But she would always slip out at night.
One night she had simply not come back.
Their mother had made no effort to inquire about where she might have gone. But three or four nights after that, when lying in the dark of the garçonnière January had heard the thick swift heartbeat of the drums, he had put on his clothes and made his way to Rue Dumaine, knowing that if she was in the city at all, that was where she would be.
The drumbeats drew him on. They’d built a fire behind the shelter of the brick kilns, but they kept the fire low. He saw only the yellow touch of it, outlining the square shouldering shapes of piles and pallets, of drays half-loaded, of sheds. The world was a stink of smoke and wet clay. But as he edged his way between those hard damp structures, like cemetery tombs in their close-crowded solidity, the blood stirred hot and unexpectedly behind his breastbone and in his loins at the tripping rattle of the hand drums, the tidal pull of the clapping hands.
He smelled blood.
They’d killed a chicken and a young pig and thrown them in the cauldron seething over the fire. Someone had brought tafia, the cheap liquor made from molasses squeezings; someone else had brought rum. Muted firelight mottled the vèvès scratched on the ground—circled crosses, spirals, and diamonds, like Mambo Jeanne had made on the plantation, and more complicated signs strung together, the secret signs of the gods. The dancing had begun.
The music tugged at January’s heart.
Nothing here of the minuets and country dances that were the heart of the music lessons he had, at that time, been teaching for over a year. Nothing here of Mozart, or of Bach, of measure and beauty and passion contained. Like raw rum it hit him, and he felt his body move in time, unconscious as the movements of coupling. All around him men and women were moving, too, rocking, swaying, sometimes catching one another and turning under their arms, sometimes only standing, dancing with the body as the slaves did—hully-gully, they called it, the loosening into rhythm that makes work easier—and not tripping here and there like the restless whites.
Hands clapping, clapping. Voices wailing and dark, “Eh, bomba, hen, hen, canga bafie te!” Candles stuck among the bricks, darts of yellow light on naked muscles gleaming with sweat, on breasts bound only with a couple of kerchiefs, on ankle-clappers ringing bare hard feet. On whip scars and old brands and the tattoo-work of Ibo and Ewe and Senegal. January felt the wild desire to do as he’d done as a child, to tear off his clothes the better to dance. Mbuki-mvuki, the old men had called it at Bellefleur, a word for what les blanquittes had no word for.
Then he saw Olympe.
She was up near the end of the yard, half-glimpsed through the dancers; up where the Queen danced on top of a cage in whose darkness a snake’s coils moved and shifted, up by the King, a squat scarred man wearing only a couple of red kerchiefs knotted around his groin and a belt of blue cord. Like many of the dancers Olympe had stripped, and wore only a thin shift, plastered to her body with sweat; her tignon cast away, her hair a black thick brush exploding around her face; her eyes shut in solitary communion with the music and the dance and the liberty to be utterly herself.
Men danced closer, touched the King’s hands or the Queen’s. They whirled to fill their mouths with rum and spit it across the blood-spattered signs on the ground, the smell of it a sweet sickish backtaste against smoke and sweat. “Zombi!” cried someone. “Zombi-Damballah!” and touched the serpent’s cage. A gold eye like a sequin flashed within. The bodies swayed faster to the rattle of the drums. The music of darkness. Music like that which would pour from an open grave, from the door into the world beyond.
A man cried out and fell shaking to the ground a yard from January’s feet. Two women propped him up, and he rolled his head and arched his back, gasped and babbled out words that made no sense. January had seen this before, too; but now it troubled him as it had not before he’d learned the ways of the Christian God. The man’s eyes opened and his face changed: aged, shrank, fell in on itself, and when he got to his feet he staggered as if lame. “Legba!” cried someone, “Papa Legba, hé!” The man staggered and limped, reaching out to touch this person or that, crying out in a hoarse croaking voice, his eyes the eyes of something other than human.
Ridden, old Mambo Jeanne would have said. Ridden by Papa Legba, the god who guards the crossroads.
