A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  Hannibal held the bottle to the light, and January smelled the swoony alcohol bitterness of laudanum. The fiddler’s mouth quirked—evidently Nancy had consumed most of the contents—but he said, “Thank you, Mary. At least I’ve been into every pawnshop in town enough that most of the pawnbrokers won’t take my violin anymore,” he added philosophically. “So the girls have quit hocking it. And of course the books are perfectly safe.”

  “I went down by Tia Hojie and got you this,” Mary went on. She produced a small bag of red flannel from the same pocket, put it around Hannibal’s neck on a long, dirty ribbon. “Don’t you open it,” she added, as he made a move to do so. “It’s healin’ juju—a black cat bone and mouse heads and I don’t know what all else. You just wear it and it’ll help you. I got a green candle to burn here, too.”

  “Thank you,” said Hannibal, reaching out to take the woman’s hands. “That’s good of you, truly. What’ll Big Mag say about having a candle up here? She took away the lamp I had to read by,” he added to January. “When it gets dark, all I can do is lie here and listen to the fights downstairs.”

  “I’ll put it in a glass jar,” promised Mary. “Besides, Big Mag gonna be busy tonight; she won’t know nuthin’. I’ll put the mark on your shoes and burn this here candle while you’re gone, and you feel better in the mornin’.”

  Hannibal coughed, fighting the spasm, then managed a smile. “I’ll feel better knowing I can pay Mag her rent money,” he said. “Thank you.”

  The woman collected the blood-crusted rags, checked to see there was water in the pitcher, and departed. Hannibal sank back on the mattress with the barely touched bowl of grits next to his hand and fell almost immediately to sleep. January shook his head, covered the bowl with the saucer, and descended the stairs. On a sudden thought he crossed the kitchen yard, to where Fat Mary was fussing around the kitchen once more. As he had suspected, there was a residue of brick dust on the kitchen steps, and a little smear of ochre on the doorsill.

  “Maybe you can help me,” he said, and she turned, the baby on one hip again and a square black bottle of gin in her hand.

  “Maybe I can,” she smiled.

  “I hear there’s a new girl around this part of town; skinny Congo girl name of Sally. Runaway from one of the plantations. You know where she’d be, how I can talk to her?”

  “Sally.” The woman frowned, searching her mind. She spoke English with a rough eastern accent, Virginia or the Carolinas, slow and drawling after the flat, clippy vowels of New Orleans speech. “Name don’t sound familiar, and I know most of the girls on the game roundabouts here.”

  “She may not be on the game yet,” said January. “She ran off with a little bit of money. She’s got a new calico dress, new earbobs, maybe. She ran off with a man.”

  “She runned off with a man, she end up on the game fast enough.” She refreshed herself with a swig of gin, and rocked her child gently, swaying on big, bare, pink-soled feet. “But I ain’t seen any of the men round about here—not the ones with money to go buyin’ calico and earbobs for a woman—with a new gal. I’ll ask around some, though.”

  “Thank you, Mary.” He slipped an American fifty-cent piece onto the table where she could pick it up after he left. He saw her note it with her eye, but she made no comment. He wasn’t exactly sure what he thought Sally could tell him, but he was beginning to be very curious about exactly what Madeleine Trepagier had done Thursday night and in what state her clothing had been when she returned home.

  Sally would know. And, if Sally were sufficiently resentful of her mistress to run away, Sally could probably be induced to talk. It would at least give him somewhere else to look, some other avenue to point out to Shaw.

  “One other question? I’m trying to find a voodooienne name of Olympia. I don’t know what her second name is these days, but she’s about so tall, skinny, real dark, like me. She’s under Marie Laveau.”

  “Everbody under Mamzelle Marie these days,” said Fat Mary, without animosity. “She make damn sure no other queen operatin’ on her own in this town. Olympia?” She frowned. “That’d be Olympia Corbier, over Customhouse Street—Olympia Snakebones, she called. She got big power, they say, but she crazy.” She shrugged. “ ’Course, they all a little crazy. Even the nice ones, like Tia Hojie.”

  “Where on Customhouse Street?”

