The Black Swan

by Day Taylor

  Ullah raised her head in alarm. "A party! We cain't have ao party!"

  Tom laughed, and pulled her close to him. "Sure we can, Ullah honey. I got it all figured out. We'll ask the boys and Adam's mama."

  "The boys is fine, but not Adam's mama. Ah doan wan' no uppity white woman nosin' 'round heah, givin' me orders in mah own house."

  To ease his own misgivings, Tom said heartily, "Adam's mama's likely to have better manners than that."

  Ullah sighed. "Mebbe." She lifted troubled eyes to his. "How long you gwine stay in Nawlens, Tom?"

  "A week or two. I want to sell the furniture and close down the house. I don't know what to do about the house servants."

  "Ain't none of 'em comin' heah," Ullah said flatly.

  Tom laughed. "I promise." He turned on his side, facing Ullah. "Haven't we talked enough for a bit?"

  Ullah chuckled softly. "You sho' a busy man 'long certain lines, Tom. Nex' thing, there be a arm baby heah, cryin' in the night."

  "A lap child and an arm baby. That sounds pretty good to me." His hands, work roughened, gently stroked her. He kissed her shoulders, her full lips, her fingers. In all the tender hollows of her, he tasted the cleanness of her well-shaped body.

  Ullah responded with an intensity of passion rare in her, clawing lightly down his arms, nipping his shoulders with her teeth. It was she who pulled him onto her eagerly, breathlessly, open-mouthed with desire. Tom, caught by

  her fire, joined his body with hers as their excitement mounted, hung suspended, and spiraled downward, leaving them both elated and pleasured.

  After a long time Ullah said, "Gwine be another girl, Tom."

  Tom felt himself quicken at the thought. Against her lips he said, "I'd rather have girls anyway. Jes' like you, UUah."

  She chuckled. "Hush yo' mouth, you sweet talker."

  But that night, instead of dreaming about all the things that crowded her mind in a kaleidoscope of happiness, Ullah dreamed of a mud-clogged pool of water that whirled and spun, pulling her into it. Frightened and shaking, she begged, "Ah doan want you to go to Naw-lens."

  "Don't be silly," Tom said easily. "Adam'U be lookin* out for you."

  "It ain't me an' Angela Ah'm afeerd for. It you, Tom. Ah had a dream 'bout muddy water. Dat means troubles. It's a warnin'. Ah knows."

  "That's only superstition, Ullah honey. Dreams can't hurt you." -^

  Tom left in the morning as he had planned. Ullah, still fretting, said, "Stay heah a few mo' days, Tom. Mebbe the trouble go 'way."

  "Ullah, I can't put it off any longer. But while I'm gone, promise me somethin'. Promise you'll be thinkin' about the barbecue, not worryin' about some old-time sayin' of your grandmammy's."

  Ullah gazed at him, her eyes bleak. "Mah granny knew. But Ah promise, Tom. You watch an' take care o' yo'seff, heah?"

  "Don't you worry on my account, Ullah," he said, hugging and kissing her. "Nothin's goin' to happen." He added, grinning, "Didn't you tell me I'm gonna be a new daddy come next summer?"

  Her eyes gleamed. "I was mebbe braggin' a li'l, but we gwine try."

  She smiled and waved until he rode out of sight. But as she went back to the house, her heart was cold and heavy with foreboding.

  Chapter Five

  Tom looked with new eyes at New Orleans, on the crescent bend of the Mississippi. It waited for him, an oasis enclosed by dikes, encompassed by the turbid yellow river, the low delta lands, and the lakes. New Orleans: a gem in a mounting of black, oily soil, soaked for eons in the water.

  It was a unique city, steeped in sophistication and sin, with untutored violence coexisting beside a hospitable gentility. My city, Tom thought, and felt himself, like it, unique. To be a New Orleanian was to be of a special breed.

  Tom entered the Vieux Carre, with its shade-dappled narrow streets that became a bed of dust in summer, a sea of black, slippery mud in rainy season. Now it was dry. And this morning the city, glowing with life and color in the midday sun, reeked of the strangely mingling odors of rot and the perfume of flowers.