“Agassu, Agassu has her!” cried someone else as a woman fell moaning, and began to kiss the earth; another man roared like a bull, shook his head, tossing and charging at Papa Legba, who whirled haltingly away. “I am Ezili!” shrieked a man in a woman’s thin voice, rolling and lolling his head and hips, “Ezili Dahomey! Ezili of a thousand lovers!” And among the crowding chaos, among the writhing dancers, the shadows and darkness, January saw Olympe’s eyes snap open, her mouth gape wide with a sudden bellow of rage.
Saw her face change.
“Ogu am I!” The voice that rolled from her throat was nothing like Olympe’s, nothing like the voice of any human he had ever heard. “Ogu am I, Ogu of the sword, Ogu of the fire!” Turning, Olympe snatched a stick from beside the snake cage, whirled it around her head.
People cried, “Ogu!” and tried to steady her, but she lashed at them with her weapon and, striding to the King, pulled the rum bottle from his hand.
“Give me that,” she boomed, in that terrible alien voice, “my balls are cold.”
Hands clapping, voices calling; heat and rhythm and darkness rolled over January in a wave. He watched in eerie horror as his sister swaggered around the brickyard, pushed through the crowd, called out in hoarse soldier slang to Papa Legba or Ezili, leaping and spinning around the fire. There was something in it of Italian comedy, January thought, those ridden by the gods improvising lines to one another, acting as the gods would act.… And something beyond that. Something Other, and frightening.
Olympe swayed, and a man caught her—the half-naked King, his manhood lifting under the thin guise of his red kerchiefs. The fire burned low, and the dancing redoubled in its speed and intensity; men and women caught at one another, clutching and moaning. Some disappeared behind the brick stacks, or into the dense pockets of shadow beyond the fire’s glare; some fell as simply as animals to the ground. Olympe was panting, soaked with sweat, the King’s arms dark bands across the stained wetness of her shift. Her head fell back; January saw the glint of the dying fire on the bones of her chest, the points where her ribs and pelvis and small shallow breasts stabbed out through the thin cloth. She was sixteen, thin and wiry, her face now not the face of a god but of a woman blind with ecstasy; and she twisted her head around, seizing the King’s face between her hands, dragging his lips to hers.
At the sight of her a hot stab of lust went through January’s flesh, disconcerting and urgent. A woman caught his arm, a young girl barely older than Olympe, panting, sweating, smiling, and pulling at him. “Dance with me,” the girl gasped. “Dance.…”
January thrust her from him. He was eighteen, and unmarried; and if not precisely pure, he was as chaste as he could stand to be, knowing that he could afford to take no wife if he got a girl with child. But it’s all right, something said in his mind—the loa, maybe, or the Devil, or his own lustful needing. In the morning neither of you will know the other’s name. It’s all in our hands, not yours.
He turned and walked away into the stacks of bricks, walked quickly, as if armed men sought him nearer the fire. Once he looked back, and saw Olympe naked in the dark King’s arms.
The drums mocked him as he fled.
In the morning he had gone to Mass, confessed to the sin of idolatry, and burned before the Virgin’s altar the first of a holocaust of candles, one by one over the next twenty-three years, for the pardon and salvation of his sister’s soul.
THREE
“Why did you run away?”
Olympe, sitting in the rude chair Lieutenant Shaw had dragged over into the corner of the Cabildo’s stone-flagged watch room for her, glanced up with a twist of scorn to her mouth, bla
ck eyes jeering. For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.
“Someday some white man’s gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe,” she said. “You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night.” And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.
“Where have you been?”
“Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame. Her mouth softened a little—which it wouldn’t have, back when she was sixteen—and she added, “Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?”
January grinned and replied, “Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” and though the joke probably wasn’t very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth. Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.
