A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “D-did she …” He swallowed, and tried again. “D-did she s-send anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  The boy looked up again, fighting hard not to shed tears in the presence of a stranger and a black man at that. “I s-see.” The downy brows pulled together for a moment, puzzling. At his height, January knew he was difficult to mistake, and he’d been one of the few in the building that night who wasn’t masked.

  They’d passed within twelve inches of each other in the doorway of the retiring room.

  All of Galen’s mind, all his heart, had been centered on that white, glittering Fata Morgana laughing at him in the candlelight … but it was just possible that he remembered.

  Panic went through him like a douse of ice water and he slumped his shoulders a little and scratched his chin. He’d found it was true also that many whites looked less closely at blacks or colored whom they did not know. “But she say, deliver ’em into your own hand, not to nobody else, so that’s what I do.” Anything not to sound like someone who would be in the ballroom that night. “You got a message for me to take back to her?”

  He could have cut out his tongue a moment later. If Galen said, Yes, wait here for two hours while I go back to the house and write one, the odds of Xavier Peralta returning in the meantime would be hideously multiplied. And of course a white would think nothing of telling him to wait half the morning. It would in any case cost him precious time to backtrack to where he’d hidden the horse. The thought that it might have been stolen flashed across his mind and turned him sick. On foot he’d have no chance at all in this country.

  A steamboat could cover the thirty miles from the city in five or six hours, depending on how many stops it had to make and what cargo had to be unloaded at any one of them. If Peralta had left at midnight …

  “N-no,” said Galen. “N-no, it’s all right.” He looked very young. He wrapped the gloves in the bandanna again, and slipped it into the pocket of his coarse tweed jacket. From his trouser pocket he took a Mexican silver dollar, which he put in January’s hand. “Thank y-you. If you’d c-care to come back to the house they’ll give you s-something in the kitchen.”

  “If it’s all right with you, sir, I’ll be gettin’ on.” He touched his cap brim politely. “M’am Dreuze, she gave me that ’cos she knew I was headin’ down to Grand Isle to see my wife, but it’s best I be on my road. Thank you kindly, though.”

  The excuse sounded hideously lame—what traveler would pass up the chance for free food and a chance to gossip at the plantation kitchen?—but Galen was clearly too shaken to notice any discrepancy. He turned back toward the house without a word, the last of the ground mist dissolving around his feet, his hand moving a little in his pocket, caressing the gloves.

  Minou’s gloves.

  January felt a little ashamed of himself.

  He strangled that woman whose body you found, he told himself. And he’s trying to shift the blame onto you. Passing off a souvenir d’amour that actually belonged to your sister is the least of what he deserves.

  It was difficult to say, however, what it was that Galen Peralta did deserve.

  Justice, he thought. Only justice. But we all of us deserve that.

  The slaves were emerging from the street between the cabins, singing softly in the dawn, as January picked his way along the packed trail between the fields, headed for the woods like a fox for its earth.

  It was years since January had traveled in rough country. Even as a child, he’d never formally learned woodcraft, only such that every country-raised slave knew: three sticks in a triangle, pointing back the way you came, blazes on tree trunks, watch your feet and legs, and be careful around anything a snake could bask on or hide under. The day was warm with the new warmth of the Louisiana spring, a damp, debilitating heat unlike the hottest days he had known in Paris. Among the oak and sweet gum woods the air felt dense, breathless, and its weight seemed to increase as he went. He tried to keep the brighter daylight beyond the thinning trees to his left, skirting the cane fields without losing sight of them, for he knew how easy it would be to lose his bearings completely in those endless woods.

  Distantly, like the sound of wind around the eaves at night, the singing from the fields still came to him.

  Little ones without father,

  Little ones without mother,

  What do you do to earn money?

  The river we cross for wild berries to search,

  We follow the bayous a-fishing for perch,

  And that’s how we earn money.

