‘You must admit,’ added Agnes Pellicot – the Widow Levesque’s former rival among the free colored demi-monde and, since the bank crash, her most assiduous friend – ‘this story of a mysterious witness who just happened to vanish at an inopportune moment is a little ridiculous. Why hasn’t he come forward, if the whole transaction was innocent?’
‘And it’s quite true,’ added Virginie, feeding a finger-full of butter to one of Livia Levesque’s two exceedingly fat yellow cats, ‘that every man of wealth and position in this city defends the Turk because of his gold.’
When January opened his mouth to protest that every man of wealth and position in this city had been slandering the Turk like a parcel of schoolgirls the previous evening, Bernadette – the eldest of the sisters and, at nearly fifty, still the closest thing January had ever seen to Original Sin – cut him off with, ‘Precisely the reason they’re going to let that dreadful man walk away free. We all know perfectly well that first, Mr Smith never existed, and secondly, that they’re going to let the Pasha go because they’re hoping he’ll invest in their businesses. If he dies, God knows who’s going to get that money. The nearest Mohammedan Orphanage, I dare say.’
During the inevitable speculation about where the Mohammedan plutocrat had acquired his gold, and where he had it hidden (‘I’ve heard he has great jars of it buried beneath the floor of his cellar!’ ‘Don’t be silly, Babette, there isn’t a house in New Orleans that has a cellar . . .’) January forced himself to sit back and regather his perspective, noting that one of the Metoyer sisters had acquired a new lover . . . and a wealthy one, to judge by Babette’s new tignon and Virginie’s very beautiful new French shawl. Bernadette was, as usual, quietly dressed in plain aubergine silk, but under the edge of her close-wrapped dark tignon glinted new earrings, solitaire diamonds of well over six carats apiece. Moreover, there was something in her manner, sleek and pleased with herself.
‘It’s driving Agnes Pellicot out of her wits,’ reported his sister Dominique, when he and Rose walked her to her own little cottage on Rue Dumaine after everyone had imbibed as much tea and gossip as they could stand. ‘She thought she’d just concluded the bargain with some American for Marie-Niège, and yesterday his cotton press and warehouse closed down and he’s had to leave town . . . and, Agnes says, she’d already bought Marie-Niège a new set of dishes for the house – Crown Derby, and the most beautiful Chantilly pattern! – and silk for three dresses, and M’sieu Cailleteau at the sign of the Golden Rabbit won’t take the dishes back. Which is monstrously unfair of him—’
‘It goes to prove, I suppose,’ remarked Rose, ‘that your sister Olympe’s curses actually do work. I understand Marie-Niège went to her and begged for a spell to stop the match, which she didn’t feel she was able to tell her mama she didn’t actually want. I shall have to keep that in mind.’
‘Well, these days one can’t afford to be choosy.’ Dominique paused before the door of her cottage, bought for her – in the usual arrangement – by a stout and still-wealthy sugar-planter. ‘I don’t think anyone I know has been placed in months, and in fact poor Iphigènie Picard was told by Hercule Lafrènniére that they would actually have to part – because of money, you know – and her mother is just furious . . . So it drives Agnes wild that Bernadette is still able to find a protector on her own, at her age . . . though she may very well be sharing him with Virginie and Babette,’ she finished matter-of-factly. ‘The way they did with Mr Granville.’
January said, ‘Hmn.’
And where lay the difference, he reflected as he and Rose continued on their way toward their own house, between such businesslike negotiations by the well-dressed mamas of Rampart street, and Shamira’s mother, who had obliged her daughter agree to concubinage, that there might be money to educate her brother and keep her mother in a modicum of food?
Where else could a girl go, in Cairo or New Orleans or in the swampy wilds of St John Parish? What could a girl do, except thank God that she was beautiful enough to be given the choice between selling her body for a decent return, or spending her life cleaning out someone else’s chamber pots?
