The music tapered, and the band began a new set. Through the cheers of the crowd, she heard her name.
“Miss Jones.”
She pried her gaze from the parade and rose onto her tiptoes, scanning the crowd. Not twenty feet on stood Tom, waving and smiling, his shaggy hair capped with a slouch hat. Mrs. Carrière stood beside him.
Effie waved back and ventured into the crowd toward them. She’d not taken but a few steps when three large men stepped in front of her. They wore plain cambric shirts with an assortment of poorly dyed rags thrown over their shoulders. Cheap masks perched on their noses, the dull black paint covering the papier-mâché a sharp contrast to their white skin.
“Where’s your costume?” one said to her.
Effie didn’t answer but tried to move around them. They sidestepped to block her path. The other revelers formed a solid wall behind her, lost in their hurrahs and applause.
“He asked you a question, you uppity wench,” another of the three men said. He grabbed hold of her upper arm, his dirt-stained fingers digging into her flesh.
“I . . . I don’t have a costume.”
The shortest of the men stepped forward. His upper left cuspid was missing and several of the teeth around it chipped. He slid a meaty hand down the bodice of her new dress. “Here and I thought you was dressed as a she-ape.”
“I got a better one for you,” the first man said, reaching into a pouch about his waist. He pulled out a handful of brownish-white powder and threw it at her face. “Now you’s white.”
Effie closed her eyes, but not before the powder struck her. The backs of her eyelids burned, and her tear ducts gushed. She coughed with such force she doubled over and nearly toppled.
The hand around her arm slackened. When she managed to open her eyes, the men were gone. She coughed and sneezed several more times. Her tongue burned with the same fire as her eyes. She tasted flour and dirt and something else chalky and bitter. Around her, the crowd continued to cheer on the parade. Music played. Horses whinnied and stamped the paving stones. Shape and color bled together.
Another hand encircled her arm. Effie tensed and tried to bat it away.
“It’s all right. I’ve got you.”
Though she could only make out the bleary shape of a man, she recognized Tom’s voice.
Another hand and familiar voice. Mrs. Carrière. “To the alleyway there. Jonah, fetch some water.”
Effie followed where they led until the roar of the parade had softened and cool shade enveloped her.
Tom thrust a hankie into her hand.
She blotted her eyes and wiped the powder from her mouth and lips. “Thank you.”
“Miscreants,” Mrs. Carrière muttered. She’d taken out her own handkerchief and dusted off Effie’s cheeks and bonnet.
Embarrassment took hold beside the pain, and she prayed, for once, that Mr. Greene was not around. “I’m fine, really. Don’t miss the parade.”
“Hush,” Mrs. Carrière said. Jonah returned with a bucket of water and held it up for her.
She splashed her face and eyes. The cold water stung her skin. It dribbled down onto her dirtied dress.
Tom held up his cane like a club. “Did you get a good look at them? See which way they went?”
“No, they were masked,” Effie said, then turned to Mrs. Carrière. “What was that?”
“An old Mardi Gras jinx.” She dabbed a bit more at Effie’s collar and then put away her hankie. “It’s meant to be just flour, but mon Dieu, judging by how red your eyes are, I’d say they mixed in dirt and lime.”
Jonah tugged at Mrs. Carrière’s skirt. “Come on, we’ll miss the floats.”
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Carrière asked her.
Her hands trembled at her side. Her eyes, her mouth, her lungs all still burned. Her new dress was soiled. “Yes, fine. Thank you. I’ll join you presently.”
The three of them left the alley and joined the crowd, casting backward glances at her over their shoulders. Tom’s gaze lingered the longest. He smoothed a hand over his trimmed sideburn and down the slope of his jaw, as if contemplating returning to her. She mustered a wobbly smile to reassure him, then leaned against a nearby wall and closed her watery eyes, wishing she could disappear into the cold stucco.
The way that man had touched her, slid his calloused hand over her breast and stomach like she was a piece of furniture, brought bile to her mouth.
Images buzzed at the periphery of her consciousness. Fuzzy at first. Specters taking shape in the self-imposed darkness. Voices blurring with the clamor of the street.
