A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  New Orleans was a city of crowds. It was not a crowded city, but a city that yanked people along from spectacle to spectacle, into groups that formed and disappeared just like that. Every day the web of spectacles, all them places here and there where you might get to see something special, every day it shifted and wove itself new, so that the tight, straight, and regular city streets only barely intersected the path by which men and women navigated a far more twisted-up maze of beatings, amusement, intrigue, prayer, politics, greed, and charity. Folks formed up around old Creole men arguing the hows and wherefores of a revolt, as if they could; they formed up around drunken américains asleep with the pigs; also around a young bride presenting her first child to the world; around the old Creole couple who were torturing their negro servants in violation of the code; around men picking out bawdy tunes on hollowed boxes strung with wire; around the Italian vegetable hawkers; around a young man choked dead in an alley off Dumaine, the dull black bruise of the garrote around his neck as if it had been delicately drawn on his skin, a tattoo. Crowds gathered in cafés to hear the old men of the great families hollering the outrages of a history so distant that no one recognized the names or the places, only the old sounds of pride and loneliness that were the words and the sound of their native tongue.

  If the city were its stages, its performing platforms, there existed no bigger stage than the one at Union and St. Charles, just three blocks down from Canal in the américain section.

  That October, after we’d all been out at the fish camps, the city just weren’t the same. It had been crippled, thousands had died of the fever, so many that it made our work seem insignificant, nothing more than a whole lot of shouting at the Devil, him with his deaf ears. I say that, but them that lived because of those fish camps would tell you a different story, and I should include myself in that number. I was grateful. I wasn’t ruined, and I was alive. Along with the lives, a thousand fortunes had been lost, but new fortunes called out to new makers. Roll, river, roll. Opportunity acalling.

  A crowd had been gathered outside the three-story office of the Louisiana State Lottery Company for hours. It was a building carved in scrolls and cherubs and gargoyles. The people wandered in and out of its doors as the mood took, watching the proceedings and then strolling on back out to the street to gossip and to wait some more. Thousands of men and a few women danced along the narrow boards laid on the mud and sand of the banquette, trying not to slip into the muck. Liquor passed from hand to hand. It was cool for October, so their faces were not streaked with sweat and their handkerchiefs were not stained with dirt. But it was hot enough that most of those waiting to hear the results of the drawing shuffled toward the building, where the building’s eave threw down a few inches of shade.

  A little man in a tiny black hat every once in a while come and stood in the doorway, peering out at the multitudes of us. He looked both afraid of the fidgety mass, but also real happy about their reason for standing there outside his building. I have their money in the vault, I reckon he was thinking. He was a rich man, I knew, and he had made a whole lot of other men rich the last few years, after rescuing the lottery from failure. None of them men would be standing in that crowd waiting patient, hoping, praying, for the news that their number had hit. The rich men, the men who owed that little man a lifetime’s worth of favors, knew where the money could be found. Providence is for the foolish and the dull. The little man, he was the lottery director.

  The little man turned back into the grand foyer, guarded by some hefty stone angels staring blank and dumb down from the fancy carved window arches, and walked quickly up a small set of stairs until he had disappeared. I imagine he peered down upon the entertainment he had dreamed up and gave birth to, an imaginary place in which all the riches of the world were stored up nice and tidy and neat in two large, transparent, and spinning wheels, which I reckon we were supposed to think were magic and not controlled by little men in their secret rooms high above the floor.

  I moved through the crowd outside the lottery building without disturbing it. And why would they notice? I was invisible because I looked like the rest of the men and was also unknown to them. That had always been one of my talents, getting lost in plain sight. I dissolved into the crowd, I was only a face seen for a moment, a shoulder, a hat. This made me feel powerful, invincible. I was a pair of eyes, ears, a mind. I had no weight on the earth.

  I had money in the lottery, knowing I would lose it. I was not stupid. And yet I could not help myself. I couldn’t stay away from a gathering of all them people, I had come to love the grotesque and the ridiculous, the absurd: men milling about watching other men pull numbers out of piles, hoping that somewhere down in there were fortunes with their names on them. Maybe it was the summer, the ridiculous things we’d had to do just to save some lives, what with the hearses and all. It had been a circus, and it would have been funny if it hadn’t been sad and deadly serious. Maybe this had made me cynical. Or maybe it had made me come to enjoy those ridiculous things, like I had become a connoisseur of the ridiculous, the brutal, the sad. I don’t know. No matter, I’ll just say that I loved the dramatic and futile gesture. How could I avoid watching the lottery, then?

  Now, I did not despise those people, the criollos, the natives white and black and brown. I could see that they were powerful men, men with energy, who reckoned they could become anyone, make anything. Ingenuity and luck. Here at the lottery they paid their respects to luck, and there weren’t nothing wrong with that.

  I could learn something here, like as not. I had ambitions. I was not dead yet.

  I pushed my way to the front of the building, squeezing in between the broad shoulders, ducking beneath chins and stepping around floor-slapping large feet. I congratulated myself on being so nimble, so damned quick.

