04 Sold Down the River bj-4 Read online

  A slave, January realized, would spring at once to the spiritlamp beneath the coffee and kindle a spill for him.

  So, of course, would a gentleman host who didn't want to relegate the task to the only lady in the room. January fetched the spill, his anger smoldering in him like the ember at the spill's tip. The comparison with Shelley's poem was too grand, he thought. Yet the words would not leave his mind.

  "It might just be my neighbors, the Daubray brothers, are behind this, or paying one of my blacks to do it." The dark glance flickered sideways to January again through the curl of the smoke. "I've been in lawsuit against them for near a year now, and the case is coming to court as soon as the harvest's in. I wouldn't put it past them to burn my mill." For a moment the old black glint of unreasoning hate showed through his brooding self-control.

  "Sneaking bastards. They know what my land means to me." He puffed his cigar like a caged dragon blowing smoke. "They know I was putting my blood and my sweat into its soil while that lightskirt mother of theirs was promenading the New Orleans docks in quest of a husband, and they know the land is my body and my life. I've done evil in my time, wasted the gifts of God and harmed those it was my duty to protect. But through it all the land was mine. It's the one true good in my life, the only thing I have to show for living: truly my Triumph. They're spiteful as women, the whole family is," he added. "They'd be glad to see me lose it. Glad enough to pay my own field hands to turn against me.

  "That's what I want you to find out."

  He raised his chin and stared at January, who still stood before him-stood as if this man were still his master. Were still able to beat him, or nail him up in the barrel in the corner of the barn in July heat or February frost. Still able to sell him away, never to see his friends or his family again.

  Heat blossomed somewhere behind January's sternum. Ice-heat, tight and furious and dangerously still. He'd set his music satchel on the floor by his feet upon coming in from the backyard-yet one more of those myriad tiny prohibitions imposed upon him in his mother's house. Neither he nor Olympe-his full sister by that slave husband of whom their mother never spoke-had ever been allowed to enter the house through the long French door from the street.

  With the coming of the November cool, balls and the opera were beginning again. Likewise, most of January's piano pupils had returned to town, the sons and daughters of the wealthy of New Orleans: Americans, French, free colored. He'd just returned from a house in the suburb of St. Mary's-quite close, in fact, to where Bellefleur's cane-fields had Iain-after talking to a woman about lessons for her son. That angelic sixyear-old had announced, the moment January was on the opposite side of the parlor's sliding doors again, "Mama, he's a nigger!" in tones of incredulous shock.

  Did he think I was going to play a tom-tom instead of a piano?

  Now he moved his satchel carefully up onto one of the spare, graceful cypress tables that adorned the parlor, and folded his hands. In the impeccable Parisian French that he knew was several degrees more correct than Fourchet's Creole sloppiness, he said, "In other words, sir, what you want is a spy."

  "Of course I want a spy!" Fourchet's eyes slitted and he looked like a rogue horse about to bite.

  His harsh voice had the note of one who wondered how January could be so dense. "No question it's the blacks. I just need to know which ones, and if the Daubrays or someone else are behind it.

  This Shaw fellow I spoke with yesterday said you'd be the man."

  "I'm afraid the lieutenant mistook me, sir." January fought to keep his voice from shaking. "I'm a surgeon by training, and a musician. I've looked into things when friends of mine needed help.

  But I'm not a spy."

  "I'll pay you," said Fourchet. "Five hundred dollars. You can't tell me you'd make as much between now and the end of the harvest, playing at balls." He nodded toward the piano in the front parlor, where January gave lessons three mornings a week to a tiny coterie of free colored children, the sons and daughters of white men by their plac?es.

  "I told Monsieur Fourchet that you certainly needed the money," put in Livia.

  January opened his mouth, then closed it, fighting not to snap, You mean YOU want-not NEEDthe money. But his mother didn't even avert her gaze from his, evidently seeing nothing amiss in charging her son five Spanish dollars a month for the privilege of sleeping in the room he'd occupied as a child, nor in reminding him of the hundred dollars he owed her.

