A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  And Africans, of course.

  In the shifty dimness of twilight he sought out a place to hide the horse. He hadn’t dared ask the children about such a thing directly, having represented himself as a man in too much of a hurry, and going in the wrong direction, to stop at the plantation himself. But he’d gathered that “Ti Margaux, up the bayou,” had recently died, and there was no one occupying his house or barns. In the jungly stillness of the swamps it was anybody’s guess which way “up the bayou” was—bayous flowed sometimes one way, sometimes another, and frequently lay eerily still under the dense green canopy of cypress and moss—but after considerable searching and backtracking January located the place, raised on stilts and built, like most of these small houses, of mud and cypress planks.

  Already neighbors and family had carried away everything of any conceivable value, including about half the planks of its gallery roof. The barn had been likewise stripped, but its doors remained, at least. In gathering darkness January found a holey and broken bucket whose chinks, once stopped with moss, didn’t leak too badly while he carried up water for the horse. He rubbed the animal down, gave it fodder, and latched the door behind him, praying that no neighbors would be by to glean behind the earlier reapers. He didn’t think so. The place looked comprehensively sacked.

  Bedroll on his shoulder and Minou’s kid gloves in his pocket, he set off once more for Chien Mort.

  “Hey, who dat, settin’ out in the dark?”

  His mother—or any of his schoolmasters—would have flayed him alive. He’d said to Olympe she’d got him talking as he used to when he was a child, and it was startling how easily his tongue burred js into zs, how the ends of words trailed away into nothing and all the cases slurred into that single all-purpose l.

  The old black, sitting on the doorstep of his cabin and playing a sort of reed panpipe, looked up and grinned toothlessly by the light of the few pine-knot torches still burning. “Who dat, sneakin’ out of the fields like a whipsnake lookin’ for rats?”

  He had followed the music in from the fields, guided through the darkening cane rows toward the whitewashed line of cabins behind the big house: panpipes, a banjo, the rattle of bones. Lively music, dancing music, weird and pagan in the darkness: the bamboula, the counjaille, the pilé chactas. It was a music that brought back to him again that hurt of nostalgia and grief, memories of sitting on the plank step of a slave cabin as the old man was sitting—as three or four children were still sitting a few cabins down the way—watching the fire-gilded faces of men and women swaying in the darkness, dancing loose the ache of work in their muscles, dancing to find the only freedom their hearts could have.

  The dancing was over now, but only just. A man on the step of the next cabin was still tinkering songs on his banjo, quiet songs now, a fragment of a jig Hannibal sometimes fiddled, the trace of an opera air. Young women were playing eyes with young men. Only a few crickets could be heard this early in the year. The frogs were croaking below the levee beyond the big house. He recalled the names he’d given their voices as a child: Monsieur Gik, Monsieur Big Dark, little Mamzelle Didi. It was cool enough that the fire someone had built in the widening of the street felt good.

  “Just a handful of leaves, blowin’ over the ground,” smiled January, as the old man moved aside to let him sit. “And damn glad to hear a little music.”

  “You headin’ for the woods?” asked the man with the banjo, a euphemistic way of asking if he were a runaway.

  “Well, let’s just say I’m headin’ away from town.” January gave him a wink. “I’m on my way down to Grand Isle, see my woman and my children. Figured what with balls and parties and everybody in town runnin’ around in masks and too drunk to tell who’s who even without, nobody’s gonna even know I’m gone till I’m back.”

  “I hear you there,” said a stout, sweet-faced young woman whose calico dress and bright-colored head scarf identified her immediately as one of Peralta’s hastily transplanted town house servants.

  “You been up to New Orleans?” asked January, with innocent surprise.

  And got the whole story.

  In pieces, and with digressions concerning the conduct of neighboring servants and the husbands, wives, boyfriends, and girlfriends of the town house staff, it was this: Galen Peralta had met the mistress of Arnaud Trepagier, his fellow pupil at the swordsmanship academy of Augustus Mayerling, and had fallen desperately in love. The boy’s father had taken him to Blue Ribbon Balls in an attempt to interest him in some other young sang mêlé, but it was of no use.

