A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “Murderer!” shrieked the Thompsonian dog, and the two men fell upon each other in a welter of kicking, flailing canes, and profanity.

  “Birds in their little nests agree,” sighed Hannibal, draining the tafia,

  “And ’tis a shameful sight

  When children of one family

  Fall out, and chide, and fight.”

  Monsieur Davis and half a dozen others hustled the combatants from the room.

  Mayerling remained where he was, shaking his head in a kind of amazement. Hannibal picked up his violin again, playing to cover the chatter of the crowd; the music was frail as honey candy, but with an edge to it like glass.

  “I never saw the point of dueling, myself.” January turned back to the keyboard. His hands followed the trail the violin set, a kind of automatic embellishment that could be done without thinking. “It might be different were I allowed to give challenges, or accept them, but I don’t think so.”

  “Of course not,” said the Prussian in surprise. “You have your music. You are an intelligent man, and an educated one. You are seldom bored. It is all from boredom, you know,” he went on, looking out into the room again. “It is like the Kaintucks in the Swamp or the Irish on Tchoupitoulas Street. They have nothing to do, so they get into fights or look for reasons to get into fights. They are not so very different from the Creoles.”

  He shook his head wonderingly.

  “… It’s not like she’s got room to be so damn choosy,” said a man’s voice, beside one of the boxes on the stage. “If Arnaud sinned he must have had his reasons. No man whose wife is making him happy goes straying like that.”

  There was a murmur of agreement. January turned his head sharply, saw that it was the Jack of Diamonds, Charles-Louis Trepagier, and another man, shorter than he but with the same sturdy, powerful build. The shorter man wore the gaudy costume of what Lord Byron probably had conceived a Turkish pasha to look like, ballooning pistachio-colored trousers, a short vest of orange and green, an orange-and-green turban with a purple glass jewel on it the size of an American dollar. An orange mask hid his face, orange slippers his feet, a long purple silk sash that had clearly started its life as a lady’s scarf wrapped two or three times around his waist.

  “It isn’t like she hasn’t had offers,” added another of the Trepagier clan resentfully. “Good ones, too—I don’t mean trash like McGinty. She thinks she’s too good …”

  “Too good! That’s a laugh!” The stranger threw back his head with a bitter bark. He leaned closer, lowering his voice but not nearly enough. “If the woman’s turned you down it’s because she’s got a lover hidden somewhere. Has had, since she shut Arnaud out of her bed. I’ve even heard she’s put on a mask and come dancing.”

  “At public balls?”

  “Public balls, certainly,” said the pasha. He nodded back over his shoulder toward the discreet doorway of the passage to the Salle. “And other places, maybe not so public.”

  “Sir …”

  January hadn’t even seen Mayerling move. The young fencing master slipped through the crowd like a bronze fish, a dangerous glitter of blue-and-black jewels like dragon scales, his big, pale hands resting folded on the gems of his belt buckle. Behind the modeled leather of his mask, his hazel eyes were suddenly deadly chill.

  “I assume,” said Mayerling, “that you are speaking third-hand gossip about someone whom none of you knows. Certainly no gentleman would bandy any woman’s name so in a public place.”

  The Trepagier boys regarded him in alarmed silence. In his five years in New Orleans the Prussian had only fought three duels, but in each he had killed with such scientifically vicious dispatch, and such utter lack of mercy, as to discourage any further challenges. The wolf-pale eyes traveled from their clothing to their faces, clearly recognizing, clearly identifying.

  “This is fortunate, since I only duel with gentlemen,” Mayerling went on quietly. He turned to regard the pasha in green. “Should I happen to find,” he said, as if he could see the face behind the garish satin of the mask, “that a woman’s name is being spoken by those whose blood would not dishonor my sword, then of course, as a gentleman, I should have no choice but to avenge that lady’s honor and put a halt to that gossip in whatever way seemed best to me.”

  The yellow gaze swept them like a backhand cut. There was no cruelty in it, only a chill and terrifying strength. January could almost see the line of blood it left.

  “I trust that I make myself clear?”