  In the wooden gutters lay garbage and refuse decaying in the heat. The rough-plumaged black carrion crows with their obscene bald faces pecked about in the filth, not even troubling to fly up or squawk when the carriage passed. The offal would be cleaned up when someone got around to it. Negroes waiting in the calaboose because of some crime or to be collected by their masters after having run away would be brought forth in neck irons, chained together in gangs to sort out the refuse of a metropolis, freeing the gutters of the carrion just as the vultures did. Black carrion crows, both human and animal, ridding the city of the dregs of itself.

  From the loud, raucous laughter and yells that emanated from the bordellos on Perdido Street, Tom could turn and look down the serene, palm-shrouded coolness of the most sedate and aristocratic streets in the entire country. Streets lined with houses blending the gracious French and Spanish architecture of ancestral lands, styles brought over the ocean along with the customs and habits of generations past.

  Tom had taken the long way to his destination, but he had the time and the desire to look again at this city he had always loved, the most sensually pleasurable in the world. There was no more lovely music to his ears than the chanting of the street hawkers melodically touting their blackberries, strawberries, and bananas in their soft, sweet-sounding voices. The cries of the green sass men with their baskets of okra, snap beans, and garden greens, mingled with the hot-blooded racket emanating from the cock pits, and the bells of the grinder man, the tapping on window and door by the lightwood man. New Orleans lived and breathed to its own peculiar tempo.

  He rode past Joseph Bruin's busy slave mart at the corner of Esplanade and Chartres Streets and found he couldn't peer into its courtyard with the same amiable curiosity he'd once felt. The male slaves would be lined up on one side, the females on the other. All standing according to height, waiting for a prospective buyer to take them from the ignominy of being unowned, unknown, and unwanted merchandise. It was out of such a line Edmund Revanche had taken Ullah when she was no more than eleven years old, close as she could reckon.

  Tom didn't know what to do with his own slaves. He couldn't free them without drawing vastly unpleasant attention to himself. A man who suddenly freed his slaves without acceptable reason was a fool, or one with abolitionist sympathies.

  But Tom couldn't see himself putting Bessie, William, Jewel, and the others at the mercies of the nigger traders. A month ago he would have given it scarcely a thought. Like most Southerners, he had looked on his slaves as property, things to be bought and sold, or at best as childlike creatures given to imitation of their masters and not knowing or feeling as white men did.

  Ullah had smashed that delusion by saying that somebody made her granddaddy a nigger. Without meaning to, she had made Tom see himself as a nigger maker too.

  It was the worst thing Ullah had ever done to him. She made him doubt the attitudes he'd grown up with, without giving him the insight to answer those doubts. She had made him question the worth of his world without giving him a new one in which he could be at ease. God above, he was no Yankee lover! But what was he? He despised the abolitionists and the Northern bigots more than the

  way of life that enslaved Ullah's people. Wrong as he considered that system, its proponents cared about the blacks, and they knew them far better than the fire-breathing Yankees. Yet, he could no longer live under that system either.

  He turned down the street where George Andreas, his attorney, had his office. Carl Dorn, Andreas's secretary, looked up from the papers neatly stacked on his desk, his expression guarded and cool.

  "What do you say, Carl." Tom handed him his card. "Tell George I want to see him, will you?"

  In silence Carl took the card and scurried toward Andreas's office.

  "Don't let hin^tell you he can't see me today," Tom called, smiling.

  Carl gestured for Tom to enter George's office.

  "What the hell's got him, Geo
rge? You'd think I had the plague."

  George Andreas sat in easy dignity behind his inlaid mahogany desk. His hands met precisely in front of him. "Perhaps he thinks you do," he said with a touch of winter in his voice.

  "What does that mean?" Tom sat down, alert and anxious.

  "There have been a number of ugly rumors about you. Where have you been, Tom? Your darkies are acting guilty as hell about somethin*. You ought to know if you want a secret kept, it can't be kept by a darky."

  Tom rubbed his temple unconsciously; his head had begun to hurt. "There's no secret, George. I've just moved out of town . . . got a small piece of land." It was difficult going for him. He didn't know how much he dared let George know. 'Thought I might consider plantin'."

  "What would you want with the headaches of a plantation? Aren't your real estate holdm's enough for you, Tom?"

