In her precise little voice, the child said, ‘Thank you, M’sieu,’ in English – she had every atom of Dominique’s charm and more – and then, in French, to Preston, ‘Would you please ask them to take special care of my box?’ And she held it up: a flat, sturdy rectangle which Rose had given her before they’d set out, lined with cotton, in which for the entirety of the sea voyage Charmian had collected and stored whatever spiders, fragments of seaweed, raveled bits of rope and chips of holystone she could find on shipboard.
Preston bowed deeply. ‘It will be my pleasure, Mademoiselle.’
January, Dominique, Charmian, Charmian’s doll Philomène, and the two servants followed the procession of porters and trunks out of the station and within an hour were unpacking their things at the boarding house of Mrs Octavia Trigg.
FOUR
‘We has breakfast in the dining room from six til nine.’ The landlady’s mannishly deep tones matched her towering stature and stern, rectangular face. ‘Dinner’s on the table at six. I keeps some hot in the kitchen till eight. After that, you speak to me if you’ll be in late and needin’ somethin’. I don’t have guests come into my kitchen scroungin’ food in the middle of the night.’
Thèrése, bred to a world of midnight suppers and after-theater coffee, rolled her eyes at these plebeian strictures, but Dominique nodded and said, ‘Bien sûr, Madame.’
Charmian, clutching box and doll to herself behind her mother’s skirts, tugged at Minou’s hand and whispered, ‘Mama, is that a lady or a man?’
Mrs Trigg’s dark eyes touched the child, and a smile softened the corners of her mouth. ‘Your little girl speak any English, Mrs Janvier?’
‘Un petit peu.’ Dominique’s fingers and thumb measured a quantity the size of a housefly.
‘You want to watch out for her.’ The smile disappeared, and the gaze that met Dominique’s eyes – and traveled on to January’s – was suddenly somber. ‘And for yourself, m’am, if I may say it. Washington’s no safe town for black folks. There’s four or five dealers here that don’t care where they gets their stock from. Now there’s railroads out to Baltimore, a man can disappear in this town and be on a boat bound for New Orleans before his family knows he’s late comin’ home from work. Police curfew’s at ten. These days it pays you be careful where you walk in the day. Get that good-for-nothing husband of mine –’ she threw a glance toward the small and dapper Mr Trigg, just descending the stair to the wide front hall – ‘to show you round one day, if he gets out of bed ’fore noon …’
‘Might I remind you, woman, that those days I get out of bed after noon is when I’ve been working like a ditch-digger—’
‘Workin’ for some rich man who don’t mind if you steals his champagne.’ Her smile sparkled in her eyes but didn’t touch that unyielding mouth. Half-concealed behind the parlor door, four children of stair-step heights and their mother’s coal-dark complexion giggled. There was a fifth girl among them, of much lighter hue and completely different build – Ife, January guessed, compact and small. ‘My husband is a musician,’ the landlady explained, and Trigg came forward and shook hands all around. ‘Seems the white folks in this town doesn’t want the black ones around the streets at night unless they want somethin’ – like a ride home, or someone to serve ’em oysters, or music for their guests to dance …’
January assumed an expression of horror. ‘I have never heard of such a thing!’
Trigg grinned.
The rooms to which Trigg showed them – two large connecting chambers on the second floor – were spotlessly clean, the furniture comfortable, and – January found out that evening – the cooking was up to the best he’d had in New Orleans. A Methodist preacher and his family had a similar arrangement across the hall, the third floor being reserved for the single men: Frank Preston and two other conductors on the Baltimore and Washington line, a cab driver, two waiters, and in solitary state at the back a single white gentleman hiding out from his creditors. The four Trigg children helped serve dinner in the long dining-room (the white gentleman had his own small salon across the hall) and Darius Trigg was a fountainhead of information about the town.
‘Was that who those men were on the railway platform this morning?’ asked January, when the guests (with the exception of the white gentleman) gathered for tea and coffee after dinner in the lamplit double parlor. ‘Slave stealers?’