He glanced at Rose, seeing – despite her ironic amusement at the follies of the world – sadness in her eyes. The school she had taught – the school she hoped to teach once more if anyone in this world ever had any money again – was a quixotic absurdity in this world, offering to instruct young girls of color in such stupidly useless subjects as history and chemistry, literature and logic, mathematics and microscopes: subjects for which Rose’s own tough mind had hungered as a hunting dog hungers for meat.
No wonder we went broke, January reflected with a sigh. Why can’t we let them be bored and ignorant and have done with it? What good will it do them, or us, to know that nappy African hair has a different shape than a white girl’s silky curls?
‘This came for you, Uncle Ben,’ Zizi-Marie greeted him as they came up the steps to the front gallery, and she held out a folded sheet of paper. ‘At least I think it’s for you. It was stuck under the window in the parlor.’
American, January mentally identified it even as he unfolded the sheet. Americans never understood the Creole rules that only animals came into the house through the French doors of the parlor, instead of through the bedroom of their hostess or host. Personally, he had never understood why, but this had been so firmly beaten into him as a child that it still made him slightly edgy when he saw American men do so, in the houses where he had – up until the bank crash – taught piano to little American children . . . Not that he, as a black man, had ever been allowed to go in through the front opening of any house, French or American, not even his mother’s. It wouldn’t be right, was all his mother ever said about it when he’d asked.
The handwriting was unfamiliar.
Mr January,
The pears you ordered from Boston have arrived. I will give myself the pleasure of holding them for you at my office on Peters Street at the corner of Poydras, this evening at 6.
P.B.
Rose said, ‘I’ll tell Willie to get his things together.’
Pears from Boston meant the slave runners.
EIGHTEEN
January half-expected that the meeting-point with P.B. – whoever that was – would be at one of the warehouses that lined the river below Peters Street. The code was a simple one, but the neighborhood, upstream of Canal Street in the American sector, was one to which he didn’t go any more than he had to.
He could think of few buildings in that neighborhood that weren’t warehouses – except for an occasional saleroom where slaves were put on display. Upriver from the market, each cotton factor and sugar exporter had his own warehouses, sometimes his own wharves. In flush times bales or barrels would be brought in on steamboats, the cotton stacked so high on the decks as to completely cover the barn-like superstructure. Even in hard times like these, cotton was big business . . .
And that business demanded slaves.
And when a white cotton-farmer paid eleven hundred dollars for a slave, he wasn’t going to listen to that slave’s protests that he was really a free musician from New Orleans who’d been captured and drugged while walking around the streets of the American quarter like an idiot one night. Yeah, sure you are, Sambo. And since that white man’s friends and in-laws and – more importantly – his creditors would constitute any judge, jury, and law enforcement in the district, it was unlikely that protests would garner the hapless victim anything but a beating.
Even by day, January hated to go above Canal Street and into the American town. By night it terrified him.
In the French Town, there were free blacks who could attest to his freedom, and French Creole judges who would believe a free black a lot sooner than they’d believe an American.
Above Canal Street he was in enemy territory, eleven hundred dollars in the pocket of any man who had a gun.
The code used by the slave runners in New Orleans was a simple offset. Six o’clock meant eight
. Poydras Street actually meant Lafayette.
The penalty for helping slaves escape from their rightful owner was five hundred dollars – enough to sweep away everything January owned. House, hope, his son’s chances of a decent life in the world . . . Given the wrong judge and the certainty of an all-white jury, he wasn’t at all confident that the court wouldn’t find some more serious penalty for a black man . . .
And if the matter wasn’t brought to court, but only settled by angry slave-owners themselves in some alley at night, the consequences could be worse yet.
‘You sure this ain’t a trap?’ whispered Willie.
January wasn’t, but he breathed: ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘Who’s this Mr Bredon, that signed my pass?’ The field hand fished in his jacket pocket for the paper, to be presented to anyone who asked them, that said he was on business for his owner.
