A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “That is how it has come, p’tit,” she said, while in her eyes he saw the reflection of his own blackness—part contempt, but part concern. “It is the Americans, moving in from all sides, with their new houses and their tawdry furniture and their loud women who have no manners. Now more and more they control this town. What do you expect of men who won’t even free their own children when they get them on Negro women? They have no understanding of culture, of civilization. To them, we are no better than their slave bastards. If they could, they would lock us all in their barracoons and sell us to make a profit. It is all they think of, the cochons.”

  She had been, he reflected now, more right than he knew.

  She had taken a certain amount of pains, those first few weeks, to introduce him to her friends among the more influential men of color, not only to let them know that he was a music master and in the market for pupils, but to remind them that he was her son, and a free man. For his part he noticed that in the years of his absence, those friends had almost entirely stopped speaking English. It was a way of setting themselves off by language, by style of dress, and mostly by attitude and actions from any association with either the slave blacks or the black American freedmen who worked as laborers in the city.

  Another voice came back to him: He could no more pass himself for a gentleman than our doctor here can pass himself for a white man.…

  Or a black one, thought January, shaking his head at himself as he slipped through the gate into the open space of dirt and grass called Congo Square. He wondered whether his blackness, and the memories of a childhood long past, would be sufficient to let him pass for what his mother had been trying for years to get everyone to forget.

  The drums beat quicker, two distinct voices, one deep, one high. Somebody laughed; there was a ripple of jokes. The drummers were mocking up a conversation, the deeper drum a man, the higher a woman, and January could almost hear the words: “Come on out behind my cabin, pretty girl?” “Yeah, what’s that gonna git me, ’sides sore heels and a round belly?” “Got me some pretty beads here,” said the deep drum. “You call them pretty?” laughed the higher drum. “I spit prettier out’n that watermelon I ate last week.” You could hear the inflection, the flick of the woman drum’s eyelashes and the sway of her hips. More laughter at the deep drum’s speculative grumble.

  Many plantations—Bellefleur had been one of them—forbade slaves to have drums at all, and when old Joseph had played his reed flutes for dancing after work was done, rhythm was kept on sticks and spoons. There was something about that blood beat speaking across the miles of bayou, swamp, and silent, stifling cane fields in the night that made the owners uneasy. It reminded them of how isolated they were among the Africans they owned.

  Those drums had not been making jokes about tussles in the grass behind the cabins.

  The memories touched sore places inside him, and he pushed them aside. He didn’t belong here. The fact that he looked as if he did troubled him for reasons he couldn’t quite define.

  January scanned their faces, moving, talking, listening in the just-turned slant of the afternoon light. Distantly, the clock on the cathedral spoke three, answered by the wail of a riverboat’s whistle. Up the street, small parties of men and women—white, colored, free blacks, a few devout slaves—would be coming out of afternoon Mass at the Saint-Antoine chapel, holding their prayer books and rosaries tight and crossing Rue des Ramparts so as not to pass the square.

  The people here ranged in color as widely as had the attendees at the funeral, though on the whole this crowd was darker. Some of them were almost as smartly dressed. Those would be the skilled slaves, the hairdressers and ironsmiths, the tailors and shoemakers, the carpenters and embroideresses, valets, cooks, and maids. They were outnumbered, however, by those in the coarse grays and browns of laborers and draymen, stablehands and yardmen, laundresses and ironers. The women’s tignons were simple muslin or gaudy calico, rather than the silks worn by the women of color in mockery of the Black Code, but like all the colored women in the city they arranged them in fantastic variations of knots, folds, points.

  And they all moved differently, spoke to each other differently, from the reserved, careful, soft-spoken members of colored society. The laughter was louder. The men smoked cigars, despite the law that neither black nor colored was permitted to do so in public. Many of the women flirted in a way the carefully reared Catholic young ladies of color never would have dared.