  The cherubim above the windows cheered me. The thick, dusty carpet cheered me, and the gilded archway into the great hall, decorated with carved magnolia leaves and pelicans flying in straight lines, it all made me wish to go on and see the coast one day. I could hear a dull sound beyond the archway, it were like the crashing of waves. Every once in a while I heard a roar, and then the sound subsided. I heard laughing, I heard shouts of anger. I heard the voice of one man, above the rest, commanding attention. The voice was met with cheers, and the man received them gracious, like it were his due. I recognized some words. Patriot, charity, wealth, responsibility. There was laughter. I heard the man bark a command, and soon there was no sound coming from the room. I could hear a regular creaking, the rattle of things in a jar, and then the same voice, this time mumbling and groaning as if praying, or making a sacrifice. I couldn’t resist temptation any longer. I wanted to see the men who thought they would gain the treasure they deserved. I know the feeling. I plunged into the crowd.

  It was more than I had hoped to see, it was a fantasy. Every sound and vibration and color settled into a vision I had dreamed, usually drunk, countless times. There was the giant negro! He shone like swamp water! His shirt had been removed! His muscles strained under his skin, tied down by the dark lines of their mooring: the muscles of his chest traced a precise and bold curve up and then down again; his arms disintegrated in a mess of smaller muscles whenever the wheel reached the bottom and he began to pull up again; his thick neck disappeared smooth through an arch into the flesh of his shoulder. He was as black as anything.

  The men in the crowd shouted and waved their hands and threw papers at the negro, who never looked up and never quit turning the large wheel. I wished he would stand up, take a break, face his harassers, let an expression cross that great broad face. But the man moved like a damned machine. There was no dancing, no singing, no comedy, nothing like he knew there was a crowd there; just endless repetition of his task. The faces of the negro’s tormentors in the front row occasionally flashed back at me as they turned to laugh with their friends, and in those faces I saw smudges of feeling, of hate, of joy; streaks of black hair and pale skin. At the edges of my visio
n, I saw a hundred different faces, each a daub of color drained of anything unusual. They spoke with one voice, and frowned with one face. I rubbed my eyes, sure my vision was failing, but there it was again: the negro in every way a real person, a collection of details clear to the drop of sweat rolling down his belly and the weird angle of his broken nose; and the men in the audience rolling and growling as one. I had lived in or around the docks, and the streets, and the bordellos, and the saloons, and the cafés, but here was the essential thing about my world, even the part of my world that got all twisted up among the Creoles: here was the mob and the nigger. There was always a mob, and there was always a nigger. Always.

  And then, the blind boys! They were something to watch. I knew they were blind right off, I could see their eyes. I had lived among the blind and the otherwise afflicted and discarded, I had wondered at the kinds of cruelties that would never be known to the victim, only to the observer. I knew them right away. I did not care for their entrance, and I thought it a hell of a rude thing to put furniture in their path and guffaw when they fell. They were not clowns. But, yep, the nigger and the mob. Got to have it. I guessed they were paid fair well for their pains, and that it was a blessing they could not see, and so they couldn’t see the men with spittle in their beards shouting with wide eyes and open mouths like chimps. They would have thought far less of their race, I was sure.

  There were two wheels on the stage, each one transparent and containing small black cylinders that tumbled over each other as they turned. One was very large, turned by the negro. It contained a hundred thousand numbers stuffed in their little capsules. These were all the chances that the men in the crowd had purchased. The other, which stood by itself on a table, contained a much smaller number of capsules, each representing one of the 3,434 prizes that could be awarded.

  The two blind boys finally took their places by each of the wheels. They wore identical blue trousers and white shirts with black boots. Just like me. The boys looked as if they were watching the ceiling, their heads angled up just so. I wondered if they thought they had turned their heads toward the crowd. The noise was deafening at times, it echoed up and around the room, and I reckoned that they might think the men standing before them were giants. Or that they, the boys, were most incredibly small.

  So unsuited to the world, and yet there they were in the middle of everything, taking their place. They were so pale, as if they had never left the confines of the asylum for fear of becoming lost forever. There was pride in their faces, too, something I hadn’t noticed until they brushed themselves off and took their places. They know they hold our fates in their hands!

  I climbed up on a chair along the wall and prepared for the drawing to begin. I leaned back against the wall, both hands bracing me on either side, feeling the painted fleur-de-lis pattern on the paper covering the wall. I was content.

  When the first man in uniform marched out onto the stage, I thought nothing of it, but when the second, heavier man in uniform joined him, I became nervous. What is this? Who are these men? What business did the army have with the lottery? It was all wrong. This was chaos, and here they were putting order on it, two men, their sabers and buttons polished and gleaming, shouting at the crowd as if they were in command. And the crowd listened! My eyes hurt.

  The taller of the two men addressed the crowd, and I heard the words Beauregard, General Beauregard, hiss through the crowd. He was a tall and thin man with a neat beard and long hair brushed back and wetted down. He smiled as if he had just told the crowd a joke he knew to be the funniest they had ever heard. They cheered, and he said, Attention! We will begin momentarily.

  I couldn’t hear every word, but I understood the meaning. Men began to press even closer to the stage, which prompted General Beauregard to hold up his hands for order. The pushing stopped.

