“But what about my nose and mouth, Mama? Colored boys want colored girls who look white. What if your nice colored boy don't like my nigger nose and mouth?”
“Aw, Lucille, honey,” Mama said then, and enveloped her in her arms. “You such a pretty chil', you know that. But you leave Mr. Day alone. You do that for yo' Mama. You save yo' heart for some nice colored boy.”
She pressed her face into Mama's neck, breathing deep the sweet talcum smell of her girlhood, but she was a woman grown now, and so she soon pulled free of the arms that held her.
“Come on, honey,” Mama said, and Lucille saw the sheen of tears held back in her eyes. “Sit yo'self down at the table and let me heat you up a bowl of my stewed shrimps.”
“I ain't hungry,” Lucille said, and she walked out of the kitchen, knowing nothing could have hurt her mama more than not to eat her food.
The colored boy who was to end up with Lucille Durand's heart came into her life a bare month later, and he was not to Mama's liking at all.
She was feeling alone and lonesome the first time she saw him, at a Sunday afternoon dance in a small park called Congo Square. A hundred years before, the city slaves used to gather in the park on Sunday afternoons to dance the calinda and the bamboula to the rattle of beef bones and the beat of bamboo drums. On this day the music was New Orleans tin-panny. Someone had brought a piano outside on a wagon bed and was playing ragtime, and later, rival jazz bands were going to have a bucking contest to see who could produce the best boogie-woogie.
He caught her eye because of the way he was strutting through the crowd and the sycamore trees, strutting like he owned the world and everything in it. She didn't want to admire such a turkey cock, although she had to admit he did look so fine in that white suit and black shirt. His face seemed chiseled out of ebony. His skin was so black it glinted blue in the sunlight.
She thought she'd lost sight of him when, next she knew, he had grasped her around the waist and was whirling her out among the dancers. “You lookin' at LeRoy Washington, girl,” he said, as if she ought to have heard of him, and the truth was she had. He was a club boxer who was already starting to make a name for himself in New Orleans. He fought for an exorbitant five dollars a night—as much as most Negroes could make in a week.
“LeRoy who?” she said.
His teeth were pure white, and he'd had gold rims put around the two front ones, so that they flashed when he smiled.
That first night he took her out to his houseboat on the Bayou St. John and laid her down on his bed and showed her how a man made love to a woman he wanted, hard and rough and hungry. He was the first man to have her, and she knew from that moment she would want no other.
Afterward, in the silver glow of moonlight, she ran her hands over the veins and arteries of his arms where they flowed in ridges just beneath his beautiful dark skin. He had muscles like black iron.
He scared her, though, because he didn't think like anyone she knew. His thoughts were the way he dressed: flashy. He was prideful and he had a streak of the rebel in him and he always spoke his mind, and that was dangerous for a Negro. The white man wanted him to speak only when spoken to, and to look away with humility.
Once they went for a walk through the zoo in Audubon Park, and she got a stone in her shoe. But she couldn't sit on one of the benches to take it off because they were for whites only, and that made her think of that day in the streetcar and the moving screen that could magically change the color of things, and she said, “I could maybe get by with usin' that bench for a minute if you wasn't with me. Light as I am an' with it comin' on to dusk.”
They had been walking side by side, with one of his arms wrapped around her waist, but he pushed away from her now with such violence she stumbled a little. “Don't you give me none of that high-yeller shit,” he said. He wasn't shouting, but she'd never heard a voice so hard. “You just as much nigger as me, girl. You think you a step closer to heaven 'cause you got some white massa's blood in you?”
She turned away from him so that he wouldn't see the tears that had welled in her eyes over the love she felt for him that was so wonderful and so terrible that to lose him now would be to cease to exist.
“You say that like I should be shamed,” she said, so softly she didn't think he'd heard her until his hands came down gently onto her shoulders.
“Come here, baby.” He turned her around and gathered her into his chest. “It ain't the nigger in us we should be shamed of, it's what we let them do to us. 'Slong as we fetch an' shuffle an' say, ‘Yes massa, no massa, three bags full, massa,’ 'slong as we believe the white man's shuck about how we somehow less human than they are, then we deserve ever'thing they do to us.”