  “ ’Tween Bourbon and Burgundy. She got a little cottage there. Her man Corbier’s an upholsterer, but he don’t got much to say for himself.”

  “If I was married to a voodooienne,” said January, “I wouldn’t have much to say for myself, either.”

  He turned away from the kitchen door. From the barroom at the far end of the line of cribs a sudden commotion of shouting broke out, whoops and screams and curses. Someone yelled “Look out! He’s got a knife!” Through the window that looked into the yard a man’s body came flying, bringing with it a tangle of cheap curtains, glass, and fragments of sash. The man sprawled, gasping, in the some three inches of unspeakable water that puddled most of the yard, as another man came crashing through the remains of the window and half a dozen others—all white, all bearded, all wearing the filthy linsey-woolsey shirts and coarse woolen suspendered pants of flatboat men—came boiling out through the rear door. The audience from the cockfight in the corner of the yard gravitated at once to the far more inviting spectacle and the man in the mud was yelling “Christ, he’s killed me! Christ, I’m bleeding!”

  The smell of blood was rank, sweet, hot in the bright air. January strode across the yard, forced his way to the front of the crowd in time to see the man on the ground sit up, face chalky under a graying bush of tobacco-stained beard. His thigh had been opened for almost a hand’s breadth, brilliant arterial blood spouting in huge gouts. The man fell back, groaning, back arching.

  Without thinking January said, “Bandanna,” and Mary, who’d come running out of the kitchen beside him, pulled off her tignon and handed it to him. He knelt beside the boatman, twisted the blue-and-yellow kerchief high around the man’s thigh, almost into the groin, and reached back, saying, “Stick—something …”

  Somebody handed him the ramrod from a pistol. He twisted it into the tourniquet, screwing it tight, his hands working automatically, remembering a dozen or a hundred similar emergencies in the night clinic at the Hôtel Dieu. “Bandanna,” he repeated, reaching out again, and a neckerchief was put into his hands. It smelled to heaven, was black with greasy sweat, and crept with lice, but there was no time to be choosy. He folded it into a pad, pressed it hard on the wound, the additional pressure closing it.

  The patient groaned, reached out, and whispered, “Whisky. For the love of God, whisky.”

  January took the bottle somebody handed down and poured it on the makeshift dressing. The man screamed at the sting of it, grabbed the bottle from his hand, and yelled, “Git this nigger away from me! Nahum! Git him away, I say! Who the hell let him touch old Gator Jim? I killed niggers his size ’fore I was old enough to spit straight!”

  “He shouldn’t have whisky,” said January, as someone else held out another bottle. “He needs to have that cut cleaned and stitched, cauterized if possible.”

  “The hell you say!” yelled the patient, trying to sit up.

  “T’bacca juice’ll clean it just as well,” added another one of the boatmen, and that seemed to act as a license—every one of the men had a remedy. Gator Jim swigged deeply of the whisky and when January tried to stop him two men pulled him back, thrust him away into the muddy yard.

  “You can’t—” began January, as the boatmen carried their friend back into the saloon. One stepped clear and stood in his path.

  For some reason he recognized the man called Nahum Shagrue, whom he’d last seen at the Calabozo.

  “Saloon’s for white men, boy.” Shagrue’s voice was very quiet, but his eyes were the eyes of a wild pig: intelligent, ugly, and deadly dangerous, calculating where and how to attack. He had a pistol and two knives in his belt,
another knife protruding from the top of one boot, and the end of his nose was a flattened mass of scar tissue, as if someone had bitten off the tip of it long ago. The cut he’d got on his forehead from the city guard was a crusted mess over one spiky brow, and tobacco juice made brown stains as if roaches had been squashed in his blond beard. He spit now, copious and accurate, on January’s foot.

  “He needs to have that wound cleaned if he isn’t going to get blood poisoning,” said January. “And he needs to have it stitched, and the tourniquet loosened every five minutes if—”

  “What, you think you’re some kinda doctor, boy?”

  January had enough sense not to reply.

  “We kin take care of our own ’thout no uppity nigger tellin’ us what to do,” said Shagrue. “Now you git, ’fore you’re the one needs cleanin’ an’ stitchin’.”

