Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (10 page)

No house-servants, January noted without surprise. Like Cornwallis, house-servants as a rule looked down on the field hands, scorning them as an alien race. And in fact they were. These people had probably all been baptized, but generally that was as far as it went. January's mother, and the other women on Bellefleur, had told him of God and the saints, but they were curious tales, dark and odd and very little like what he heard later from Pere Antoine in town.

The music itself, he understood, was what spoke to these people in the wordless words of God.

Only one-a girl, slim and sullen with her dark hair lying in thick corkscrew ringlets over her shoulders-did not sing. Bitter-eyed, bitter-mouthed, she stood apart from the ring, holding a baby in her arms and watching with her back against a cypress tree. In time a heavy-muscled giant in the long-tailed coat and beaver hat of a driver came to her, to draw her away with him into the dark of the trees.

Now and then a woman would shriek or cry out, head lolling in grief, but on one face only did January see actual tears. His attention was drawn to this woman because she was the only person who wore mourning, and her black dress was better fitting, despite her short round body and immense breasts. Her mahogany-black hair had been crimped into long streams, and waved as she rolled her head in a kind of solitary ecstasy, tears flowing from her closed eyes and down her velvet-dark apple cheeks.

“Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.” “Abobo, abobo.”

“Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.” “Spirit come down.”

“Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.”

People came, and people left, as those who'd slipped from the mill vanished again in the darkness, lest the overseer and the drivers note too many gone too long. A big strong woman and a lovely girl, clearly her daughter, gathered seven smaller children-including the dancing boys-and led them away to their beds, with an eighth tucked in the front of the mother's dress at breast. The thin field hand and the girl in purple calico faded into the dark of the woods, hands entwined.

These people were the pattern he had come here to learn, January thought. The warp and the weft of the lives whose telltale break, somewhere, would point the way to the killer whose deed would condemn them all.

And yet looking at them, it was hard to remember that one of these was a killer and a calculating despoiler. All he felt in his heart was a curious and profound sadness, rooted in a darkness his memory couldn't pierce.

They were still singing when he left.

There were twenty-five men in the main gang, including three drivers: Ajax, Herc, and Dice. Two of the men, Ram Joe and Boaz, were out sick, Boaz with pneumonia and Ram Joe snakebit. In January's opinion at least three others working in the field should have been laid up as well, for he heard the hum of pneumonia in Lago's breathing, and Java and Dumaka both were running fevers. But the most that would happen with Fourchet was that the men were put back as trimmers, working behind the cutters to lop the cane-tops and slash off the leaves. Of the four men whose cabin he shared, three-Gosport, Quashie, and Kadar-were in the main gang as well.

“Whoo, lord!”
Quashie exclaimed, as they left the cabin in predawn mist and cold, and held up his hand as if shielding his eyes. “We got us a bozal here! Right off the boat, looks like!” He was the thin tall man January had seen at the ring-shout last night, holding hands with the purple calico girl. Ajax the driver and his wife Hope-she of the nine children-had kept their cabin open long into the night, people bringing in food to share after the shout, but January hadn't seen Quashie or the girl there. The young man had not returned to their own crowded dwelling until nearly dawn. “It ain't a tar baby, it's a tar daddy!” he told January. “You so black when you come outside the chickens think it's night again, go in to roost!”

“Don't matter none,” replied January goodnaturedly. “I'm just thinkin' how you so yellow when you step out at night, all the roosters get up an' crow, wake up everybody in the place.” He was tired, for he'd sat up long at Ajax the driver's last night, meeting as many people as he could, and afterward had walked down to the bank above the landing in the pitch-black fog, to tie a black bandanna to the arm of Michie Demosthenes the Oak, knowing he'd be too weary to do so in the morning.

And he'd been right.

Quashie contemplated him for a moment, hearing the challenge in his words. Then he said, “And ugly!” He cringed exaggeratedly as they walked along between the rows of shabby wooden cabins toward the open ground that lay between Thierry's house and the mill. “I never seen a man so ugly! Your whole family so ugly, I hear there's a law in town against more'n three of you walkin' down the street at once.”