She kept her face buried in his chest and her thoughts to herself. You can't change the world, though, was what she was thinking. You just forget 'bout that, 'cause ain't nothin' you can do 'bout it.
The day came when Lucille knew she would have to take him home to meet Mama, and that scared her more than anything she had ever had to face. One of her cousins had married a black-skinned boy, and the girl's family had had nothing to say to her or her husband since. Lucille didn't want to have to choose between Mama and her man.
She asked him to Sunday dinner at the house on Conti Street, and Mama fixed a chicken in his honor. They ate at the round oak table in the kitchen, and Lucille watched the resistance settle over her mama's face as she took in the size and blackness of him, and his nappy hair.
Mama asked him all sorts of questions about what he did for a living and who his people were, where they came from. The more Mama poked and prodded, the surlier his mouth got, and no sooner had he left through the door than Mama declared him an “uppity nigger,” which was the worst condemnation she knew.
Lucille gathered up the dishes in silence and took them to the sink, but Mama wasn't going to let it alone.
“You light-complected and light-eyed, and you come from good stock, girl. You don' want to be throwin' yo'self away on just any-old-body.”
Lucille thought about asking Mama what stock her daddy had come from, what stock had given her her light complexion and light eyes, but she knew it would be no use. It didn't matter anyway, because she knew what she wanted and his name was LeRoy Washington, although she thought that if she tried to figure out why she wanted him so much she would never be able to do it.
Later that evening LeRoy came back to the house and took her out for a date, to the Sunday dance again at Congo Square. He still strutted through the crowd, but this time she was on his arm, and she felt proud and happy and in love. He stopped beneath a sycamore tree and gave her a kiss so sweet and deep it turned her inside out.
He nuzzled her neck, pressing his lips to the place where her pulse beat. “You want some jelly, baby? That what you want? Say yes.”
“Yes.”
He laughed and slipped his arm around her waist and they left the dance no sooner than they'd got there, heading for his houseboat and his bed. They walked down Villere to catch the streetcar, too wrapped up in each other to notice how the road had become deserted, except for a gang of mulatto men who seemed to have come at them from out of nowhere and had them surrounded before she could even draw breath to scream.
There were five of them. Shrimpers by the look and the smell of them, and they were so drunk they breathed whiskey fumes.
She could get a good look at only two of them. The one had a head the size of a watermelon and dull, stony eyes. The other, who was smiling, had turquoise eyes and was the color of old brick. He pursed his lips at her and made a wet, smacking noise.
For a moment all was strangely still and quiet. The hot packed dirt beneath her feet smelled of oil and rust. She thought she could hear a banjo playing, but it seemed a long way away.
Then the man with the turquoise eyes grabbed at his crotch, pumping his hips, and laughed, and his laughter hit her like a hard fist. “What's a peola piece a ass like you doin' steppin' out with this big black nigger?
”
“LeRoy,” she tried to say beneath a breath that wasn't there. “Don't fight them.”
“Honey, I don't think they givin' me much choice.”
The shrimper laughed again. “Got to teach you to keep your nigger hands off our women, boy. Uh-huh.”
“Run!” LeRoy shouted, thrusting her away from him just as he was enveloped in a flurry of fists.
The force of LeRoy's push carried her as far as the banquette, where she tripped over the curb and went sprawling. The scream that had been lodged in her throat since the shrimpers had come upon them popped out of its own accord.
Her scream brought LeRoy spinning around to look at her just as one of the shrimpers took a swing with a fence slat like it was a baseball bat, smacking LeRoy square across his face. He toppled onto his knees, swaying, blood from a long cut on his forehead running in streams over his eyes. He tried to raise his fists in the classic boxer's stance and get back onto his feet, but they were kicking him now, five sets of hobnailed boots, and from every direction.
“LeRoy!” she screamed, and tried to crawl to him on her hands and knees.
