by Ray Celestin
His grandmother took a moment, and then explained in language tailored for his six-year-old self, that his mother, living out in Black Storyville, had contracted an illness after giving birth to his new baby sister, and that Lewis’s father had abandoned her once more. Then she explained that Lewis had to move to his mother’s house to care for her, and the woman sitting next to his grandmother was going to take him there. Lewis looked from his grandmother to the stranger, and back again, and promptly burst into tears.
As his grandmother dressed him in his best clothes – a white Lord Fauntleroy suit – and packed his case, she tried to soothe him as best she could, then after he had said a tearful goodbye, the stern-looking woman led Lewis out of the house.
When they got to the tram stop at Tulane Avenue, the woman, exasperated by Lewis’s bawling, knelt down next to him and spoke to him for the first time, in a voice that was surprisingly warm.
‘Lewis,’ she said, ‘you know what that place is behind the stop?’
Lewis followed her finger to the doleful red-brick building on the other side of the road – the House of Detention. Lewis nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes.
‘It’s where the bad people go,’ he said, and the woman nodded at him and smiled.
‘Now, if you don’t shut the hell up, that’s where you gonna end up, too,’ she hissed.
Lewis felt like bursting into tears once again, but he did everything he could to stay quiet and not sob. He wiped the tears from his eyes and resolved not to look at the woman again, in case her hard, stranger’s face caused him to bawl once more.
Presently the streetcar arrived. Lewis had never ridden the streetcar before. He stepped onto the tram after the woman, nodded hello at the driver, and sat in the first row of seats, where there was a window free for him to look out of. The driver rang the bell, and the tram sped off, and Lewis smiled as he watched the houses go by. And then he heard the woman shout his name. He turned to see her sitting all the way at the back of the tram with a vexed expression on her face.
‘Boy!’ she shouted. ‘Get back here where you belong!’
Lewis, thinking she was joking, turned back around and carried on staring out of the window. Until he felt a hand grab his arm and yank him out of the seat. He stumbled to the floor, grazing his knee, and the woman dragged him by the elbow all the way down to the end of the tram, past rows of wide-eyed passengers watching the spectacle the pair were making of themselves. She threw him onto the back-row and pointed at the sign on the rear of the seat in front: FOR COLORED FOLKS ONLY.
‘You wanna get us lynched?’
‘I ain’t never been on the streetcar before,’ Lewis said, and peered at her, confused and upset.
When the tram reached the corner of Tulane and Liberty, they descended and crossed the two blocks to Mayann’s on foot, the woman dragging Lewis by the wrist. They approached a rickety wooden door set into one of the houses by the intersection of Liberty and Perdido and, without knocking or needing the use of a key, the woman pushed the door open with a robust shove. The room they stepped into was dim and joyless, and Lewis had to squint to make anything out. Amidst the rattletrap floorboards and bare walls, the space was taken up by an imposing iron-frame bed, a rudimentary kitchen along one wall, and a second door opening out onto a back courtyard which provided the only source of light. Through the open doorway Lewis could glimpse a view of the tumbledown houses opposite, and the clotheslines arcing through the yard. He scanned the rest of the room, amazed at how small it was, how dingy and close, and he wondered where the other rooms were.
After a few moments his mother sat up in the iron-frame bed, rubbed her eyes and smiled weakly at Lewis, who did his best to smile back. Then he noticed that sleeping next to her was the baby sister he had never met, a wrinkled bean of a thing, tiny and smothered in rough cotton cloths. His mother turned her gaze from the baby to Lewis and Lewis saw she looked ill, eyes puffy and full of water. Lewis had only met his mother on a few previous occasions, when she had paid visits to him and her mother-in-law at the house in James Alley, occasions when she’d made an effort and had arrived well turned out in her Sunday best.
‘I thought maybe your grandma wouldn’t let you come.’ She spoke quietly, her voice so weak and delirious that Lewis thought she might be talking to herself.