  “And she wasn’t pushin’ him away much, neither,” added the woman, who turned out to be Honey, the Peralta household cook.

  “Pushin’ with one hand and makin’ bedroom eyes while she did it,” added another woman, the wrinkles of advancing age beginning to line her strong-chinned face. “Just as well Arnaud Trepagier came down with the cholera like he did, or there woulda been trouble.” She spoke with malicious satisfaction in her voice and spite in her eyes, for which January couldn’t blame her. After living in New Orleans for most, if not all, of her adult life, exile to a backwater plantation at a moment’s notice had to be galling, disorienting, and terrifying.

  Angelique went into mourning.

  (“Some mourning,” sniffed the elderly maid. “I seen more modest dresses paradin’ up and down Gallatin Street.” “Well, she did wear black,” amended the kinder Honey. “I seen her in the market.”)

  Michie Galen sent her notes. Michie Xavier said it wasn’t proper. Michie Galen didn’t care. He was seventeen and in love.

  (“Lord, a man doesn’t need to be seventeen to make a damn fool of himself over a girl,” grinned a woman on another doorstep, a wrapped bundle of baby sleeping at her bare breast and a four-year-old boy, sleeping also, cradled against her other side. Her field-hand husband, sitting beside her, gave her a hard nudge with his elbow and a smile with his eyes. Everybody except January had obviously heard this story already, but it was new enough to still have bright edges of interest in the telling.)

  Michie Galen begged his father to speak to Madame Dreuze. They went to the Mardi Gras quadroon ball. “First thing anybody hear about it, Michie Xavier come in when it’s near light, which is late for him. He ain’t one to stay out howlin’ at the mornin’ star. He ask, has Michie Galen come in? We say no, and just then there’s knockin’ at the gate, and Charles, he go open it, Michie Xavier right on his heels and most of the rest of us followin’ after. And in the light of the street lamps we see Michie Galen, drunk as a wheelbarrow and hangin’ on the side of the gate, with his mask hanging off, and his face all scratched up, scratched deep an’ bleedin’.”

  January was silent, but he felt exactly as he had when, as a child, he’d gone hunting with a sling and stones and seen a squirrel drop off a branch under a clean and perfect hit.

  Angelique’s face returned to him—the enigmatic cat face, surrounded by lace and jewels—and that scornful, razor-edged voice saying How dare you lay a hand on me? Saying it for the second time, with the tones exact as music well rehearsed.

  The fire fell in upon itself with a silky rustle. The field hands gathered close, to hear the end of the tale. Someone glanced nervously along the street, in the direction of the overseer’s cottage, but from the dark windows came no sound.

  “Michie Xavier and Michie Galen just stand there for a minute, starin’ at each other,” the cook went on. “Then Michie Xavier turn to us and say, real quiet, ‘Shut the gate now, Charles. And don’t you open it tomorrow mornin’. Honey, we got enough food in the kitchen for meals for a day without goin’ out to the market?’ Ain’t nobody said what happened, but I figure it, Michie Galen got drunk and in a to-do with some low-down woman, and his pa didn’t want word of it gettin’ out to Rosalie Delaporte that he’s engaged to.”

  “To Thierry Delaporte, you mean,” put in a small, dignified, middle-aged man whose rough clothing and coarse moccasins were alike new and unsettled on his thin frame. There
were bandages on two of his fingers. Charles, the Peralta butler, January guessed. Put to some lesser task for the nonce, since Galen Peralta, staying at the big house here alone, would scarcely need the formality of more than a cook and a maid to keep the place clean. “Rosalie Delaporte’s pa,” he added, to January, by way of explanation. “He has a big plantation out in Saint Charles Parish, and they been talkin’ of marryin’ his girl for years.”

  “It’ll be years, if Michie Galen takes up with that Angelique gal,” retorted the maid. “I hear she pure poison.”