  "I'm satisfied. The saloons alone bring in enough and;— "

  "Lately, they've all fallen off in business."

  "All right, George, what you got stuck in your craw?"

  "You always were too soft with your darkies, Tom. Folks think maybe you're more than just soft. There's also the matter of a slave you bought from Edmund Revanche. Seems a little peculiar that the quadroon should disappear about the same time you left New Orleans."

  "That it?"

  "There is the question of the slave child you took from Gray Oaks."

  "Edmund knows he can't legally separate a mother from a child under ten years of age."

  "He expects to be paid for the child. I have managed to convince Edmund not to do anythin' about the pickaninny, but it hasn't sat well with him. What's come over you, Tom? It's a damned good thing your daddy isn't here. He'd take the buggy whip to you."

  Tom felt as though the room were closing in on him. "I paid Edmund four thousand dollars—even with his inflated ideas, that should have been enough." He said spiritlessly, "Aside from rumors and Edmund's pique, is that all?"

  George's eyebrows rose. "Is that all!? Dear Lord, man, what names you haven't been called in recent weeks aren't worth mentionin'. Your business is off, you're suspected of consortin' with rebellious niggers, some say you incited them, and you ask if that is all?"

  "They are sayin' that, are they?" Tom wiped his hand across his forehead. "I'm closin' the Clio Street house, George. Get the best price you can. Auction the furnish-in's. The field hands go with the house. I'll arrange for Bessie, William, and Jewel."

  "This is going to add fuel to the talk."

  "I can't help that."

  "What about the other house slaves? YouVe educated them, haven't you?"

  "Yes, they should be all right."

  "Be all right! You aren't actually thinkin' of freeing them?"

  "George, I don't know. Would it be so wrong to give them their papers? They've served the family for years."

  George Andreas's face hardened. "If that is what you wish to do, Tom, I'm sure nothin' I might say would dissuade you. However, if you've got any sense, you'll return to New Orelans. Reestablish yourself. Give folks a chance to see there is no truth in what they hear."

  "I'm not comin' back, George."

  "Where shall I mail your correspondence?"

  Tom looked baffled. "I'll be in now and then."

  George's mouth was drawn in a thin line of disapproval.

  "You're a damned fool," he snarled. "Get yourself another attorney."

  Tom hesitated, then gave him the Tremains' address.

  George's face brightened. "You courtin' Paul Tremain's widow? That's the first sensible thing you've said today. Zoe Tremain is a fine lady."

  "Yes, she is." Already Tom felt guilty that he had involved her. "Just send my mail to her. She'll know how to reach me."

  When Tom left George's office, he felt more tired than he did after a full day's work. His head buzzed with old worries and new ones. Without thinking, he headed toward the coffee shop where he and Ross and Edmund had spent so many pleasant afternoons.

  He ordered his favorite, cafe brulot. The place hummed with the deep, harmonious sounds of men's voices. Through foreign eyes Tom looked at the too familiar sight of men at a leisure that neither time nor circumstances changed. With some discomfiture he saw Edmund Revanche sitting with Ross Bennett, Mark Wilford, and Etienne Bordulac.

  Ross ostentatiously moved his chair so that his back was to Tom, but Edmund's cold, snapping eyes waited with knowing patience for Tom to greet him.

  "What'cha say, Edmund?" Tom asked softly as he approached their table. "Goin' to have a big cane crop?"

  "Looks good, Tom. Pull up a chair. You've kept yourself scarce these days. Old friends forgotten, Tom?"

  "You know better than that. Hello, Ross, Etienne, Mark."

  Ross made a sound somewhere between a clearing of the throat and a laugh. He downed the remainder of the warmed sling in his glass and hailed one of the scurrying bilingual waiters to refill it for him.

  Tom spoke briefly to the other two men and fell silent trying to concentrate on the conversation his arrival had interrupted.

  Mark was saying, "The Underground stations are only a day's ride apart. My God, they'll have 'em in a line door to door if it isn't stopped. I tell you, Etienne, these damned nigger stealers won't give up until they've forced us into war!"

  "If anybody's gonna start a war, it should be us," Ross

  agreed. "The Abolitionists are challengin' us, an* there ain't a Southerner worth his salt that don't show a challenger who's boss. Ain't that right, Mark?"

