A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  Thin with pines on the weak soil, the woods here seemed as bare of cover as the ballroom of the Salle d’Orléans.

  The hooves were near and he knew they’d see him for sure if he kept moving. He crouched behind the roots of the biggest tree he could find, wadding his big body down flat and small to the earth and tucking the dwindling bundle of blanket and food between belly and knees. He’d feel a fool if they saw him, hiding like a child behind a tree.

  As if, he thought, feeling a fool was the worst thing that would happen then.

  “… Wench over to the Boyle place.” American voices, quiet. “Cooks a treat, but ugly as a pig.”

  “Put a bag over her head, then. Christ, what you want for a—You there! You, nigger!”

  Every muscle galvanized as if touched with a scientist’s electrical spark, but he forced stillness. A trick, a trap …

  Then another voice said in bad English skewed by worse French, “You talkin’ to me, Michie?”

  “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you. You see any other niggers hereabouts? Lemme see your pass.”

  “That ain’t him, Theo, that’s just old Lucius Lacrîme. Got a place hereabouts.” The hooves were still. January heard the chink of bridle hardware as one of the horses tossed its head. “You seen a big black buck, Looch? Headin’ toward the city, maybe?”

  “Not headin’ toward the city, no, sir.” Lucius Lacrîme had an old man’s voice, thin and slow and almost sing-song, a broken glass scritching on a rock. “Big man? My nephew he say there somebody holed up someplace along Bayou Désolé. Big man by his track, and black my nephew say, but wearin’ boots like a white man. That be him?”

  The woods were so still January could hear the far-off boom of the steamboats on the river, four miles away, and the ringing of an ax. Bridle hardware jingled again, this time sharply, and a horse blew.

  “That’ll be him,” said the man who was fastidious about the appearance of cooks. “You know Bayou Désolé, Furman?”

  “I know where it lies. Bad country, peters out in a swamp. Just the place a runaway’d hole up, I guess.”

  The hooves retreated. The voices faded into the mottled buffs and blacks of the early spring woods. January didn’t raise his head, knowing in his bones that Lucius Lacrîme still stood where he’d been.

  In time the old voice said in English, “You can come out, son. They gone.” There was a stillness, January not moving. Then, in French, “You’re safe, my son. I won’t harm you.” He barely heard a rustle, until the old man got almost on top of his hiding place. Then he stood up.

  “Thank you, grandfather.” He nodded to the flattened weeds behind the cypress knees. “There’s not much cover here.”

  “They’re searching, all around the woods.” Dark eyes like clear coffee considered him from within an eon of wrinkles, like the eyes of a tortoise on a log. He was a middle-size man who looked as if he’d been knotted out of grass a thousand years ago, dry and frail and clean. Tribal scars like Uncle Bichet’s made shiny bumps in the ashy stubble of his beard.

  “They say they look for a runaway field hand, but no field hand wears boots or needs them.” He held out an arthritic claw and took January’s left hand, turned and touched the powerful fingers, the raw welt that the rope had left when they’d bound him. “What they think you pick for them, flowers?”

  January closed his hand. “No dealer in Natchez is gonna ask about why a field hand’s got no calluses, if the price is cheap. Thank you for sending them on.” He reached down for his bundle, but the old man caught his right hand with its crusted wad of wrappings, and turned it over in his bony fingers.

  “And what’s this, p’tit? Do they know you hurt? They’ll spot you by it.”

  January shook his head. “I don’t think they know.”

  The old man brought the bandage up to his nose and sniffed, then pushed at the edges, where the shackle had chafed raw the skin of his wrist. He nodded a few times, and said, “You a lucky child, p’tit. Old Limba, he look out for you. But headin’ on back to town, that the first place they look. Stay in the bayous, down the southwest across the river, or back in the swamps. You can trap, fish, hunt.… They never find you.” His grin was bright, like sun flecking off dark water. “They never found me.”