The sealed cold quiet, the iron stiffness that January remembered from Olympe’s girlhood, broke and showed underneath the woman he’d met upon his return eighteen months ago: an angry woman gentled and softened by Paul Corbier’s unquestioning love and the happiness she’d had with her children. When Lieutenant Shaw had brought her out of the cells she’d been like a wary animal, silent and cold and withdrawn—the girl he had known before his departure for France. Maybe that was why he’d spoken to her as he had.
“I’m sorry,” he said now. “But they’re going to want to know.” He nodded to the watch room’s main desk. Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, looking as usual like a scarecrow who’d dressed in a high wind and poor light, was engaged in quiet conversation with the sergeant, pausing every now and then to spit in the general direction of the sandbox in the big room’s corner.
The oil lamps in their iron brackets along the walls had been put out; the smell of the burnt oil lingered. The wide doors stood open onto the arcade that fronted the Place d’Armes and from across that dusty square came the dim wakening clamor of the levees, stevedores loading crates of coffee and dry goods, books and cheeses, vinegar, corks, and pigs of lead, for transhipment up the river. They worked as swiftly as they could before the day turned hot, their voices a rough distant barking against the morning calm. Seagulls squawked and screamed at one another over the market garbage. The yammer of house slaves and market-women joined them, bargaining over tomatoes and peaches and bananas in the fruit stands that bordered the Place. In the courtyard behind the prison, whose doors were open also into the big square guardroom, a boy climbed the gallery stairs to dole breakfast to the prisoners, pressing himself against the rail as men in the blue uniforms of city lamplighters brought down from the cells the first of the slaves who’d been caught out without passes, to be whipped at the pillory.
Olympe’s mouth hardened, and Paul Corbier reached out to take her hand. “I was helping a friend who had asked my help,” she told them quietly. “As for Isaak Jumon, his wife, Célie, came to me Friday, a week ago today. She asked me to make a gris-gris against Isaak’s mother, Geneviève. Isaak’s father was a white man, and left Isaak property when he died last year; left it to Isaak, not to Geneviève or to Isaak’s brother Antoine, who lives with Geneviève still. Geneviève claimed that the property was hers; that Isaak was her slave, and all he inherited came to her.…”
“Her slave?”
Olympe shrugged. January wondered if the contempt in her face was at Geneviève’s greed or at his naïveté. “Don’t ask me the why of it,” she said. “But she got a judge to write out a warrant distraining Isaak as her property, and he fled, Célie says. So she came to me for a gris-gris, and I gave her one.”
“What kind of gris-gris?”
The dark glance slid sidelong at him. “I didn’t send her home with poison, if that’s what you’re thinking, brother.”
“Yet there was poison in the house.” Lieutenant Shaw ambled to them, hands in the pockets of his sorry green coat and greasy, light brown hair hanging down over his bony shoulders. He spoke French with a kind of clumsy fluency, ungrammatical as a fieldhand’s and spattered with English misconstruction. “That was arsenic in one of them tins as we took off yore shelf, M’am Corbier, and monkshood in another, and the doctor I took them jars to says that was antimony in the third.”
“Then why don’t you arrest my brother as well?” asked Olympe in a reasonable voice. “He carries arsenic in his bag, when he works in the Hospital during the fever season. Salts of mercury, too, and foxglove, that can stop the heart. Arrest the doctor that told you the contents of those jars. I’ll bet he has all that and more in his office.”
“My friend is a healer, Lieutenant Shaw.” Mamzelle Marie, who had entered quietly through the open doors of the arcade, made her way with leisurely grace to them and regarded the gawky Kentuckian with a mixture of amusement and insolence. “As a healer, Olympe, like her brother, has obligations to secrecy. Should a young girl give birth out of wedlock, she must trust that her midwife will not spread word of it. Must a slave who has slipped out of his master’s thrall for an evening, and met with some injury, risk his life by letting the wound go untended for fear of a beating into the bargain?” She added, with the barest touch of mocking malice, “That might lose the owner money, were the slave to die. You wouldn’t want that, sir.”