“Now, I don't know nuthin' bout your family,” returned January mildly, as they grouped around the two-wheeled rice cart, set up in front of the line of plantation shops just upstream of the mill. “But you so ugly I hear you was five years old 'fore you realized your name wasn't 'Damn!'”

As a matter of fact, neither man was ugly-January had heard himself described as good-looking and Quashie was handsome-but the rules of the game had to be observed.

“Yeah, and your mama ugly, too,” retorted Quashie, as the men and women around them laughed, holding out their bowls for Minta the cook's helper to fill. “And fat. Your mama so fat when I hump her the other day, I had to roll over two times 'fore I rolled off her.”

“Oh, that was you?” January raised his eyebrows in mock enlightenment. This was an old game that wasn't quite a game, and in his childhood years at school, he'd been called hulking and black and dirty, and told he looked like a field hand or a newly-arrived African by sharper-tongued opponents than Quashie. “I wondered about that. She said at first she thought she been stung in the ass by a mosquito. Spent half the night lookin' around for lemon grass to burn, keep them bugs out of her room.”

They had barely ten minutes to slop down the congris from the gourd bowls, chickpeas and rice with a little sausage in it to give it heart. The men of the night shift were just leaving the mill, men January recognized a little now from one or another slipping away to Ajax's cabin last night for rice or raisin pudding. Rodney the second-gang driver, in his stylish purple coat and halfboots, counted off the day men as they filed in to take their places, like the damned passing through the glowing mouth of Hell.

Pér me si va ne la città dolènte. Dante's words echoed in January's mind.

Through me the way into the suffering city,

Through me the way to eternal pain,

Through me the way that runs among the lost . . .

“You ever cut cane, boy?” Thierry stepped up to January. His voice was soft, coming from beneath a mammoth wall of black mustache. His eyebrows were long, too, shelving out in a way that should have been comical and wasn't. His eyes were blue.

“No, sir,” replied January, lowering his eyes respectfully to the overseer's boots. “Michie Georges, he grew cotton on his place. I worked the main gang there, til they put me to look out for Michie Hannibal.”

“Fucking useless shit,” said Thierry.

“Yes, Sir.”

Past his shoulder January saw the girl Quashie had been with last night slip out the back door of Thierry's house, spring down the step, and lose herself into the women's gang. The gay purple calico, newer than the frocks of the other women, glowed in the morning dark like a flower. She avoided Quashie's eye, and the women of the gang stepped aside a little to let her pass.

“They give me some fucking useless cottonhand . . . Gosport!”

The tall man with the scarred arm came forward, one of January's cabin-mates, steady and pleasant. He'd been sold south two years ago from Georgia, for running away.

“Teach Cotton-Patch here how to use a knife and make sure he doesn't cut his fingers off. You use him for trimming?” The overseer turned to Ajax, who tilted back his beaver hat and nodded.

“We sure need somebody, sir.”

So January had been handed a cane-knife, marked down by the overseer against his name.

“Most of the men who cuts the cane wears an old shirt and an old pair of pants on over their regular clothes, 'cause of the dirt.” Wearing the same engaging smile that had gone last night with the yellow waistcoat, Harry fell into step with January as the men walked out through the darkness to the fields. The cold was brutal, numbing the fingers and the toes through the cheap heavy brogans the men wore. January could see his own breath. The whetstone slapped his thigh through his pocket, and the dripping gourd-bottle hanging from his shoulder cut into his flesh with its strap. “I brung extra for you, knowin' you'd need them.”

Having seen Harry in action last night, swapping candles and the stubs of sealing wax for eggs and salt and string at the shout and later at Ajax's, January guessed the young man had ulterior motives in his offer. There'd been a man like that on Bellefleur when he was young-Django, his name had been. You accepted a gift or a favor, and you owed a favor in return. But looking around him January knew he didn't have much choice about refusing. He'd been given a shirt and trousers of coarse osnabrig cloth-new, heavy, and board-stiff-and a pair of badly fitting brogans from the plantation store, and knew they wouldn't last long with the kind of wear they'd get in the cane-fields. So he made his face look as if there weren't a Harry on every plantation up and down the river and said, “Why, thank you. That's sure good of you.”