  The pasha opened his mouth to speak. The Jack of Diamonds reached out, put a hand on his pink silk arm. To Mayerling, he said, “It was, of course, a woman of the lower classes of whom we spoke, a chaca shopkeeper who betrayed her husband, nothing more.”

  “Even so,” said Mayerling softly. “Such talk disturbs me. Perhaps you should study to ape gentlemen a little more closely—whoever you are.”

  None of them replied. Mayerling waited for a moment, giving them time to declare themselves gentlemen and offended, then turned his back and vanished into the crowd.

  January leaned over, and touched Uncle Bichet on the shoulder. “Who was that?” he asked, the old man looked at him in some surprise.

  “Just a couple of the Trepagier boys.”

  “No—with them.”

  The cellist turned his head to look, but the pasha was even then vanishing through the curtained doorway that led to the Salle d’Orléans, deep in conversation with the purple pirate.

  The Trepagier brothers—there were at least four of them, two of whom were married and none of whom were boys at all—were bullying and insulting a much younger man who had dared flirt with a flustered and feathered damsel garbed as a gypsy, evidently secure in the knowledge that he would not dare challenge them, and they were correct.

  Uncle Bichet shook his head, and glanced at the program card. “Those lazy folks been standing long enough,” he said, and January turned, unwillingly, back to his music.

  Sally, he thought. Whoever the green pasha was, he had to have spoken with the runaway servant girl Sally. Or he recognized Madame Trepagier at the ball Thursday night, either by her movement, stance, and voice—as he himself had done—or because she’d worn that silly Indian costume somewhere before.

  And if that were the case, thought January with sudden bitterness, for a man attending a quadroon ball he had a lot of nerve criticizing a woman he recognized there.

  The dancing lasted until nearly dawn. Technically Lent began at midnight, but there was no diminution of champagne, tafia, gumbo or pâté, though having made his confession that afternoon January abstained all evening even when the opportunity presented itself. Eventually Xavier Peralta made his appearance, clothed in the red robe and scepter of a king with his cousin the chief of police still at his side. The waltzes and quadrilles grew wilder as the more respectable ladies took their departure, the fights and jostling more frequent. Everyone seemed determined to extract the final drops of pleasure from the Carnival season, to dance the soles off their shoes, to dally on the balconies above the torchlit river of noise surging along Rue Orléans.

  Also, as the night wore on, more and more of the wealthier men disappeared for longer and longer periods of time. The Creole belles, though perhaps not of the highest society, stood abandoned along the wall, whispering among themselves and pretending not to care. Most of them, January suspected, would stop at home only long enough to wash off their rouge before attending early services in the cathedral. The American women whose husbands were still in attendance whispered about the half dozen or so whose men had “stepped out for a bit of air.” Most of them appeared and disappeared a number of times, but the Roman soldier stayed gone. The deserted Cleopatra involved herself in an animated discussion with several other ladies but kept an eye on the door, and when the errant Roman at last returned, there was promise of bitter acrimony in her greeting.

  They bring it on themselves, January thought, but he knew it wasn’t that easy. Like everything else ab
out New Orleans, it was a bittersweet tangle, and you could not run from it without leaving pieces of your torn-out heart behind.

  No wonder everyone tried to dance and be gay, he thought, as he walked toward the livery stable in the tepid mists of predawn. Costumed maskers still reeled along the banquettes of Rue Orléans, and from every tavern music could be heard, brassy street bands and thumping drums. Under the flicker of the street lamps whooping Kaintucks pursued masked and laughing prostitutes. The air, thick with the smell of the river, was also weighed with wine and whisky and tobacco and cheap perfume.

  He collected his rented horse from a sleepy stable-hand and rode down to the levee, where the flatboat captain he’d contracted yesterday waited for him in the white ocean of mist that rose from the river. The river itself was very still, the levees on either side rising like ridges of mountains from the thinning vapors. Behind them in the last starlight the town dozed, exhausted at last.

  There was only so much—deception financial and romantic, the monstrosity of slavery, and the waiting horrors of yellow fever—that could be masked behind the bright scrim of music, the taste of coffee and gumbo, the shimmer of the moonlight.