  “They’ll never look.” January settled his weight against the tug of Lacrîme’s hand. “Not so long as I’m out of their way. Not so long as I don’t come back to the city. So long as I don’t come forward as a free man, claiming what’s mine, they don’t care if I’m dead or a slave or on a ship heading back to Europe. Just so long as I don’t bother them. And I’m not going to give them that.”

  It was the first time he’d said it; the first time he’d expressed to himself exactly what it was that had carried him against the current of the river, that had kept him moving through the long exhaustion of the previous days and nights.

  The songs in the field. The blue bead on his ankle. The twisted steel cross in his pocket. They were verses in a bigger song, and suddenly he was aware of what the song was about. And it wasn’t just about his family, his friends, and his own sore heart.

  Lacrîme peered up at him with those tortoise eyes. “They who, p’tit?”

  An old man who figured an innocent black man’s life was worth less to him than the life of the son whom he believed to be a murderer. The boy who hadn’t the guts to go against his father’s will.

  The woman he’d taught to play Beethoven, all those years ago.

  And whoever it was that she would lead him to.

  “White men,” he said. “I’m going on to town. Is there a path you can point me out to get there?”

  Lacrîme took him by way of the swamp tracks, the game trails, the twisty ways through the marsh country that lay back of the river, toward the tangled shores of Lake Pontchartrain. They were old tracks, from the days when networks of marron settlements had laced the boscages. The old man looked fragile, crabbed up with arthritis and age, but like a cypress root he was tough as iron. He scrambled with bobcat agility through thickets, bogs, and low-lying mud that sucked and dragged at January’s boots and seemed to pull the strength out of him.

  “T’cha, you get soft in this country,” the old man chided, when January stopped to lean against a tree to rest. “Soft and tame. The boss men all ask for a man bred in this country, a criolo, instead of one who came across the sea. They all uppity, they say, princes and kings and warriors. When we fought the Dahomies, we’d run this much and more, through the bottomlands by the river, and woe on any man who let the enemy hear him. He’d be lucky if he lived to be brought to the beach and the white man’s ships.”

  “Were you?” asked January. They stood knee-deep in water, skimmed over in an emerald velvet whisper of duckweed, the woods around them gray-silent, hung with silver moss, dark leaves, and stillness. More rain had fallen earlier and the world smelled of it, and of woodsmoke from some distant squatter’s shack. Maybe bandits, and maybe others like Lacrîme.

  “Ah.” The old man spat and turned to lead him once again along the silent traces in the woods. “They took our village, filthy Dahomies. We twelve, we young men, came back from hunting to find it all gone. Big stuff, the stuff of great tales. We followed them through the jungle, along the rivers, through the heat and the black night. And they left what traces they could, our parents, our sisters, our little brothers, and the girls we were courting. It would have been a great tale if we’d taken them back. A great song, sung all down the years.”

  He shook his head, with a wry mouth that such innocence could have been. “Maybe we sang a verse or two of it to each other, just to try it out, to hear how it would be.

  “But there was no tale. Not even with my own village was I put in a ship, but with a bunch of people—Hausa from up by the great lake, Fulbe and Ibos—whose language I didn’t even know. Young men are stupid.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder at January, laboring behind him.

  “Nobody will give you justice, p’ti
t, no matter how much truth you shove down their throats. I’d been better to go north with my friends and look for another tribe of the Ewe, who at least knew the names of my gods.”

  “Did you ever find them again?” asked January. “Your own people, your family—those who spoke your tongue, who knew the names of your gods?”

  The Ewe shook his head. “Never.”

  January followed in silence, as twilight settled deep over the green-gray land, then night.

  They traveled on through night, sleeping only little. The food was gone and the rum January had been putting on his hand to keep infection at bay. He checked the wound whenever they stopped, which wasn’t often, until daylight failed; the mess of the raw flesh was ugly, but looked clean, as far as he could tell, and he felt no fever. He was weary, however, weary beyond anything he’d ever known, even working in the fields—even the weariness after fighting, hiding in trees and blasting away with a rifle at the advancing red-coated troops with the expectation of losing his own life any minute, hadn’t been like this. He guessed this was one effect of the wound, but the knowledge didn’t help him much. He wanted only to sleep.