“Lift your dress up, girlie,” a man with a gravelly voice said in the sharpening memory. When she tarried, he slapped her about the head.
Another man dressed in a shiny suit coat with soft, manicured hands pinched her still-flat breasts. “She’s younger than you say.”
“Hard to know their age with certainty. But look, strong for a girl.” The gravelly voiced man squeezed her bicep. “And healthy.” He pried open her mouth.
The other man peered over her. He stank of musk and spices. He tugged on her front teeth. One wiggled in its socket. “She’s too young to carry more than a few canes.”
“Aye, but think of her potential.” He grabbed his crotch and jostled whatever lay beneath his trousers.
The taste of bile again. The din of the parade a distant murmur behind the unfurling memory. She grasped at the sounds—music and laughter, flapping banners and trotting horses. But not until she heard his sonorous voice did she find purchase on the present.
“Miss Jones, are you all right? Tom told me what happened.”
She opened her eyes. Mr. Greene stood before her, resplendent in the same brown suit he’d worn in Tivoli Circle. His cheeks were smooth from a recent pass with the razor and his hair glossy with oil. He’d asked her something, but she couldn’t remember what.
“If you’re not well, I can walk you home.” He reached out and brushed her cheekbone. The rawness of her throat and lungs, the tingling of her gums, the sting in her eyes retreated, and she felt only the electric contact of their skin.
Her fingers retraced the path of his touch. Flour and dirt remained speckled on her skin. What a fright she must look! She swatted at her cheeks and the yoke of her dress, stirring a cloud of dirt-riddled flour and lime. Both she and Mr. Greene coughed.
“Sorry,” she said, wishing with renewed vigor that she might indeed disappear.
“Think nothing of it.” He took her hand and settled it in the crook of his arm.
The sudden clamor of her heart beat out even the street-side bedlam.
“Where do you live?”
“No, I needn’t go home, Mr. Greene.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s my first Mardi Gras,” she heard herself say. “It’d be a pity to end on such a note.”
He studied her. His eyes were dark and rich, like cypress bark after a storm. A thin scar followed his hairline just above his right temple. The delicious scent of his shaving soap—rosemary and bitter orange—hung in the air between them.
“To the parade, then. If you’re sure.”
She nodded.
“And call me Samson.”
They twisted and sidestepped their way through the crowd. This time Effie hardly noticed the press of bodies and waft of sweat. She’d never taken a man’s arm before, enjoyed the gentle clasp of bicep and forearm. Her fingers, chilled from the water she’d used to wash out her eyes, now tingled with warmth.
When they reached the others, who’d managed to secure a perch at the very front of the crowd, Samson squeezed her hand before letting it go. Effie let her arm dangle at her side, her fingertips cooling in the open air. She looked ahead at the marching drummers, trumpeters, and banjoists, but her mind’s eye saw only her hand—gangly fingers, flat nail beds, twin scars from her experiments with embalming chemicals—as it had been, tucked in the bend of Samson’s arm.
“Do you play an instrument, Mis
s Jones?” he asked, leaning so close his warm breath swept along her neck.
To anyone else, her response would simply have been no. Such a straightforward question necessitated no explanation or embellishment. Yet she found herself searching for something to say that might entreat another question and prolong the conversation. “I studied piano briefly under the tutelage of my warden’s wife. My hands are of suitable size—I can span a tenth with ease—but she said I lacked the emotional breadth necessary and so we stopped.”
Samson’s eyebrows pulled together, creating a ripple of skin between them. “Emotional breadth, what the deuce does that mean?”
“I play with the vigor of a corpse.” When the furrow between his brows deepened, she added, “Her analogy, not mine. But an apt one, I suppose, looking back on it.”
“That’s a monstrous thing to say to one’s ward.”
Perhaps it was. Effie had not considered that a kinder woman—Mrs. Neale or Mrs. Carrière, for example—might have come at the issue more obliquely. But to what end? Effie would likely have not caught her meaning and continued practicing though she lacked a fundamental skill necessary for excellence. At last, she shrugged. “I had other interests.”
