the katydid perched on a heart-shaped platform of pickerelweed, but allowed Musette to tug her back to the grassy verge.

‘Honestly, Madame, you shouldn't indulge her about insects at all,' sniffed Thèrése. ‘Dirty, nasty things. As if Michie Henri weren't bad enough!'

The dank river-fog that had cloaked the city at breakfast time was burning off, the morning's mellowness turning sticky-hot. Beyond the houses of Lafayette Square, a great half-built mass of masonry swarmed with workmen and wagons.

‘The new Treasury,' said Preston. ‘It's brought hundreds of Irishmen into town to work on it. I'm told there's fights every night, down in Reservation B by the canal, between Irish
b'hoys
and the slave gangs that haul in the bricks from the barges.'