A man came running around the corner, yelling and swinging a long, double-linked chain above his head. At first she thought it was a white man come to join the shrimpers in their nigger-knocking, but then his hat flew off and she caught the yellow flash of his hair.
LeRoy had fought as if he'd been in the prize ring, but Mr. Day was doing it dirty. He had one end of the chain wrapped around his fist and he was going for their eyes. One shrimper's face erupted into blood, and the man screamed and reeled away. Another got a kick between his legs that had him on his knees vomiting up the sour mash he'd been drinking all day. When a third went out cold after the chain clipped him hard behind his ear, the last two took off running, scattering gravel behind them like birdshot.
Lucille felt a strong hand pull her up by the arm. “You all right, Luce honey?”
She nodded, her breath sobbing in her throat. “LeRoy?”
“He's okay. Just dazed. Come on, let's get out of here in case they have friends.”
They half carried LeRoy between them, limping their way to the neutral ground on Esplanade Avenue. They leaned LeRoy up against the trunk of a palm tree, while he glared at Mr. Day through his swollen eyes.
“Where the hell you come from?” he said.
Lucille figured she didn't have to introduce them, even if she could find the breath for it. They had met each other in passing twice at the Conti Street house, and both times a pair of alley cats would have behaved friendlier.
“I was parking my bike 'round the block,” Mr. Day was saying, “when I heard all the commotion.” He had carefully unwrapped the chain from around his fist and now he was sliding the heavy links back and forth in his hands and staring at it with a perplexed look on his face. His knuckles were bruised and bloody. “Shit. I got the blasted thing off, but now how do I get it back on?”
LeRoy pushed himself off the tree. He swayed back and forth on his feet. “I never asked for no help from no white cop.”
Mr. Day was still breathing so hard his throat sang, but he was able to convey utter disdain with the lifting of one eyebrow. “I beg your pardon. I guess I didn't notice how you were winning the argument.”
“Well, it's won. So you can just be moseyin' along now.”
Mr. Day spat a wad of blood into the grass. “I was going to the boogie-woogie contest, but my mouth's all busted up, thanks to y'all. How'm I supposed to play my sax with a busted mouth?”
LeRoy hawked a laugh and spat his own wad of blood. “Prob'ly with the same kinda finesse you showed fighting.”
“Finesse? And this criticism is coming from the man who couldn't last one round with Catfish Pruitte when he was having a bad day.”
“Hunh.” LeRoy tried to look mortally insulted, but the truth was the only fight he'd ever lost had been to the Cajun mulatto, and Catfish had beaten him hollow. “I could whip yo' white ass on one of my worst days and not break a sweat.”
“You think so.”
“I know so.”
Mr. Day smiled and shook his head, and let fly with a left jab to LeRoy's mouth that sent blood and spittle spraying into the air.
The surprise punch didn't knock LeRoy to the ground, but it sent him staggering. It was like a fight between a pair of junkyard dogs after that, and it lasted about as long. They ended up kneeling in the sun-browned grass of the neutral ground, facing each other and bleeding all over themselves, which served them right. At first she thought they were choking, and then she realized they were laughing.
She didn't know how it came to be that the three of them wound up on LeRoy's houseboat after that, with her frying up a mess of catfish on the stove and the two of them sitting at the table. She kept thinking about those mulatto shrimpers. How they had wanted to beat up LeRoy for stepping out with a light-complexioned girl. She thought how they'd been so full of hate, and she thought how their hatred was probably mostly for the white man, and for their own brown skin and the Negro in their blood, but they couldn't fight the white man or themselves, so they had gone nigger-knocking instead. She thought how the hatred in their eyes had been thick enough to slice up with a cane knife.
She put plates heaping with fish in front of the men, but she couldn't bring herself to sit down with them. Whites and coloreds just didn't sit down to supper together, and yet there they were, doing it. It was the elusive principle of the moving streetcar screen all over again.
They weren't saying anything to each other, the men, only digging into her catfish and drinking beer from green quart bottles.
