A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  The sergeant looked at the description on the papers again, then held them up to the light. There was sullen doubt in his voice. “It says here you’re a griffe.” He used one of the terms by which the offspring of full blacks and mulattos were described. In January’s childhood, the quadroon boys had used it as an insult, though generally not when they were close enough to him to be caught. His mother and his mother’s friends had a whole rainbow of terminology to distinguish those with one white great-grandparent from those with two, three, or four. “You look like a full-blood Congo to me.”

  The papers also said very dark. January knew, for he had read them carefully, resentfully, furious at the necessity of having them at all. Behind him, two officers dragged a white man through the station house doors, paunchy, bearded, and reeking of corn liquor and tobacco.

  “You stinkin’ Frenchified pansy sons a hoors, I shit better men than you ever’ time I pull down my pants! I’m Nahum Shagrue, own blood kin to the smallpox and on visitin’ terms to every gator on the river! I fucked an’ skinned ever’ squaw on the Upper Missouri an’ killed more men than the cholera! I chew up flatboats and eat grizzly bears and broken glass!”

  One of the guardsmen loitering on the benches gestured to the prisoner and said something to another, and January caught Lieutenant Shaw’s name. Both men laughed. The sergeant jerked his head toward the massive oak door that led to the Cabildo’s inner court. January’s papers stayed where they were on his desk.

  The central courtyard of the old Spanish city hall ran back almost as far as Exchange Alley, flagged with the heavy granite blocks brought as ballast by oceangoing ships and surrounded on two sides by galleries onto which looked the cells. As the guardsmen led January to the stairway that ascended to the first of these galleries, they passed a sturdy, stocklike construction of stained and scarred gray wood, and January realized with a queasy contraction of his stomach that this was the city whipping post.

  No, he thought, quite calmly, pushing all possibility from his mind that his own neck might feel that rubbed tightness, his own arms and ankles be locked into those dirty slots. No. They don’t just keep people here indefinitely. Someone will send for Livia or Dominique. In any case nothing will be done without a hearing.

  The knot of ice behind his breastbone did not melt.

  The plastered walls of the cell looked like they had been whitewashed sometime around the Declaration of American Independence, at which time the straw in the mattresses of the cots had probably been changed, though January wouldn’t have staked any large sum on it. Both cots were already occupied, one by an enormously fat black man with hands even bigger than January’s—although January suspected that spanning an octave and a half on the piano was not what he did with his—the other by a scar-faced mulatto who sized January up speculatively with cold gray-green eyes, then turned his face away with an almost perceptible shrug. Another mulatto, elderly and gray-haired and incoherent with drink, was fumbling around trying to reach the bucket in the corner in time to vomit. Three other men, two black and one white, were seated on the floor. Roaches the length of January’s thumb scampered over the sleeper and in and out of mattresses, bucket, and the cracks in the walls.

  “You heave in that bucket, Pop,” said the mulatto on the bed, “or I’ll make you lick it up.”

  The old man collapsed back against the wall and began to cry. “I di’n’ mean it,” he said softly. “I di’n’ mean nuthin’. I di’n’ know them clothes belonged to nobody, settin’ out on the fence that way. I thought some lady throwed ’em away, I swear—”

  “—said I was impudent. What the hell ‘impudent’ mean?”

  “It mean twenty-five lashes, is what it mean—or thirty if you ‘drunk an’ impudent.’ ”

  No, thought January, putting aside the dread that had begun to grow like a tumor inside him. Not without seeing a judge. It won’t happen. His palms felt damp, and he wiped them on torn and dirty trousers.

  The white man spat. Daubs and squiggles of expectorated tobacco juice covered the wall opposite him and the floor beneath. The sweetish, greasy stench of it rivaled the smell of the bucket.

  From beyond the strapwork iron of the door, muffled by the space of the court or the length of the gallery, women’s voices rose, shrilly arguing. From further off came a scream from the cells where they kept the insane: “But they did all conspire against me! The king, and President Jackson, they paid off my parents and my schoolmasters and the mayor to ruin me.…”

  A guard cursed.

