Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (28 page)

“But why?” January straightened again and stood with the beam across his shoulders, regarding the Prussian in bafflement.

Of medium stature and slender build, the fencing master was one of the most demanding in the city, no more so on his pupils than on himself. Most mornings when January arrived-long before any of the aristocratic Creole pupils who would have been appalled to know that a man of color was allowed into the Salle-it was to find Mayerling already lifting iron scale weights or the weighted beam to further develop strength and flexibility, or engaging and disengaging the salon's door handle with neat, small circles of his colichemarde.

“There are any number of reasons.” Mayerling shrugged, and came to help January lift the beam down. “It is the slow season, and his mother is a monstrously expensive woman; he may have had investments in the Bank of the United States that now are in danger.” The fencing master threw January a linen towel, to wipe the sweat from his face and hair, and used another himself. The morning sunlight, just moving down the wall, tipped the ivory brush of his military-cut hair and made tiny, crinkling shadows in the saber scars that laced the beaky face. “I observe he is not selling anything to which his mother might hold claim. In fact to sell to La Redfern, for cash-and to feel the need to sweeten her by attending her party-says to me at least that he is doing this without Madame Cordelia's knowledge. In any case, before returning to Mandeville yesterday, he sold two women servants, Zoe and Irene, to the American dealer Bill Palmer.”

“Zoe?” January paused in the midst of putting on his shirt, shocked. “Are you sure?”

“This was the name, yes.” In some surprise at his reaction, Mayerling regarded him for a moment. “I took note because they were Byzantine Empresses, Zoe and Irene-I kept wondering if there were a third named Theodosia somewhere. This is important?”

January nodded. The look of amused complicity in Jumon's eyes; Zoe's smile. I don't think she approves. . . . The affection unmistakable in his voice.

Then fury for the woman's sake and sickened disappointment, as if he himself had been sold. Maybe only the old fear he'd had as a child, waiting for his mother to be sold away from him, for his friends or aunts or others whom he loved, to disappear. The pain of that betrayal must have been worse than anything in her life. He tried to hear Mathurin's deep voice: I'm terribly fond of you, Zoe, but . . .

But what?

“I don't think he'd have done that if he weren't desperate.”

And his personal valet. Longtime friends, with him for years. . . .

How could he? How could he?

Even as he thought the words January felt contempt for himself, for his own naivete. He could almost hear Olympe's sneer. Write a note and send it by a boy down to the dealers on Baronne Street, is how, brother. That's how they mostly all do it.

Like a man regretfully deciding to have an old dog shot because it's become flatulent or incontinent in the house, and sullies his carpets or disturbs his guests.

The jewels on Madame Cordelia's wrists. The fabrics purchased on whims and never even cut. The pink-and-gold dishes, the mantillas-seven, eight, ten of them-in their boxes.

And like a devil's voice whispering in his heart, the sentence formed itself. If he betrayed her, if he sold her, does she love him still? Or will she be willing to talk?

Mayerling came over to him, a kind of chilly concern in the strange hazel eyes. “You knew this woman?”

“I'd met her. I saw them together.”

“Ah.” The Prussian considered, head tilted to one side like a bird. “Palmer does not give top prices, but he pays in cash. I understand he's leaving today, for the Mississippi Territories, to sell where the prices are high.” There was a flex of irony in that light alto voice, nothing so definite as disapproval, but the kind of deliberate neutrality Mayerling cultivated in dealing with his pupils, all of whom were the sons of wealthy slave owners, and slave owners themselves. A member of the junket nobility, he had come to this country, January knew, with secrets of his own, and he kept a great deal to himself. Still, when January's breath caught in pain as he tried to shrug into his coat, the sword master helped him on with it with the matter-of-fact skill of a valet.

“Thank you,” said January, and glanced at the sun on the wall. Early yet. There was a chance he could still find Palmer-and his chattels-at his offices on Baronne Street, though his skin crept at the thought. Automatically he checked his coat pocket for the papers that proved him a free man and breathed a sigh of gratitude that he had intended to make another attempt to see Olympe at the Cabildo that morning, and so had dressed like a man of some substance. With any luck Palmer would pay more attention to the quality of his clothing and the excellence of his English than to the color of his face and hands.