  For no reason he remembered a morning, seven or eight weeks earlier, when he’d come to the chapel for early Mass, passing by this square and smelling blood. He had crossed the damp grass and found the beheaded body of a black rooster nailed to one of the oaks, its blood dripping down on the little plate of chickpeas and rice beside the tree’s roots, surrounded by a ring of silver half-reale bits. His confessor had told him only a few days ago that he and the other priests would now and then find pieces of pound cake, cigars, or bits of candy at the feet of certain statues in the church.

  The drums seemed to have reached an understanding. One could hear it, like the pounding of a lust-quick heart. A banjo joined in, sharp as crickets in summer trees, and a makeshift flute called a nightbird’s rill.

  “Calinda, calinda!” called out someone. “Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!”

  It was nothing like Rossini, nothing like Schubert. Nothing that had to do with Herr Kovald or Paris at all.

  Already, men and women had begun to dance.

  Leaning against the iron palings of the fence, hands in his pockets and uneasy shame in his heart, January searched the crowd.

  The woman he was looking for he hadn’t seen in sixteen years.

  Dark faces under bright tignons, white smiles gleaming. Shabby skirts swirling, moving, breasts swaying under white blouses, arms weaving. A smell of sweat came off the crowd, and with it the memory of nearly forgotten nights sitting on the step of his mother’s cabin, watching the other slaves dance by the smoky blaze of pine knots. Considering how much there had been to do on Bellefleur, the endless weeding and chopping at the heavy cane, repairing barns and outbuildings, cutting cypress, digging mud for levees and causeways, he still wondered how any of them had had the energy to dance, how he himself had managed, even with the wild energy of a child.

  More and more were joining in, though, even as they had then. People were shouting, singing, wild and pagan and utterly unlike the music he had been trained to make. Tunes and fragments of tunes unwound like dizzy pinwheels, reeling off into space. A thin girl with a red tignon coiled high like a many-knotted turban danced near him, teasing and inviting, and the brass rattles she wore on her ankles clattered in alien music. He grinned, shook his head. She flashed him a glimpse of calf and petticoat and spun on her way. Across the crowd a face seemed to emerge, half familiar—he realized with a shock it was Romulus Valle, and looked quickly away.

  How many others were here? he wondered in momentary panic. Bella—would Bella come here on her Sunday afternoons? His mother’s cook? He realized he didn’t even know if she was still a slave, or had been freed. It had never occurred to him to ask. She was part of his mother’s household from time immemorial.… In either case she’d never let him hear the end of this if she saw him.

  He wondered suddenly if the girl Judith would be here, and what he could possibly say to her about the thing he carried in his pocket.

  “Her-on mandé,

  Her-on mandé,

  Ti-gui li papa!”

  Thin, whining, almost hypnotic, the voices rose from deeper in the crowd. More and more were dancing, to the counterpoint rhythm of the drums, the sweet, metallic jangle of ankle clappers. January’s mind groped at the meaning of the words, but they were as much African as French—and bad French at that.

  “Her-on mandé,

  Ti-gui li papa!

  Her-on mandé,

  Her-on mandé,

  Do-se dan do-go!”

  Other voices rose up, only slightly more compr
ehensible:

  “They seek to frighten me,

  Those people must be crazy.

  They don’t see their misfortune

  Or else they must be drunk.

  “I, the Voodoo queen,

  With my lovely handkerchief

  Am not afraid of tomcat shrieks—

  I drink serpent venom!”

  Someone shouted, “Marie! Marie!” Turning his head, January saw that a woman had mounted a sort of platform made of packing boxes in the center of the square. She was tall and would have topped many in the crowd even had she not been standing on the makeshift dais—handsome rather than beautiful, with strong cheekbones and very dark eyes. Gold earrings flashed in the torrent of black hair that streamed on her shoulders, and jewels—possibly glass and possibly real—glittered on her white blouse and tempestuous blue skirt. Even without moving her feet she was dancing, body rippling snakelike, eyes closed in a kind of curious ecstasy, though her face was impassive in the long, brazen light.