‘They say –’ Trigg took his music satchel from a shelf, sat on the piano stool to sort its contents – ‘they’re watchin’ for runaways. And given that dealers like Klephert and Birch are handing out cash for any man or boy they lay hand to, a lot of ’em are runaways.’
‘Sometimes they’ll come aboard and search the trains.’ Frank Preston looked up from the Washington Intelligencer, issues of which lay on the parlor’s round marble-topped table, along with the New York Herald, the Colored American, and school books for the children. ‘City constables don’t take any notice, no more than they stopped the Irish, three years ago, from burning down Negro churches and Negro businesses …’
‘Congress has now adopted a ruling that legislation concerning slavery cannot be discussed in its sessions.’ The Reverend Horace Perkins grimaced. ‘Except of course where it involves more effective pursuit of runaways …’
Then he glanced, almost apologetically, toward his stout little wife Clarice, who sat with Dominique watching over the children as they played pick up sticks, as if to remind everyone that politics ought not to be discussed in mixed company.
Mrs Trigg had informed Dominique that all guests beneath her roof were welcome both at her table and in the parlor, so Thèrése – though she had little good to say in private about American Protestant blacks (and she herself, she was quick to point out, was NOT black, but colored) – sat a little apart, graciously accepting compliments from a growing court of admiring bachelor boarders.
Trigg took from the top of the bookshelf a leather case which contained a ten-key Steitwolf flute, and for a time he and January talked music, while Dominique started a game of euchre with the Reverend. Under cover of this chatter, January said in a lowered voice, ‘I’ve spoken to a few runaways in New Orleans.’
More than a few, over the past year and a half, who’d spent the night in the secret room under January’s house, waiting to be smuggled out of town and on to the long freedom-trail that led north.
‘Have you, now?’ A smile lifted one corner of Trigg’s neat little mustache, as if he read the secret in his voice.
‘I have.’
Their eyes met. ‘Well, well … Honored to have you under my roof, sir. I’ve spoken to a few runaways myself.’ He turned his head quickly at the sound of a knock on the outside door. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘will be my boys. There’s a ball tonight at Mr Corcoran’s – the banker, you know, or maybe you don’t – and every Senator in the city will be turning up on his doorstep because his cook is the best in town except for Octavia.’ He threw a glance and a grin in the direction of the dining room, now empty and lighted only by the lingering twilight in the windows and the lamp glow from the kitchen beyond. ‘We make it a practice to walk over there together once dark falls, and if I was you, sir, I’d make it your practice as well.’
‘I shall.’ January nodded toward the parlor piano. ‘Some evening when you’re not stealing some white banker’s champagne, maybe you and I could play a little together? That’s a fine instrument there.’
Trigg settled his silk-fine beaver hat on to his pomaded hair. ‘I’d be more than pleased.’
‘You’re seeing the town at its best,’ said Frank Preston the following morning as he escorted the Janvier party – January, Dominique, Charmian, Musette, and Thèrése – down Connecticut Avenue toward the handsome houses of Lafayette Square.
‘Tiens!’ Minou gazed around her at the vacant fields. Cows grazed peacefully between widely-scattered houses, pigs rooted in roadside ditches. Even this close to the center of Washington – a roughly built-up rectangle that str
etched from the President’s House to a bit beyond the Capitol two miles away – the houses were countrified, set back from the unpaved streets and surrounded by chicken coops, cow barns, vegetable gardens and orchards. ‘And what is it like at its worst, enfin? No, darling, this isn’t the day we collect insects, you’ll get your frock dirty—’
Charmian gazed in agonized regret at the katydid perched on a heart-shaped platform of pickerelweed, but allowed Musette to tug her back to the grassy verge.
‘Honestly, Madame, you shouldn’t indulge her about insects at all,’ sniffed Thèrése. ‘Dirty, nasty things. As if Michie Henri weren’t bad enough!’
The dank river-fog that had cloaked the city at breakfast time was burning off, the morning’s mellowness turning sticky-hot. Beyond the houses of Lafayette Square, a great half-built mass of masonry swarmed with workmen and wagons.
