Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  Oh General, don’t you never catch me.

  Oh General, don’t you never catch me.

  Oh General, don’t you never catch me,

  I’m on a ship, I’m gone out to the sea.

  The words floated, rose, faded like the pull of the tide, the voices of women riding up over the deep bass of men. January stopped, listening, on the rough wood banquette, and the rattle of a dray hauling bricks down Baronne Street at a reckless hand gallop drowned out the song. When the vehicle was past there was nothing, as if it had somehow drawn the song after it and away into the general clamor of the street.

  “Sir, you buy me, I’ll work for you good.”

  January turned to see an elderly man in the rough calico shirt and osnaburg britches of a fieldhand sitting on a bench outside a dark little shop front. HARRAHAN AND CLAINE, said the green-and-yellow sign next to the door. The man smiled engagingly; he, a younger man, and two teenaged girls were chained to the bench by light ankle shackles.

  “I can do ’most anything with horses: drive ’em, feed ’em, train ’em …” He coughed, the rattling, wet cough of pulmonary consumption, and forced himself to smile.

  “I’m a fine cook, sir,” said a woman a few doors down, as January passed. “Make bread, cook you up the finest chicken and dumplings you’ll ever see.…” She smiled, showing where teeth had been lost to childbearing. Her hands were the rough hands of a fieldworker. January wondered if she’d ever been in a kitchen in her life. “You just try me out, sir, you’ll never be sorry.”

  And as he walked on, past a cavernous brick exchange where not only slaves, but mules, wagonloads of hay, boxes of bean coffee, lots of rosewood furniture, and fine pressed letter paper were being dickered over by dark-coated brokers, he heard the older woman who sat on the banquette with the would-be cook say, “You want to be careful, honey. I had me six different masters and the colored was always the roughest.”

  He was aware of men looking after him, once caught a fragment of conversation about “… big buck nigger …” but didn’t stay to hear anything further. Mostly the men here, the dealers and brokers, the owners of ironworks or cotton presses, were Americans, and the voices he heard were all in English. His flesh crept with the sensation of being in enemy territory, naked and disarmed before enemy guns. All he could do was stand straight, walk easily, as if he had no fear—as if all things were as they had been when he was a youth, and the city largely French. As if a black man, particularly one as African-looking as he, were not automatically assumed to be someone’s slave.

  In a way it was the same as being in the Swamp.

  In a way it was worse.

  Master bought a horse, he bed it in the stall,

  Master bought a dog, he bed it by the fire,

  Master bought a cow, he bed her in the barn,

  Here I sleep out on the ground.…

  The singing from the yard behind a dealer’s faded. It was drowned in the whine and yarp of a mouth organ, the slap of a boy’s bare feet on the boards as he danced to show a pair of prospective buyers how lively he was, smiling gaily. Smiling—no one wants to pay for a sullen slave. January edged past and went on, feeling men’s eyes on his back.

  I should have looked for Shaw, he thought. I should have got Corcet to do this.

  Corcet at least was fairer of skin. He was an attorney.…

  January shook his head at himself inwardly. And I’m a surgeon, and what good has that ever done me, going among Americans? He only wanted, he understood, not to be the one to have to come to this place, not to have to deal with slave traders. As if Corcet would not find it as hateful and as frightening.

  The sign that bore the name William Palmer, Esq., was mounted on a square building of yellow bricks, much like a dozen others up and down the street. Coming into the hot, shadowy vault of the room, January could see through the open door at the rear to a small yard with benches around three sides. The yard was empty. A chinless youth with the sores of scrofula on his neck and ears looked up from a ledger. “Mr. Palmer?” asked January politely.

  “Just missed him,” said the clerk, and spit on the sanded floor. He glanced past January at the door, waiting.

  For January’s master, January realized.

  “Have you any idea when he might be back, sir?”

  The boy was still waiting for a white man to come in. He glanced at January a little impatiently and shrugged. “A week Sattiday maybe. He’s gone up to Baton Rouge with a load of niggers. Left this mornin’ on the Philly. You got a message for him?”