  “I walk on pins,

  I walk on needles,

  I walk on gilded splinters,

  I want to see what they can do …”

  Other voices were shouting, “Zombi! Papa Limba!” and January’s eyes passed quickly across the faces of those who crowded near. The woman had a snake in her arms, the biggest king snake he had ever seen, six feet long and thick as a man’s wrist. It coiled around her neck and over her shoulders as she danced, and the droning voices rose against the driving heartbeat of the drums. Through the pickets around the square he could see white faces looking in, women in simple calicoes or the fancier twills and silks, men in the coarse clothing of laborers or the frock coats of artisans or merchants. At the square’s four gates, policemen looked on impassively.

  How could they? January wondered. How could they simply watch? Did they not feel what these people felt, what he himself felt against his will? The music was electric, drawing the mind and body to it with a force beyond that of childhood memory. It drew at the blood, and even from here, halfway across the square, he could sense the power of the woman with the snake.

  He moved nearer. Few of the dancers seemed to notice him, the men dancing first with one woman, then with another, others leaping, shaking, twisting on their own. Looking up at the woman’s face, he wondered if she was aware of the crowd around her, or, if not, what it was that she saw and heard and felt. The snake moved its head, tongue flicking, and January stepped back. Irrational fear brushed him, that the woman would look down at him with those huge black eyes and say, You are not one of us.… You are here to spy.

  And close by the platform of boxes—marked BRODERICK AND SONS—among the dancers, he saw the woman he was looking for, the woman he had come to this place to find.

  She was dancing alone, like the woman on the platform. There were far more women than men around the boxes and many of them moved, eyes shut, in solitary ecstasy. She was thinner than he remembered and her pointy-chinned, flat-boned face was lined. Her clothing, and the orange-and-black tignon that covered her hair, was faded and old. Above the low neck of her calico blouse he could see the points of her collarbone, the beginnings of crepy wrinkles in her neck, and the sight of it went to his heart.

  He dared not go up to her, dared not speak. He doubted, in her present state, she would hear him. But the memories were like vinegar, honey, and salt.

  “Oh yes, yes, Mamzelle Marie,

  She knows well the Grand Zombi …”

  The woman with the snake stepped down. Eyes open, black as coal, she stretched forth her hands, clasping the hands of the dancers who crowded close. Sometimes she spoke, a low guttural voice January could not hear. Now and then a woman would curtsy to her or a man would kiss her hands. The thin black woman came forward, clasped the voodooienne’s hands, and their eyes met, smiling with curious kinship. The two women embraced, and the one they called Marie kissed the other’s cheek.

  Under the trees someone set up a pot of gumbo, the smell of it thin and smoky in the air. On a packing box a man piled yesterday’s bread, and a pralinière stood by with her cart. Men and women gathered around, talking softly and laughing together, then going back into the dancing, as January knew they would be doing all afternoon. But the thin woman turned and walked toward the gate of the square, her patched skirts swishing in the weeds.

  She passed between the policemen there, crossed Rue des Ramparts and vanished between the buildings on the corner of Rue Saint Louis. January followed her, angling sideways to pass through the crowd of whites gathered outside the palings. He dodged a carriage and a couple of cabs on the broad street, leaped the gutter, and stepped quickly along the banquette through the shadows that were already growing long.

  The attack, when it came, took him completely by surprise. His mind was focused on the woman in the orange-and-black tignon, not only seeking her—pausing at the corner of Rue Burgundy to look for her—but wondering what he would say to her when he came up with her. Wondering if she would recognize him. Or, if she did, whether she would admit to it, and if she admitted to it, whether she would speak to him or simply walk away. He had not been able to locate her before leaving New Orleans, so their last meeting had been an awkward commonplace, with angry words and bitter prophecies of ill on both their parts.

  He knew subconsciously that there was someone on the banquette behind him. But only when those footfalls, the rustle of that clothing, came within a foot of him on the uncrowded walk did he turn, startled, and then it was far too late.

