A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “Phrasie, don’t be a goose.” Livia Levesque emerged from the bedroom on her friend’s heels and made an unsuccessful grab at the filthy little wad of parchment and bone.

  Euphrasie Dreuze wrenched herself free. Only five years older than January, she was plumper than she’d been when first he had seen her but retained the impression of kitten-soft cuddliness that had attracted a well-off young broker thirty years before. Her chin was pouchy and deep lines graven on either side of her painted mouth, but she was still a lovely woman, fair-skinned even among quadroons, with small, grasping hands. Even for day wear her tignon was orange silk, glittering with an aigrette of jewels.

  With a shattering sob she brandished what she held. January took it, turned it over in his hands. A dried bat, little bigger than a magnolia leaf.

  A gris-gris. A talisman of death.

  “Madame Dreuze, Madame Dreuze,” bleated Clemence Drouet, fluttering at her heels the way she had fluttered at Angelique’s, her round face still gray with shock and tears. “Please don’t.…”

  “Throw that piece of trash out,” commanded Livia sharply and snatched it from her son’s hands.

  Even as she did so, Euphrasie turned with a hysterical cry upon the servant girl Judith, frozen in the act of pouring coffee from a pot at the sideboard.

  “You did this!” Euphrasie shrieked, smashing cup and saucer from the girl’s hands. “You black slut! You planted it there, you wanted my child to die!” Her hand lashed out, quick as a cottonmouth striking, and clapped the girl on the ear. Judith gasped and tried to run, but the room was choked with furniture, new and English and thick with carving. Odile and Pellicot clogged the door to the other half of the parlor, Clemence and Euphrasie herself that to the bedroom.

  “You did it, you did it, you did it!” Euphrasie struck her again, knocking her white head scarf flying, her gesture almost an identical echo of Angelique’s last night, when she had struck young Peralta. “You cheap, lazy whore! You dirty black tramp!” She caught Judith by the hair, dragging her forward and shaking her by the thick pecan-colored mass until the girl screamed. “You wanted her dead! You wanted to go back to that mealymouthed white bitch! You hated her! You got some voodoo and got her to make gris-gris!”

  “Phrasie!” Clisson caught the hysterical woman’s wrist. “How can you, with Angelique dead in her bed there?”

  “Phrasie, don’t be a fool.” Livia thrust herself into the fray, slapped Euphrasie loudly on her plump cheek.

  Euphrasie fell back, opening her mouth to scream, and Livia picked up the water pitcher from the sideboard. “You scream and I dump this over you.”

  Clisson, Odile, and Agnes Pellicot promptly retreated to the doorway, hands pressing their mountains of petticoats back for safety. January reflected that they’d all known his mother for thirty years.

  Euphrasie, too, wisely forbore to scream. For a moment the only sound was the girl Judith sobbing in the corner, her hair a tobacco-colored explosion around her swollen face. The smell of coffee soaking into wool carpet hung thick in the air. Outside a woman sang “Callas! Hot callas hot!”

  Then Euphrasie burst into fresh tears and flung herself onto the bosom of the only male present. “They murdered my little girl!” she howled. “My God, they witched her, put evil on her, so someone was drawn to kill her!”

  Livia rolled her eyes. January’s mother was small and delicate, like her younger daughter but not so tall, almost frail looking, with fine bronze skin and Dominique’s catlike beauty. At fifty-seven she moved with a decisive quickness that January didn’t recall from her languid heyday, as if her widowhood, first from Janvier and then from Christophe Levesque, had freed her of the obligation to be alluring to men.

  “She hated her!” Euphrasie moaned into January’s shirt. “She ran away, again and again, going back to that uppity péteuse. She hated my angel, she wanted her dead so she could go back.…”

  Livia meanwhile set the pitcher down, picked up Judith’s head scarf and the unbroken saucer and cup, and said to the sobbing servant, “Get a rag and vinegar and get this coffee sopped up before the stain sets.” She thrust the scarf into the girl’s hands. “Put this back on before you come back. And wash your face. You look a sight. And you”—she pointed at Clemence, sagging gray faced against the side of the door, both lace-mitted fists stuffed into her mouth—“don’t you go faint on me again. I haven’t time for that.” She looked around for the gris-gris but January had retrieved it from the floor and slipped it into his coat pocket.