  Mechanically his trained mind analyzed the eerie, descending scale, the loose embellishments of the rhythm, and the meandering syncopation of implied drums, but the song whispered to something deeper in his heart. Like the calinda, it had nothing to do with Schubert and Rossini, but its power called his name nonetheless.

  A warbler sang in a thicket of hackberry. Farther off, a buzzard cried.

  Then stillness.

  Silence.

  January halted, listening, wondering if the winds had shifted over. Far off he heard the alto hoot of a steamboat.

  The cane fields lay between him and the river. The singing had ceased.

  Something tightened, a knot behind his sternum, and he quickened his pace, trying not to run, for running would leave more sign and put him in danger of tripping, a serious matter in the leaves and fallen branches underfoot. If he ran, he would very likely lose his way.

  In his mind he could see a horseman—two horsemen, perhaps—riding out from the big house, waving for the overseer (Uhrquahr, he mean …), the workers silent as they watched.…

  Or maybe it was just that someone was getting a talking-to. That would be enough to stop the singing, for as long as it lasted. He strained his ears, but the singing did not resume.

  He moved on, quicker now, trying to remember the landmarks. They’d looked different in last night’s gathering darkness from the way they had in the afternoon, and far different now, coming back the other way. He found one of his own trail markers near a red oak veiled in Spanish moss like a mourning widow, and had no recollection whatsoever of the place. He knocked the sticks flying as he moved on. How soon would it be, he wondered, before they organized to follow?

  At Bellefleur when he was six one of the field hands had run away. He remembered how the overseer had called for men to hunt, and the men had gathered. There had been more white men in the posse from neighboring plantations, since Bellefleur, close to New Orleans, had not been nearly as isolated as Chien Mort, but it was planting time and few could be spared. Most of the hunting had been done—and done willingly—by the runaway’s fellow slaves.

  He’d as much as told them he was a runaway. And he was no kin nor friend of theirs. For a break from the monotony of clearing the fields, of course they’d follow.

  Rain started, thin and steady. It would cover his scent if they were using dogs but made tracks likelier in soft ground, and it further obscured the landmarks. A respectable music master in Paris, he’d worn boots for sixteen years, and Livia had seen to it in the years before that that he’d gone shod like a respectable colored, not barefoot like a black. Though his boots would leave a sharper track he didn’t dare take them off and try to flee barefoot.

  Around him the woods grew thicker and the ground boggy, cypresses rising ghostly among the oaks. It was farther than he had thought to the small tributary bayou he’d followed to old Ti Margaux’s shack. His clothes grew leaden on his back and dragged at his limbs. His mind, always too active, conjured the picture of that exhausted, hag-ridden young man coming back to the whitewashed plantation house to meet his father standing on the threshold, newly returned from the steamboat landing.

  Who brought you those gloves?

  A b-big n-nigger from town.

  And you let him see you? You let anyone from town see your face?

  He thought about the girl Sally, simply walking away from Les Saules. As the cook Claire had remarked, it was only an hour
to the American streetcar line. Out here he’d have a long way to run before he came to safety.

  He came through trees and found himself facing water he’d never seen before, jewel green with duckweed and scaled over with the expanding rings of water drops in the rain. Cypress like old gray gods in rags crowded along its edge, pale against the bright green of the pines behind them. In the water itself their knobby knees rose up like wading children sent ahead to scout the shallows. A turtle blinked at him from a log.

  Thank God the alligators are still sleeping this time of year, he thought, turning back on his own tracks, casting around for the blaze he’d left—he thought he’d left—hereabouts. The water in front of him might be the bayou along which Ti Margaux had his broken-down house, or might be a tributary of it, or might lead somewhere else altogether. The rain came harder, rustling in the leaves of the live oaks, the needles of the pines. By the water the air was cool, but in the trees again, even the rain didn’t seem to affect the damp heat, only keep him from hearing the sounds of pursuit. He stumbled in a tangle of wild azalea, and very suddenly, found himself face-to-face with a young black man in the coarse trousers of a field hand, a club in his hand.