When LeRoy was done scraping his plate clean, he leaned back in his chair, patted his belly, and ran his red tongue over his black, swollen lips. “Man, we showed them fuckin' niggers. We busted they fuckin' nigger asses good.”
An hour or so after the fight and Lucille was finally getting her breath back. She swatted him on the back of the head. “You watch yo' mouth, LeRoy Washington.”
“Ooo-ee! Listen to the righteous girl.” He rubbed away the sting and then craned his head around to grin at her. “You think we married the way she carries on.”
“I think you ought to be,” Mr. Day said with a face set serious and in a tone she couldn't put a name to except she thought it would surely send LeRoy up onto his high horse again.
Instead, the two men shared a slow smile, and the smile was like a handshake. Or a promise.
Mr. Day didn't play his saxophone that night because his mouth was too sore and swollen, but he came back other nights, bringing his horn along with buckets of fried shrimp and cartons of dirty rice. As fireflies sparkled in the black-green trees and the bream popped in the bayou's dark waters, he and LeRoy would drink wine out of mason jars and pass a reefer back and forth. After a while he would play for them, and pain would be in every deep, crying note. It was as if he had taken out of her own life all the misery and confusion, all the wrongs she'd done and all the wrong done unto her, and put it into his music.
“Where a white boy learn to play like that?” LeRoy asked one night, and he told them he'd learned from the Negro musicians who played in the saloons and bawdy houses of Storyville, and from hours of listening to race records. She thought the music must have been in him before that, and when he played he was only traveling back to a place he already knew, a place of hauntings and of longings for things lost or left undone. For a love and a life that should have been, but never was.
LeRoy had a harmonica and sometimes he would blow along. Lucille didn't know how to play anything, but she could sing. It was how she learned to sing the blues.
Chapter Ten
FROM THE NEW ORLEANSMORNING TRIBUNE,LATE edition, Wednesday, July 13, 1927:
THE SCANDALOUS LIFE AND DEATHOF CHARLES ST. CLAIRE
By Wylie T. Jones
The pools of blood are mostly dried now, the body has been carried away, yet the mystery of who killed Charles St. Claire remains.
&n
bsp; The gruesome and brutal manner of Mr. St. Claire's death is known: seven deep wounds with a cane knife, including the fatal slash to the jugular. But what every man, woman, and child ought to be asking themselves as the sun sets today on the City That Care Forgot is, Why?
The answer to this question is for the police to discover, of course; however one cannot help but wonder if the motive for Charles St. Claire's death does lie in his life. For in only a few short hours, this reporter has been able to uncover some sordid particulars regarding the victim of last night's heinous murder. Please be forewarned, though, that such a licentious way of life does not make for salubrious reading.
Mr. St. Claire's profession was the law, but his practice was to defend the accused in criminal trials, where for the gratification of what even his friends do say was a monumental hubris, he often attempted to turn a case in his favor on legal technicalities or through theatrical antics before gullible juries, thereby bringing about the release of these men and women—hardened criminals in some cases—back into society where they might continue to prey upon other innocent victims. It should also be noted that many of Mr. St. Claire's so-called clients were of the Negro race.
On late, late nights when decent men had long before retired to their beds, Mr. St. Claire could be seen frequenting this city's most notorious speakeasies and participating in lewd acts and drunkenness. His favorite cocktail is said to have been absinthe and cocaine.
Whole families could live for a year off the sums Mr. St. Claire would wager during a single day at the track or in a night at the bourré tables.
Indulging in behavior reminiscent of the days of plaçage from the last century, Mr. St. Claire is said to have kept a colored mistress in an apartment on Rampart Street, even continuing with the liaison after his marriage last February to famous film star Remy Lelourie.
Such was the life of Charles St. Claire.
One wonders if in his final, horrifying moments, as the cane knife slashed through the tender flesh of his throat and his red blood splattered over the floor and walls of the old slave shack on the grounds of Sans Souci—did Charles St. Claire understand at last that the sins of the flesh are paid for in death?
Mortal Sins Page 14