  The light in the yard faded. Voices could be heard as the work gangs were brought in from cleaning the city’s gutters or mending the levees, a soft shush of clothing and the clink of iron chain. The splash of water as someone washed in the basin of the courtyard pump. The cell began to grow dark.

  Half an hour later Nahum Shagrue was dragged along the gallery, stumbling, head down, fresh blood trickling from a scalp wound he hadn’t had when he’d been brought into the duty room. Mercifully, he was locked in another cell.

  About the time music started up in Rue Saint Pierre below the narrow windows in the cell’s opposite wall, a youth came along the gallery carrying wooden bowls of beans and rice, gritty and flavorless, and a jug of water. The guards came back with him to collect the bowls afterward. The man who had been ‘impudent’ smashed a roach with his open hand and cursed drunkenly against someone he called ‘that stinkin’ Roarke.’ The white man continued to chew and spit, wordless as an ox. Outside it began to rain.

  The bells on the cathedral struck six, then seven. At eight—full dark—the cannon in Congo Square boomed out, signaling curfew for those few slaves who remained abroad, though the rain, January guessed, would have broken up the dancing long ago.

  He wondered about the woman he’d followed from the square and where she lived, and if he’d have to go through this again next Sunday to locate her.

  If he wasn’t on a boat by that time, he thought bitterly, wedging his broad shoulders against the stained plaster of the wall and drawing up his knees. The man next to him grumbled, “Watch your feet, nigger,” and January growled tiredly, “You watch yours.” There were advantages to being six feet three and the size of a barn.

  On a boat and on his way back to Paris, where he wouldn’t have to worry about being triced up in that hellish scaffold in the yard and lashed with a whip because some chaca jack-in-office thought he was darker than he should have been. Jesus! he thought, lowering his throbbing head to his wrists. Maybe he couldn’t get work as a surgeon in Paris, and maybe the government taxed everything from toothbrushes to menservants, but at least he wouldn’t have to worry about carrying papers around certifying that he wasn’t somebody’s property trying to commit the crime of stealing himself.

  And Ayasha? something whispered in his heart.

  Well, not Paris, then. But there were other places in France. Places where every cobblestone and gargoyle and chestnut tree didn’t say her name. Or England. The world was filled with cities.…

  He wondered who were the men who’d attacked him.

  And why.

  He stifled the rising panic, the fear that nobody would come for him, nobody would come to get him out of this, and thought about those men. One at least had been in the square. Probably both. They’d clearly followed him.

  Why?

  Coarse clothing, but he thought their shoes looked better than those given to slaves for wintertime wear. In the tangle of the fighting he hadn’t had a chance to observe their hands or their clothes, to guess at what they did.

  Stay out of barrooms, the official on the docks had said. They’s enough cheats and scum in this city … you’d find yourself pickin’ cotton in Natchez before you kin say Jack Robinson.…

  ‘Impudent’ means twenty-five lashes, is what it means.

  NO. It will not happen.

  Why hadn’t Livia come? Or Minou?

  The clock on the cathedral chimed eleven.

  The sergeant hadn’t sent fo
r them. Was the sergeant being bribed to turn over likely blacks to Carmen and Ricardo or Tallbott, or any of those others who owned the pens and depots and barracoons along Banks’ Arcade and Gravier and Baronne streets?

  Sitting here in this stinking darkness, it seemed hideously likely.

  January closed his eyes, tried to calm the thumping of his heart. Along the gallery, female voices rose again, arguing bitterly, and a man’s bellowed, “You hoors shut up, y’hear! Man can’t get no sleep!” Other voices joined in, cursing, followed by the sounds of a fight.

  I was a fool to return. He wondered why they all didn’t leave, all who were able to—all who were still free. And how long, he wondered, would that freedom last, with the arriving Americans, who saw every dark-skinned human being as something to be appropriated and sold?

  It won’t happen to me. I’ll be let out tomorrow. Holy Mary ever-Virgin, send someone to get me out of here.…

  Abishag Shaw appeared at the cell door shortly before eight.

