Crimson Angel Read online

  And he didn’t wonder at it, that the librés – the free colored – of New Orleans dealt with the blacks – slave or freed – as a different race, a different culture, a different species.

  Rose – intelligent, educated, and kind, with a deep, cool kindness that had taken years to flower – was the daughter of the free people of color, descended from the mixed blood of black women and white men who had granted to their offspring many, but not all, the privileges of whiteness, the chief of them being assurance that they wouldn’t be sold away from everyone they knew at a moment’s notice. They were able to make their livings more or less as they wished, the boys from educations their white fathers paid for, the girls – if they were pretty – as the plaçées – the ‘placed women’ – of other white men who could afford such mistresses. That Rose was his wife and not a plaçée was due to a combination of temperament and circumstance, but she was, he saw now without anger or resentment, a libré to the ends of her ink-stained fingers.

  She saw herself as primarily the descendant of white people.

  She saw them – or some of them – as being her family, in a way January’s mother, for all her pretense of being like the other free colored plaçées of New Orleans, never could.

  His reluctant amusement at his mother’s pretensions took away some of the sting of that chasm: she was what she was. And Rose, dearly as he loved her, was what she was. So he turned his eyes from the hell pit of that past, as he had taught himself to do, and only asked, ‘And I take it Granmère married a man from Louisiana?’

  ‘From Bordeaux, actually,’ said Vitrack. ‘Oliva de Gericault married Louis-Charles Vitrac –’ he pronounced it in the French fashion this time – ‘in 1786, when she was sixteen. He’d come to Cap Francais – the capital of Saint-Domingue – as clerk for a shipping company. I think they met at church. The de Gericault plantation, La Châtaigneraie, lay only five or six miles from the town. Their son – our father –’ he nodded at Rose, with the friendly acknowledgement common in French Creole families of relatives ‘on the shady side of the street’ – ‘was born in Cap Francais a year later, and they fled with Absalon de Gericault and his family to Cuba in 1791.’

  In 1791. January turned the phrase over in his mind. For all Jefferson Vitrack’s opinion that the importation of millions of men and women like his grandmother, to die in the cane fields of Saint-Domingue and Louisiana, was inexcusable, there was a little bit of this young white man that flinched from saying, ‘When the slaves finally revolted.’

  When the slaves, who outnumbered the whites seventeen to one, had finally had enough of being beaten, being raped, being killed in any number of atrocious fashions at the merest hint of insubordination, being treated like animals, and had turned upon their captors, their rapists, their murderers in bloodthirsty and totally justifiable fury.

  Maybe when the slaves revolted sounded a little too much, to white ears, like we asked for it.

  In 1791 sidestepped the question of whose innocent wives and children had died, by whose hand and under what circumstances, and maybe that was for the best if this discussion were to proceed.

  ‘Great-Granpère named his new plantation on Cuba “Hispaniola”,’ said Vitrack, ‘after the island that he never ceased to consider his home.’

  ‘Hispaniola is also the name of one of your brother’s plantations in Grand Isle, isn’t it?’

  Both nodded. A cockroach the size of a small hummingbird threw itself, wings rattling, at the candelabra; it was definitely time to go indoors. January gathered up the candles and carried them into his room – officially a bedroom, but in practice a sort of study – and thence through to the parlor, Rose and her brother bearing the coffee things behind, like the mystical servants bearing the Grail to the Fisher King. When she’d attained her freedom as a white man’s mistress, and acquired a house in New Orleans, January’s mother had soundly beaten it into her son that only animals – or Americans, which amounted to the same thing – came straight into the parlor from the street, in spite of the fact that all openings in the walls of the house doubled as both windows and doors. You came in through the room of the master of the house, or its mistress, depending on who had invited you. Their slave cabin on Bellefleur Plantation having boasted only a single door and no windows at all, seven-year-old Benjamin had marveled at both the ridiculousness of this French Creole custom and at his mother’s sudden conversion to the libré way of doing things, but had dared not disobey, and the habit had remained.