“Oh?” His brows had relaxed back into symmetrical arches above his thickly lashed eyes and he smiled. “Dolls and tea parties?”
“Human anatomy.”
“I see . . . how interesting.”
He straightened and returned his gaze to the parade. Effie did likewise. Clearly, that had been the wrong thing to say. If only Adeline were here to coach her.
The last of the king’s court rode by, costumes a-shimmer. Behind them came a wonder unlike anything Effie had seen before: the famous floats.
At forefront of this lumbering display strode two men dressed in long black cloaks and beak-like masks. They carried a banner with great scrolling letters that read, MARCH OF AGES.
The first float, a chassis with steel-rimmed wheels pulled by a single horse, bore a man in a Roman toga. He stood still as a statue with white-feathered wings fashioned to his costume. In one hand he held a scythe; in the other an hourglass. Father Time, Effie guessed.
The next floats portrayed scenes from the past—crepe-festooned wagons with tableaux of Caesar, Charlemagne, and Washington. Behind the costumed figures rose papier-mâché backdrops of temples, castles, and clouds, each expertly painted and embellished with gold and silver leaf. They swayed and trembled with the movement of the wagons while the crowd gasped and applauded.
Effie marveled at the care and engineering. The time it must have taken to design and construct each one. Her gaze toggled between the floats and Samson, who himself stood in awe.
But the mood of the floats changed as they progressed to the present. One float carried a herculean man dressed in a shabby, ill-fitting suit and wearing blackface. He stood before a long cannon, lanyard in hand, ready to fire. But instead of facing outward, the muzzle pointed directly at him, as if he were too dim-witted to know at which end of the cannon to stand.
Other floats bore men completely ensconced in papier-mâché animal costumes with human-like faces and dress. So precise were the faces drawn, it took little imagination for Effie to make the link between animal and man. The tobacco grub was meant to be President Grant. The rattlesnake, Governor Kellogg. The snail, the leech, the gorilla, members of the state legislature.
The smile Samson had worn vanished. His jaw clenched, and his easy posture grew stiff. Effie too felt her muscles tighten, as if bracing against the spectacle, while those around them laughed and cheered.
The final float, the future, depicted the goddess Minerva in command of a disorderly band of Amazons. The revelers in the tableau, men dressed as women, stood in a sloppy show of arms, in mockery of the suffragists.
Effie felt undressed by the spectacle. Naked and shamed. The crowd’s laughter was like lashes against her exposed skin. The measure of gaiety she’d mustered since the flour and lime incident stole away as sure as the breath from her lungs.
The men who’d dreamed up these floats had never looked upon the insides of a man. Never seen the heart, lungs, spleen, liver all laid out in the same grand order regardless of race or sex.
The last float had passed and now a throng of maskers, both on foot and in carts, danced and shuffled before them—knights, friars, jesters, Indians. A man and woman lurched theatrically under the weight of an enormous carpetbag they bore between them. Men, styled as Yankees with glossy top hats and exaggerated coattails, tossed wooden coins at the crowd. Others, dressed in shabby clothes and unraveling straw hats, their faces blackened with shoe polish, bounded from foot to foot like lumbering gorillas.
Effie started to turn away, but Mrs. Carrière clasped her arm. “This is why we’re here.” She handed Effie one corner of the banner they’d stitched that night at the club meeting and moved away several paces until the cloth stretched tight between them. Several of the Negroes watching the parade from the opposite sidewalk raised their fists and cheered.
With her dainty shoulders squared and chin aloft, Mrs. Carrière stepped into the throngs of maskers marching at the tail end of the parade. So too did Samson and Tom and even little Jonah. They each took hold of a section of the banner, moving into a solid line, and Effie was swept down from the banquette and into the street with them.
Boos and jeering now out-sounded the cries of support. Effie’s fingers held strong to the fabric even as they trembled. An orange peel struck her cheek. A wad of paper bounced off her back. A youth in a devil costume shoved her with such force, she nearly toppled. Tom reached out and steadied her. Mrs. Carrière nodded her onward. Samson flashed his brilliant smile. Though her entire rib cage rattled with the thud of her heart, Effie marched on beside them.