“No, M’am.” Shaw met the voodooienne’s gaze calmly, arms folded over his chest. “And I do understand M’am Corbier’s not wantin’ to say where she was nor why she tried to run away the minute officers of the law showed up in her house. It’s just that it looks bad, and it’s gonna look worse when the state prosecutor asks her about it in open court.” He scratched under the breast of his coat with fingers like stalks of cane. “That’s all. M’am.”
January glanced across at Olympe, wondering if indeed she had been outside Colonel Pritchard’s house last night. She would not do that which she saw to be evil. But what was evil in her eyes?
“I am a voodoo.” Olympe looked gravely up at Shaw. “Believe what you will, Lieutenant. I—and indeed almost any voodoo you speak to in this town—work more in herbs of healing than in poisonings. The whites who come creeping veiled to our doors to ask for love potions or tricken bags—or partners for their lusts sometimes—they have no idea who we are or what we are. In any case the girl Célie told me, Not a death spell. She’s a good girl, confirmed and goes to church.” In the past, January thought, Olympe would have given those last five words a derisive twist; now she simply stated them as a fact. Perhaps, he thought, because now she, too, had a daughter.
“I gave her a ball of saffron, salt, gunpowder, and dog filth, tied in black paper, to leave in Geneviève Jumon’s house and another in her shop. Saturday night when the moon was full I took and split a beef tongue and witched it with silver and pins and guinea peppers, and buried it in the cemetery with a piece of paper bearing Geneviève’s name. That was all that I did. And in truth I didn’t need even to do that. The woman’s evil and greed themselves will call down grief on her, with no doing of mine. About Isaak I know nothing. Are you so certain that he is dead?”
Shaw’s pale brows raised, the gray eyes beneath them suddenly sharp and wary. “Why do you ask that, M’am?”
“Have you seen his body?”
“Where is she?” shouted a voice behind them. “What have you done with her? Pigs! Bastards! Murderers!” January turned in time to see a heavyset little man stumble through the Cabildo’s outer doors, his well-cut gray coat awry and his eyes burning with rage and grief. “Have you no pity? No shame?” He flung himself at the nearest Guard, who happened to be Shaw, seizing him by the lapels and shaking him to and fro. Shaw, who January knew could hav
e broken his assailant’s neck with very little trouble, raised no hand to thrust him back, and a well-dressed tall gentleman dashed through the door in the next moment, followed by a small, plump lady whose dove-gray silk tignon matched her dress.
“Fortune,” she cried, wringing her mitted hands, as the well-dressed gentleman seized Shaw’s attacker and pulled him away. “Fortune, no!”
“Really, Monsieur Gérard, you must be more careful of how you step! You might have injured this gentleman, falling into him as you did.…”
“Gentleman?” The heavyset man twisted against the firm grip, face flushed dusky with rage. Though the peacemaker had spoken English—stressing the word falling as if that would alter what everyone in the room had just seen—Monsieur Gérard shouted in French,“These—these Americans dare to traduce my daughter and you say—”
“Of course it was an accident, sir.” Still speaking English, the pacifier turned an apologetic smile upon Shaw, who was methodically straightening his coat. Not, thought January, that any amount of straightening would improve the appearance of that wretched garment. “Certainly Monsieur Gérard is most aware of the difference in your stations and also of the penalties attached to a man of color striking a white man such as yourself. Please accept my client’s apologies, Captain. I am Clément Delachaise Vilhardouin, representing Monsieur Gérard and his daughter in this regrettable affair. I pray your indulgence for my client, who speaks no English.”
The woman—clearly Madame Gérard—had caught up with the group now, and was holding her husband’s other arm, sobbing “Fortune, Fortune, what could I do? They came at night, you would not return from Baton Rouge till the morning, they had a warrant for her arrest.…”
Gérard himself was silent, chest heaving and dark eyes smoldering. From the open doorway a woman’s voice could be heard, shrieking crazily, “He’s trying to kill me! My husband—my father—they killed all my children, smothered them one by one! Please, please, someone believe me! …”
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