  That debt had come about three weeks ago, when January had gone to play at a ball and, returning late, had encountered a gang of rowdies, Kentucky river-ruffians of the sort that came down on the keelboats. Coarse, dirty, largely uneducated, they were habitually heavily armed and drunk. He'd escaped with his life, and without serious injury, only by refusing to resist, putting his arms over his head and telling himself over and over that to put up a fight would escalate the situation to a killing rather than just "roughing up a nigger." It hadn't been easy.

  The custom of the country, he'd told himself later. And he had known, returning from France in the wake of his wife's death from the cholera two years ago, that in the land of his birth he could be beaten up by any white man, that he had no right to resist. It was the price he'd paid, to return to the only home he had.

  But the incident had cost him the clothes he wore, clothes a musician needed if he expected to be hired to play at the balls of the wealthy: long-tailed black wool coat, gray trousers, cream-colored silk waistcoat, linen shirt. And it had cost him all the music in his satchel-torn up, pissed on, dunked in the overflowing gutters of Rue Bienville-difficult and costly to replace. The season of entertainments was just beginning, after the summer's brutal heat. He could not afford delay in repurchasing the tools and apparel of his trade.

  But he knew, even as he'd asked her for the money, that his mother would not let him forget.

  And it was in her eyes now: that avid glitter. Envy, too, that he'd been offered the money, and the task, instead of she.

  "I'm sorry, Monsieur Fourchet," he said again, and marveled to hear his own calm voice. "It isn't a matter of money. I-"

  "Don't be a fool! " Fourchet's voice cracked into a full-out shout, as January remembered it. The child in him flinched at the recollection of the man's capricious rages, the sudden transitions from reasonableness to violent fury. "Too proud to get your black hands dirty? Think you're too good these days to live with the niggers you were born among?"

  "I think-" began January, and Fourchet raged. "Don't you back-talk me, you black whelp, I don't give a tinker's reverence what you think! " He flung the cigar to the spotless cypresswood floor. "I could get a dozen like you just walking down Baronne Street who'd leap on a dollar to suck my arse, let alone do as I'm asking you to do!"

  "Then I suggest you betake yourself to Baronne Street, sir," said January quietly. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

  "I'll make you goddam sorry...!" Fourchet thundered, but January simply raised his new beaver hat to the man, bowed deeply, picked up his music satchel, and walked through the rear parlor and out the back door. He could hear the man's enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard and mounted the stairs to his room in the gar?onni?re, and only when he had shut the door behind him did he start to shake.

  He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself-forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago.

  Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn't hurt him much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.

  He found himself listening, heart racing, to the old man's shouted obscenities as he pulled off the coat and shirt his mother had lent him the money to buy, the armor of respectability that, more even than the papers in his pocket, said: This is a free man.

  To Fourchet, January realized, he would never be free.
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  Only jumped-up.

  To the Americans who saw him walking well-dressed about the streets, the Americans whose growing numbers were slowly swamping the older population of Creole French and Spanish, it was the same.

  He fought down the impulse to change clothes fast and run. With his habitual neatness he made himself fold the coat and trousers into the armoire, and set the shoes neatly under the bed.

  Clothed in rougher trousers, a calico shirt, and the short corduroy jacket he'd bought while a student in Paris, he descended the stairs and deposited the white shirt in the tiny laundry room next to the kitchen. It was there that his mother caught him, before he could be across the yard again, through the passway to Rue Burgundy and gone.

  "Benjamin, I have never been so mortified in my life."

  If the statement had been true he would have heard it in her voice, but it wasn't. She wasn't mortified. She was angry. Thwarted and angry.

  "Neither have I, Maman, that he'd even think I'd do such a thing as he asks."

  "Don't be silly." Her hands were clasped tight, like a little sculpture of seashell and bronze, at her belt buckle. Her mouth was hard as sculptor's work. "I assumed you'd welcome the first chance that came to you, to pay back what you owe me. The quarter-interest in that property the Widow Delachaise is selling is still open for fifteen hundred, and I don't think I need to remind you that because of those new clothes of yours, and all that music, not to mention getting the piano retuned last month, I'm in no position to-"

  "No, Maman." January forced his voice level, as he had with Fourchet. "You don't need to remind me."