  “Come mornin’,” Honey went on, after a brief digression on the family ties between the Peraltas, the Delaportes, the Tremouilles, and the Bringiers, “Michie Xavier sends Momo over there”—she pointed to a young man who was quite clearly making himself at home with the local girls—“up to Alhambra by the lake with a message, askin’ for Tia Zozo the cook there and people to be butler and maid and coachman and all, to take our places so we could come down here for a couple weeks, so there’d be no blabbin’.”

  “Couple weeks, you think?” said the maid bitterly. “Whether word gets out now or later, it’ll still make trouble for him and that Delaporte girl his pa’s so set on him marryin’. You dreamin’, girl. We gonna be here a long time.”

  There was smoldering rage in her eyes.

  January thought about the miles of swamp and bayou and road he’d ridden over, the utter isolation of this place. This woman—all of the house servants—had been taken from their friends, from husbands or lovers, from the place they knew, literally at a day’s notice and for what appeared to them to be sheer caprice. He saw the grief come into Honey’s eyes, and the fat woman looked away.

  “Michie Xavier wouldn’t do that to us, Anne,” said Charles gently. “I know him. I worked in his house forty years. He said to me, as we were gettin’ in the wagon, that we’d all be back soon.”

  “Ha! So where is he?”

  “On his way, most like. He had to stay around for Ash Wednesday, to go to church at the cathedral, and have fish supper at the Bringiers’. Now he’ll be on his way, to see Michie Galen, if nuthin’ else.”

  “Besides,” pointed out January, remembering his own childhood terror of leaving Bellefleur Plantation for the city, “who’s he got cookin’ for him and brushin’ his clothes? If you all are here clearin’ cane fields, what are those folk from Alhambra up there doin’ in place of you? He’ll get sick of wrinkly shirts and dust bunnies under his desk in no time.”

  The maid Anne did not look convinced, but Honey smiled gratefully. The talk ran on a little longer, about the death of Xavier’s first wife in childbed with the boy Galen, and his second in the yellow fever four years ago. There were evidently three little girls as well. Every detail of the family’s life and movements were aired—January had almost forgotten how much house servants knew about their masters’ business. He’d been too young to care much during his own days in the quarters, though it was one of the maids who’d kept him posted on the progress of his mother’s sale. Later, Livia had tried to keep him separate from the slave children in the French town, though with poor success. He remembered, too, Olympe’s stories about how the voodoo doctors and voodoo queens gathered information from subtle, far-flung networks of informers, learning everything about who went where and for what purposes about people who were totally unaware of how closely they were observed.

  At length the old man with the panpipe said, “Little Dog-Star risin’. Ol’ Uhrquahr look out his window and still see fire here, he be out. Uhrquahr the overseer,” he explained to January. “I’d tell you spread your blanket here in one of the cabins, but Uhrquahr, he mean. Better not chance it.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said January. “Fire and a chance to talk was what I needed, and to set a spell. I’ll be movin’ on before it gets light.”

  It had been a long time, he thought, striding quietly through the starlit fields toward the cornfield and its sycamores, since he’d sat listening to that kind of talk, the lazy back-and-forth of the field hands and yard servants as they wound down for sleep. It was not that he missed that life, though he knew whites who would claim he did, in his heart of hearts. The anxiety, dread, and helplessness that were the underpinning of those days were too strong, even yet, in his memory. The whites were fools who said that slaves enjoyed their slavery, much less that they “liked a strong hand.” Like most people they got along as best they could, taking happiness where and how they found it, in the knowledge that even that could be taken away at some white man’s whim.

  What he had missed, without being aware of it, was the beauty that had slipped in between the bars of that childhood cage: the soft chill of the spring evening, the smell of the newly turned earth. The rattle of the bamboula in the darkness and the friendliness of those companions in misfortune.

  That he had never had his mother’s love, he had known at the time. But he had had his father’s, and every woman on Bellefleur had been his aunt. He had not realized how deeply he had missed that feeling. Having been raised in so close-knit a community—first on Bellefleur and later in the French town—it was no wonder he yearned for it all the years he had been in Paris.

