01 A Free Man of Color bj-1

by Barbara Hambly

  "Hey, Sambo," yelled a mulatto woman, "you that big all over?" She gave him a broken-toothed smile and hiked her skirt up farther.

  January grinned and raised his cap to her-he was wearing his roughest clothes and the sloppy cloth cap of a laborer-and shook his head. He started to move on but a bearded flatboat man was suddenly in front of him, piggy eyes glittering with a half-drunken hangover and tobacco crusted in his beard.

  "You leave them hoors alone, boy." He stepped close, crowding him; January stepped back. As usual, the Kentuckian wasn't by himself. They always seemed to travel in twos and threes, and his friends emerged from the nearest barroom door, like sullen dogs looking for something to do.

  January was startled into replying, "I was," which was a mistake, he realized a moment later. It hadn't been accompanied by a grin and bow.

  The man smelled like a privy; the hair of his chest, hanging through his open shirt, was visibly alive with lice. "You was lookin'," he said, stepping forward again. "And you was thinkin'."

  About THOSE women? January wanted to say but knew the man-the men, all of them-were actively spoiling for a fight. He managed the bow, but the grin was difficult. "I wasn't thinkin' nuthin', sir, no sir," he said, keeping his eyes down and reflecting that if he ended up in the Calabozo now, he was in serious trouble. There were those in the city guard who might decide his confession would be the shortest way out of everybody's problems, and the thought of what they might do to obtain it turned him cold inside.

  He backed from the Americans, stepping with all appearance of an accident into the stream of sewage down the middle of the street. Hating himself, furious, knowing he could pick his assailant up and heave him through the nearest shed wall and not daring to raise his hand, he mocked a little jump of surprise, looked down at his boots, and cried, "Oh, Lordy, now my master gonna wear me out, gettin' my boots all nasty! Oh, Lordy..." He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and began to scrub at the filthy slop.

  In contempt, the bearded man stepped forward and shoved him, throwing him full-length in the stream. January caught himself on his hands but rolled and sprawled, flinging up his legs to make the fall look worse than it was. He lay where he was, breathing hard, not daring to look up at the laughing circle of men who had gathered, knowing his eyes would betray him. It's an alternative to being beaten, he repeated to himself. It's an alternative to being hanged.

  They moved on after a moment, whooping among themselves and shoving each other: "Lordy, Lordy, mah massa gwine wear me out..."

  He heard the whore's voice, "You sure put it to that black buck, handsome," and, a moment later, the ringing sound of a slap and the smack of her body into the doorjamb behind her.

  "You keep your bitchy eyes where they belong, nigger.

  He got to his feet and moved on, as quietly and inconspicuously as he could. I will leave this place, he thought, his hair still prickling with anger that the only choice he had had was to let himself be struck, to degrade himself in order to get away. The world is wide...

  ... and contains nothing.

  He shook away the old despair. At least most of the world doesn't contain Kentucky swine with their bellies over their belts and no more reading than Livia's cats have. A hundred and fifty dollars.

  Provided, of course, that he survived this at all.

  Past another row of cribs-only a few of which were open-he turned right down an alley, glancing behind him to make sure his erstwhile tormentors were not watching. A drunken Choctaw snored under a straggling cypress tree, naked as Adam without even a blanket to cover him. Someone had taken one of his moccasins, but evidently found it wanting-it had large holes in it-and discarded it in the weeds not far away. The other was still on the Indian's foot.

  Came into town with his loads of pelts or fiU, thought January, and spent last night drinking up the profits. He bent, checked the man for signs of exposure, but he was sleeping peacefully. With a shrug, January passed on. In the yard behind the cribs a small group of men were gathered, watching a cockfight. Freed slaves, January guessed, or the men who bought a kind of quasi-freedom from their owners by the day or the week, seeking employment as laborers where they could and preferring whatever sheds and alleyways they could find to sleeping in the cramped slave quarters constantly overlooked by the windows of the whites. A ragged little girl was watching the alleyway-at the first sign of police, the men could disperse leaving nothing but a splattering of chicken blood on the ground.