  “It was that woman,” Euphrasie wailed, clutching January’s lapels. “That stuck-up white vache! That nigger bitch, she’d run off, trying to go home, and that Trepagier, she’d tell that girl how if my Angelique were to die, she’d take her back. I know it. That Trepagier set her up to murder my child, my only little girl! Oh, what am I going to do? They drew down death on her and left me to starve!”

  “Phrasie, you know as well as I do Etienne Crozat left you with five hundred a year,” said Livia tartly. “Benjamin, pull her loose or she’ll hang on to you weeping till doomsday. You’d think it was her funeral tomorrow and not her daughter’s.”

  Odile Gignac meanwhile had helped Clemence Drouet to one of the overstuffed brocade chairs, where the girl burst into shuddering tears, handkerchief stuffed in her mouth, as if all her life she had been forbidden to make a sound of discontent or grief. “There, there, chérie,” murmured the dressmaker comfortingly. “You mustn’t cry like that. You’ll make yourself ill.”

  January had to reflect that his sister was right about the Drouet girl’s dresses: Like her costume last night, this one—also designed by Angelique, if Dominique spoke true—though costly and beautiful, made her look like nothing so much as a green-gold pear.

  “That Trepagier put her up to it! She put her up!” It was astonishing how Madame Dreuze could keep her face buried in his sleeve without either muffling her voice or disarraying her tignon. “She hated her like poison! They poisoned my child, the two of them together!”

  “Angelique was strangled,” Livia reminded her dryly. She went to the sideboard and handed January a clean napkin from a drawer as he fished vainly in his pockets for a handkerchief. “And you can’t very well say Madeleine Trepagier turned up at the Orleans ballroom and did it. Get that child out of here, Odile. She’s been nothing but underfoot since …”

  “Why not? She could have come in through the Théâtre …”

  “With all the Trepagier family in the Théâtre to recognize her? And that hag of an aunt of hers?”

  “That black slut Judith did, then! Why not? She hated my child.…”

  At Livia’s impatient signal, Catherine Clisson came forward and eased the weeping woman from her leaning post. Clisson relieved Ben of his napkin and proceeded to dry Euphrasie’s eyes as she guided her toward the settee. Livia Levesque took her tall son’s arm and steered him briskly toward the door, and January went willingly, unnerved by the accuracy of Madame Dreuze’s chance shot.

  “I swear,” declared Livia, as they descended the two high brick steps to the banquette, “it’s like a summer rainstorm in there, between those two watering pots.” She pulled her delicate knit-lace gloves on and flexed her hands. “Give me my parasol, Ben.”

  “Why does she say the girl Judith hated Angelique?” January handed his mother the fragile, lacy sunshade she had thrust into his hands on the way through the door. “I take it Judith belonged to Madeleine Trepagier?”

  Like the jewels and the dresses, he thought. When there’s only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town …

  The thought conjured up was an ugly one.

  Livia opened the sunshade with a brisk crackle of bamboo and starch, despite the fact that the day was milkily overcast. Even so far back from the river, the air smelled of steamboat soot.

  “She’s carrying on as if she were wronged, not her daughter murdered,” the elderly lady sniffed. “And not her only child, as she’s been saying. She has two son
s still living, one of them a journeyman joiner with Roig and the other a clerk at the Presbytère, but they’re not the ones who’ve been giving her gambling money and buying her silk dresses. Etienne Crozat left her a house and five hundred a year when he married André Milaudon’s daughter in ’28, so she hasn’t any room to talk.” She moved with small, quick steps along the brick banquette, the river breeze stirring the pale green chintz of her bell-shaped skirts. Like Catherine Clisson, she was dressed very plainly and very expensively, her tignon striped pale green and white and fitting her fine-boned face like the petals of a half-closed rose. A gold crucifix sparkled at her throat, and Christophe Levesque’s wedding ring gleamed through the fragile net of the mitt.

  “And Madame Trepagier?”