  No wonder, he thought, that when he had been wounded unto death in his heart, it was to that community he returned. It’s here that I belong, he thought, without even a sensation of surprise. Not Europe. Not Paris. Not Africa. Here among these no-longer-Africans, not-really-French.

  And Nahum Shagrue?

  It was a riddle he couldn’t answer.

  Behind him he heard far-off voices, raised in one last song, like the voices of ghosts in the dark.

  “Misery led this black to the woods,

  Tell my master I died in the woods.”

  The gibbous moon stood high above the trees. As he lay in his blanket under the sycamores, telling over his rosary and watching the drift of clouds come and go by the wan light of muzzy stars, Paris seemed infinities distant. In Paris, he wondered if Ayasha had ever felt that way about Algiers.

  SEVENTEEN

  From the sycamores, he could see Galen Peralta coming across the cane fields in the clear gray-pink of first light.

  The rise of the unplowed ground, slight though it was, gave him a clear view in all directions, thankfully unimpeded by the cane that by autumn would be tall enough to conceal an army. Smoke drifted from the kitchen buildings between the big house and the overseer’s cottage, though the morning was warming and there was none from cottage, cabins, or house. Far on the river, the whistle of a steamboat floated in the thick stillness of morning. Conceivably Peralta Père could have left the city as late as midnight last night, in which case he would be arriving any minute.

  January tried his best to recall if he’d heard a boat last night. He didn’t think so, but so taken up had he been with what the servants had to tell, he had forgotten to listen. The currents below the city were swift, and a downriver boat wouldn’t need to make speed by sticking to the tortuous channels near the shore. The moon was waxing. He’d heard there were pilots who’d travel on moonless nights. He supposed that in sufficiently desperate circumstances he’d even pay to ride with one.

  Narrowing his eyes, he squinted into the dove-colored light. At least he hoped that was Galen.

  The boy came nearer. On foot, of course, to avoid questions about taking a horse out so early. The reedy, rather delicate frame was the one he recognized from the Salle d’Orléans, worlds different from the stocky, straight-backed form of Peralta Père. Under a wide-brimmed hat, the face was shadowed, but the man did not move with the confident stride of an overseer.

  January tried to calm the pounding of his heart. The steamboat wouldn’t come in for some time yet. He had time to get out, to get clear.

  He didn’t have to say much to this boy, but he had to see him face-to-face, to verify—and to be able to testify—about what he had been told.

  After a week, the scratches were still livid, though fading. In another week they’d be gone. Th
e marks were clearly the rakes of a woman’s nails, cheekbone to chin, both sides; scabbed in places, and in others clear pink lines across the delicate, pale brown skin that still retained the porcelain quality of a child’s. Galen squinted up at him from under the brim of his wide hat, the first time January had seen him up close.

  Large, clear blue eyes, and an almost invisible blond mustache clinging ridiculously to the short upper lip. Fair hair bleached fairer by the sun at its tips. Blue smudges marked his eyes, and strain and grief and sleepless nights had put lines around his mouth.

  January had worked the night shift at the Hôtel Dieu too long to think it impossible, or even unlikely, that a man who would strangle a woman he loved in a fit of rage would afterward lie awake weeping for her at night. He had seen men howling with tears and attempting to cut their own wrists over the bodies of wives or lovers they had themselves disemboweled with broken bottles. And for all that she had the skin of a white woman, Angelique was colored, lesser in the eyes of the law and perhaps in her lover’s eyes as well.

  Perhaps that was what hurt him so much.

  “Yuh-yuh-you have s-something for me?”

  “Yes, sir.” January removed his soft cap and deliberately made his accent as backstreet as possible. “M’am Dreuze sent this.” He produced the clean bandanna from his jacket pocket, in which were wrapped Dominique’s gloves.

  The boy unwrapped them, stood looking down at them, and January could see the muscles of his jaw harden with the effort to command himself.

  Unlike Charles-Louis Trepagier, this was not a young man who accepted violence casually, not even the violence of his own nature. January wondered what Xavier Peralta had said to his son that first dawn, after the servants were dismissed.