  A completely different set of rules applied, of course, if the owner of the house happened to be white and if you happened to be black – or free colored – or if the owner was white and American …

  They reassembled in the parlor, stuffy with the dense lingering heat of the day, but bug-free. Zizi-Marie brought more coffee.

  ‘Granpère and Granmère Vitrac came to Grand Isle in 1803, as soon as Spain gave Louisiana back to France,’ explained Rose. ‘And Granpère never forgave Napoleon for selling the whole concern to the Americans – three weeks later! – not ’til the day he died. I can’t say that I blame him.’ She cast a glance at the windows, beyond which, even at this dead season of the year, freight wagons still hauled corn and salt pork, iron bars and silk hankies, along Rue Esplanade from the wharves to the bayou where it would be trans-shipped to plantations east of the city.

  1803, January recalled, was the year he and his mother – and his younger sister Olympe – had first come to New Orleans. Where the wide ‘neutral ground’ along Rue Esplanade lay now had been the crumbling city wall, the drainage ditch in its center a sort of moat. Where the wooden houses of the suburb of Marigny stood had been sugar-fields.

  Only a few streets over, as a child he’d sit in the evenings on the gallery above his mother’s kitchen and hear the slaves singing as they were marched back to the quarters after work.

  ‘I remember when we were children we were always talking about the treasure that Great-Granpère left behind,’ Rose went on, ‘either in Cuba or in Saint-Domingue. But I don’t remember whether it was something we heard the grown-ups talk about, or something we made up. Do you remember Great-Granpère Absalon ever speaking of it, Jeoffrey?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was only a year old when he died. He came to Hispaniola – the Louisiana Hispaniola, not the Cuban plantation – in 1809, when the Spanish authorities on Cuba expelled all the French refugees. Granpère Vitrac was dead by then, and Papa ran the plantation. Aramis says Granmère Oliva was terrified of old Absalon, he doesn’t know why. Our brother Aramis was only three,’ he added, with a glance at January. ‘He says he liked Great-Granpère, though he doesn’t remember him very well either. And Rose was still here in New Orleans then. Granmère Oliva always pooh-poohed the treasure when we children would talk of it. Did Mammy Ginette –’ Vitrack turned to his sister – ‘ever say anything to you about the treasure?’

  Rose was silent for a time, gazing with half-closed eyes at the little cluster of candles – like the village storyteller, January recalled, back in the quarters at Bellefleur Plantation when he was tiny. Calling out of the clear dark lake of his memories the tales of Compair Lapin and Bouki the Hyena, of High John the Conqueror and of the witches that waited for the careless at the crossroads on moonless nights.

  Rose would be calling to her mind now herself as a gawky, short-sighted child who begged to be taught all those things that would be of no use to her, like mathematics and the wherefore of storms. Calling to mind the three-room ‘big house’ of her white father’s plantation to which she’d been taken upon her mother’s death, and the dreamy peacefulness of Grand Isle.

  ‘No,’ she said at length. ‘She showed me the Crimson Angel, which she wore on a string around her neck, under her clothes. She said Great-Granmère Amalie – Great-Granpère Absalon’s wife – had given it to her, and that it had been a symbol of the de Gericault family back in France – which I knew already, from Granmère Oliva’s ring. She said it was the only valuable thing she ha
d. But the treasure was real. I’m certain of that.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Rose was silent for a moment, calling old memories back to mind. ‘Mammy Ginette was … I think she’d been a servant in Great-Granpère’s house in Saint-Domingue. Mammy Ginette came to Papa’s plantation – the family was living at Chouteau Plantation then, which had come to Papa when he’d married Aramis’ and Jeoffrey’s maman – when I was ten. I’d just come there myself, after Mother’s death. I was lonely and grieving, and Mammy Ginette was very good to me, telling me stories about Great-Granpère’s plantation back on Saint-Domingue. We’d play games behind the barn, and she’d build the plantation for me out of bits of brick and lumber – I was always building things like that. I remember when I was twelve I reconstructed the entire city of Paris out of old shingles, and I was furious when Aramis stole them to make a bonfire.