  She cocked her head up at him. “Arnaud Trepagier was free to do with his own Negroes as he pleased,” she said, in that deep voice like smoky honey that both her daughters had inherited. “I think the girl used to be his wife’s maid, but as far as I’m concerned that’s of a piece with giving her his wife’s dresses and his wife’s jewelry. That cook of Angelique’s was Trepagier’s, too, and a good one, for a Congo.”

  He remembered the way Angelique had looked at him, the slight, impersonal regret in her eyes as she’d said, You’re new. He knew his anger at her was wrong, for he was alive and she was dead, but he felt it all the same.

  His mother spoke as if she’d never sweated in a cane field at sugaring time, had never been bought and sold like a riding mare. January remembered huddling in terror in the gluey, humming blackness of a dirt-floored cabin, holding his little sister and fighting not to cry, wondering if the Frenchman who was buying his mother would buy him, too, and whom he’d have to live with if he was left behind.

  Olympe had told him once that buying them hadn’t been their mother’s idea. He had no clue where she’d gotten this information, or if it was true.

  “The whole time she was hunting through that room for a gris-gris—and she turned the place upside down, with Angelique lying there in her bed in that white dress looking like the Devil’s bride—she was picking up every brooch, earring, and bracelet she could find and putting them in her reticule.” Livia paused at the corner of Rue Burgundy to let her son cross the plank that spanned the cypress-lined gutter and hold out his hand to help her over.

  “And a fair pile of them there were, too. Some of them were French and old—antique gold, not anything a wastrel like Arnaud Trepagier would have the taste to buy for a woman and surely too tasteful for any of Angelique’s asking. If that silly heifer Clemence thinks she’s going to get a keepsake out of her she’s badly mistaken. Every stitch and stone of it’s going to be in the shops tomorrow, you mark my words, before Madame Trepagier can claim them back.”

  “Can she?”

  “I don’t suppose Trepagier made a will. Or Angelique either. That girl Clemence kept blundering around underfoot, hinting that Angelique had promised her this and promised her that, but a fat lot of good that’ll do her. I never saw anybody who looked so much like a sheep. Acts like one, too.”

  A carriage passed in front of them, curtains drawn back to show a pair of porcelain-fair girls and an older woman in a fashionable bonnet and lace cap. Livia remarked, “Hmph. Pauline Mazant has her nerve, setting up as chaperone to her daughters—the whole town knows she’s carrying on an affair with Prosper Livaudais. And him young enough to be her son, or her nephew anyway.”

  She turned her attention back to January and the matter at hand. “At Trepagier’s death, presumably the jewelry would revert to Angelique, and then to her mother—those brothers of hers wouldn’t touch it, and small blame to them. But Madame Trepagier may sue her for the more expensive pieces, like that set of pearls and emeralds, if they ever find them, and the two slaves. The cook should fetch a thousand dollars at least, even if she can’t make pastry, and the girl nearly that.”

  Only his mother, reflected January wryly, would keep track of the relative price of her friends’ servants.

  “Unless Phrasie decides to keep them for herself. She’s only got the one woman now and she can’t cook worth sour apples, but she may sell them and keep the cash, to prevent La Trepagier from getting them back. Weeping about the hardship of her lot all the while, of course. And God alone knows what she owes in faro games.”

  They walked in silence for a few minutes, threading their way among servants, householders, men and women abroad on the errands of the day. The air was warm without brightness, heavy with the strange sense of expectation that the dampness frequently seemed to bring. Even here, at the back of the old town, the well-dressed servants of the rich came and went from the small shops, the dressmakers and furniture builders, the milliners who copied the latest French styles, the dealers in books and linen, soaps and corsetry. Here and there the tall town houses of the wealthy lifted above the rows of brightly painted stucco cottages or the old Spanish dwellings, built half a story above the ground for coolness—the voices of children sounded like the cries of small birds from courtyards and alleyways. A pair of nuns walked slowly down the opposite banquette, black robes billowing a little in the wind off the river—they stopped to buy pralines from a woman in a gaudy head scarf, then moved on, smiling like girls. From far off a riverboat whistled, a deep alto song like some enormous water beast. Livia made a little detour to avoid the puddles where a man was washing out the stone-paved passageway into a court, and past its shadows January glimpsed banana plants, palmettos, and jasmine.