  They were medium-size men, dark without the lustrous blackness of a pure African. One of them wore a pink-and-black checkered shirt that he remembered seeing in the square. The other man, in coarse red calico and a corduroy jacket similar to January’s own, had his arm raised already and the makeshift blackjack he held coming down. January flung up his forearm to block the blow and managed to deflect it a little. It struck his temple with numbing force and stunned him, so that the ensuing struggle was little more than a confusion of punches and knees, of jarring pain in his belly and the hard, crunching smack of his knuckles meeting cheekbone or eye socket. Hands ripped and tore at his shirt and he heard the pocket of his jacket tear. One of them tried to get behind and hold his arms, but January was a very big man and turned, slamming the man in the pink-checkered shirt into the corner of the house nearby.

  The next thing he knew he was trying not very successfully to get to his feet with the aid of the same house corner, and two men were propping him, saying “Okay, Sambo, that’s enough of that,” while his brain slowly identified the thundering in his head as being retreating footsteps pelting away down Rue Burgundy. His skull felt as if it had been cracked, but he did notice that he was not seeing double.

  The white men standing over him wore the blue uniforms of the New Orleans City Guard.

  “No badge,” said one of them. “You got a ticket of leave, Sambo?”

  “My name is Benjamin January,” he said, straightening up.

  He still didn’t remember being hit, but his head gave an agonizing throb and the next moment nausea gripped him. The police stepped back, but not very far back, as he reeled to the gutter and fell to his knees, vomiting helplessly into the muddy water.

  More footfalls behind him. “Got away,” said a voice with a German accent. “What’s this one got to say for himself?”

  “Mostly ‘Here come mah lunch!’ ”

  There was uproarious laughter, and January was hauled to his feet again. He was trembling, humiliated, and cold with shock to the marrow of his bones.

  “My name is Benjamin January,” he said again, and fumbled in his coat pocket. His hands felt as if they belonged to someone else. “Here are my papers.”

  “And that’s why you was hangin’ around the voodoo dance, hah?” said the smallest of the squad. He was a little dark man with the flat, clipped speech of a born Orleanian. He took the papers and shoved them into his uniform pocket, grasped January by the arm. “Let’s go, Sambo. I suppos
e you got no idea who those fellas were you were fightin’, hah?”

  “I don’t,” said January, stopping and pulling irritably from the man’s grip. His head spun horribly and even that movement brought the taste of nausea back to his throat. Some of the vomit had gotten on his trousers and all he wanted to do was go home and lie down. “One of them was in the square, but …”

  At the first movement of resistance the three of them closed around him, jerking his arms roughly and causing another queasy surge of weakness. Reflex and anger made him half-turn, but he stopped the movement at once, transformed it into simply bringing his hand to his mouth once more, while he tried to breathe and force back his fury.

  His head cleared a little and he realized two of them had their clubs unhooked from their belts, waiting for his next move.

  In their faces he saw it wasn’t going to do him any good to explain.

  ELEVEN

  “Disturbing the peace, fighting in public and on the Sabbath,” said the little officer, slapping January’s papers down on the sergeant’s desk in the Cabildo’s stone-flagged duty room. The corner chamber of the old Spanish city hall faced the river, across the railed green plot of the Place des Armes and the rise of the levee, and the late sunlight visible past the shadows of the arcade had a sickly yellowish cast from the ever-present cloud of steamboat soot.

  “No ticket to be out and claiming he’s free, but I’d check on these if I were you, sir.”

  The desk sergeant studied him with chilly eyes, and January could see him evaluating the color of his skin as well as the coarseness of his clothing.

  In French, and with his most consciously Parisian attitude of body and voice, January said, “Is it possible to send for my mother, the widow Levesque on Rue Burgundy, Monsieur? She will vouch for me.” His head felt like an underdone pudding and his stomach was even worse, and the damp patch of vomit on his torn trouser leg seemed to fill the room with its stink, but he saw the expression in the sergeant’s eyes change. “Or if she cannot be found, my sister, Mademoiselle Dominique Janvier, also on Rue Burgundy. Or …” He groped for the names of the wealthiest and most influential of his mother’s friends. “If they cannot be found, might I send a message to … to Batiste Rodriges the sugar broker, or to Doctor Delange? The papers are genuine, I assure you, though the mistake is completely understandable.”