  From within the saloon, January could hear the harsh upriver voices. “Holy Christ, get him some whisky.” “I hear cowshit on a wound’ll draw the poison right out.” “Lady over on Jackson Street got a cow.…” “The hell with them fancy French doctors, get me old Injun Sam.… Sober him up first.…”

  January knew the man would die.

  He turned, and his eyes met those of the boatman before him; pale like broken glass, cold and intolerant and abysmally ignorant.

  And proud of it.

  He turned away.

  FIFTEEN

  Olympe Corbier opened the door of her small, ochre-stuccoed cottage on Rue Douane and stood looking across at her brother for some moments, her thin face blank beneath the orange-and-black tignon. Behind her the room was filled with light and thick with the smells of incense and drying herbs. A cheap French chromo of the Virgin was tacked to the wall under a wreath of sassafras; on a narrow table of plank and twig before it stood a green candle on one side, a red one on the other, amid a gay tangle of beads. That was all January could see past her shoulder. Somewhere in the house a child was singing.

  She said, “Ben.”

  It was the woman who had been at Congo Square.

  “Olympe.”

  “Marie said you was back.” She stepped aside to let him in. When he mounted the tall brick steps he gained over her in height. Tall for a woman, she was nowhere near his own inches. She was dressed much as she had been Sunday, in a bright-colored skirt badly frayed and the white blouse and jacket of a poor artisan’s wife. The fine wrinkles that stitched her eyelids and were beginning to make their appearance around her lips detracted nothing from the vivid life of her face.

  “Marie?”

  “The Queen. Laveau. But it was all over anyway, that Widow Levesque’s big son was back from France and playin’ piano like Angel Gabriel. Nana Bichie told me in the market, where I buy my herbs. That you had a lady in France, but she died, and so you returned.”

  Her French had deteriorated. Even before he had left, it had begun to coarsen, the js shifting into zs and the as to os, the endings and articles of words fading away. Like his, her voice was deep and made music of the sounds. In another room of the cottage—or perhaps in the yard behind—a young girl’s voice sounded, and the singing child stilled for a moment. Her eyes changed momentarily as she kept track of what was going on, as mothers do—or as other children’s mothers always had. Just a touch, then her attention returned to him.

  “You never came.”

  “I didn’t know you’d want me to,” he said. “We’d fought.…” He hesitated, feeling awkward and stupid but knowing that their quarrel sixteen years ago was something that still needed getting past. “And I felt bad that I hadn’t come back, hadn’t made the time to look for you, before I left for France. I was stupid then—and I guess I didn’t quite have the nerve now. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get the nerve, if I didn’t need your advice.”

  “About Angelique Crozat?”

  He looked nonplussed. Her dark face split into a white grin and the tension of her body relaxed. She shook her head, “Brother, for a griffe you sure white inside. You don’t think everybody in town don’t know about that silly cow Phrasie Dreuze hangin’ herself all over you like Spanish moss at the funeral and layin’ it on you to ‘avenge her daughter’s murder’? It true like she sayin’ that somebody witched her pillow?”

  “Put this in her mattress.” He produced the handkerchief from his coat pocket—his slightly-better corduroy coatee, not the rough serge roundabout he’d worn to the Swamp. Bella had shaken her head over the damp and stinking bundle he’d brought down to her upon his return to the house that morning: “Fox go callin’ on a pig, gonna get shit on his fur,” she’d said.

  Olympe led the way to a very old, very scarred settee set beneath the lake-side window, nudged aside an enormous gray cat, and sat beside him, turning the gris-gris carefully in the light. She kept the handkerchief between the dried bat and her palm, touched the dead thing only with her nail, but her face had the businesslike intentness of a physician’s during the examination of a stool or a sputum. The cat sniffed at January’s knee, then tucked its feet and stared slit-eyed into sleepy distance once more.

  “John Bayou made this,” Olympe said at last. “It’s the kind hangs in the swamp near the lake where he goes, and you can still smell the turpentine on it.” She held it out for him to sniff. “He favors snuff and turpentine. Dr. Yah-Yah woulda made a wax ball with chicken feathers, ’stead of huntin’ down a bat. It’s bad gris-gris, death written all over it.” Her dark eyes flickered to him. “You been carryin’ this in your pocket?”