  Whoever had given Shaw the task of running these men down wanted to keep him very busy.

  January crossed the yard. The kitchen lay to his right, empty save for a huge mulatto woman nursing a baby while she cooked a panful of grits at the stove. He glanced briefly through the door: the room was alive with roaches and stank of rats, but the woman was crooning a little song about Compair Rabbit, and the child seemed quiet enough.

  A rickety stair led up the back of the whorehouse to a ramshackle attic under the roof. January had to bend his tall height to edge through the narrow door, stoop even in the center of the pointed room under the ridgepole. At the far end, under one of the dusty dormers, he could make out books stacked against the wall and a mattress laid on the floor. Mice fled squeaking from the sound of his feet. Down below, he heard the thump and creak of a bed frame striking a flimsy wall and a man's piglike grunts.

  "I don't know where they get the energy at this hour of the morning," came Hannibal's voice plaintively from the mattress. "The Glutton-she's the second from the far end-has been at it since eight o'clock. Even at five cents a turn she has to be making a fortune. Nine of them so far. I've been married to women who didn't perform that much in a year."

  January knelt beside the mattress. In the dusty light the fiddler looked awful, his face ghastly white and sunken in the dark frame of his long hair. Blood spotted the sheet over him and blotched the rags thrown down near a water pitcher not far away, and the threadbare nightshirt he wore was damp with sweat. His

  pulse was steady, however, and his nails, when pinched, returned to color quickly, and when January put his ear to his friend's chest he heard none of the telltale rattle of pneumonia.

  "I'm sorry I missed the Hermanns' ball," said Hannibal, when January sat up again. "Did you get someone to replace me?"

  "Bichet's nephew Johnnie."

  "Then I completely abase myself. That's the best you could do? The boy couldn't keep time with a clock in his hand to help him. I'll be there tonight, I promise."

  January looked gravely down at him, the bled-out pallor and shaky hands. "You sure?"

  " 'How has he the leisure to be sick, in such a justling time?' I'll be there. I need the money."

  More thumping and rattling below. A man cried out, as if startled or hurt. Hannibal shut his eyes.

  "Besides, this place was bad enough last night. Tonight's Mardi Gras, and I'd much rather be at the Theatre d'Orleans snabbling oysters than here listening to the bedstead symphony and the fights in the barroom. The Butcher came up and sat with me a little last night-she's the one who brought me the water-but they'll all be busy tonight, so I'd just as soon brush up my good coat and make my appearance in society. Which reminds me, I don't know what French privies are like, but in this country we go into them from the top, not the bottom."

  January looked down at his coat and laughed bitterly. "Evidently not in Kentucky," he said, and Hannibal looked quickly away.

  "Ah. I should have... Well."

  "My mama'd tell me that's what you get when you go past Canal Street and mix with the Americans. She-"

  The outside door opened. The big woman entered, having replaced the baby with a bowl of grits and gravy in one enormous hand, two cups of coffee on saucers balanced easily in the other. In spite of her size and girth -coupling with her would be like mounting a plow horse, thought January admiringly-she was beautiful, if one had not been raised to believe white skin and delicate features constituted all of beauty.

  "I saw you was up here, Ben," she
said, kneeling beside him and handing him the cup. It wasn't clean, but he'd drunk from far worse, and the coffee was strong enough to kill cholera, yellow fever, or such of this woman's customers as survived the woman herself. "How you feelin', Hannibal?"

  "Ready to imitate the action of the tigers." He sat up a little, poked at the contents of the dish, and ate a few mouthfuls without much enthusiasm. The woman reached into her dress pocket and produced a small bottle. "I found this in Nancy's room. There ain't much left, but if you water it some it may last you."

  Hannibal held the bottle to the light, and January smelled the swoony alcohol bitterness of laudanum. The fiddler's mouth quirked-evidently Nancy had consumed most of the contents-but he said, "Thank you, Mary. At least I've been into every pawnshop in town enough that most of the pawnbrokers won't take my violin anymore," he added philosophically. "So the girls have quit hocking it. And of course the books are perfectly safe."