  “Not safe to sleep, Compair Rabbit,” the old man said, shaking January out of his doze where they’d stopped to rest by the foot of a tree. “Bouki the hyena, he’s out riding the tracks. Used to be there was farms in the boscage, villages like in Africa. We’d live like we did, and they couldn’t find us. When they came, we’d just melt away in the woods. Now Bouki and his hyenas, they ride the trails, hire Americans from up the river. Compair Rabbit better not sleep now when Bouki’s out hunting.”

  They found a pirogue on the tangled banks of the long bayou that stretched from the lake in toward the town and hugged the bottomless shadows of its banks where the moonlight didn’t touch. In time they followed in the waters of the canal toward the grubby scatter of wooden cottages, mud and stucco houses that made up the Faubourg Tremé, the newer French suburb. Though it was long after curfew, Orion and his hunting dogs sinking west toward their home beyond the trackless deserts of Mexico, January was conscious of lamps burning, ochre slits behind louvered shutters, threads of amber outlining shut doors. All around him, as Lucius Lacrîme drew the small boat close to a floating wooden stage and led the way up and into the rough gaggle of unpaved and unguttered streets that smelled of outhouses, January sensed a kind of movement in the dark, a certain life flitting in the dense black of the alleyways. Once he heard, dim as a drift of smoke, a woman singing something that had naught to do with Mozart or Rossini, with polkas or ballads or the loves and griefs of whites.

  Lacrîme led him around the back of a whitewashed cottage whose stucco was chipped and falling and badly in need of repair. Tobacco smoke rode over the stink of the privies in the dark of the yard. There was a gleam of gold, like Polyphemus’s brooding eye, halfway up the outside stair to the attic.

  “Hey, Compair Jon,” breathed Lacrîme—though January had no idea how he could have seen or recognized anyone in the density of the shadows.

  “Hey, Compair Lacrîme,” replied a soft voice from above. The smell of smoke increased as the man took his cigar from his mouth and blew a cloud.

  “There room up there for my friend to sleep?”

  “Being he got no objection to featherbeds and lullabies, and beautiful girls bringing him cocoa in bed when he wakes.”

  “You got any objection to that, Compair Rabbit?”

  January looked up at the glowing coal. “You just tell them girls that cocoa better not have skin on it, and make sure those lullabies are by Schubert and not Rossini—leastwise not anything Rossini’s written lately.”

  He heard the soft snort of laughter. “Mozart right by you?”

  He made a deprecating gesture, like a housekeeper haggling in the market. “If that’s all you got, I guess I’ll put up with it.” He felt he could have been happy on bare boards, which he suspected would be the case, just so long as he could lie down and sleep.

  “They’ll be looking for you in town, you know,” said Lucius Lacrîme’s soft, scratchy voice at his elbow. He’d told the old man a little of what had happened in Chien Mort—that he was a free man who’d lost the proofs of his freedom, and what had passed between him and Galen Peralta. “Even those that don’t know what went on know runaways mostly head for town nowadays.”

  “People know me here,” said January.

  “And people know old man Peralta. And if you think you got a chance against him in court of law, you’re a fool.”

  January knew he was right. The thought of going into a courtroom, of trying to persuade a jury that he was innocent on his cloudy assertions that a white woman was involved in some kind of scandal—a jury of white men, possibly Americans—frightened him badly, worse than he had been afraid chained to the pillar in the sugar house. It was like holding a line in combat: stand and fire, knowing that if you ran you were a dead man, but facing some other man’s loaded gun.

  If he didn’t run now, he thought, he might not be able to later.

  But the line hadn’t broken, he thought. They’d kept firing, and the British had eventually fallen back.

  That the Americans hadn’t even thanked him for his trouble was beside the point.

  “I have to stay,” he said. He didn’t know what else he could say, besides that.