‘Lewis,’ she continued, ‘I ain’t done right by you in the past. But I’m gonna try and make it up to you.’ He looked at her and suppressed an urge to cry. He wanted to go back to his grandmother’s, to the sunlit house in James Alley, with its jumble of rooms, and its garden, and its chinaball tree. How could this single dingy room have suddenly become his home? A room so poor-looking it seemed to have been robbed of its light. A room in a faraway part of town, with its two trembling strangers, weak and in need.
Now, twelve years later, Lewis was once more hauling his life’s possessions up Perdido Street in the direction of his mother’s apartment. But this time he was the adult. And as he looked down to Clarence, who was stumbling along by his side, he realized with a heavy sense of history repeating, that his adopted son was about the same age he himself had been when he was dragged, terrified, across town by the nameless woman.
The pair of them cut pitiable figures. Lewis had bloodstains on his shirt and a scab forming on his lip that was beginning to itch. He had a burlap sack flung over one shoulder with their clothes in it, and his cornet case slung over his other shoulder. In his hands he had the painfully heavy Victrola windup record player that, aside from his horn, was his prize possession, and on top of it a stack of records – the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini, Henry Burr – all tied together by a flimsy length of twine. Next to Lewis, Clarence groaned under the weight of a canvas bag full of his toys.
‘We nearly there, boy,’ said Lewis, with a smile, and Clarence grimaced.
‘I’ll tell you a ghost story if you want? About Jean Lafitte.’
But Clarence shook his head and turned his gaze to the street in front of him, and Lewis felt guilty once again that he had put the boy through the unsettling and painful process of moving out to Gretna and back again.
They crossed Liberty Street and approached the apartment. He put the Victrola and the records down with a groan, knocked on the door and rubbed the small of his back while he waited. After a few seconds the door swung open and Mayann Armstrong appeared, still wearing her blue-and-white maid’s uniform. She was a stocky, robust woman, but a life of toil and stress had taken its toll and she had aged well beyond her thirty-three years. She peered at the two sorry figures in front of her with a frown, stared at Lewis’s busted face, then at the belongings on the floor, and shook her head, then without a word wandered back into the apartment. Lewis nodded at Clarence and they picked up their things and shuffled in after her.
Inside the apartment the back door was open and from the courtyard Lewis could hear the sound of women chatting, and children playing hopscotch. They put their things down and Clarence scrabbled about the floor settling his toys into their new home. Mayann leaned against the kitchen counter and stared at Lewis, her arms folded over her chest.
‘What happened, boy?’ she asked, some tenderness and concern entering her voice.
‘I couldn’t take it anymore,’ said Lewis, and he told her about the increasingly quarrelsome atmosphere in the house in Gretna. The arguments had always included Daisy throwing something at him – shoes, records, toys, even bricks picked up from the street on one occasion. And Clarence would be in tears, clinging to their legs as they shouted at each other. Then Daisy had taken to swinging punches at his mouth, knowing it was his weak-spot. A busted lip meant he couldn’t earn a living, and before long Lewis had decided to pack his things and head back across the river, choosing love of music over love of a woman.
While Lewis talked and Clarence knelt by their bags unpacking things haphazardly, Mayann listened to her son with a stony face. When he had finished, she didn’t remind him she had be
en against the match with Daisy from the start, that she had fully expected something like this to happen. She held out her arms, and hugged him.
‘You best get over to Mrs Parker’s and see if you can borrow a mattress. And I guess we’re gonna need some extra food.’
‘I’ll head on over to Zatterman’s and Stahle ’s,’ said Lewis, putting his hat back on his head. ‘Red beans and a pound o’ rice?’ he asked with a smile, and Mayann smiled back at him and nodded.
Lewis walked to the door and opened it, but before he left he stopped and turned back to his mother, as if forgetting something. Mayann stared at him, and Lewis grinned. ‘Thanks, Mama,’ he said sheepishly, and Mayann shook her head. Then they heard a whirling noise and looked down to see Clarence had unpacked the records, had placed one on the platter of the Victrola, and was spinning the gramophone’s handle like a top. As Lewis stepped out, the music from the Victrola started up, an aria from The Barber of Seville. The sound of Tetrazzini’s voice floated past him and out onto the street, where it mixed with the jazz blaring out of the honky-tonks across the road. A few of the hustlers lounging about outside turned to see where the opera music was coming from and they caught Lewis’s gaze. He smiled, tipped his hat at them, and ambled off in the direction of Rampart Street, picking at the scab on his lip.