  "I went down by Tia Hojie and got you this," Mary went on. She produced a small bag of red flannel from the same pocket, put it around Hannibal's neck on a long, dirty ribbon. "Don't you open it," she

  added, as he made a move to do so. "It's healin' juju-a black cat bone and mouse heads and I don't know what all else. You just wear it and it'll help you. I got a green candle to burn here, too."

  "Thank you," said Hannibal, reaching out to take the woman's hands. "That's good of you, truly. What'll Big Mag say about having a candle up here? She took away the lamp I had to read by," he added to January. "When it gets dark, all I can do is lie here and listen to the fights downstairs."

  "I'll put it in a glass jar," promised Mary. "Besides, Big Mag gonna be busy tonight; she won't know nuthin'. I'll put the mark on your shoes and burn this here candle while you're gone, and you feel better in the mornin'."

  Hannibal coughed, fighting the spasm, then managed a smile. "I'll feel better knowing I can pay Mag her rent money," he said. "Thank you."

  The woman collected the blood-crusted rags, checked to see there was water in the pitcher, and departed. Hannibal sank back on the mattress with the barely touched bowl of grits next to his hand and fell almost immediately to sleep. January shook his head, covered the bowl with the saucer, and descended the stairs. On a sudden thought he crossed the kitchen yard, to where Fat Mary was fussing around the kitchen once more. As he had suspected, there was a residue of brick dust on the kitchen steps, and a little smear of ochre on the doorsill.

  "Maybe you can help me," he said, and she turned, the baby on one hip again and a square black bottle of gin in her hand.

  "Maybe I can," she smiled.

  "I hear there's a new girl around this part of town; skinny Congo girl name of Sally. Runaway from one of the plantations. You know where she'd be, how I can talk to her?"

  "Sally." The woman frowned, searching her mind.

  She spoke English with a rough eastern accent, Virginia or the Carolinas, slow and drawling after the flat, clippy vowels of New Orleans speech. "Name don't sound familiar, and I know most of the girls on the game roundabouts here."

  "She may not be on the game yet," said January. "She ran off with a little bit of money. She's got a new calico dress, new earbobs, maybe. She ran off with a man."

  "She runned off with a man, she end up on the game fast enough." She refreshed herself with a swig of gin, and rocked her child gently, swaying on big, bare, pink-soled feet. "But I ain't seen any of the men round about here-not the ones with money to go buyin' calico and earbobs for a woman-with a new gal. I'll ask around some, though."

  "Thank you, Mary." He slipped an American fifty-cent piece onto the table where she could pick it up after he left. He saw her note it with her eye, but she made no comment. He wasn't exactly sure what he thought Sally could tell him, but he was beginning to be very curious about exactly what Madeleine Trepagier had done Thursday night and in what state her clothing had been when she returned home.

  Sally would know. And, if Sally were sufficiently resentful of her mistress to run away, Sally could probably be induced to talk. It would at least give him somewhere else to look, some other avenue to point out to Shaw.

  "One other question? I'm trying to find a voodooienne name of Olympia. I don't know what her second name is these days, but she's about so tall, skinny, real dark, like me. She's under Marie Laveau."

  "Everbody under Mamzelle Marie these days," said Fat Mary, without animosity. "She make damn sure no other queen operatin' on her own in this town. Olympia?" She frowned. "That'd be Olympia Corbier, over Customhouse Street-Olympia Snakebones, she called. She got big power, they say, but she crazy." She shrugged. " 'Course, they all a little crazy. Even the nice ones, like Tia Hojie."

  "Where on Customhouse Street?"

  " 'Tween Bourbon and Burgundy. She got a little cottage there. Her man Corbier's an upholsterer, but he don't got much to say for himself."

  "If I was married to a voodooienne," said January, "I wouldn't have much to say for myself, either."