CHAPTER 10
The next morning, Effie arrived at the shop to find Colm waiting for her just inside the carriageway gate. A cross-shaped smudge of soot marked his forehead. He leaned against the iron fence with their equipment spread haphazardly at his feet. The ash from his cigarette drifted down, landing only a few inches from the crate of embalming fluid.
She pushed the crate away with her foot. It slid across the worn pavers with the sound of a blunt razor scraping over a bewhiskered chin. “I’ve told you before, the fluid’s flammable.”
Colm shrugged, took a long drag, and exhaled the smoke into her face.
She itched to pluck the cigarette from his fingers and grind it to dust beneath her boot heel. But Mr. Whitmark would deplore such a rumpus. So instead, she waved away the smoke and picked up the embalming cabinet and dressing case. “Where to?”
He took another drag, then snuffed out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe and tucked the half-spent fag into his shirt pocket. “Third and Prytania.”
Though she’d not been upriver to the Garden District, Effie knew well who lived there: the crème de la crème of the city’s rich Americans. A few were Northerners who’d made homes there after the War, but most of the mansions belonged to Confederate Seceshes. “Are you sure?”
To this, he only grunted and scooped up the crate in his meaty arms. Jars clanked and fluid sloshed. With his free hand, he grabbed the folded cooling table. “Let’s go already,” he said, as if she’d been the one dawdling.
Effie followed a pace behind him, not out of deference, but to avoid further conversation. Once they cleared the bustle of the city center, she allowed her mind to wander, leafing through yesterday’s events like pages in a book. All in all, not a very good book or an especially happy one. It had taken her nearly two hours to comb the flour, dirt, and lime from her hair and brush it from her clothes. Tobacco juice and cooking grease streaked her lovely new dress from the refuse hurled at her during the club’s short-lived march with the parade. They’d made it all of three blocks before two police officers corralled them aside with their billy clubs and asked for their papers.
“This is Mardi Gras! We don’t need permission to march,” Samson had said. But
apparently, that didn’t matter. They were escorted off the street and warned with threat of arrest should they try again. The officers, one of whom had the light brown skin of a gens de couleur, seemed almost apologetic as he spoke. These were Rex’s rules, after all, not Governor Kellogg’s. But the group agreed it best not to chance a run-in with less sympathetic officers, or worse—members of the White League. Besides, they’d made their point. So with a nodding of heads and a flashing of tired smiles, the group dispersed—Jonah and Mrs. Carrière to the fairgrounds, Tom and Samson to a nearby groggery, and Effie, at her own instance, alone to her boardinghouse.
When she’d spied her frazzled hair, ravaged dress, and red-rimmed eyes in the foyer mirror, her jaw slackened. A dusting of flour still clung to her neck and the insides of her ears. This was the face Samson had gazed at all afternoon? Still, she couldn’t forget the way he’d taken her hand and held it in the crook of his arm. How soft the wool of his jacket, how warm the heat circulating through his limbs, how firm his sinews and muscle.
He’d taken her hand only out of politeness. She knew that. Yet it was enough to carry her through all the combing and brushing and cleaning that followed and write a happy ending to the day.
Even now, her arms beginning to ache from the weight of her supplies, elation stirred inside her at the thought of his touch. Miss Jones, he’d said in the alley. Did that mean he’d remembered her name? More likely he’d heard one of the other club members mention it before he’d gone to check on her, but what if—
Colm’s voice intruded on her reverie. “Hurry up.”
She glared at the greasy brown hair peeking out from beneath the back of his flannel cap. “The dead can’t get any deader.”
He laughed at this, a single sharp chuckle that shook his barreled chest, though she’d not intended it as a joke. His pace slowed until, despite Effie’s best efforts, they were walking side by side. Tall oak trees lined the street. Modest townhomes and shotgun houses had given way to great boxy affairs of brick or freshly painted stucco with wide galleries and stately columns. Lush gardens penned in by scrolling iron fences buffered the houses from the street.
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