  "Don't interrupt me, Benjamin."

  Their eyes met: old wanting, old needing, a thousand griefs never comforted, a thousand things never said. January remembered her-one of his earliest memories-being beaten for stealing eggs for him and for Olympe, when a fox had killed the three chickens that constituted the only livestock they possessed. Remembered her silence under the lash.

  "We need that money," Livia said, in a voice that took into account nothing of the other property she owned, or the funds in three separate banks. "You can't possibly think Monsieur Fourchet would use this opportunity to take advantage of your position and kidnap you to sell to dealers, for heaven's sake. If he told that animal Shaw about hiring you, he can't intend-"

  "No, Maman," said January. "That's not what I think."

  "Then what? It's not as if you know any of those people. And it's not as if you're going to make a sou more this season than last season, teaching piano and playing at balls. Really, Benjamin, I don't know what to make of your attitude."

  She looked up at him, her expression and the set of her head waiting for an explanation, and those great brown eyes like dark agate forbidding him to make her wrong by giving one.

  Anything he said, he knew, he would still be wrong.

  "I'm going for a walk," he said. "Can we talk about this when I get back?"

  "I think it's something we need to settle now." She followed him across the hard-packed earth of the yard. "I told Monsieur Fourchet I'd talk to you. You can't judge the man by his speech. You remember how rough-spoken he always was, it's his way. Financial opportunities like the Widow Delachaise selling up don't remain available for long. Monsieur Granville at the bank said he'd hold the negotiations open as long as he could, but they won't last forever."

  "I'm sorry, Maman," said January. The cool sun of early afternoon flashed on yesterday's rain puddles, on the leaves of the banana plants that clustered around the gate and along the wall.

  From the street came the clatter of some light vehicle, a gig or a fiacre, and a woman's voice lifted in a wailing minor key the slurry, half-African gombo patois:

  "Beautiful callas! Beautiful callas, hot!" the melismatic notes elongated, embellished like a Muslim call to prayer, as if the words were only an excuse, a vehicle for what lay in her heart.

  "I need a little time to think. We can talk about this when I get back."

  "And when will that be?" Livia stepped beside him into the open gate. Always wanting the last word. To have his retreat, even, on her terms.

  "At sunset," said January, and walked away, not knowing if he'd be back by sunset or not.

  TWO

  "Rough-spoken, she said." January turned the coffee cup in his hand, and gazed out past the square brick pillars that held up the market's vast, tiled roof. Beyond the shadows, slanting autumn light crystallized the chaos along the levee into the brilliant confusion of a Brueghel painting: steamboats like floating barns, with their black smokestacks and bright paint on their wheel-housings and superstructures; low brown oystercraft and bum-boats creeping among them like palmetto bugs among the cakes and loaves on a table. Keelboats, snub-nosed and crude, being hauled by main force to the wharves. The blue coats of captains and pilots; the occasional red flash of some keelboatman's shirt; gold heaps of oranges or lemons; a whore's gay dress. Piles of corn in the husk, tomatoes, bales of green-gray wiry moss, or tobacco from the American territories to the north. Boxes without number, pianos, silk, fine steel tools from Germany and England. A cacophony of French and Spanish, English and half-African gombo patois and the mingling scents of coffee, sewage, smoke.

  "He beat her, Rose. Beat her with a riding crop-I was there-and used her as a man would take shame on himself to use a whore. He cracked two of my ribs beating me, and I couldn't have been six years old. Once when my mother got in a fight with another woman, he nailed her up in the barrel in the corner of the barn, a flour barrel you couldn't stand up in. Does she remember none of that?"

  Rose Vitrac stirred her own coffee, and with a gloved forefinger propped her spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. The small thick oval slabs of glass aged her face beyond its twenty-eight years, and gave it an air of aloofness. Behind them her hazel-green eyes-legacy of a white father and a white grandfather-were wise and kind and cynical. "If you take his money," the former schoolmistress pointed out, "you'll be able to get your own rooms. You'll no longer have to live with her."

