Ciji Ware (66 page)

“Hey, whatcha know, boss lady?” Virgil hailed her. “Isn’t this somethin’ else?” He nodded at the full house.

“Amazing,” Corlis replied curtly.

“Have you talked to King since you got here?”

“No,” she said more sharply than she intended.

Virgil cocked an eyebrow and said no more.

Corlis inhaled deeply. “Okay. So. You guys ready to rock ’n’ roll here today?”

“Yep,” Manny replied, exchanging looks with Virgil.

Corlis glanced at Virgil. Had he leaked to King information Marchand had revealed to the three of them, she wondered? She instinctively knew that Virgil Johnson greatly respected Kingsbury Duvallon and now felt fiercely invested in his own black heritage, as represented by the Selwyn buildings.
Who was she to judge the man?
she thought.

“Thanks for setting everything up,” she said by way of a peace offering. “Sorry I was late and… sorry I snapped at you.”

“No problem,” Virgil said, and grinned.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked suspiciously.

Before Virgil could answer, a door opened, and a few council members strolled in. The clock on the wall said it was five minutes past four. The meeting was late getting started. Corlis gazed around the hall, now chock-a-block with a churning, noisy mass of picket-toting protesters. Sprinkled around the hearing room were gaggles of downtown businesspeople, lobbyists, council staff, and curious onlookers, as well as a squadron of grim-faced lawyers and technical advisers who represented Grover Jeffries and the Del Mar Corporation.

And sure enough, even Cindy Lou Mallory and her mother had taken seats in the second row. Out of the corner of her eye, Corlis caught a brief glimpse of King’s tall, dark-haired figure, but she quickly looked away.

Eyes front! Keep your concentration, McCullough!

The remaining members of the city council finally began drifting toward the dais. One by one they took their places behind their name plaques. She saw Lafayette Marchand rush through the double doors into the chamber as city council president Edgar Dumas loudly banged his gavel.

“This meetin’ will come to order!” Dumas shouted above the noise. He glanced around the packed chamber with a frown. “The clerk will please commence the final readin’ of the proposed ordinance and use permits we have before us,” he announced as the television cameras began to whir. “Then we will allow time for public comment in the order in which everybody signed up.”

The room was silent as the clerk recited the legal language granting an ordinance that would allow for the “upgrading of the 600 block of Canal Street.” Then she read the accompanying proposals for demolishing the existing “derelict buildings” and various use permits that would allow “developer Grover Jeffries and the Del Mar Corporation to erect a twenty-eight-story high-rise.”

As the clerk wound up her recitation, Corlis’s attention drifted once again to the first row of spectators seated around Kingsbury Duvallon. Suddenly her jaw went slack, and she stared in amazement. Sitting next to him was a turbaned octogenarian dressed in an outfit that Margery McCullough had worn in the days when she’d worked for William Randolph Hearst.

“Aunt Marge!”
she breathed, astonished beyond words.

Virgil uncorked his eye from the camera’s eyepiece and grinned. “I was wonderin’ when you’d notice your aunt was here. Now I see why you’re such a slave driver,” he whispered hoarsely. “Chip off the old block, huh?”

“What’s she doing sitting next to
King
?”
Corlis whispered.

“She asked to sit there,” Virgil said with a faint shrug, and returned to his eyepiece. “Shh… the testimony’s startin’ from the good guys.”

What followed was King Duvallon’s well-orchestrated presentation by the coalition of community leaders who vehemently opposed the Del Mar project. Slated to speak first was professor of black history Barry Jefferson, a veteran of the Vietnam War and Purple Heart recipient. The conservatively attired academic rose from his seat and strode confidently to the podium carrying a leather-bound volume in his right hand. He smiled pleasantly at the city council members seated before him.

“These eleven buildings you’re proposing to tear down represent a golden age in this town when
real
diversity existed in New Orleans,” he began, gesturing with his pen at the easel on which stood the rendering of the Selwyn block as it had looked in the mid-nineteenth century. “The year was 1842. I have submitted, to the council’s secretary, copies of census documents that
prove
that forty-five percent of African Americans in this city were
Free
Men and Women of Color,” he reminded the black majority sitting on the dais. “That’s right, Mr. Council President… a proud time in our people’s history when we have solid evidence that almost
half
of us were free before the Civil War.
Not
slaves!”

Shouts and whistles erupted spontaneously from the audience.

“Order! Order!” Council President Dumas shouted above the tumult, hammering his gavel. “We
will
have order in these chambers! This is testimony we have already heard, Professor Jefferson. If you have nothing new to enlighten us about—”

Barry Jefferson’s booming voice soared over the heads of his audience. “And two of those free African men, Messieurs Colvis and Dumas,
were among the owners
of these historic buildings whose fate is being decided by you today,” he declared, making a jabbing motion with his pen toward the second of the two easels. “I beg you on the council to consider this. Today,
not one
building on this city’s main thoroughfare is owned by a black citizen, even though we make up seventy-two percent of the city’s population.
Not one
!”

Boos and catcalls greeted this announcement. The historian leaned over the podium and glared at the members of the city council. “Do you mean to tell me that this governmental body is even
considering
tearing down any one of these national treasures?” he demanded acidly. “Especially the two priceless, historic buildings owned by tailors Colvis and Dumas? Behind that ugly screen stand beautiful Greek Revival structures here in our city that these amazing gentlemen built and owned at a time when the majority of our enslaved black brothers and sisters in the South were not allowed, by order of the Black Code, to own
anything
,
including the shirts on their backs.”