“Myself, I am on a handshaking basis only with Mathurin Jumon,” said Mayerling, as he walked with January down the narrow stairs. “But my wife”-and there was unalloyed delight as he spoke of the woman who in her childhood had been one of January's piano pupils-“my wife belongs to several of the same charitable societies as Madame Cordelia Jumon. They are related, for all I know: all these Creole families seem to be. Shall I ask her to go to Mandeville and speak with this redoubtable lady? According to Madame Mayerling”-he spoke his wife's formal title, as men must even in the presence of their friends-“Madame Jumon is a woman who has suffered greatly in her life and continues to suffer at voluble length. It should not be difficult to learn details.”

Oh General, don't you never catch me. Oh General, don't you never catch me. Oh General, don't you never catch me, I'm on a ship, I'm gone out to the sea.

The words floated, rose, faded like the pull of the tide, the voices of women riding up over the deep bass of men. January stopped, listening, on the rough wood banquette, and the rattle of a dray hauling bricks down Baronne Street at a reckless hand gallop drowned out the song. When the vehicle was past there was nothing, as if it had somehow drawn the song after it and away into the general clamor of the street.

“Sir, you buy me, I'll work for you good.”

January turned to see an elderly man in the rough calico shirt and osnaburg britches of a fieldhand sitting on a bench outside a dark little shop front. HARRAHAN AND CLAINE, said the green-and-yellow sign next to the door. The man smiled engagingly; he, a younger man, and two teenaged girls were chained to the bench by light ankle shackles.

“I can do 'most anything with horses: drive 'em, feed 'em, train 'em . . .” He coughed, the rattling, wet cough of pulmonary consumption, and forced himself to smile.

“I'm a fine cook, sir,” said a woman a few doors down, as January passed. “Make bread, cook you up the finest chicken and dumplings you'll ever see. . . .” She smiled, showing where teeth had been lost to childbearing. Her hands were the rough hands of a fieldworker. January wondered if she'd ever been in a kitchen in her life. “You just try me out, sir, you'll never be sorry.”

And as he walked on, past a cavernous brick exchange where not only slaves, but mules, wagonloads of hay, boxes of bean coffee, lots of rosewood furniture, and fine pressed letter paper were being dickered over by darkcoated brokers, he heard the older woman who sat on the banquette with the would-be cook say, “You want to be careful, honey. I had me six different masters and the colored was always the roughest.”

He was aware of men looking after him, once caught a fragment of conversation about “. . . big buck nigger . . .” but didn't stay to hear anything further. Mostly the men here, the dealers and brokers, the owners of ironworks or cotton presses, were Americans, and the voices he heard were all in English. His flesh crept with the sensation of being in enemy territory, naked and disarmed before enemy guns. All he could do was stand straight, walk easily, as if he had no fear-as if all things were as they had been when he was a youth, and the city largely French. As if a black man, particularly one as African-looking as he, were not automatically assumed to be someone's slave.

 In a way it was the same as being in the Swamp. In a way it was worse.

Master bought a horse, he bed it in the stall, Master bought a dog, he bed it by the fire, Master bought a cow, he bed her in the barn, Here I sleep out on the ground . . .

The singing from the yard behind a dealer's faded. It was drowned in the whine and yarp of a mouth organ, the slap of a boy's bare feet on the boards as he danced to show a pair of prospective buyers how lively he was, smiling gaily. Smiling-no one wants to pay for a sullen slave. January edged past and went on, feeling men's eyes on his back.

I should have looked for Shaw, he thought. I should have got Corcet to do this.

Corcet at least was fairer of skin. He was an attorney. . . .

January shook his head at himself inwardly. And I'm a surgeon, and what good has that ever done me, going among Americans? He only wanted, he understood, not to be the one to have to come to this place, not to have to deal with slave traders. As if Corcet would not find it as hateful and as frightening.

The sign that bore the name William Palmer, Esq., was mounted on a square building of yellow bricks, much like a dozen others up and down the street. Coming into the hot, shadowy vault of the room, January could see through the open door at the rear to a small yard with benches around three sides. The yard was empty. A chinless youth with the sores of scrofula on his neck and ears looked up from a ledger. “Mr. Palmer?” asked January politely.

