Sold Down the River Read online

  “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.

  Since her departure to join the voodoos at the age of sixteen, Olympe had not entered their mother’s house at all.

  “It’s good to see you.” With her awkward, wading-bird grace, Rose moved her rough wooden chair aside to make room, and January brought over another of the several dozen seats scattered around among the tables in the shelter of the arcade. People generally bought coffee from one of the stands in the market and brought it here to sit, but the woman who ran the nearest stand came to the table before anyone went to her, with a cup for Olympe as she was sitting down, and had to be pressed two or three times to take the picayune payment for it.

  That was what it was, January supposed, to be a voodoo.

  “I hear Simon Fourchet asked you to find the one who wants to kill him,” said Olympe.

  She was tall for a woman, as January was tall for a man, and like her brother coal black: beau noir lustre, the dealers called that ebon African shininess. She wore a skirt of bright-hued calico, yellow and red, like the market women, and a jacket of purple wool. Strings of cowrie shells and the vertebrae of snakes circled her neck and wound in the folds of the scarlet tignon that hid her hair, giving her the voodoo name of Olympia Snakebones. When St.-Denis Janvier had bought Livia and her two children from Simon Fourchet, he’d paid to have them tutored in proper French, which after his years in Paris January spoke without thinking. Olympe, on the other hand, had kept her rough African habits of speech through all her teachers’ beatings, sliding le and la into a single all-purpose li and casually slurring and dropping the beginnings and endings of words, as if she took pride in speaking like a field hand. Perhaps she did.

  “If Fourchet’s looking for one who wants to kill him, he doesn’t have to walk farther than the quarters on his own land,” snapped January. He was getting tired of everyone’s opinions on a subject that he himself considered closed.

  “That’s exactly where he’s looking,” returned Olympe calmly. “And what you think’s going to happen to those folks when he dies?”

  The coffle of slaves clustered the railing of the deck of the Bonnets o’ Blue, stared back at the swarming levee, the cafés under the sycamore trees around the Place d’Armes, the twin white towers of the cathedral under the sidelong smoke-yellow glare of the autumn sun. Gazing, January knew, for probably the last time. Life expectancy on a cane plantation wasn’t long.

  Behind him, Olympe’s voice went on. “Not four years ago they hanged Nat Turner and near seventy others in Virginia for rising up and killing whites. Every slave-owner in the country has been seeing rebels under his bed ever since. You think getting sold to pay the
inheritance tax is the worst that’ll befall a man’s slaves, if he dies of poison in his own home?”

  “You want me to save his life?” January remembered the wet thud of the broom handle on his buttocks and thighs, the agony of blows multiplying as the bruises puffed and gorged the flesh with blood. He couldn’t even remember what he’d done to trigger the beating, if anything.

  “I’d like you to think about saving the lives of the hundred or so folks who didn’t put nightshade into that brandy. However much they might have wanted to.”

  For that moment, January hated her. He hadn’t thought about it consciously, but he realized now that in addition to his sense that Simon Fourchet deserved whatever retribution was coming to him from his slaves—whether incited by his neighbors or not—in addition to his fears of something going wrong, he had been looking forward to a pleasant winter of playing music and being paid for it.

  The days of summer heat and summer fever were done. The wealthy of New Orleans—the sugar brokers, the steamboat owners, the bankers and landlords and merchant importers, both French and American—were coming back to town to attend the opera and give parties and marry off their daughters and sons to the sons and daughters of their friends. The militia companies and burial societies, those bulwarks of the free colored community, would be organizing subscription balls and fund-raisers even more entertaining than the galas of the whites. January not only earned his bread through Mozart and Rossini, cotillions and schottisches and valses brilliantes. They were the meat and drink of his soul, the fire at which he warmed himself.

  For a year he’d lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.

  After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.

  He looked up now, studying Rose’s long delicate profile. The cool mouth that was so sensitive beneath the mask of its primness. The way her smile came and went, as if in girlhood she’d been punished for laughing at the world’s absurdity. Slim strong hands, stained with ink—she was currently making her living correcting young boys’ Greek examinations for a school on the Rue d’Esplanade—and blistered from the chemical experiments that were her refuge and her joy.

  A winter of friendship. Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents’ worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.

  A winter of rest.

  Sugar-grinding. Roulaison. The suffocating heat of the mill-house and the clammy damp of the cabins. The ache of muscles lifting, hauling, dragging armfuls of sharp-leaved cane after not quite enough food and never ever enough rest. The pain that settled into your bones when you couldn’t even remember when last you’d slept to your heart’s content.

  Fear of being beaten. Fear of being sold.

  Simon Fourchet’s flaying voice and the sense that it would make no difference to anyone if he, Benjamin January, lived or died.

  “You think I’d be safe there?” He threw the words at his sister like a lump of dirt. “Maybe Fourchet’ll make sure I don’t get kidnapped and sold, but that’s not going to keep the killer from slipping poison into my food if he guesses why I’m there. And it won’t keep me from being beat up by men who think I’m carrying tales to the master. Killed, maybe, if there really is rebellion planned.”

  “Then you’ll just have to be careful,” said Olympe, “won’t you?”

  January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January’s freedom. Copies were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January’s mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Théâtre d’Orleans and various gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of January’s principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet’s lawyer.

  “Not that it will do the slightest bit of good,” said January grimly, “should Fourchet’s overseer, or his son, turn out to be a cheat and a slave-thief. Altruism is all very well, and I’m really sorry for those folks on Mon Triomphe, but I’d just as soon not try to convince some cracker cotton-farmer in the Missouri Territory to write to the New Orleans City Notary about whether or not I’m a free man.”