  “Here he is!” shouted the man. “Here he—”

  January covered the distance between them in two long strides, wrested the club from the hunter—who was too surprised at being attacked, instead of fled, to use it—and cracked him a hard blow across the side of the head. The young man went sprawling, stunned, and January sprinted in the direction he thought he’d been going immediately before the encounter. The rain pelted harder around him, blurring the green-on-green-on-green of water and vegetation into a confusing monochrome.

  He turned toward the thicker growth along the water, but voices were calling out from the high ground, so he knew he couldn’t go to earth. Instead he veered for the high ground himself, where the water ash and cypress and palmetto gave place to loblolly pine that killed most undergrowth with its needles. His long legs pumped, his body settling into its stride. He was tall, but he hadn’t run in years, and his boots were heavy on his feet. Too many years, he thought, as his breath burned suddenly in his lungs. Those boys back there would be young, and fit.

  He skidded, wove, plunged back toward the water again. Something gray caught his eye, and he saw that it was the old house of the deceased Ti Margaux, impossibly on the other side of the water. He had no idea how he’d gotten himself turned around, but the place was unmistakable. For a moment he considered lying low and letting them run past, but they’d see the house as well, know he’d head there. The snakes would be sleeping in winter, like the gators—Please God, let the snakes be still sleeping! Then he pulled off his coat and plunged into the bayou.

  It wasn’t wide—twelve or fifteen feet—nor particularly deep. He only had to strike out and swim for a stroke or two, holding the coat and his papers aloft, then his boots were slushing thickly in unspeakable mud and a tangle of alligator weed that dragged at him like steel nets. Underwater leaves slit at his thighs and sides as he dragged himself ashore, stumbled up the slope, dragged open the door of the old barn and caught up the bridle, remembering to work evenly and without haste as he coaxed the bit into the horse’s mouth, buckled chin strap and band. He flung himself, dripping, onto the horse’s back without benefit of saddle and kicked the animal forward out the barn door at a gallop.

  Outside there was only a tangle of cypress and red oak, buckler fern and butterweed and creeper slowing the horse’s stride. January ducked, keeping his head down under the low-hanging branches, wet moss trailing over his back as he tried to find the narrow trace that had led him here.

  Then men were on him, springing out of the jungles of verdure, black, half-naked, armed with clubs and yelling with the hunt. January drove his heels into his mount’s sides but hands were already dragging at the bridle, at his legs, pulling the panicking horse down and dragging him off. He swung with his club and felt it connect, but blows rained on his shoulders, stunning him. He felt his own makeshift weapon ripped from his hands, then he was pinned, still struggling, to the ground.

  A white man’s voice said, “Let him up.”

  They did, still holding his arms, crowding close around him, the rain not quite washing the rank smell of his own sweat or theirs or the swamp from him.

  Three white men stood on the slightly higher ground before him. Evidently none had tried to ride through the swamp, following, like the blacks, on foot. One was a square-built, fair-haired man of thirty or so with a bristling mustache and whiskers, a blacksnake whip hanging coiled at his belt—Uhrquahr the overseer. The second, still in the tweed coat and hunting breeches he’d worn to walk to the cornfield that morning, the rain dripping from the broad brim of his palmetto hat, was Galen Peralta.

  The third, white hair bare to the rain and eyes cold and hard as blue glass, was Xavier Peralta.

  Peralta turned to one of the field hands holding January’s arms. “Is this the man who came to the cabins last night and asked about Michie Galen?”

  “Yes sir, it is.”

  He turned back at January. He, too, looked exhausted, as if the nights that had passed in obligatory family revelry had been harrowed by sleeplessness. It wasn’t yet noon, which meant he’d taken the earliest boat he could that morning.

  “You told my son that you’d been sent by Madame Dreuze with a keepsake—a gesture I find not in the slightest like the woman, for all her protests of sentimentality—and you told my servants that you were a runaway bound for Grand Isle. I think that you were lying both times. Tell the truth to me now. Who are you?”