  "Would you do it?" he asked. "Spy on a man's slaves for him?"

  "I don't think that I could." A line of men and women passed close to the half-empty arcade, through the chaos of hogs and cotton bales and sacks on the levee, to the gangplank of the Bonnets o' Blue. Shackled together, the slaves were bound for one of the new cotton plantations in the Missouri territory, each clutching a few small possessions done up in a bandanna.

  Afternoon sun sparkled on the water, but the wind that tore at their clothing and at the flags of the riverboat jackstaffs was sharp. One woman wept bitterly. Rose turned her head to watch them, her delicate mouth somber.

  "My mother was a free woman," she said. "I was never a slave. I don't think I could pass myself off as one, because I don't know all those little things, the things you learn as a child. If someone wronged me I'd go to the master, which I gather isn't done..."

  "Good God, no! " January was shocked to his soul that she'd even suggest it.

  Rose spread her hands. "I've never been that dependent on someone's whim," she said. Her voice was a low alto-like polished wood rather than silver-and, like Fourchet, she had the speech of an educated Creole, not the French of France. "Not even my father's. And it does something to you, when you're raised that way. When I lived on my father's plantation, after Mother's death, my friend Cora-the maid's daughter-taught me a lot, but just being told isn't the same. I think that's why Lieutenant Shaw directed Monsieur Fourchet to you."

  Savagely, January muttered, "I can't tell you how honored I feel."

  "But as to whether I would spy, if I could... Somebody did murder the poor butler, Ben. That the poison was meant for the master doesn't make the servant less dead."

  His eyes avoided hers. "It isn't my affair." "No. Of course not. Justice for a slave isn't anyone's affair."

  That this was something January himself would have said-had he not just refused to become involved in Simon Fourchet's war with his slaves
-didn't help the slow pain of the anger he felt, and he looked for a time out into the square. A man cursed at the deck crew unloading bales of cotton from the steamboat Lancaster; a young woman in the black-and-white habit of a nun stopped with wide fascinated eyes to listen, and her older companion seized her arm and pulled her along. Two boys, white and black, rolled a hoop across the earth of the Place d'Armes just behind the levee, dodging in and out among the brown-leaved sycamores; a market woman in a red-and-purple-striped tignon shouted a good-natured reproof. A few yards farther the hoop bounded out of control, startling a pair of horses being led down the gangplank of the small stern-wheeler Belle Dame: a carriage team by the look of them-from somewhere in the bayous of the Barataria country, to judge from the narrow lines of the boat, the single wheel and shallow draft-matched blacks with white stockings, as if they'd waded in paint.

  The nearer horse reared, plunging in fear, and the man in charge of them, tall and fair with a mouth like the single stroke of a pen, dragged brutally on the animal's bit to pull it down. For good measure he added a cut across the hocks with his whip, and turned just in time to see the black boy dart to retrieve his hoop, the white playmate at his heels. The fair man's whip licked out, caught the black boy across the face.

  The child staggered back, clutching his cheek. Blood poured from between his fingers. His white friend skidded to a halt, stood staring, mouth open, as the man turned away, cursing and lashing at the frightened horses again. He did not even look back as he jerked them toward the blue shadows of Rue Chartres.

  The white boy picked up the hoop. He looked at his friend again, in an agony of uncertainty about what sort of support or comfort he should give or should be seen to give. In the end he ran away crying, leaving his playmate to bleed and weep alone. "Ben."

  January turned his head. His sister Olympe stood next to Rose's chair. January had two sisters. The elder, born two years later than himself, was the daughter of that fellow-slave whom his mother never mentioned: the tall man with tribal scars on his face who sometimes walked in January's dreams. The younger, Dominique, was St.Denis Janvier's child, their mother's lace-trimmed princess. Dominique had been only four when January had left for Paris to study medicine eighteen years ago. Dominique, January had long ago noticed, came and went through their mother's bedroom-which opened onto Rue Burgundy, in the accepted Creole fashion-as a matter of course.