  The other man in the uniform stood by the smaller wheel and silently watched his companion slide up and down the stage. He had no interest in either Beauregard or the drawing, that was clear. He stared at a spot on the wall at the back of the room. He was a hard-looking man, rigid in every way that Beauregard was flexible, like a cat. Beauregard straightened the cloths upon the table and picked up the chairs where the boys had knocked them over. He swung them up into the air above his head and turned toward the crowd to acknowledge the applause. A showman, too, I thought. I wished the general would smash the chairs upon the stage and interrupt everything with a dash of violence and disorder. He had been a general, he could reckon with chaos. He had made it and used it and et it up, hadn’t he? Don’t look like he suffered much from it. And here he is, pretending to be the Order itself. What bullshit. I much preferred the dour general who kept his mouth shut and watched the crowd with disdain. That one’s honest about it anyway.

  As Beauregard put everything in just the right place, and patted the two blind boys on the head, and made a show of urging the negro on in his labors, I looked around me. There had been confidence in the room before the drawing had resumed. Men in their sweaty hats had jawed at each other, slapped backs, teased the weak and told jokes to the strong. Every man had seemed sure he would emerge from the room the better for it, but now that the moment had finally arrived, I could smell the insecurity. They crowded together and they reeked. They removed their hats and fished for their tickets in hidden pockets. They all looked the same direction without blinking. What I had imagined was power and independence had become something else. They were just a lump, a mass, tempered by fear. The money.

  The general quickly explained the rules and the procedures, which some of the men repeated to their companions in French. I sensed that these men already knew the rules, that they already had spent days standing in the room staring at the stage. There must have been comfort in hearing it again, though, and I could see the men nodding their heads each time the general paused. Light streamed in from the upper windows and fell in lines of dust on the crowd and on the slowly fading wallpaper. In the great hall there was no carpet, nothing to relieve the press of heart pine on hobnailed boots. The men shifted their feet, and on the floorboards I could see stains, which might have been either blood or tobacco. I could imagine a church in the building, or a trading floor. A little of both, I think.

  Finally Beauregard began the process. He stopped the negro from turning the big wheel and directed him to stand next to the silent general. He opened a small door in the side of the wheel and gestured for one of the blind boys to reach inside. The boy came closer, holding out for the general’s arm, which Beauregard brandished with a great and chivalrous flourish. Guided to the door, the blind boy reached inside and pulled out one of the little cylinders. The silent general stepped forward and took the object from the boy, who seemed startled. Then the general opened it, and in an echoing low voice called out a number. A shout from the center of the crowd. Then Beauregard turned the other wheel a few times and gestured to the other blind boy, who reached in and pulled another number. The prize! Twenty dollars, Beauregard roared. In the middle the crowd stirred, and I could see a head bobbing toward the side of the stage, where the prize awaited.

  This is how it went for hours. Men gathered their prizes and returned to the crowd, perhaps because they had other numbers, perhaps to lord it over their unlucky friends. Occasionally Beauregard would announce that the ticket in question was eligible for a very large prize, but it never failed that the cylinder pulled from the prize wheel awarded only a small consolation prize. I knew this was one of the twice-yearly drawings at which it was possible to win $600,000 if in possession of the correct and very expensive ticket. I had no hope of seeing that happen.

  Then there was a commotion across the ballroom. A large man in a black bowler pulled tight over his face pushed through the crowd. I hadn’t been paying attention. Beauregard had called a number. The big man across the room, just a black head bobbing along, pulled a small boy along with him. They were dressed identically, dust-covered stonemasons. Beauregard kept calling the number, bored, and lo
oked as if he were about to decide the ticket holder was absent, when he noticed the man and the boy—father and son?—waving a ticket above his head. I strained to see the look on the man’s face. Was there shock or joy? What does a man do in such a situation? But I couldn’t see that far and the sun was in my eyes. All I saw was movement, height, the black hat. I was glad for the man, whoever he was. I listened to the crowd.

  The three hundred thousand dollar prize!

  Mon dieu!

  He is rich! Bastard.

  Beauregard had stopped, and watched the big man cleave the crowd, dragging his boy along with him as if they were part of the entertainment. The boy also wore a black bowler, pulled down low.

  At that moment I noticed, as if for the first time, the red accents on the walls, bright like new blood. And the upper reaches of the room, unfinished, bare and crumbling like some kind of ancient ruin.

  The crowd, at first, made way for the two winners, falling back from the sight of a man bearing a ticket to unfathomable riches. Men leaned back from the pair, knocking into the men behind them, losing their hats in the fray.

  Then the murmuring began. I could hear it, in that guttural and imperfect French, the growling of resentment and anger and calculation. The big man looked, to some in the crowd, to be ungrateful or arrogant. I heard men talking, gathered in small groups within the crowd, angrily pointing at the big man in the distance, accusing him of being a foreigner, insulting them by not acting glad to have their money, appearing to want someone to take the burden off his hands. I wondered how they could see that, when all I could see was that hat.

  I sensed the danger. I recognized this sort of crowd, I had been lost in the middle of such crowds before. I knew such a crowd could turn easily, eat anything.