  “My name is Benjamin January,” said January. “I’m a free man of color.” He reached into his pocket—the field hands never releasing their hold on his arms—and produced the papers.

  Uhrquahr took them and tore them up without looking at them. “You a slave now,” he said, and smiled.

  “Bring him,” said Peralta and turned away.

  EIGHTEEN

  The sugar mill was one of the few buildings on the Peralta place constructed of brick. There was a chamber to one side where the wood was stored against the voracious fires of the winter harvests, but with winter barely over the wood room was nearly empty, the brick floor swept clean. The backbreaking work of filling it would be a constant through the coming year, like hoeing up the fast-sprouting weeds before they smothered the cane or keeping the ditches clear.

  On the opposite side of the mill, past the silent dark shapes of the rollers and the long line of the empty boiling vats, cones of sugar cured in another chamber on their wooden racks, leaching out the last of the molasses under stretched squares of gauze to keep the roaches away. The thick, raw-sweet smell of it filled the gloom.

  “Spancel him to the upright.” Peralta’s voice echoed coldly in the high rafters, beneath the thrumming of the rain. His horse, and Uhrquahr’s, had been waiting at the edge of the trees, the ankle chains in their saddlebags. “Just by the ankle will do,” he added, as the overseer made a move to shove January back against one of the squared cypress pillars that supported the dome of the mill chamber itself. “I’ll call you if there’s trouble.”

  They had to pull off January’s boots to lock the chain. It chafed the flesh of his foot and drove deep into the skin the blue bead of Olympe’s charm.

  From beneath his coattails Peralta took two pistols, one of which he handed to Uhrquahr. For all his soaked clothing, dripping into a puddle around his feet, the old planter radiated a kind of quiet anger, a deadliness more to be feared than the overseer’s blind, raw exercise of power.

  “Mr. Uhrquahr, will you stand outside the door of the wood room? Should I raise a cry you are to come in, but not before. I doubt this will take long. Have Hephastion send the men back into the fields as soon as the rain clears.”

  The overseer touched the brim of his soaked slouch hat and departed, the sound of the rain momentarily louder as he opened the door from the wood room outside. As he stepped
out into the light Uhrquahr glanced sullenly over his shoulder, disappointed and angry.

  January leaned his back against the pillar, his hands at his sides, watching Peralta in silence. The old man stood at a distance, the white hair making wet strings on his collar, his blue eyes cold as glass. There was something in the way he stood that told January he was waiting for him to speak, to hear what the first rush of words would be, explanations and excuses, perhaps pleas. So he kept his silence, as if both men were abiding until the turn of some unknown tide. The sound of the rain was very loud.

  It was Peralta who finally broke the silence. “I did not know the police hired free blacks as agents.”

  January almost protested that he was sang mêlé, not black, then realized how ridiculous that would sound. Maybe Olympe was right about him being whiter than their mother inside.

  “The police didn’t send me,” he said, and shook his head a little as a thread of water trickled from his close-cropped hair down into his eye. His voice was soft in the near dark. “Didn’t you ask Monsieur Tremouille not to send anyone? Not to investigate at all? I’m the man they’ll hang in the place of your son.”

  Peralta looked away. In the shadows it was impossible to see his expression, or whether his fair, pinkish skin colored up, but the tension that hardened his shoulders and back was unmistakable, his silence like the scrape of a cotton-press wheel screwed too tight.

  Shoot me and walk out, thought January, too angry at this man now to care what he did. He’d seen a lot of death, and at this range, a bullet was going to be less painful and quicker than the rope and the drop. Shoot me and walk out or say something. He would not volunteer another word.

  “You were … one of the musicians. The pianist.”

  “That’s right,” said January. “And your son can tell you that I was in the room talking to Mademoiselle Crozat when he came in, and that when I walked out she was still alive.”