  He nodded.

  “You lucky you get off with just a couple beatin’s.” January’s hand went to the swollen lips of the cut cheek he’d taken Sunday afternoon. The gris-gris had, of course, been in his pocket at the time. Also today in the Swamp.

  “What?” she said, seeing his face. “You thought it would only work against the one whose name was spoke at its making?” Her face softened a little, and the old, ready contempt she’d flayed him with at their last meeting was tempered now by years of bearing children and dealing with the helplessness of other people’s pain. “Or they teach you in France it was all nigger hoodoo?” Once she would have thrown the words at him like a challenger’s gauntlet. Now she smiled, exasperated but kind.

  “Where would I find this John Bayou?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it,” said Olympe. “He mean, Doctor John.” Her coffee-dark eyes narrowed, like the cat’s. “And what was Angelique Crozat to you?”

  “A woman they’re saying I killed.”

  “Who’s saying?”

  “The police. Not saying it right out yet, but they’re thinking it louder and louder.” And he told her what had happened that night, leaving out only who it was who had given him the message to take to Angelique—“someone who couldn’t be at that ball”—and what Shaw had told him later.

  “Phrasie Dreuze,” said Olympe, as if she’d bitten on a lemon, and her eyes had the look of an angry cat’s again. “Yes, her man made it worth her while to keep her mouth shut about him and her daughter. Mamzelle Marie had her cut of that, for showin’ Phrasie how to pass off Angelique as a virgin to Trepagier when the time come. But some people knew. Anybody who knew Angelique as a child didn’t have far to go to guess. No wonder she didn’t have much use for men.”

  She shook her head. “Phrasie know you were the last person to see her girl alive?”

  “I think so. She was there when Clemence Drouet told Shaw about it, but I don’t think she’s smart enough to put two and two together. Even if she was, I don’t think she’d care.”

  “No. So long as she’s got her revenge.” She turned her head, to regard the withered bat on the windowsill. “I’ll need a dollar, two dollars, to find out from Doctor John.”

  He took them from his wallet, heavy silver cartwheels, and she placed them on the sill on either side of the bat. The cat jumped up and sniffed the money, but didn’t go near the gris-gris. January told himself it was because the thing smelled of snuff and turpentine.
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  “Anybody ever ask you to witch Angelique?”

  Olympe hesitated, but her eyes moved.

  “Who?”

  She pushed the silver dollars to and fro with a fingertip. “When you talked about goin’ to France, brother, you talked about becomin’ a doctor. A real doctor, a go-to-school doctor. You do that?”

  January nodded.

  “You take that oath they make doctors take, about not runnin’ your mouth about your patients who come to you with secrets? Secrets that are the seeds of their illness?”

  He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. Then he sighed. “Looks like it’s my day to be double stupid. Now you got me talkin’ gombo,” he added, realizing he had slipped, not only into the softer inflections of the Africanized speech, but into its abbreviated forms as well.

  “You always did set store on bein’ a Frenchman,” smiled Olympe. “You as bad as Mama, and that sister of ours with her fat custard moneybag, pretendin’ I’m no kin of theirs because I’m my father’s child.” Her mouth quirked, and for a moment the old anger glinted in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.” His hand moved toward the money. She regarded him in surprise.

  “You change your mind ’bout Doctor John?”

  “I thought you just told me you wouldn’t tell.”

  “I won’t tell on the person who paid me,” she said, as if explaining something to one of her younger children. “Might be some completely different soul went to John Bayou, and that’s none of my lookout. I should know in two, three days.”

  “I’ll be back by then.” He thought he said the words casually, but there was more than just interest in the way she turned her head. “I’m leaving town for a few days. Riding out tonight, as soon as the dancing’s through.”

  He felt his heart trip quicker as he spoke the words aloud. It was something he didn’t want to think about. Since he had returned to Louisiana, he had not been out of New Orleans, had barely left the French town, and then only for certain specific destinations: the Culvers’ house, the houses of other private pupils.