  “You know anything about what kind of terms Madame Dreuze was negotiating with Monsieur Peralta?”

  “Euphrasie Dreuze hasn’t the wits to negotiate the price of a pineapple in the market,” retorted Livia coolly. “She was trotting back and forth for weeks between her daughter and Monsieur Peralta, pretending she was ‘checking’ with that harpy and really taking her instructions, and a pretty bargain it was, too. She wanted that piece of downtown property on Bourbon and Barracks, six seventy-five a year and a clothing allowance, household money plus freehold on whatever young Peralta might give her.”

  January didn’t even bother to ask how his mother had come by those figures.

  “Grasping witch. Personally I can’t see how Peralta Père would countenance it, because he’d be just laying his son open for a drain on the capital. And her playing bedroom eyes with Tom Jenkins since last May. Père et fils, they’re well rid of her.”

  A cat blinked from an iron-grilled balcony. Two boys ran by, chasing a hoop.

  “Tell me about Madeleine Trepagier,” said January.

  “You knew her.” Livia angled her parasol though there was no sunlight strong enough to cast shadow. “She was one of your piano students. Madeleine Dubonnet.”

  “I know.” January felt that much admission was better than trying to remember a lie. “The one who played Beethoven with such … rage.” He was surprised his mother remembered the students he’d had before he left.

  His mother’s dark eyes cut sidelong to him, then away. “If she had rage in her she had a right to it,” she said. “With a drunkard of a father who married her to one of his gambling friends to cancel a debt. Oh, the Trepagiers are a good family, and Arnaud had three plantations, if you want to call that piece of swamp in Metairie a plantation. Good for nothing but possum hunting is what I’ve heard, and wouldn’t fetch more than fifteen dollars an acre even now, and less than that back when he sold it to that American.” The inflection of her voice added that as far as she was concerned, the American was a tobacco-chewing flatboat man with fleas in his crotch.

  “I’ve ridden past Les Saules,” he remarked, to keep her on track.

  “It’s been going downhill for years.” Livia dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “Cheap Creole cane. It won’t produce more than eight hundred pounds an acre, if the cold doesn’t kill it. And three mortgages, and lucky to get them. Arnaud Trepagier was a fine gentleman but not much of a planter, and they say the woman’s a pinchpenny and works her slaves hard, not t
hat slaves won’t whine like sick puppies if you make them step out any faster than a tortoise on a cold day. God knows what the woman’s going to do now, with all the debts he left. I’d be surprised if she could get ten dollars an acre for that land. That worthless brother of Trepagier’s left town years ago, when he sold his own plantation, also to an American”—there was that inflection again—“and got cheated out of his eyeteeth on railroad stock. And I’d sooner peddle gumbo in the market than go live with Alicia Picard—that’s Dubonnet’s sister—and her mealymouthed son.”

  January almost asked his mother if she wanted to go back over the battlefield and slit the throats of anyone she’d only wounded in the first fusillade, but stopped himself. Behind them, a voice called out, “Madame Levesque! Madame Livia!” and January turned, hearing running footsteps. The woman Judith was hurrying down Rue Burgundy toward them, her hand pressed to her side to ease a stitch. She’d put on her head scarf again, and against the soft yellows and rusts and greens of the houses the dull red of her calico dress seemed like a smear of dark blood.

  “Madame Livia, it isn’t true!” panted Judith, when she had come up with January and his mother. “It isn’t true! I never went to a voodoo woman or made any gris-gris against Mamzelle Angelique!”

  Livia looked down her nose at the younger woman, in spite of the fact that Judith was some five inches taller than her. “And did you run away?”

  The slave woman was, January guessed, exactly of his mother’s extraction—half-and-half mulatto—but he could see in his mother’s eyes, hear in the tone of her voice, the exact configuration of the white French when they spoke to their slaves. The look, the tone, that said, I am colored. She is black.

  Maybe she didn’t remember the cane fields.

  And Judith said, “M’am, it was only for a night. It really was only for a night.” As if Livia Levesque had been white, she didn’t look her in the face. “She’d whipped me, with a stick of cane.… I really would have come back. Madame Madeleine, she told me I had to.… I never would have gone to a voodoo.”