  “No, sir,” replied January, trying to will his mind away from this jumped-up child, without a whisker on his face, holding out his hand to him now in the complete expectation that January was only the winged Mercury charged by some white man with a note to another white man. “No message.”

  He walked down to the levee, trying not to hate the boy for the unconscious arrogant glint in his eye, for the assumption that he, a man of forty-one, had no life, no past, no future, except insofar as it concerned running errands for another man.

  No wife, no sisters, no mother who had been a slave and wanted to remember none of it. No fears, no music, no dreams.

  Only: Here, Ben, take this down to Bill Palmer on Baronne Street—You ask around, one of the white gentlemen’ll tell you where it is. And don’t you linger round the market on the way back, boy.…

  And he couldn’t even say, I’m no man’s boy, because this pipsqueak with brown stains on his lips didn’t even ask if he was—simply assumed that no man of color would have business of his own.

  Let it go, Ben, he told himself. Let it go. It’s the custom of the country, and you knew that when you came back. But he could not let it go. As he made his careful way down Canal Street, where there were enough people, enough businessmen—Creoles, shopkeepers, and more-or-less-honest workers—where there were people who would come to his aid should he be attacked, his mind returned to the blood-smelling darkness behind Colonel Pritchard’s house, to the hot gleam of firelight in a brickyard years ago, to the drums. To a woman dancing with the rainbow serpent Damballah.

  It was a place for hate to go, he thought. A place to pretend you were free. A place to forget. Like the frail golden palaces of music, the safe glowing heart of Mozart and Bach and Boccherini, it was a place to hide your mind in, when the pain got too bad.

  There were half a dozen coffles of slaves being loaded on the steamboats, down at the wharves that fringed the levee for over a mile above the Place d’Armes. Even in the slow season, demand for slaves was high. Men moving into the new cotton lands of Mississippi and the new states of Missouri and Alabama, could make a fortune in two years: clearing a plantation, getting a crop in the ground, selling the whole concern with the cotton standing that same year and buying another plantation.… If they had slaves.

  On the wharves January moved more carefully. Twice, along Baronne Street, he thought he’d glimpsed Killdevil Ned. Loafing idly, staring into shopwindows or watching with avid interest while a prospective buyer stripped a light-skinned woman to the waist in front of a dealer’s office.… But always there, when January turned around. Waiting his chance. Insolent, in his way, as the clerk at Palmer’s: I’m watching you, nigger, and there’s nuthin you can do about it.

  And there wasn’t.

  The boats were loading, all along the quays, a dozen of them, large and small. In the winter and spring there’d be scores. Tall strange boxy confabulations, like boarding-houses mounted on rafts, white paint glaring in the smoky morning light, black stacks oozing grime, gilding glinting, while men off-loaded the produce of the upriver plantations and towns, and loaded on German tools and French wines, paint, starch, barrels of gloves, rolls of fabric for someone’s carriage upholstery, a Patent Washing Machine.…

  The chained slaves waiting for shipment on the wharf were silent, mostly. January looked at their faces as he passed them, and saw their eyes.

  He had felt anger and pity for Zoë, betrayed by a m
aster she loved. But every one of these people had been betrayed.

  The Philadelphia had left for Baton Rouge early, as soon as it grew light enough to see the river. For a time January stood by the empty wharf, amid a knot of Irish stevedores and American and Creole merchants who waited while the Grand Turk backed and filled and angled to take the Philadelphia’s place, only watching the opaque green-brown waters, the pelicans and gulls squabbling for scraps. When the wind shifted, the smell of the town came over him, gunpowder and burning, pestilence and decay.

  The trial was tomorrow. He thought he glimpsed Killdevil Ned again as he made his way back along the levee, but lost sight of him by the time he reached the Place d’Armes. He didn’t know if the trapper followed him home.