“Don't mention it,” smiled Harry, and handed over a worn pair of pants, too large at the waist and cut off at the knees, and a second shirt, faded and patched. These January put on over his new things, and Gosport showed him how to hold a cane-knife-which he knew, having watched the men as a child, though he'd been far too young to wield one himself-and how to top the armload of cane-stalks the cutter would shove at him, cutting off the unripe portion with quick, flicking strokes and then slashing off the leaves.

“Cane piled on the stubble, trash piled between the rows,” instructed Gosport. “Watch out for snakes. When you feel the knife start to labor on the cuts you brace it on your shoe like this, give it a couple swipes with the stone. But you be careful with that knife, understand? You got to cross a ditch, or cross the pile row, you throw your knife over first. That cane's slippery, and if you're not careful you'll see your blood.”

“Gonna teach him how to tie his shoes, too?” jeered Quashie.

“He cuts his hand off, you want to carry him back?” retorted Gosport, which got a laugh, because of January's size.

They started moving along the rows: the work that would buy acceptance, the acceptance that would buy the right to ask questions.

January hated Simon Fourchet, and the hatred redoubled with every stab of the muscles of his shoulders, with every slice of the sharp cane and razor-tough leaves through the flesh of his hands, with every aching hour.

The men sang as they worked, pacing the rhythm of their strokes:

"Madame Caba, your tignon fell down,

Madame Caba, your tignon fell down,

Michie Zizi, he's a handsome man,

O, Michie Zizi, he's a handsome man . . ."

Or they would sing the African songs, the songs in a tongue no one remembered, the words meaningless now but the music still drawing the heart.

"Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi,

Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi . . ."

Buzzards circled overhead, scores of them, tiny as motes of pepper against the blue of the sky as the mists burned away. Rabbits in the cane fled the men, or sometimes fat clumsy raccoons; small green lizards darted to safety, or sat on the thin stalks of grass that the men called maiden cane and watched with wisely tilting turquoise-rimmed eyes. The cane in this field was second-growth cane and a lot of it lay badly, sprawling in all directions and growing along the ground rather than all of it standing straight. The sprawled cane wound among the standing and had to be dragged and wrestled out, stalks sometimes sixteen feet long, a mess of leaves and insects and dust. Dust and cane-juice plastered January's face and he wished Fourchet had died already and all these people, innocent as well as guilty, had been hanged for the crime before he even knew about it, so it wouldn't be his responsibility to try to save them. His shoulders hurt. His hands hurt.

Sometimes if no one else was singing, a man would break into a holler: wailing solo notes that climbed and descended a scale Bach had never heard of. Nonsense sounds, just “Yay” or “Whoa, ”but soaring like hawks with the sense and meaning of the heart. The other men would join in, as vendors in town would sometimes add their wailing to the drawn-out singsong of the berry lady or the charcoal man, catching the notes and twirling them like dancers: elemental music, like rain or wind or the heartbeat of the earth.

Mid-morning the women came out with the carts, gathering the harvested rows. They set their babies at the ends of the rows among the water bottles of the men, with one of the hogmeat gang to keep cane-rats and buzzards off them. At noon the rice cart came, put together by Kiki the cook or more probably Minta: rice and beans, greens and pone, a little pork in the greens.

When it got too dark to work safely, torches were lit and the men set to helping the women load the rest of the cane, and haul it to the mill. Carrying the piled cane up the short flight of steps to the grinders, January was able to see the setup of the mill. The grinders were set on a raised floor above a roundhouse, where the mules hauled on the sweeps that turned the machinery, the three huge toothed iron cylinders chewed the cane, the glinting new metal of one a vicious reminder of the dead man whose soul had been sung across to the other side last night. The green sap dripped and ran into the iron reservoir beneath, to be tipped from there into the first of the battery of cauldrons. La grande, it was called, and as each successive kettle was boiled down it was purified with alum and ash and emptied into the next: le flambeau, la lessive, le sirop, la batterie, every one smaller than the last, a seething inferno of heat and stink and boiling juice.