‘Never met him,’ said January, which was a lie. Judas Bredon was one of the men who coordinated slave escapes from New Orleans; the man who had asked January to join those who helped the fugitives. January carried his legitimate free-papers tucked into one boot . . . and a completely illegal knife in the other. At eight o’clock on a December night the river fog reduced visibility among the warehouses to a few yards, and the stench of sewage, garbage, and cattle pens masked the burnt sugar and smoke of the refineries; the air was so thick that it was almost palpable in the swaying glimmer of his lantern.
The glare of cressets around the wharves dimmed away behind them. The clop of hooves faded; January heard the sloosh of the river around wharf pilings.
Music drifted through the fog.
At first he thought it was a work chant, men wailing African words they’d learned as children as they worked late to unload cotton. But there were too many voices, women’s as well as men’s. Words took shape in the darkness.
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land.
Tell old Pharoah:
Let my people go . . .
The building on the corner of Peters Street and Lafayette had probably been a cotton warehouse until the bank crash. It was brick and unprepossessing, the windows of its upper floor shuttered tight. Those on the lower glowed with the dull orange gleam of lanterns. Fog drifted through the topaz gleam of the open doors. Against that grimy light, January saw men and women, either slaves or the roughest sort of artisans and dock workers.
He thought: It’s a Protestant church.
Yet the music pulled at something in his chest, like the sound of the waves had the first time he’d seen the ocean.
At his mother’s that afternoon, between bouts of slandering Hüseyin Pasha, he’d heard all about Letty – the Metoyers’ maid – who was American-born and Protestant, to the great contempt of not only the three Metoyer sisters, but also their Louisiana-born Catholic cook. I tell Elise to show a little Christian charity to the girl, but honestly, she does bring it on herself, you know . . . Oh, I don’t know what kind of Protestant – there are about a hundred of them, aren’t there? Methodists and Lutherans and Baptists, and heaven only knows how they can tell each other apart . . .
And the chuckle in Virginie Metoyer’s voice had been like the flick of a whip.
It seems like it’s harder and harder to find a good Catholic maid these days . . .
He and Willie moved into the doorway.
When Israel was in Egypt land,
(Let my people go . . . )
Oppressed so hard they couldn’t stand,
(Let my people go . . . )
Voices called and answered, the familiar patterns of a thousand old songs that January remembered from the village ring-shouts as a child. His mother’s voice came back to his memory, sweet as a bronze chime, though these days she denied she’d ever gone to such diversions. . . . Like the field hollers of the men in the roulaison, when truly, he thought, they were oppressed so hard they couldn’t stand . . .
And like the hollers, like the ring shouts, like the field songs whose words served to warn runaways in the woods when the riding boss came by (‘Wade in the water . . . Run to the rocks . . . ’ Which actually meant: The Man’s comin’ with the dogs . . . ), he recognized at once that this hymn was in code.
Only, this time, the code wasn’t escape.
The code was hope, and the hope smote him like a blow with a club.
God knows our names.
He won’t let us be slaves forever.
He saved the Children of Israel, and he’ll save us.
January had attended Protestant meetings before and hadn’t been impressed. The sight of the sinners on the ‘anxious bench’, down before the preacher, writhing and sobbing at the thought of their sins, had filled him with distaste and with contempt for the Americans who felt they had to turn the state of one’s soul into a show. He had felt as separate from the ranting of the preacher on that occasion – several years ago, now – as he had felt when he’d watched that ecstatic young girl in pink silk and jewels, at the Convent of St Theresa in Batignolles . . . As he’d felt when, as a young man, he’d been drawn by the music to the slave dances at the brickyard on Rue Dumaine and had seen men and women reeling and shouting under the influence of the African loa and West Indian rum.
There was an ‘anxious bench’ in this makeshift church, but the preacher wasn’t trying to convert anyone on it. And in an odd echo of the voodoo dances – to which Protestant blacks were not welcome – January looked around him and saw nothing but faces as dark as his own. Not even the polite crème café of the librés, nor the dusky sang-melée hues that everyone in New Orleans, white and black alike, preferred.