  January wasn’t sure he had slept at all. The night blurred together into a long darkness of intermittent fear; of deliberately cultivated memories of Paris, of Ayasha and of every piece of music he’d ever played; of the prickle of roach feet, the scratching scamper of rats, and unspeakable smells. In the depths of the night he’d fingered his rosary in his pocket, telling over the beads in the darkness, bringing back the words and the incense of the Mass he’d attended that morning before his ill-fated expedition to Congo Square. The familiar promise of the prayers, the touch of the steel crucifix, had comforted him somewhat. At seven, voices in the yard gashed his meditations, a man reading out sentences: “Matthew Priest, for impudence, twenty lashes …”

  And the smack of leather opening flesh, punctuated by a man’s hoarse screams.

  “I am most sorry, Maestro,” said Shaw, leading the way swiftly along the gallery and down the wooden steps to the court. As usual he looked like something that had been raised by wolves. As they came to the flagstone court he glanced around him warily, as if expecting an Indian attack. “I been on another detail these two days, chasin’ after complaints about rented-out slaves roomin’ away ’stead of stayin’ with their masters. ’Course everyone does it—that whole area round about the Swamp’s nuthin’ but boardinghouses and tenements—but the captain got a flea up his nose about it all of a sudden, and I been talkin’ to lodgin’ house keepers who look like they’d sell their mothers’ coffins out from under ’em. I wouldn’t even be back here now, iff’n I hadn’t gone by your ma’s lookin’ for you.…”

  “Looking for me?” They stopped by the brass pump in the courtyard that allegedly provided for the hygienic impulses of the Cabildo’s prisoners. January scooped water onto the stiffened filth on his trouser leg, and sponged at it with a handful of weeds pulled from between the flagstones. His whole body was one vast ache and his head felt as if it was half-filled with dirty water that sloshed agonizingly every time he turned it. Every muscle of his arms and torso seemed to have turned to wood in the night. He’d checked his clothing before leaving the cell but couldn’t rid himself of the conviction that it still crawled with roaches.

  “Yore ma said she’d got word you was in some kind o’ trouble with the law,” said the lieutenant, keeping a wary eye on the door of the duty room. “She was some horripilated.… No, don’t worry ’bout goin’ in there, I got ’em.” He took January’s papers from his coat pocket and held them up, then steered January toward a small postern door that let out onto Rue St. Pierre. “She was some horripilated and said there had to be some kind o’ mistake.”

  “But she wouldn’t come down here to see.” Bitterly, January took the papers, checked them to make sure they were actually his, then shoved them into his coat.

  “Well, she did say she was gonna make sure your sister came down, soon as that man of hers got his breakfast and tied his cravat and got hisself out the door, though God knows how long that’d take him. He looks like he does powerful damage to a breakfast table.” Shaw spat into the gutter. “But I said I’d take care of it for her, seein’ as how I needed words with you anyway.”

  January looked away, forcing back a wave of rage worse than anything he had experienced in the darkness of the cell at night.

  Of course Minou wouldn’t come, as long as that fat flan of a protector of hers needed coddling and kissing. Maybe it was understandable. God forbid she should associate with blacks or with a brother who associated with blacks.

  But Livia had no excuse.

  After this long, it shouldn’t hurt.

  Passage to Le Havre was seventy-five dollars. Cheaper, if he’d be willing to forgo the comfort of a cabin and bring his own food. Add in another five dollars or so for a rail ticket to Paris, and fifty to live on there until he could find work. But not in Montmartre. Not anywhere near those quiet northern suburbs. And it would be many years before he trusted himself to return to Notre Dame. Still …

  The coffee-stand in the market near the river catered to everyone, without distinction: Creole sugar brokers, colored market women, stevedores black and shiny as obsidian; riverboat pilots and exiled Haitian sang mêlé aristocrats; white-bearded sugar planters and their wide-eyed grandsons, gazing at the green-brown river with its forest of masts, hulls, and chimneys belching smoke. Flatboat men every bit as cultured and aromatic as Nahum Shagrue docked rafts of lumber and unloaded bales of furs, hemp, tobacco, and corn; bearded laborers with Shaw’s flat Kentucky accents or a Gaelic lift to their voices sweated side by side with black dockhands unloading cotton and woolen goods, raw cotton, boxes of coffee, liquor, spices from the half dozen steamboats currently in port. Morose and villainous-looking Tockos from the Delta guided pirogues heaped with oysters into the wharves, calling to one another in their alien tongue.