17
Morning sunshine beamed through the gaps in a wooden fence and sliced through a yard brimming with clotheslines. The lines were stretched and doubled back across every available inch of space, and from them hung a sea of white sheets that flapped and danced briskly in the wind. In the center of the yard, in the middle of the swinging walls of laundry, sat a dark-skinned, emaciated Creole by the name of Bechet. He sat at a scrubbing board working soap into wet linen with long, wiry fingers, mumbling a folk song to himself under his breath. He heard a noise, stopped singing and peered upwards with a frown. A shape moved between the washing lines, a shadow of a man. A sheet was pulled back and the shape revealed itself to be Luca D’Andrea.
A grin broke out on Bechet’s face and he spoke in a broken French accent. ‘Luca! Longtemps! For a minute there, I thought you were a ghost.’ Bechet chuckled to himself and Luca smiled back at him. The old Creole was a spindly man, with sun-cracked skin, and a near-perpetual smile. Luca peered at him sitting at his board in the center of his washman’s yard, and he had the impression of a spider perched at the center of its web.
‘How’s life?’ Bechet asked, his tone warm.
‘Life’s good,’ replied Luca. ‘How’s the laundry trade?’
‘Ah,’ Bechet shrugged, ‘linen gets dirty, linen gets clean.’
He peered up at Luca, squinting his eyes against the sun, his hands scouring out a slow, metallic rhythm on the scrubbing board.
‘I assume this isn’t a courtesy call,’ said the old man, and Luca shook his head.
‘I need information on the Axeman.’
Bechet stopped his scrubbing and a look of dismay crossed his face. ‘The Axeman? Now why you wanna go chasing him?’
Luca frowned at him and shrugged. ‘Why shouldn’t I be chasing him?’ he asked, and Bechet narrowed his eyes and lifted an index finger in his direction. ‘Because it seems like to me,’ the old man said, his finger wagging, soapsuds curling round the underside of his hand, ‘the Axeman’s a demon.’
Bechet burst into a loud, raucous cackle and moved his hands to his chest.
‘You chasing a demon,’ he said. ‘A homegrown, New Orleans demon.’
Luca grimaced and gave Bechet a dismissive look. He had been buying information from the old man for nearly two decades, and although Bechet had always struck him as eccentric – it did take a certain type of character to run the risk of being an informer – in all those years, Luca had never known him to cackle and rant about demons. Luca had been seeking out all his old informants and associates since his release. Those who were still alive, and still lucid enough to talk, all told him the same thing – no one in the whole city knew anything about the Axeman, it was as if he didn’t exist. And now Bechet was calling the killer a demon.
‘I was thinking it might be a Creole,’ said Luca, trying to get the conversation back on track. ‘You hear of any Creoles with a taste for axes and a grudge?’
Bechet’s laughing settled down and he shook his head.
‘Plenty o’ folks got grudges in New Orleans,’ he said. Then he stared at Luca and held up the soap-bar he had been using on the sheets. ‘You put all these poor folks together and squeeze ’em tight,’ he said, squeezing the soap in his knotted, gangly hands. ‘And you’ve molded a demon.’ He opened his hand. ‘A demon in the shape of New Orleans,’ he continued, his eyes unusually cold. The old man shifted his gaze to the misshapen soap in his hands, then tutted to himself, as if having witnessed a sin, and he set about his work once more.
Luca frowned and wondered how those bony old fingers had the strength to crush a rock-hard bar of soap.
‘This Creole hunt,’ said Bechet, ‘it ain’t one of your frame-up jobs? Angola didn’t teach you nothing?’
Luca shook his head. ‘This ain’t a frame-up,’ he said, ‘I think this might be voodou.’