  SIXTEEN

  At no time was the cast of characters assembled at the request of the Bailiff of the Criminal Court of the State of Louisiana particularly inspiring of trust in the jury system. Watching them take their seats on the benches of the courtroom on the upper floor of the old Presbytère building, January felt a certain longing for the intendants and juges d’instruction of France.

  In the summer the situation was worse, for the men of property and responsibility had already largely abandoned the town. What was left to make up the bulk of the jury pool was a disproportionate number of laborers, stevedores, saloonkeepers and café owners, small merchants such as January had rubbed elbows with on the wharves, and pettifogging businessmen like those along Baronne Street; frequently men of small education and intense prejudices. On the whole this batch didn’t look too bad, thought January, taking his seat beside Vachel Corcet at one of the long tables near the empty jury box. But he would have felt more sanguine about the whole thing if there’d been more of them who looked like they had the intelligence to read and write.

  “State your name,” said the Clerk of the Court, and spit.

  These were the twelve men, January reflected, they’d have to convince that just because Olympe worshiped African gods, it did not mean she was a poisoner.

  “Henry Shotwell.”

  “I object to these proceedings, sir!” Monsieur Vilhardouin was on his feet. “It is prejudicial to the defense of my client, and indeed a slight upon the entire community of New Orleans, to assume that English is the language to be spoken in this Court!”

  Henry Shotwell, a heavyset man in an over-gaudy tie and stickpin, removed his cigar from his mouth and said, “Oh, for Chrissake,” and the Clerk of the Court turned red.

  The State Prosecutor set down the bundle of papers he’d been perusing and rose, and January, seeing him for the first time, groaned inwardly. It was Orell Greenaway.

  “Let me remind Mr. Vilhardouin,” said Greenaway, glaring venomously up at Vilhardouin’s tall elegant form, “that the State of Louisiana is now part of the United States, and that the official language of the United States is English.”

  “We true citizens of the City of New Orleans,” retorted Vilhardouin, in French, “were sold to the United States against our will and without being consulted in the matter—”

  “Welcome to our ranks,” muttered January dourly.

  “—and we were assured that our rights would be respected as citizens on an equal standing with those who invaded us.”

  “I very much fear,” retorted Greenaway, in English, “that I have never had the opportunity to study a foreign tongue.”

  “It was not foreign upon these shores!”

  The Judge banged his gavel. It was, January was relieved to see, J. F. Canonge in charge of the Court, the gray-haired and formidable pillar of Creole society who had been conspicuously absent from Madame Redfern’s Bastille Day celebrations: During the Revolution his father had been a soldier of the Loyalist cause. “Monsieur Vilhardouin begs Mr. Greenaway to take into consideration,” translated the Judge, “that the rights of the French citizens of this territory were guaranteed when they were ceded, without their knowledge, to the United States. Monsieur Shaw,” he went on, turning his leonine head to address the Lieutenant, who was lounging in the back of the court cracking his knuckles, “please request that an interpreter be sent in.”

  Greenaway directed a glare at Vilhardouin that would have taken paint off a fence. Henry Shotwell flipped aside his coat skirts and seated himself again, took a flask from his pocket, imbibed a stiff jolt, and relit his cigar. The man next to him, who looked like a minor clerk or an apothecary’s assistant, wrinkled his nose and fanned at the smoke, as if the whole room weren’t choking with the fumes of the fever smudges in the courtyard behind the building. Had Hannibal been with him and not flat on his back in an opium stupor after hemorrhaging half the night, January would have offered handsome odds on at least one challenge before the end of the day.

  He wondered if Corcet was a betting man.

  The interpreter was the same harried-looking notary who’d been press-ganged at the Recorder’s Court. While this gentleman was inquiring of the Judge when he was expected to get his own work done, January saw Hubert Granville rise from the bench, where he sat beside Madame Geneviève and Antoine, and go up to speak to Greenaway, his forefinger jabbing instructively. At the same time Mathurin Jumon went up and spoke to Vilhardouin. There appeared to be genuine distress in his face, and it crossed January’s mind, absurdly, to wonder if the money Mathurin sought so desperately to raise was in some way destined to save Célie.