‘The new Treasury,’ said Preston. ‘It’s brought hundreds of Irishmen into town to work on it. I’m told there’s fights every night, down in Reservation B by the canal, between Irish b’hoys and the slave gangs that haul in the bricks from the barges.’
‘And what,’ inquired January, ‘do they plan to put into this nice new Treasury when it’s finished?’
Preston looked more than usually grave. ‘That I wouldn’t know, sir. But Democrats from all over the country are coming into town asking for jobs there—’ He extended a hand to assist Dominique over a modest puddle, which in January’s fraternal opinion his sister could easily have hopped across herself.
‘Those gentlemen there.’ Preston nodded toward the knots of men in threadbare coats, spitting and reading newspapers on the steps of several of the grand houses of Lafayette Square. ‘First thing the Democrats did, when Jackson got into office, was fire all the men who opposed him and replace them with his own supporters. Senators, and the gentlemen that head up the departments, have the disposal of jobs as well. Last fall, during the Special Session of Congress, you’d see a line outside the President’s House clear to the street.’
‘When in the fall?’
‘All through September, and the first two weeks of October,’ the conductor replied. January guessed his age at just over thirty, and he spoke with the accent of New England. His customary gravity seemed to extend to the protectiveness he’d developed toward Dominique, and he led her along as if he feared the slightest jar would shatter her.
Having seen London, Paris, and Rome, January felt a sort of amazement at the backwater provincialism of this capital city of the country in which he’d been born. Grandiose boulevards stretched for miles, wide as processional ways and unpaved as village cart-tracks, between cow pastures and swampy streams. The brick mansions and commercial row-houses of ‘downtown’ were more reminiscent of a modest river-port – Baton Rouge or Natchez – than of the national grandeur frequently claimed in political speeches. As they passed the President’s House and entered the more populous zones traffic was thick, noisy, and bogged in the mud of the unpaved streets; where the thoroughfares were firm, draymen black and white seemed unable to resist the urge to lash their horses like Roman chariot teams at a dead gallop, scattering pedestrians right and left.
As they sprang clear of one such speeding Jehu, January inquired, ‘If a stranger were run down by one of those lunatics, where would they take him? Is there a public hospital?’
‘Up on Crow Hill,’ said Preston. ‘That’s a couple of miles north of here.’
‘Is everything in this town a couple of miles apart?’ Thèrése lifted her petticoats to pointedly examine her too-tight shoe.
‘What about the police department?’ asked January. ‘If he were shot in a tavern—’
‘You don’t want to get anywhere near the constables.’ Preston lowered his voice and glanced back at Charmian and Musette, stopped now to gaze in wonder at a stuffed owl in a shop window. ‘Nor the jail. There’s only one constable to each ward here, and their job is purely and solely to keep black men from “illegally assembling”. There’s a dealer named Fowler who pays the constables to let him into the jails “looking for runaways”. And any likely-looking man who finds himself jailed for having abolitionist newspapers in his possession, or failing to step out of the way of a white man on the street, is going to be “recognized” as a runaway and taken into Fowler’s slave jail.’
Preston’s mouth hardened. ‘Dealers like Neal at the Central Market, and Bill Williams, have their own slave-jails – the smaller dealers pay off the constables to keep their slaves in the public jails. If your friend was a black man—’
‘A white man, English. He disappeared here in October.’
‘I should go to the Ministry, then. If he was killed in a tavern, the owner would pay off the constables and not report it. But if he were in a street accident, the Minister might have heard.’
Since Chloë Viellard had written to the British Minister as soon as she guessed Singletary was missing, January only nodded, and they passed on to other topics. They were now in the center of town, and the street was lined with boarding houses and hotels, oyster parlors and barber shops, harness makers, livery stables, tobacconists and stationers. At the far end of the street, above a scrim of straggly poplar-trees, the flattish copper dome of the Capitol rose above its shallow hill, like a countryman’s hat.
‘Last year was a short session,’ Preston explained. ‘They rose in March. The long sessions, they’ll sit through May or sometimes June, if they’ve a great deal of business. After the short sessions, the Congressmen all go home – many of the foreign ministers as well.