‘Voodou?’ Bechet looked at up him with a bemused expression. ‘Maybe. If you wanna know about this kinda stuff, I know a lady can help. I’ll get you the details, but the price, it’s gone up while you were away. What it was, plus ten.’
Luca shrugged, indicating money wasn’t a problem, and Bechet grinned at him.
‘Inflation, mon ami. This girl can help you out. In more ways than one,’ he said, raising his eyebrows. He stood, wiped his hands on his trousers and stretched out the creaking armature of his back. Luca noticed a copper wire wrapped around Bechet’s ankle, a slave charm to ward off consumption. Luca thought it strange – the old man was from Haiti, an island of freemen. Bechet resumed humming the folksong he had been singing to himself and ambled away, disappearing behind the lines of hanging sheets.
Luca looked around the yard while he waited. He felt strangely at home with the sheets dancing about in front of him, their shifting planes like a crisp, geometric fog. He had been out of prison long enough, but he still found himself craving enclosed spaces, nooks and crannies, holing himself up in his hotel room most nights. During his time in prison he didn’t have to worry about where to go, what to eat, when to wash and sleep. Freedom meant concerning himself once more with the realm of weight, matter and consequence. It made him feel like a ghost re-entering the world. And he still had the feeling that somehow the world he had returned to was not quite the one he had left, or at least not the one he remembered. In Angola he had remade the outside into a pristine, sparkling place. And now he found he couldn’t quite cope with the actuality of New Orleans, a polluted city of refuse and foul smells. Bechet’s yard of sheets so white they glinted in the sun was the first place he had been since his release that actually felt clean. It gave him a sense of hope, that the slime and stench of Angola might, given enough time, be washed off him for good.
He took a cigarette from his packet and lit it. He had been smoking incessantly since his release, mainly because he hadn’t really been eating. Whatever it was that had happened to his stomach in Angola didn’t sit well with rich food, coffee or liquor. And so cigarettes had become the least painful option.
Eventually Bechet reappeared, hobbling back through the sheets, carrying with him a scrap of paper and two battered metal cups.
‘No smoking here, Luca. Laundry gotta smell fresh,’ he said, taking a deep breath of the morning air, tapping his chest with his palm. Luca flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stubbed it out with a swipe of his boot.
Bechet handed him the slip of paper and one of the cups. ‘Bierre du pays,’ said Bechet. A Creole beer brewed from pineapples. Luca used to enjoy the tangy taste of the drink, but now he wondered what the beer would do to his stomach. Bechet held his cup up to toast the transaction, and Luca, out of politeness, clinked his cup against Bechet’s and dr
ank. Then he gave Bechet the money he had asked for and Bechet checked the notes before putting them into his shirt pocket and sitting back down on his stool.
‘You know, this whole Axeman thing makes me laugh,’ Bechet said. ‘If you look at it from a Negro point of view. You haven’t exactly been a friend to people o’ color. You and all the police. Setting ’em up, beating ’em down, framing ’em, taking their money. Now some darkie’s running round town killing whites, and everybody wonderin’ who gonna be next.’ Bechet shrugged. ‘It was always gonna happen.’
Luca stared at the old man and nodded.
‘I think you got a point there, old friend,’ he said, tipping his hat at Bechet. ‘Au revoir, mon ami.’
He was about to turn and leave when Bechet spoke again.
‘You know, we have a saying back in Haiti. Complot plis fort passe ouanga.’
Luca frowned. He had lived in New Orleans long enough to have picked up a decent French vocabulary, but the myriad dialects and turns of phrase of the Creoles and Cajuns still remained a mystery. Bechet picked up on his confusion and smiled.
‘It means “conspiracy is greater than witchcraft”.’
Luca smiled back. ‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ he said. Then he turned and walked away from the old man, disappearing through the shifting white sheets.
18
When Michael looked back on his life, he felt its path had for the most part been directed by two, and only two, large and fateful decisions. The first of these was choosing to start a family with a colored woman, the second concerned the death of a book-keeper named Reginald Abner.