  ‘I think she took to me because she’d come to Louisiana looking for her granddaughter,’ she went on after a moment. ‘Mélusina was my age, she said, and had been kidnapped by slave-traders back in Cuba. Mammy Ginette came to America to look for her – she only stayed with us on the plantation for a week – and she planned to use the Crimson Angel to buy her back—’

  ‘Did she ever find her?’ The candle-glow flickered in her spectacles as she looked across at her brother. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘I don’t think she can have,’ he replied, with a trace of sadness, ‘if an “old slave-woman” traded it to a smuggler to get that bunch of Americans away from a slave-revolt to safety. But the treasure—?’

  ‘Mammy Ginette told me that the year the Spanish drove the French planters out of Cuba – 1809, it would have been, nine years before she came to Louisiana looking for her granddaughter – an “old blind man” forced her to lead him back to Saint-Domingue – Haiti, it was called by that time – to find a treasure.’

  ‘Great-Granpère’s treasure?’

  ‘I think it has to have been. Else why her? Why not someone else? But the slaves, once they’d won their freedom, were fighting among themselves by then. The Republic they founded had already split into two republics of Haiti, and Christophe made himself king of one of them a few years later …’

  ‘If Mammy Ginette’s daughter was a slave in Cuba back in May –’ January turned the tiny gold-and-crimson figure in his powerful fingers – ‘it doesn’t sound like they did find the treasure.’

  ‘She said they didn’t make it far,’ said Rose. ‘She wouldn’t talk about Haiti; said it was horrible, like a nightmare. She said she barely got back to Cuba, and I think the blacks there must have killed this “old blind man”. But she said to me, more than once, that she was telling me this because I was “family”.’

  ‘Like the newspaper,’ said Jefferson Vitrack quietly. ‘None but the family can find it.’

  ‘So I think it has to have been the family treasure.’

  ‘I do, too.’ He fell silent for a time, long slender hands – duplicates of Rose’s hands – folded on the table before him, while from the narrow dining-room behind the parlor a chair scraped softly and Zizi-Marie said, ‘’night, Gabe.’ Her footsteps creaked. There was a little cabinet behind the pantry, from which a ladder ascended to the loft where the girls had slept, back when Rose’s school had had pupils. In the ensuing stillness – for it was now late in the night – January heard also the faint scrape and rumble of someone moving in the little secret chamber that he’d walled off from the main storage area at street-level beneath the house, when he’d started taking in fugitives. There were three of them down there: Tommy, Boston, and Boston’s wife Nell, scheduled to meet tomorrow with others of the organization that guided runaways north. Nell was with child, they said. Owners knew that once a woman bore a baby, she probably wouldn’t run.

  ‘It’s not for myself that I want to find that treasure,’ Vitrack said at last. ‘Though of course, if you help me, I promise you’ll have your share. Please hear me out,’ he added as January drew breath to say that there was no way in Hell he was going anywhere near Haiti.

  ‘My father-in-law – Congressman Ulysses Rauch – is President of the Philadelphia branch of the American Colonization Society.’ From his yellow envelope he produced a folded paper, presumably credentials, and laid it on the table, as if he expected January to request documentation of his claim. ‘He believes – as do I – that the only way in which the disgrace of slavery can be eradicated from our nation is for the slaves to be returned to Africa, the continent which God intended for their habitation. Only in this way can the white race secure itself against the inevitable retaliation by its former bondsmen.’

  And make damn sure those former bondsmen aren’t going to take jobs that white men want?

  ‘Inevitable?’

  ‘Of course.’ Vitrack spoke as if the matter were self-evident. ‘The events of 1791 have pretty much proved that if given their liberty, slaves will – with quite justifiable anger and outrage – turn on their former masters and seek revenge. Men from Thomas Jefferson himself on down have long recognized that the black race and the white are basically incompatible and cannot live side by side. Yet the expense of transportation to our colony in Africa,’ he went on, again cutting off any objection that January might have made to either his reasoning or his evidence, ‘and, in some cases, a very stubborn prejudice against the idea of repatriation, have often mitigated against this solution.’

