Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (19 page)

He moved nearer. Few of the dancers seemed to notice him, the men dancing first with one woman, then with another, others leaping, shaking, twisting on their own. Looking up at the woman's face, he wondered if she was aware of the crowd around her, or, if not, what it was that she saw and heard and felt. The snake moved its head, tongue flicking, and January stepped back. Irrational fear brushed him, that the woman would look down at him with those huge black eyes and say, You are not one of us. . . . You are here to spy.

And close by the platform of boxes—marked BRODERICK AND SONS—among the dancers, he saw the woman he was looking for, the woman he had come to this place to find.

She was dancing alone, like the woman on the platform. There were far more women than men around the boxes and many of them moved, eyes shut, in solitary ecstasy. She was thinner than he remembered and her pointy-chinned, flat-boned face was lined. Her clothing, and the orange-and-black tignon that covered her hair, was faded and old. Above the low neck of her calico blouse he could see the points of her collarbone, the beginnings of crepy wrinkles in her neck, and the sight of it went to his heart.

He dared not go up to her, dared not speak. He doubted, in her present state, she would hear him. But the memories were like vinegar, honey, and salt.

“Oh yes, yes, Mamzelle Marie, She knows well the Grand Zombi
...”

The woman with the snake stepped down. Eyes open, black as coal, she stretched forth her hands, clasping the hands of the dancers who crowded close. