A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  George had righted the carriage and stopped the horses along the curb, and was now descending the step to the ground with his switch in hand.

  “You know better’n dat, boy. You make way for ladies. And what that look on your face? Don’t you sass.”

  But this was a white boy, a defiant boy, yes, but a white boy. I was angry about the way he looked at me, but I also didn’t want George in trouble.

  “I don’t think that’s proper, George,” I called.

  He turned back to me, his hand now on the collar of the boy, switch in hand. Why the boy hadn’t run, I didn’t know then. A small crowd of negroes and Italians gathered to watch.

  “Oh, it all right, Miss Anna. I know his papa, he got that colored cobbler shop up on Burgundy. This here is Homer.”

  He was colored. My God, I should have guessed. I had been chasing colored ghosts for days, and yet couldn’t see in front of me. So white, his arms are burned red from the sun. While he awaited his licking from George, as if he’d been waiting for it since birth, he kept looking me in the eye. This, perhaps more than anything at all, infuriated George. George did not look strange white people in the eye.

  I felt a knot tie itself up in my stomach, and pressure like hands pushing in on my temples. Something broke, and I could not allow George to beat this little colored boy, even though I’d watched him clear the way for me and mete out punishment to the insufficiently deferent since I was a little girl being taken to church. That day I couldn’t allow it. And, I thought, I can never allow it again. Everything had changed in a day and a night, and I was new.

  “George, wait.”

  George stopped dragging the boy to the sidewalk, where he could properly switch him, and looked at me. We had stopped traffic on Royal, and the cart drivers behind us were shouting. The crowd on the sidewalks got bigger. I stepped down from the carriage as quickly as I could, picked up my skirts, and walked straight to the boy.

  “George, enough. Let him be.”

  Now I had made George angry. Enforcing the rules gave George great pleasure, I suppose in knowing that there were rules and that he had mastered them. He was a man eager to discipline those weaker than himself. I had interrupted one of his pleasures.

  “But Miss Anna, he a disrespectful little nigger boy, and he insulted you now.”

  “I want you to leave him alone.”

  “His papa would want me to switch him, ma’am. Just so you knows. Somebody else gone do lot worse someday, he don’t learn.”

  “And I want you to get back on that carriage, please.”

  There were rules, and because George was so absorbed by them, he could do almost nothing but obey. Almost nothing.

  As he let the boy go, he cuffed him across the back of his head, as if to say they weren’t finished with each other, and when he turned back toward the trap I slapped George hard and loud against his face. I slapped him again when he looked at me in surprise and hurt, and I slapped him again when he didn’t move fast enough toward the carriage for my liking. When he got back up top, his hurt had become a crooked, knowing smile at nothing in particular.

  Before the boy ran, he whispered, “I will find you, don’t worry.” And then he ran while I stood there slapping my negro driver in the street like any other proper and imperious white lady might have done. I slapped him like I’d slap a dog that had messed the floor, or a recalcitrant horse that would not get into its stall. George took it, and now he smiled a little bent smile. He held out his hand to assist me.

  It was horrifying, so I ran, too.

  I flashed by open windows filled with gawkers, drawn to the spectacle of a frightened, proper white Creole woman in hard shoes click-clacking down the banquette without concern for propriety or the filth of the street. I will find you, don’t worry. I turned this corner and that one until I began to pass the small yellow and green cottages of the quadroons. They knew better than to stare, and their pity I didn’t resent. To them it would have appeared I’d lost my mind, but they also would have considered insanity a privilege of my station. I was as clear and certain of myself as I had ever been, however. I came to the corner of Conti and Royal and let a scream loose—a deep, raspy scream at the heavens—which caused the old apothecary on the corner to hobble out of his shop waving his hands as if to ward off the demons so obviously besieging me. I relieved him of his worry with a bow and a smile, and finally I felt in control of myself. I straightened my soiled frock and replaced the veil that had flown backward from my face and hung like an empty net over my shoulder and began to walk back down Royal to Dumaine.

  George searched for me, of course, and a few times I saw him pass by in the gap between distant blocks, moving his head from side to side. He passed by me on Royal but did not see me pressed into the portico of a house whose mistress peered out at me with abnormally wide eyes set in a powdered face behind the wavy gray glass. I wondered whether she had ever been out on those streets alone. She looked like one of the thousands of women who lived above the streets in this city, secret and silent, the last of old families long dead.

  But I was out on the streets, aware and exposed. It was thrilling. The kindling carriers, bent over and bearing great bundles of tree limbs tied to their backs, waved and called out to me as they passed on the street. I walked as if I belonged there, as if these, and not the woman in the window, were my people. I waved to the fruit sellers and the praline ladies, who bowed to me no matter how loose I carried myself, or how familiar my greeting. I even loosened my tongue and spoke the French I’d heard spoken beneath the stairs among the servants since I was a little girl, the patois my little girlfriends and I had spoken to each other for amusement, all of us losing ourselves in giggles, imagining ourselves in tignons, scrubbing floors and cleaning up after babies.

  The boy stepped out in front of me then, out from a small alley onto the banquette ahead of me. The shoes around his neck, brand-new, swung around him when he turned to look at me. He showed no surprise and didn’t speak. He turned away from me and began to walk down the street. I followed, calling after him. Boy! I said. Boy! But he never said a word. Every once in a while he looked back after me, as if to make sure I was following. He looked at me as if he knew me, as if he could see through the sinew to the center of my heart. He looked at me as if he knew what I was, and why I had protected him. He did not look impressed or grateful.

  We passed the convent and he stopped, looking up. An ancient hand appeared in an arched window and waved, he nodded, and then he continued on. When I passed, the curtains had been drawn again. I let myself be led. I understood that I was to follow.

  We made an odd pair, the cobbler’s son and I, walking up toward Rampart, crossing over the busy street, and into the little neighborhood around Congo Square. I kept walking closer to him until finally we were walking together, side by side. I noticed he was careful not to get so close that I touched his shoes. There were a pair of petite boots in light calfskin for a lady, a pair of formal shoes in black leather for a man, and a small pair of lace-ups in horsehide for a child. Each shined, sometimes even picking up the glancing and trembling sun off the water puddles we walked between. He did not fall behind me, nor did he take the road side of the banquette. He walked as if I were his equal, and that he owed me no special consideration. He is a courageous boy, I thought.

  We stopped in front of a small cottage painted white with green shutters. The shutters were drawn and the green doors were closed. The house looked asleep. The boy, who George had called Homer, opened a side gate and beckoned me through it.

  At the end of the damp, bricked walkway overcome by vines climbing over the wooden fence, we mounted a set of stairs up to a back porch. Homer tied a handkerchief around his mouth and nose, and then handed me one of my own. I did my best to tie it tight. When he was satisfied, he walked through the back door and held it so I would follow him.

  We walked straight into a room empty of everything except a table upon which sat three rotted turnips. My eyes adjus
ted to the low light, and I could see that there were low cupboards against one wall, flung open and empty. Homer took up the turnips and flung them out the door into the back garden, where three cats descended upon them for a moment before slinking away.

  “Don’t like turnips, I guess.”

  Finally, a few words.

  “Who?” I asked, thinking he referred to the people who lived in the cottage. Or maybe the cats.

  “Thieves,” he said, and I thought I could detect anger behind his kerchief. “Cupboards ain’t always been empty. Had some nice plates in there.”

  I began to think I understood, which made me all the more fearful. Why had he brought me?

  “This house is abandoned then,” I said.

  “No. No it isn’t.” He walked out of the room, through the high doorway, and disappeared into the darkness of the next. Why did I follow? There had been a reason the Lord had put that boy in the way of my carriage, a reason I had slapped George, a reason the boy had appeared again, a reason for the hand in the window of the convent. If I left I would never know. I went through the door.

  God forgive me for crying out at what I saw, for surely I will never forgive myself.

  A man, a woman, and a child. Homer looked at me, not surprised at my cry, or at the tears that spilled from me. The Thompsons, he said. Each had turned ashen and anemic, their eyes yellow at the edges, their skin as dry and as thin as corn husks. All three gazed upward, their mouths open, their hands by their sides. I noticed the little girl held her mother’s hand. The thieves had not stolen the fine blue coverlet that had been drawn up to their chests. Tiny graces, I thought.

  They were negroes, not as dark as George, not as light as Homer. Or as light as me. Mr. Thompson’s hands were not terribly large, but they were thick and calloused and peeling. Working hands, skilled hands. Homer told me that this was their house, that Mr. Thompson had built it himself when he wasn’t working at the forge making filigreed iron rails, and that the fever had come on them all very quickly.

  “I have never seen dead people before,” I said to Homer quietly. “Why did you bring me here?”

  He looked at me as if I was speaking in tongues.

  “They’re not dead.”

  God forgive me for crying out again, and this time shrinking to my knees. I prayed for deliverance, and for the salvation and protection of us all. I prayed for the health of the Thompsons, and for all of our souls.

  Homer straightened the coverlet. He picked up a wet cloth from a bucket beside the bed and began to wipe each of their faces and drip water between their lips. I saw their eyes flutter, and their throats move to take in the water, but not a single other part of them moved.

  “They will pass soon,” Homer said. “My papa thought they might pass on before I got here.”

  I motioned for him to be quiet, afraid the Thompsons would hear his morbid talk. He smiled bitterly.

  “They can’t hear us,” he said. “They’re most of the way to the other place, and they listening for them angels. That’s how it always is.”

  Now Homer turned his back to me and flipped up the coverlet at the bottom to reveal three pairs of feet. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson’s feet were bare, cracked, and crisscrossed by old blood. The little Thompson girl still had her lace-up shoes on, but they were worn through at the toe and the heel, and could barely have been useful. Homer took the shoes off his neck.

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s how it always is’?” I said. I was angry and I only dimly understood why. This young boy thought he had something he could tell me, something he could teach me, and I resented it. But I didn’t know what it was.

  He didn’t answer me.

  I felt only pity for those three coloreds, in their pretty and neat little home built board on board by the shriveled man now lying on the bed before me, unseeing and unmoving.

  “Why, they need a nurse! A priest!” I said.

  Homer kept unlacing the shoes, his back to me.

  “Yes ma’am, they did. But that cost money. Most folks got their own kin to worry about. And now it too late, just about over.”

  “What about their family?”

  He looked up but didn’t say anything.

  “Who doesn’t have a family?”

  Why was he fiddling with those shoes? I was enraged.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “I know what I’m doing here,” Homer said. “You followed me.”

  There was a dust-covered stool in the corner away from the bed, and I sat on it. I stared at three pairs of feet.

  “This is how it always is?” I whispered, afraid of my voice.

  Homer understood that I had been defeated, and was gentle with me.

  “Not always,” he said. “But a lot.”

  “Why did you bring those shoes?”

  Homer looked down at his papa’s work, the fine shoes, and smiled a little.

  “They steal shoes too. Always. They alive, but too weak to fight back, and them thieves take the shoes. They won’t take shoes off a dead man, but living people don’t scare them none.”

  This was my city, strange and unknowable.

  “And Mama says,” Homer continued, “it ain’t right to be buried barefoot, don’t matter who you are, nobody ought to be seen in their bare feet at their own funeral, like they didn’t care about who they were, like they didn’t have pride, like they didn’t deserve respect. Can’t go off like that, Mama says.”

  “Who will bury them?” I said, noticing that I had given up on them as Homer had. Perhaps I would stay to watch them die. Perhaps they had already died and I had not noticed. I had not noticed. The things I hadn’t noticed, an infinitude.

  “There other men who take care of that. Papa knows them. I’ll tell him that they ought to get sent soon.”

  He knew I would never die like that. He had seen into me, he knew who I was. He had not once asked my name, and I was confident he never would, nor would he ever mention this day to anyone. He was a smart boy, an unusual boy. I leaned forward on the stool and looked down at the pine floors. I traced a line in the dust with the toe of my shoe. I wondered if the three people in that bed had said good-bye to each other.

  Homer was putting the first shoe on Mr. Thompson.

  “Wait,” I said.

  I stood up and walked to the water bucket next to the bed. Homer sat back and watched, as if he had known this would happen. I took the bucket, full of old water and dirt, and tossed it out into the garden. I saw a cistern full of new rainwater, and I used it to rinse the bucket and fill it with clean, warm water. I walked back into the room.

  Homer was now sitting on my stool. He said nothing. He waited.

  I removed the clean handkerchief from around my face and dipped it into the water.

  Homer got up and stood by the shuttered window.

  I knelt and began to wash Mr. Thompson’s feet. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou among women…

  Homer opened the window and pushed out the shutters. The sunlight warmed my back, the breeze cleansed the room, and in my bones I knew that the Thompsons were dead. I could feel it. I washed Mrs. Thompson’s feet, and the sun dried them quickly. I came to the little child and hesitated.

  “I’ll be giving her a new pair, ma’am, though she already got one set,” Homer said from the corner. He sounded very far away. “I reckon she would like a nice pair.”

  And so I unlaced her little shoes, and pulled them off, and washed her unblemished little feet.

  “The nun says you were friends with Mr. Thompson’s cousin, or uncle, or some such,” Homer said. “He ain’t been around, he would be the last of the family, I reckon. You know how to tell him? My father would call on him, you wouldn’t have to do it. You busy, I’m sure.”

  I shook my head. He looked disappointed but not surprised.

  “Them nuns are strange,” he said. “They all love them mysteries.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you know, she, the nu
n in charge, she said for me to tell you you ain’t to go around the convent no more after this, that they now told you everything you wanted to know, whatever that was. I ain’t nosy.”

  Of course he knew the entire story, I had no doubt. He stood up.

  “And now I got to do my work, ma’am.”

  I left Homer to his business and went out of the house. I wandered the Quarter, stopping in the little shops I knew, having conversations I would never remember. I was not in myself, I floated above. Nothing was the same, as far as I could tell.

  Hours later, when I had emerged from my reverie, my mind again reunited with my body. I took the streetcar back home. Our rooms were lit by warm yellow light through the tall French doors that faced southwest, toward the river where it came twisting down toward me. I threw open the doors and stepped out on the second-floor gallery. I willed the good citizens of New Orleans to look up, to see me as I was at that moment, but they kept their heads down and their eyes forward, marching grimly down toward St. Charles. I soon lost interest in this entertainment and went in search of my husband, my general.

  I knew, I think, by faith alone—it amazes me that I would even write that, I had already changed I suppose—who had been in the coffin that day in the convent chapel. It’s what I chose to believe, anyway. I only wish they’d thought enough of me to let me know the truth.

  CHAPTER 16

  John Bell Hood

  Soon I was a partner in the operation of Father Michel and Rintrah, tiptoeing among the cots and the patients on the floor, sending sheets to the burner and cooling the fevered. On the other side of the house, Rintrah’s men received, stored, and shipped off thousands of boxes of contraband and stolen goods, the exact nature of which I scrupulously avoided knowing. I knew only that the shipments came in beautiful carriages made up as hearses, and that the horses often smelled briny and sour when they arrived, as if they’d been washed in Lake Pontchartrain. Sometimes I heard the men talking about the fish camps, but I was fairly well convinced that it was not lake trout in those boxes. I suppose I had become part of a criminal enterprise, and then only because the sick ward operation needed money, and who would give money to comfort the indigent afflicted, to keep alive the half-dead negro man in the attic? I accepted the arrangement, though I must have shown my distaste on my face. One day I caught Rintrah laughing at me as he counted out all manner of struck coinage in gold and silver, which he placed in an old, blackened bull sack and cinched up before leaving it for Father Mike.