  In the darkness it was impossible to see, but there was a rustle of fabric, a glint of eyes, as the old man shook his head. “That’s how I ended up taking a ride in a great big ship, p’tit,” said Lucius Lacrîme sadly and clapped him softly on the back. “And nobody’ll sing that song about your courage.”

  The thought of starting again elsewhere, of giving up what little he had left without a fight, dragged at him, like the time as a child he’d caught a fishhook in his flesh. The thought of letting Peralta, Tremouille, and Etienne Crozat win. He was at Chalmette again, loading his musket and watching red blurs take shape in the rank brume of powder smoke and fog.

  “I still have to stay.”

  “You lay still, then, until you know what the hyenas are doing, Compair Rabbit. And when you break cover, you watch your back.”

  January didn’t hear him go.

  TWENTY

  The attic over the store was one of those places Abishag Shaw had been told to shut down, a sleeping place for slaves who preferred to rent their own bodies from their owners for cash money, and find their own food and housing and employment, rather than exist in the enclosed compounds behind the white folks’ houses. In a room twenty feet by thirty—blocked off by a wood-and-plaster wall from the attic storeroom of the shop below—ten men slept, as January had guessed, on the bare floor, rolled in blankets with their heads on their spare jackets or shirts. The place stank of unwashed clothes, unbathed flesh, of mice and roaches and of the smoke leaking through the brick of the two chimneys that rose up along the dividing wall. January had to feel his way gingerly down the center of the room so as not to trip over anyone, as he sought the place he’d seen in the little dim moonlight let in when he’d opened the door.

  There was a dormer on the other side of the slanted roof—which, like Hannibal’s attic in the Swamp, rose to a point a foot and a half short of his own height—and after a few minutes his eyes adjusted to the still denser dark, so that he could guess at the shapes that lay all around him, breathing deeply, heavily, in the vermin-infested dark.

  Still, it was less crowded than the jail cell, quieter and far cleaner. By the last threads of blue moonlight he could see the man nearest him, and beyond him the little bundle of clothing, tin cup and plate, and the tin identification medal that showed him to be a slave working rather than a runaway when he walked about the streets.

  He was sleeping under a roof he’d chosen for himself.

  January closed his eyes.

  His hand slid into his pocket, fingering the battered rosary as he told off prayers of thanks.

  The illusion of freedom was tiny, he thought—maybe as tiny as his own illu
sion of justice—but they made do with it. It was better, to them, than the marginally more comfortable accommodations under a master’s roof. Better than leaving everything he owned, everything he had worked for, everything he had left in the world, for the convenience of whoever had put that scarf around Angelique Crozat’s ivory silk throat.

  Save for a few hours snatched along the way, he had been without sleep for two nights and most of a third. Sleeping, he dreamed of the soft wailing voices of the workers in the fields, under the glassy weight of the new sun.

  “They say go north, find us new kin,

  They say go north, find us new kin,

  We try save our folks,

  We never come back again.”

  But the dream’s light changed, from the early spring sun, harsh on the cane fields, to moonlight heavy as quicksilver, a black ocean strewn with phosphor galaxies, the black shape of a ship riding silent in the dark.

  Dark blots on the ivory silk beach, like messy scabs; a tangle of walls and pens, shacks and fences; charred flesh and the smell of human waste and branding fires; the muted whisper of weeping. The glint of eyes that showed twelve young men, watching from the clotted shadows of the mangrove swamp.

  “Without my folks, is no land home,

  He say without my folks, no land be home,

  I’ll die on that beach,

  Before I live my life alone.”

  “I walk on needles, I walk on pins,” sang a voice back, whirling through dark and time like the smell of a burning house. “I know well the Grand Zombi …”

  The throb of drums swept aside the beat of the surf on the shore. Voices cried, “Calinda! Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!”

  Rain smell, and the throbbing in his hand as if it had been pounded with a hammer. It was only marginally more painful than the rest of his body: legs, arms, back. Downstairs, two people argued in gombo French over the price of a half-pound of sugar.