  "The boys are a bit riled." Edmund balanced his chair on the two back legs enjoying the spectacle. "There's been the usual talk of uprisings and conspiracies. Now there's been a passel of rumors that some of the nigger-lovin* bastards are of our own kind. That won't go down in these parts. But, of course, our friends miss the main point."

  Tom kept his eyes in earnest study on one of the many paintings of voluptuous and licentious women that adorned the walls. He said, "No one is goin' to start a war over the niggers."

  "That is precisely what they will do. Of course the war, when it comes, won't really have anything to do with the niggers, but the loyal patriots who promote war will use the inalienable rights of mankind guaranteed by our estimable Constitution to serve their own ends. What a noble war it will be for future historians!"

  "Damn, you're the most cynical, cold bastard I've ever met," Tom said, awed, as though seeing Edmund clearly for the first time.

  Edmund laughed comfortably. "Because I say people are asinine enough to blunder into war? You've mistaken cynicism for clear-sightedness, Tom. We Southerners are a political minority. Political minorities get defeated and overlooked for their own good, particularly when their economic mainstay is a target of active fanaticism of the Northern majority.

  "Abolitionists attack us on moral grounds. Save the soul of mankind! Yet their true attack comes at our economy. Whether they believe in their bigoted preachments is beside the point. What matters is that profit-seekin* Northerners will parrot the words of their abolitionist preachers. The South will become the symbol of evil."

  "Who the hell cares what they think!" Mark shouted. **We don't mix in with their way of slavery. They kill 'em in their sweatshops! Damn, they don't give a good spit about any o' their people."

  "We oughta hang the damned abolitionist bastards," Ross said sullenly.

  Etienne said, "Do go on, Edmund. What of cotton? Would they risk closin' their own mills and factories to rid us of slavery? Our cotton and raw exports represent

  sixty per cent of the export value of the entire nation. New Orleans is a more active port, by value as well as volume, than even New York. Can they do without us?"

  A knowing smile played on Edmund's mouth. "Can they do without us?"

  Ross laughed in satisfaction. "Hell no, they can't!"

  "Can't they?" Edmund laughed bitterly. "Cotton, gentlemen, mountains of cotton. That's our Achilles heel. We need the North. We can hurt them economically, but, by God,
they can bring us to our knees. We've already given away our rights to an equal voice in the government a word at a time."

  "Then, the great Compromise was just another loss for us."

  Edmund shrugged. "It drew the battle lines for the admission of each new state and territory, did it not? Did not the people of California lose all voice in the matter of slavery? Where are their inalienable rights? The Northern industrialists are imposin' their way on us and the new state, because their needs are not the same as ours.

  "The North," he continued, "isn't agricultural in the same way we are. Theirs is subsistence farmin*. In fact, gentleman, no section of this vast country is agricultural in the same fashion we are. It makes our politics and our lives different. Our government is becomin' a toady of Northern interests to the detriment of other sections.

  "You talk of war, gentlemen? I talk of survival. We need manufacturing, railroads, shipping. Of course there will be a war. The question is when, and will we be prepared."

  "Calhoun was the only damned man who knew what he was talkin' about. Our daddies shoulda been uniting the South back in the thirties," Mark said. "Damned Yankee insurrectionists."

  With a thickening tongue, Ross boasted, "No Southerner is gonna let no-count Yankees make no never mind. There's ways of takin' care o' insurrectionists and nigger-lovers. There's ways, an' I'm one Southerner who believes in doin' what has to be done." For the first time he looked directly at Tom, his handsome face contorted by hostility and drink. "Ain't those your sentiments, Tom, or have you had a recent change of heart?"

  "You know how I feel, Ross, how I've always felt."

  Ross laughed harshly.

  "That's no way to treat a new bridegroom, Ross. Last thing on Tom's mind is politics," Edmund said smoothly.

  Tom's head snapped up. Mark and Etienne looked at him curiously. "You have been married, Tom?" Etienne asked.

  Tom's heart was hammering so hard he began to shake. He placed the cup of cafe brulot on the table to avoid spilling it. Edmund Revanche followed the movement with amusement.