  Antoine, plumaged in mourning nearly as elaborate as his mother’s, turned in his seat, his eyes following the big man. He hastily straightened when Mathurin turned his head. His black-gloved hand made a feint at a pocket, but he caught his mother’s warning glance, and resettled it in his lap. Mathurin, for one moment, stood looking at him. Then he, too, averted his face.

  Granville returned to his seat and said something in an undervoice to Madame Geneviève.

  “State your name. Donnez votre nom, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Aristide Valcour.”

  “State your occupation. Donnez votr’ occupation.”

  “I am a mechanic at the municipal waterworks.”

  “Je suis méchanique au—”

  “I object, Your Honor.” Greenaway stood. “How can I be certain that this interpreter is giving a true and impartial translation of the prospective juryman’s statements? I request that a man better versed in the true language of this country be called in—”

  “The true language of this country is French!”

  “La langue vrai du cette pays c’est—”

  “It was the last time you paid any attention to what was going on around you!”

  “How dare you—”

  Vachel Corcet bolted to his feet one second behind Vilhardouin, reached out half-instinctively to stop him and at once pulled back. Granville, Shaw, and Mr. Shotwell all sprang forward and interposed themselves between the two lawyers: “Don’t be a fool, man!” yelled the banker. In a rear corner of the courtroom, Burton Blodgett, a sweaty wad of rum-soaked wool and rumpled linen, scribbled gleefully in his notebook.

  “Monsieur Vilhardouin,” said Judge Canonge, “as you may have observed, it is a hot day. Due to Judge Gravier’s illness, and Judge Danville’s departure, there are one hundred and thirty-two cases on the docket to be heard, and more coming in every day. It is now nine-thirty in the morning. If we could settle this matter, grave though it is, with expedition as well as justice, it would be an act of mercy not only to all in this room but to those poor souls locked up in the Cabildo, awaiting their turn on Justice’s scales.”

  Face flushed under the dark glory of side-whiskers, Vilhardouin straightened his somber tailcoat and resumed his seat.

  “Mr. Greenaway.” Canonge switched effortlessly to English as perfect as his French. “As a notary of this city Mr. Doussan is completely versed in both languages native to the population and I take it as a mark of disrespect to the judgment of this Court that you express doubt as to his ability or inclination to translate words as they are spoken.”

  Greenaway drew
himself up to his full five-foot-four-inch height. “I accept the Court’s decision.” He spit, quite accurately, into the brass cuspidor.

  The jury selection continued. Vilhardouin challenged Colby, Shotwell, Quigley, Horn, Lupoff, and Haldeman; Greenaway challenged prospective jurors Pargoud, Seignoret, Bringier, Valcour, Lanoue, Rouzau, and Villiere, all challenges taking place at length and through the medium of the harassed Monsieur Doussan, who gamely and vainly tried to work at his own papers in between quarrels. At the back of the courtroom Lieutenant Shaw continued to chew and spit like a placid locust, watching everything with narrowed gray eyes. During the proceedings Monsieur Vilhardouin rose from his seat two or three times to go to the doors of the courtroom and question the Bailiff outside: Blodgett, seated beside Shaw, leaned and craned unashamedly to hear.

  “Monsieur Gérard and Madame Célie Jumon have not yet arrived,” murmured Corcet to January. In the front row beside Granville, Madame Geneviève Jumon, and Antoine, Paul Corbier sat rigid in his go-to-church black corduroy coatee. His hands were folded around the brim of his shallow-crowned beaver hat on his knees and his eyes were straight to the front. He’d come in last night on the Bonnets O’Blue, harried and visibly thinner; January had supped with the family, and even Gabriel’s cooking hadn’t been sufficient to make the meal anything but an ordeal of silent anxiety.