These were the American-born slaves: more African of blood than the gens de couleur libré, so shut out of their society; not Catholic; not French; and utterly without power.
God knows our names . . .
The man at the pulpit was young. Somehow, January knew it was the P.B. he was here to see, the man who was risking his life to get men like Willie away to a country where they could be free. His voice was strong, and though he spoke in the ranting, over-familiar style favored by the white Protestant preachers, he was an excellent speaker. Men and women called out, ‘Amen!’ and ‘You tell us, brother!’ as they did during storytelling times, either at parties at the back of town or when January had been a child in the Bellefleur slave-village: not for them the respectful silence of the Mass.
‘The Children of Israel had forgotten God’s law, and so God sent them harsh masters, cruel masters.’ The preacher’s hand made a long slashing gesture, calling all eyes. Lanterns flanked his makeshift podium. Against their glow January could barely see his face. ‘But God relented and sent them a Law, for all men to obey. Even as he sends his Law to us all now . . .’
Code, thought January. His eyes traveled over the room, and even in the dimness he picked out the white countenance of the man sitting on a chair near the pulpit: the white preacher whose congregation sponsored this midweek meeting for the slaves. Most denominations in the south forbade black preachers to have their own congregations, so that young man who spoke so beautifully was – and always would be – merely a ‘guest’ of the white pastor.
‘If we follow that Law, we can all hope for our reward in Heaven. We can all hope to become the Children of God, welcomed into his bosom, taken up like Elijah in a chariot of flame, never to have toil or grief or pain any more . . .’
And maybe – January could hear it as clearly as if the preacher’s thoughts radiated from mind to mind throughout the room – we won’t have to wait for Heaven, but can escape at least a little of that toil while we’re still here on Earth . . .
‘We must be faithful. We must have hope. God knows our names, brothers and sisters – for you are all my brothers and sisters. You are all EACH OTHERS’ brothers and sisters. God knows where every single one of his children lives, what they do each day, who they love, and what dreams they dream at night. There isn’t a word you whisper in prayer that God doesn’t hear . . .’
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br /> Could that white preacher, sitting there smiling, really be that stupid? Probably, reflected January. Whites didn’t grow up with that sense of the world being one way and everyone saying it was different. Didn’t grow up with the sense of a double universe, visible and unseen equal and alike, laid over one another like two colors of light. With a sense of coded meanings that sounded innocent and really meant wherever you are hiding, brother runaway, duck down NOW ’cause the Man’s coming . . .
He knew full well that no state government would permit an all-black church, for precisely that reason. Hope was too strong a thing to let it go blazing up on its own. You had to make sure the whites kept an eye on a black man preaching hope . . .
And he smiled as the congregation burst into song again, right under that smug nose:
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home . . .
He glanced sidelong at Willie’s face and saw – almost with a sense of shock – the wide eyes, the tears flowing down silently. Willie, too, knew that home wasn’t Heaven.
Home was where he could be free.
Willie and January lingered as the congregation drifted into the night. Curfew was at ten. January guessed that more than a few of the men and women here had slipped away without their masters’ knowledge and had to hasten back before the master returned. From the shadows by the door, he recognized Bernadette Metoyer’s little housemaid, Letty, and Sillery, Jones, and Delilah from the livery. He nodded a greeting to a tall young man named Four-Eyes he’d met while playing piano last winter uptown, and others that he’d seen when he went to the uptown grocery where, after hours, the American-born black musicians would go to play American tunes with African rhythm, syncopated and wry. Up by the pulpit, the young preacher was besieged with handshakes and those who clustered close to speak. As he and Willie slipped through the knots of men and women, January saw the pastor’s face slick with sweat, like a man who has been working the roulaison furnace. The sweat also made his hair look black, curly like Rose’s rather than nappy (What does it look like under a microscope? he couldn’t stop himself from wondering) and soaked to dripping points.
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 19