  Mardi Gras was done. The greedy consumption of the last good food, the draining of the last of the wine, a final, wild coupling in the darkness before the penitential death of Lent.

  He watched the dark shore of the west bank approaching with terror in his heart.

  SIXTEEN

  Morning found him eight miles from the city, riding west along the levee with the rank trees and undergrowth of the batture at the foot of the slope on his left, the dark brown earth of fields on his right. In places they were rank with winter weeds, but as the sun first gilded, then cleared the writhing stringers of the Gulf clouds, groups of slaves could be seen threading their way along the paths, hoes on their shoulders, bare feet swirling the ground mists. Once a white man called to him in slurry New Orleans French and asked to see his papers, but when January produced them—and a receipt from Desdunes’s Livery, to prove he hadn’t stolen the horse—the patroller seemed to lose interest and barely gave them a glance.

  The man had to tuck his whip under his arm to take the papers. Down in the field below, the workers sang as they hoed, a steady-paced song in almost incomprehensible gombo, clearing the land for the new crop of cane.

  January remembered that song from the plantation on which he had been born.

  Since he had been back, he had been afraid to leave New Orleans, fearing for his liberty—fearing, too, the sight of the changes that had taken place as Americans took control of the land and that the whites would see him as a slave and perhaps make him one again. The smell of the earth and the sweat of the workers; the beat of the morning sun on the backs of his hands and the twitterings of birds in the oaks that surrounded the fields; the occasional drift, like pockets of lingering mist, of the field songs brought back to him his own days of slavery, of childhood, of innocence, a terrible mingling of sweetness and pain.

  For thirty years, like Livia, he had pretended it wasn’t he who’d been a slave. Now it came to him, as it hadn’t in years, that he never knew what had become of his father.

  Or of that child, he thought—that little boy running through the cane fields before first light or lying on the batture picking voice from voice in the chorus of the frogs when the sun went down.

  For a time it seemed to him that he still didn’t know.

  He stopped frequently to rest the horse, knowing that there was no chance of trading for a fresh one between the city and Bayou Chien Mort. He cut overland to avoid the wide loop of the river past McDonoughville, passed through swampy woods of cypress and hickory that hummed and creaked with insect life in the dense sun of the forenoon. The land here was soggy and crossed with marshes and bayous like green-brown glass under hushed but wakeful trees. Some time after noon he bought a bowl of gumbo and half a pone of corn bread for a picayune from a trapper whose cabin lay in a clearing among the marshes. The house was barely a shack and only with difficulty distinguishable from the byre that sheltered the single cow and the litter of pigs, but he knew, by the man’s eyes, that had he asked to come in he would have been denied. They were Spanish, like the isleños in the Terre des Boeufs to the south, and barely understood his French. From around a corner of the house half a dozen filthy, skinny children watched him, but no one said a word.

  Bayou Chien Mort itself lay some twenty-five miles southeast of New Orleans, in Plaquemines Parish, country that was still largely French where it was anything at all. In a way that made him feel more comfortable, for the small farmers and trappers of the backwoods here were less likely to kidnap a black man and sell him as a slave. The enterprise would have required far too much energy. He’d seen them in the market in New Orleans, simply clothed in homespun cotton striped red and blue, abysmally poor and surrounded by swarms of children who all seemed to bear names like Nono and Vévé and Bibi, cheerfully selling powdered filé and alligator hides and going away again without bothering, like the Americans did, to sample the delights of the big city. Even more than the Creoles, who despised them, these primitive trappers belonged to a world of their own, cut off from the rest of the world until even their language was almost obscure.

  Nevertheless he felt safer among them than he would have in the more American north or west, though no black man traveling alone was truly safe. Even when he picked up the course of the river again he kept his distance from it, holding to a muddy trace through the silent stillness of the forest that lay behind the plantations. The river was far too heavily traveled for comfort, and the keelboat men—Nahum Shagrue and his spiritual kin—were only a step above river pirates themselves and sometimes not even that.