  January said nothing, which, he assumed, he was meant to do. He’d never encountered a single freed slave – himself, his mother, and the elder of his two younger sisters included – who had ever expressed the slightest interest in being sent to a primitive, tropical country where very few spoke his language and where, even within the ‘American’ black colony, the comforts of civilization were rudimentary. Nor had any of the runaways he’d ever hidden beneath his house ever exclaimed, ‘I gotta find my way to Africa!’ And what, he wondered, did the American Colonization Society intend to do with the librés: half-white, three-quarters white, seven-eighths white or more?

  He himself, with three African grandparents, had been born in Louisiana and considered himself an American.

  ‘In 1824 an alternative destination was proposed, in the Republic of Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola. President Boyer was desirous of colonists to his nation, but of the six thousand or so free blacks who went there, many returned to the United States within a year, owing largely to the fact that there simply wasn’t enough money to help them settle.’

  The fact that the Haitians themselves had been engaged in bloody factional warfare for over half of the black republic’s existence, January was careful not to say, might have had something to do with that as well.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean that the scheme is unworkable.’ Vitrack leaned forward, as if with little encouragement he would have seized January by the lapels of his jacket and shaken him to make him see the wisdom of the plan. ‘When I read in the Intelligencer about the Crimson Angel – when I encountered proof that the childhood tales we heard on the plantation about the de Gericault treasure were true – I came south at once. I spoke to Mr and Mrs Powderleigh in Washington, who said that the “old slave-woman” wasn’t one of the slaves on the plantation where they were staying.’

  From his yellow envelope he withdrew several sheets of notes and unerringly selected the page he sought. ‘Mrs Powderleigh says she thought she’d seen the woman selling fruit in the streets of Guane, but wasn’t certain. Her name might have been Sally, but the Powderleighs don’t speak any sort of Spanish at all, much less the Creole Spanish of Cuba.’

  And they were probably terrified, thought January. Whatever they were doing on an isolated coffee-plantation in Cuba – Mrs Powderleigh and Violet Loveridge had known Doña Clemencita, the plantation’s mistress, in school, according to the Intelligencer – they could not have reckoned on the murderous confusion of a slave uprising. And having everyone around them in the jagged torchlight and blackness of the night attack shouti
ng in an unfamiliar tongue would only have added to their shock and confusion. No wonder they didn’t catch the name of the woman to whom they owed their lives. He wondered if ‘Michael Donnelley’, the writer of the article, had actually been as brave and intrepid as he described, or if he’d spent the whole night cowering under a bed until the time came to make a break for the beach.

  ‘They did confirm that the old woman seemed to know the smuggler captain – Loup de la Mer, he’s called – and that he put them ashore in New Orleans. I guessed that the first thing he’d do would be to pawn the Angel. From the owner of the pawnshop I learned where he stays when he’s in town.’ Vitrack sipped his coffee and made a face – it was now stone cold, or as cold as anything ever got in New Orleans in the summer, even at one in the morning. Through the wavy glass of the French doors out to the gallery, January could see that even the lights in the house of the Metoyer sisters on the other side of the Rue Esplanade neutral ground had been put out, the whole of the town (except for the gambling parlors … ) asleep in the indigo velvet smother of the night.

  ‘For it is, surely,’ said the young man, ‘the Hand of Providence that has manifested itself here. That the very fortune that was made from the blood and sweat of African bondsmen will be turned to good – sanctified – by this use. Diamonds and jewels, she said, enough to buy the whole of Cuba. The fortunes made by the sugar-planters of Saint-Domingue were legendary. This old blind man must have been connected with the family somehow—’

  ‘Who was he?’ asked January curiously. ‘Not Great-Granpère Absalon himself, I assume?’

  Brother and sister looked at one another. ‘Mammy Ginette just said he was an old blind man. She only spoke of him the once, the first night of her brief stay at our plantation.’

  ‘I never heard anyone say Great-Granpère was blind.’ Vitrack shrugged. ‘But the blind man, whoever he was, knew the treasure was there. And that it was worth risking his life for. Even as I do.’