  He turned away from the kitchen door. From the barroom at the far end of the line of cribs a sudden commotion of shouting broke out, whoops and screams and curses. Someone yelled "Look out! He's got a knife!" Through the window that looked into the yard a man's body came flying, bringing with it a tangle of cheap curtains, glass, and fragments of sash. The man sprawled, gasping, in the some three inches of unspeakable water that puddled most of the yard, as another man came crashing through the remains of the window and half a dozen others-all white, all bearded, all wearing the filthy linsey-woolsey shirts and coarse woolen sus-pendered pants of flatboat men-came boiling out through the rear door. The audience from the cockfight in the corner of the yard gravitated at once to the far more inviting spectacle and the man in the mud was yelling "Christ, he's killed me! Christ, I'm bleeding!"

  The smell of blood was rank, sweet, hot in the bright air. January strode across the yard, forced his way to the front of the crowd in time to see the man on the ground sit up, face chalky under a graying bush of tobacco-stained beard. His thigh had been opened for almost a hand's breadth, brilliant arterial blood spouting in huge gouts. The man fell back, groaning, back arching.

  Without thinking January said, "Bandanna," and Mary, who'd come running out of the kitchen beside him, pulled off her tignon and handed it to him. He knelt beside the boatman, twisted the blue-and-yellow kerchief high around the man's thigh, almost into the groin, and reached back, saying, "Stick-something..."

  Somebody handed him the ramrod from a pistol. He twisted it into the tourniquet, screwing it tight, his hands working automatically, remembering a dozen or a hundred similar emergencies in the night clinic at the Hotel Dieu. "Bandanna," he repeated, reaching out again, and a neckerchief was put into his hands. It smelled to heaven, was black with greasy sweat, and crept with lice, but there was no time to be choosy. He folded it into a pad, pressed it hard on the wound, the additional pressure closing it.

  The patient groaned, reached out, and whispered, "Whisky. For the love of God, whisky."

  January took the bottle somebody handed down and poured it on the makeshift dressing. The man screamed at the sting of it, grabbed the bottle from his hand, and yelled, "Git this nigger away from me! Nahum! Git him away, I say! Who the hell let him touch old Gator Jim? I killed niggers his size 'fore I was old enough to spit straight!"

  "He shouldn't have whisky," said January, as someone else held out another bottle. "He needs to have that cut cleaned and stitched, cauterized if possible."

  "The hell you say!" yelled the patient, trying to sit up.

  "T'bacca juice'll clean it just as well," added another one of the boatmen, and that seemed to act as a license- every one of the men had a remedy. Gator Jim swigged deeply of the whisky and when January tried to stop him two men pulled him back, thrust him away into the muddy yard.

  "You can't-" began January, as the boatmen carried their friend back into the saloon. One stepped clear and stood in his path.

  For some reason he
recognized the man called Nahum Shagrue, whom he'd last seen at the Calabozo.

  "Saloon's for white men, boy." Shagrue's voice was very quiet, but his eyes were the eyes of a wild pig: intelligent, ugly, and deadly dangerous, calculating where and how to attack. He had a pistol and two knives in his belt, another knife protruding from the top of one boot, and the end of his nose was a flattened mass of scar tissue, as if someone had bitten off the tip of it long ago. The cut he'd got on his forehead from the city guard was a crusted mess over one spiky brow, and tobacco juice made brown stains as if roaches had been squashed in his blond beard. He spit now, copious and accurate, on January's foot.

  "He needs to have that wound cleaned if he isn't going to get blood poisoning," said January. "And he needs to have it stitched, and the tourniquet loosened every five minutes if-"

  "What, you think you're some kinda doctor, boy?"

  January had enough sense not to reply.

  "We kin take care of our own 'thout no uppity nigger tellin' us what to do," said Shagrue. "Now you git, 'fore you're the one needs cleanin' an' stitchin'."

  From within the saloon, January could hear the harsh upriver voices. "Holy Christ, get him some whisky." "I hear cowshit on a wound'll draw the poison right out." "Lady over on Jackson Street got a cow..." "The hell with them fancy French doctors, get me old Injun Sam... Sober him up first..."