More boos and rude noises burst forth on all sides of the auditorium, prompting President Dumas to bang his gavel repeatedly.

“We will have order!”
Edgar Dumas shouted angrily.

Corlis glanced over at King, who was ignoring the uproar and instead was scribbling energetically on a notepad he held in his lap. Dr. Jefferson’s basso profundo rose above even Edgar Dumas’s stentorian roar.

“Do you city council people really intend to destroy this tangible evidence of our people’s history? Do you really want to erase from the face of the earth our
struggle
and our
triumph
over the evils of slavery? You’re really gonna
do
that?” he reproached his listeners. “By destroying these buildings, you’re going to allow the black and white children of this town to forget that—once upon a time in New Orleans—there was a whole city block that had buildings constructed by these two gentlemen right here,” he said, pointing to the antique portraits of Colvis and Dumas displayed on the easel, “who, with their partners, owned ’em and rented some of the space to several
white
merchants, mind you. And not only that—” Jefferson thumped the podium like a Sunday preacher. “Their neighbors and co-owners on the block included Paul Tulane and other Scots-Irish, French, and English people—and that the very land on which these buildings stand was owned by an
unmarried
Free Woman of Color named Martine Fouché LaCroix!”

“Yay!” burst out Althea LaCroix. Sitting next to her, Dylan Fouché began to clap wildly.

“Professor Jefferson, your time is up!” Edgar Dumas declared rudely, banging his gavel.

Ignoring him, Jefferson narrowed his focus to the two female council members. “I should think the
feminists
should get exercised about something like this being bulldozed by greedy developers who won’t be giving many
ladies
construction jobs on this new high-rise hotel project!”

A burst of laughter rippled throughout the auditorium like a drumroll.

Well glory be
,
Corlis thought. A word in favor of feminism. Was this the New South she’d been told about but had yet to see?

Dumas pounded his gavel once more. “Now settle down, everyone! Professor Jeff—”

Jefferson abruptly turned his back on the city council members and made a sweeping gesture that embraced the entire hall. “There’s something precious for every single citizen—black or white, man or woman—in the city of New Orleans that is contained in these buildings that the
men in those seersucker suits
at the back of this chamber want to turn into rubble,” he declared, his voice dripping with righteous sarcasm. “It’s our
history
!
Our
collective
history. It belongs to each and every one of us… and it should be a tangible reminder to us that we’re
all
in this together—especially now, Edgar Dumas!”

Expert showman that he was, Professor Jefferson abruptly turned to face the dais again. With a dramatic flourish, he seized the tattered, leather-bound volume that he had placed on top of the podium. He banged the brown cover with his fist while casting a piercing look directly at the city council president.

“Your time is
up
!”
Edgar Dumas declared firmly.

“I know that,” the historian acknowledged, shifting his tone to one that was pleasant and cordial.

King rose from his seat and approached the podium. Corlis glanced to the back of the auditorium in time to witness Grover Jeffries’s expression of astonishment turn to red-faced fury. It was obvious that the developer hadn’t caught sight of his adversary in the standing-room-only auditorium—until now.

Professor Jefferson continued talking. “Kingsbury Duvallon has just been handed a diary that was written in the 1830s and 40s by the
wife
of one of the white contractors hired by the Canal Street Consortium, as they called themselves, to erect the buildings that, for the moment, at least,” he added with heavy emphasis, “are still standing.”

Professor Jefferson ceremoniously handed his coconspirator the diary. Then he neatly stepped to one side to allow the younger man to take his place at the microphone. King glanced sideways across the packed audience until his gaze came to rest on the roped-off area assigned to the media. He flashed a triumphant grin in Corlis’s direction and then looked down at the leather-bound volume in his hand.

“This family treasure,” King began conversationally, “has come to us all the way from California, where it has been in the custody of a woman kind enough to fly to New Orleans—at her own expense, mind you—when she heard that y’all were considering demolishing the buildings.” A smattering of applause greeted this aside. “The diary—which we will allow the Historic New Orleans Collection archivist to authenticate to your satisfaction,” King continued, “gives a fascinating account of the amazing mix of people who were involved in the building project back in the 1840s. However, one passage, in particular, I want y’all to hear.”

“I will ask you to make this
extremely
brief, Mr. Duvallon,” Dumas intervened caustically.

King opened the volume to a page marked with a paper bookmark and began to read:

I paid a melancholy call on tailors Colvis and Dumas this morning to inform them of the tragic passing of their partner, Julien LaCroix, of yellow fever yesterday. Unfortunately, Mr. Joseph Dumas was not in his shop, having been summoned to the
carrè de la ville
to conduct a fitting for one of his roster of distinguished clients. However, his son, Edgar…

King paused dramatically, and smiled at city council president Edgar Dumas.

…his son, Edgar, treated me most kindly, indeed, while I recited my distressing news about the death of poor Mr. LaCroix. Young Edgar Dumas, who has become a close friend of my Warren, served me a goodly cup of very hot, very strong coffee…

King looked up.

“The diarist makes specific mention of Joseph Dumas’s
son
,”
King said, speaking forcefully into the podium’s microphone while pointing at the engraving of the long-deceased tailor. “She speaks of this man’s son—
Edgar Dumas
.”