  “Sunday’s the worse,” Shaw remarked, sipping his coffee standing, as if he had only paused between tables to speak to a friend. January, seated at the same table he’d occupied with Hannibal the morning of the duel with a coffee and a fritter before him, was ironically aware, not for the first time, of the unspoken agreement that appearances had to be kept up.

  And indeed, his mother would never let him hear the end of it were she to happen down Rue du Levée and see him eating with so squalid a specimen of the human race as Lieutenant Abishag Shaw.

  “And Sunday in Carnival is the worst of the lot,” the policeman added. “They was a cockfight round the back of the cemetery, not to speak of the dancin’—not that I saw that, mind. What was you up to there, anyway?” He’d discarded his tobacco, at least. January wondered how he could possibly taste anything. “Seems to me your ma’d like to have wore you out, did she know where you was.”

  “I noticed she wasn’t tripping on her petticoats to get me out of jail.”

  “Well …” Shaw balanced his cup in one big hand and scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “Some folks is like that, not wantin’ to admit they got a son ended up in the Calaboose.”

  “She hasn’t wanted to admit she had a son at all,” returned January, his voice surprisingly level. “Not a black one, anyway. Nor a black daughter.” He sipped his coffee and gazed straight ahead of him, out across the street at the stucco walls of pink and orange and pale blue, the shutters just opening as servants came out onto the galleries to air bedding and shake cleaning rags. He didn’t look back at Shaw, but he could almost sense the man’s surprise.

  “I got th’ impression yore ma was right proud of Miss Janvier.”

  “She is,” said January. “Dominique has fair skin and is kept by a white man. It’s Olympe Janvier she’s not proud of. My full sister. The one I was looking for in Congo Square.”

  “Ah.”

  A woman passed, selling callas from a basket on her head, and stopped, smiling, to hand one of those hot fried rice balls to old Romulus Valle, neatly dressed with a rush basket on his arm, out doing the morning shopping as if he’d never spent last night dancing under the spell of Mamzelle Marie.

&nb
sp; After a moment Shaw asked, “Find her?”

  “I followed her out of the square and down Rue Saint Louis. The men who beat me followed me. I still can’t imagine why. Maybe they just thought I looked like I had money on me, or they recognized me as a stranger.”

  He turned his face away for a moment, not looking at the tall white man who stood over him. The movement pulled at a fold on his trouser leg and he swatted at it, filled again with the morbid conviction that some of the Cabildo’s medium-sized fauna were still with him. Then the fact that he was here, beneath the brick arcades of the market, and not still listening to the profanity of his cellmates and the screaming of the insane, brought it home to him, belatedly, that there was something he needed to say.

  “Thank you for getting me out of there.” He had to force back the childish impulse to mumble the words, force himself to meet the man’s eyes. “It was … good of you. Sir.”

  Shaw shook his head, dismissing the thanks, and signaled a pralinière who was making her way between the tables. “I never can get enough of these things,” he admitted, selecting a white praline and waving away the offer of change from his half-reale. January bought a brown praline, and the woman gave him a little bunch of the straw-flowers that lined the edge of her basket, for lagniappe.

  “Lots of johnnie raws comin’ into town all the time,” Shaw said, when she had gone. “If it don’t bother the folks none if white folks watch ’em dance, what do they care if some out-of-town darky with his big hands in his pockets stares? It ain’t like it’s a real voodoo dance, not the kind they have out on the lake. You speak to any of the women?”