“Just missed him.” said the clerk, and spit on the sanded floor. He glanced past January at the door, waiting.

For January's master, January realized.

“Have you any idea when he might be back, sir?” The boy was still waiting for a white man to come in. He glanced at January a little impatiently and shrugged. “A week Sattiday maybe. He's gone up to Baton Rouge with a load of niggers. Left this mornin' on the Philly. You got a message for him?”

“No, sir,” replied January, trying to will his mind away from this jumped-up child, without a whisker on his face, holding out his hand to him now in the complete expectation that January was only the winged Mercury charged by some white man with a note to another white man. “No message.”

He walked down to the levee, trying not to hate the boy for the unconscious arrogant glint in his eye, for the assumption that he, a man of forty-one, had no life, no past, no future, except insofar as it concerned running errands for another man.

No wife, no sisters, no mother who had been a slave and wanted to remember none of it. No fears, no music, no dreams.

Only: Here, Ben, take this down to Bill Palmer on Baronne Street-You ask around, one of the white gentlemen'll tell you, where it is. And don't you linger round the market on the way back, boy. . . .

And he couldn't even say, I'm no man's boy, because this pipsqueak with brown stains on his lips didn't even ask if he was, simply assumed that no man of color would have business of his own.

Let it go, Ben, he told himself. Let it go. It's the custom of the country, and you knew that when you came back. But he could not let it go. As he made his careful way down Canal Street, where there were enough people, enough businessmen-Creoles, shopkeepers, and more-or-lesshonest workers-where there were people who would come to his aid should he be attacked, his mind returned to the blood-smelling darkness behind Colonel Pritchard's house, to the hot gleam of firelight in a brickyard years ago, to the drums. To a woman dancing with the rainbow serpent Damballah.

It was a place for hate to go, he thought. A place to pretend you were free. A place to forget. Like the frail golden palaces of music, the safe glowing heart of Mozart and Bach and Boccherini, it was a place to hide your mind in, when the pain got too bad.

There were half a dozen coffles of slaves being loaded on the steamboats, down at the wharves that fringed the levee for over a mile above the Place d'Armes. Even in the slow season, demand for slaves was high. Men moving into the new cotton lands of Mississippi and the new states of Missouri and Alabama, could make a fortune in two years: clearing a plantation, getting a crop in the ground, selling the whole concern with the cotton standing that same year and buying another plantation. . . . If they had slaves.

On the wharves January moved more carefully. Twice, along Baronne Street, he thought he'd glimpsed Killdevil Ned. Loafing idly, staring into shopwindows or watching with avid interest while a prospective buyer stripped a light-skinned woman to the waist in front of a dealer's office. . . . But always there, when January turned around. Waiting his chance. Insolent, in his way, as the clerk at Palmer's: I'm watching you, nigger, and there's nuthin' you can do about it.

And there wasn't.

The boats were loading, all along the quays, a dozen of them, large and small. In the winter and spring there'd be scores. Tall strange boxy confabulations, like boarding houses mounted on rafts, white paint glaring in the smoky morning light, black stacks oozing grime, gilding glinting, while men off-loaded the produce of the upriver plantations and towns, and loaded on German tools and French wines, paint, starch, barrels of gloves, rolls of fabric for someone's carriage upholstery, a Patent Washing Machine. . . .

The chained slaves waiting for shipment on the wharf were silent, mostly. January looked at their faces as he passed them, and saw their eyes.

He had felt anger and pity for Zoe, betrayed by a master she loved. But every one of these people had been betrayed.

The Philadelphia had left for Baton Rouge early, as soon as it grew light enough to see the river. For a time January stood by the empty wharf, amid a knot of Irish stevedores and American and Creole merchants who waited while the Grand Turk backed and filled and angled to take the Philadelphia's place, only watching the opaque green-brown waters, the pelicans and gulls squabbling for scraps. When the wind shifted, the smell of the town came over him, gunpowder and burning, pestilence and decay.

The trial was tomorrow. He thought he glimpsed Killdevil Ned again as he made his way back along the levee, but lost sight of him by the time he reached the Place d'Armes. He didn't know if the trapper followed him home.