  Lieutenant Shaw, slouched so deeply in a corner of the big stone watchroom of the town prison, the Cabildo, that he appeared to be lying in the chair on his shoulder blades with his boots on his desk, raised mild gray eyes from the documents, and scratched with businesslike thoroughness under his shabby collar.

  “Prob’ly wouldn’t do you much good anyways, if’n they’re like my uncle Zenas—Zenas and his family went to Missouri to grow cotton.” Shaw scratched again, and looped a long strand of his greasy ditchwater hair back around one ear.

  “Zenas can plug a squirrel through the eye at two hundred and fifty yards and build a house from the ground up includin’ the furniture usin’ only an ax, but he can’t write for sour owl-shit. You think you’ll be in much more danger there than you’d be just walkin’ around here?”

  Shaw asked the question sincerely, and sincerely, January had to admit that in certain sections of New Orleans—the entrepôt and hub of slave-trading for the entire region—he was probably in more peril of kidnapping than he’d be on Mon Triomphe.

  “It’s easy for you to say. Sir.” In his tone he heard his own defeat. The thought of what he was going to do made his stomach clench with dread, but he knew that Rose and Olympe were right. He understood that he could not feel anger that none would give justice to slaves, if he wasn’t willing to work for that justice himself.

  “I understand that,” said Shaw. “And I hope you understand I’d do it, if’n I didn’t have certain physical limitations that’d make me middlin’ unconvincin’ as a cane-hand.”

  January met his eyes with a bitter retort on his lips, but he knew Shaw. And he saw in the Kentuckian’s quiet gaze that yes, this man would go out into the fields to trap the murderer …

  If he didn’t happen to be white. And, as he’d said, a middling unconvincing cane-hand.

  So he only said, “What? You don’t think you could pass?” and Shaw relaxed and returned his unwilling grin. January reached into the pocket of his neat brown corduroy livery for his watch and tightened his lips when it wasn’t there. The watch was silver, bought in Paris after he’d given up work as a surgeon and returned to being a musician. As a surgeon he’d never been able to afford such a thing, for even in France no one would choose a black surgeon over a white.

  At least in France, he reflected dourly, he wouldn’t have had to go searching through pawnshops for weeks to recover it, after it had been stolen by the same louts who’d cut his coat to ribbons and torn up his music.

  Along with his other few valuables, the watch was safe at Olympe’s house now. A slave would not possess such a thing.

  “Yore pal Sefton’ll be along,” said Shaw reassuringly. “What do you know about Fourchet’s son?”

  “Not much.” January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. “He’s a few years older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine-merchant here in town.”

  “Juana Villardiga, accordin’ to the records.” Shaw folded his hands over the papers, rumpling them as if they were yesterday’s newspaper instead of the proofs that January would need, should his freedom be in jeopardy. The morning was chill, and through the arched doors at the inner side of the watchroom the Cabildo courtyard was dusky still. Two prisoners swabbed the flagstones under the watchful eye of a blue-uniformed City Guard.

  January’s eyes felt gritty. After spending most of the evening getting the documents drawn up and finding musician friends to replace him in his engagements to play at this or that party until after the sugar harvest—not an easy matter, given the perennial paucity of
good musicians in the town—he’d gone late to bed, and in the few hours that he had slept, had dreamed of being a child again, and a slave.

  “In 1802 Fourchet married again, a woman name of Camille Bassancourt who came here with her aunt from Paris. They had three sons and two daughters—”

  “After my time.” January shook his head. “We left Bellefleur in 1801. I only remember Esteban.”

  Shaw used the corner of the top document to pick his teeth, brown with tobacco like a row of discolored tombstones. He was a lanky man who looked as if he’d been put together from random lengths of cane, close to January’s height and homely as a mongrel dog. “The girls an’ one boy are still livin’ …” He grubbed in a pocket and consulted a much-scribbled fragment of paper. “Solange is at school with the Ursulines here in town. Robert—that’s the boy—an’ his wife just got back on the sixth from takin’ Elvire, the older girl, to a boardin’ school in Poitiers.”

  Given the man’s raspy, flatboat drawl, it always surprised January that Shaw pronounced the names of French cities and individuals correctly.

  “Accordin’ to Fourchet’s lawyer, Camille died in ’28.” Shaw extracted a plug of tobacco from his trouser pocket, picked a knot of lint off it, and bit off a hunk the size of a Spanish dollar. “Fourchet remarried this past April to a girl name of Marie-Noël Daubray—”

  “Daubray?” interrupted January. “Isn’t that the name—”

  “Of the fellas he thinks might be behind the mill fire an’ all? It is.” He gestured with the fragment of paper—a bill from Berylmann, a gunsmith on Canal Street, January saw—and concentrated for a moment on reducing the brown chunk in the corner of his jaws to a manageable consistency. “Their first cousin once removed, in fact. Granddaughter of their oldest brother, which is what the lawsuit’s about. What’s our boy Esteban like?”

  “Stiff,” said January, the first description that came to his mind. “I haven’t seen him since he was twelve, remember, and I was only eight.” He leaned back in the chair beside Shaw’s cluttered desk with half-closed eyes, summoning back the silent boy who’d stare with such repelled fascination at the naked breasts of the women in the fields. “But he was stiff. He walked around with his shoulders up—” He demonstrated, bracing his whole body in imitation of that tight, silent, awkward boy, and was aware of Shaw’s cool eyes flickering over him, reading what that imitation had to say.