  He had hoped to stop and sleep at the heat of noon, but the execrable nature of the forest road slowed his progress, and as the sun’s slant grew steeper he dared not halt for more than the hour or so needed from time to time to rest his horse. Once or twice he dozed after foddering the animal on the oats he’d brought—save for four hours after Hermann’s ball he had not done more than nap in almost two days—but every time the wind brought him the hoot of a steamboat on the river he’d jerk awake in a sweat, fearing Xavier Peralta had canceled all the family breakfasts and Ash Wednesday dinners to hasten to his exiled son.

  An hour or two before sunset he reached Chien Mort. He came at it from behind, seeing light where the trees thinned, and then beyond that the slightly mounded rows of a cleared field, short trenches cut along the centers of the rows to receive the half-fermented stalks of last year’s cane.

  They were well ahead on their work, he thought. According to his mother, Peralta usually remained at his chief residence—Alhambra—on Lake Pontchartrain. He must have an efficient overseer here.

  Keeping to the woods, he rode along the edges of the cleared land to within sight of the house, identifying various outbuildings, landmarks, fields, and trying to memorize them as he had once memorized landmarks as a child. If anything went wrong he might need to orient himself in a hurry, and in the dark. There were fields of second-crop cane, just beginning to sprout bristles of dark, striped stalks—Batavia cane, which hadn’t even been introduced in the country when he was a child—and fields whose turned earth told him by its pattern that it would soon be planted in corn.

  Past those lay the levee, with its thick line of sycamores. A little band of woodland hid the home place from him, but he could see the brick dome and tower of the refinery, and beyond it, barely glimpsed past an orchard, the whitewashed wooden cabins of the slaves. The house itself and the overseer’s cottage, the dovecotes and smokehouses and stables, all lay hidden among the darkness of gray-bearded oaks.

  He clucked softly to the horse and moved along.

  Between the cane fields and the corn lay a ridge of land, thick with nettles and peppergrass. Two or three sycamores stood on it, left, January guessed, to provide shade to the workers when they stopped for nooning.

  H
e reined around, picking his way along the edge of the cleared ground until he’d worked back to the trace once more. A few miles earlier he had seen another path leading back into the woods and smelled smoke among the trees where the land grew boggy. Patient retracing led him to the place again, and though it was farther from the Peralta fields than he liked, he didn’t know the area and this was his best hope. The path was a seldom-used one and led into swamp and hackberry thickets along Bayou Chien Mort itself, but as the afternoon was dimming he found what he sought: a small house constructed of mud, moss, and cypress planks, its gallery overlooking the still water of a narrow bayou, its yard swarming with black-eyed, unkempt, barefoot children, descendants of Canadian French exiled here almost a hundred years earlier.

  “Papa, he up the bayou, him,” explained the oldest girl to January’s question. The smoke he’d smelled an hour ago had been from her cook fire, the kitchen being also the main room of the little house, rich with the smells of onion, pepper, and crawfish. “But Val, he take a message to Peralta, if you want.”

  Val—fetched from the shed where he was scraping muskrat hides—proved to be fourteen, with black hair and the strange pale gray-green eyes the Acadians sometimes had. All the children grouped around the kitchen table while January wrote his message, marveling either at the fact that a black man could write or at the miracle of literacy itself; then they sat on the gallery with him while he ate some of the jambalaya the girl had been cooking (“It ain’t sat long enough to be real good,” the girl said.), and he left them marveling over the coins he gave them as he went on his way.

  They reminded him of Ayasha’s description of the Moroccan peasants who lived on the edge of the desert: They know their prayers, she had said, and how to tell genuine coin from the most convincing counterfeit. And that is all.

  He smiled. He wondered what she would have made of all this: the Spanish woodcutters, the Italian ice-cream vendors in the market, the strange, tiny colony of Tockos in the deep Delta who fished for oysters and sang Greek songs and occasionally drowned themselves when the moon was full, the Germans and the degraded remnants of the Choctaw and Natchez nations. There was supposed to be a colony of Chinese somewhere on the Algiers bank of the river.