‘Most Congressmen come here without their families.’ Preston waved at the façade of a grubby clapboard structure grandly named The Virginia House. ‘Senators sometimes bring them, and gentlemen like Mr Henry Clay, or Mr Daniel Webster, are wealthy enough to rent houses for their terms. But most Congressmen live in rooms and eat around a common table like students at a college. The biggest houses belong to folk like Mr Corcoran the banker, and Mr Peabody who owns buildings all over town. They’re the ones that the Congressmen go “calling” on to leave their cards … Those, and the foreign ministries.’
‘Benjamin, look!’ Minou caught his arm. ‘Oh, the darling thing … That lady across the street, just look at her bonnet … Is that Belgian lace, do you think, or French?’
‘You’ll want to visit Rochelle’s up on K Street,’ said Preston with a smile. ‘Mrs Perkins will take you—’
Thèrése rolled her eyes to indicate her opinion of the sartorial taste displayed by the Reverend Perkins’ chubby wife. Dominique said, ‘Thèrése, hush! Honestly, I don’t know why I put up with you …’
As they neared Capitol Hill, the neighborhood deteriorated. Among the shabby plank boarding-houses and taverns they passed half a dozen buildings which bore signs: SLAVES FOR SALE. Chained coffles of slaves passed them from the direction of the Baltimore road, bare feet thick with gray mud. Everywhere in town January had seen dark faces, but further up the avenue the black men and women he’d seen were well-dressed, like artisans or shopkeepers. Here they wore the clothes of laborers, or the numbered tin badges of slaves. Thèrése ignored them and Dominique seemed to, but Charmian, who had been chattering brightly to Preston, grew silent, and January felt her small, lace-gloved hand tighten around his fingers.
‘There.’ Preston halted, and his voice sank. ‘Across the street in that doorway, see ’em? The man in the green jacket, the woman in the striped skirt …’
January nodded.
To call the man’s face bestial would have insulted every harmless four-footed creature God had made. It was, rather, the worst of human: hard, calm, with brown eyes like a doll’s, expressionless. The long chin was unshaven, and his long dark hair unclean. He’d been talking to one of the dealers under a sign that said: SLAVES – TOP PRICES PAID – FANCIES, but he turned his head, watched Dominique, January, and those with them with calculation that made January’s blood go cold. The woman’s round, lumpy countenance would have been pleasant
were it not for the watchful squint and the stripe of tobacco-stain down the middle of her chin.
‘Mark ’em good,’ murmured Preston. ‘Those are the Fowlers, Elsie and Kyle. They run the biggest ring of kidnappers in town. They work with all the dealers. They have houses of prostitution, too, just across the Avenue in Reservation C. The yellow man behind them—’
January looked: a man almost his own height and powerful build, with African features, a broken nose, and a complexion little darker than a Spaniard’s.
‘—that’s Kyle’s chief driver, Davy Quent. They work with a wagon with a false bottom; two big bay horses with white feet. Kyle, Quent and their boys can knock a man out and have him under the bottom of the wagon in half a minute, tied and gagged. If you see that team or any of the three of them in a place where there aren’t a dozen people about, turn around and get out of there as quick as you can walk.’
The line of slaves went by. Davy Quent didn’t even glance at them. This is our job. This has nothing to do with me.
The Capitol’s low hill rose a few streets beyond, surrounded by what was probably supposed to be a lawn of weedy grass. A gang of young men – they could have been apprentices or clerks – played what appeared to be a four-cornered game of cricket: ‘That’s town ball,’ explained Preston. ‘They play it all over New England, and the year before last a couple of Massachusetts clerks at the Navy Yard got up a team. Now everyone in town’s playing. It’s just One Old Cat with Massachusetts rules.’
January had never heard of One Old Cat, but the game looked like what children played on Hounslow Heath, on his one visit to London in 1822. Across the street from the Capitol stood two slave-jails, and the men chained on the bench outside watched the game, and cheered when one or another of the team that was ‘up’ thwacked the thrown leather ball with a round stick like a cricket-bat, and dashed the circuit marked out with four-foot pegs.
Good Man Friday Page 5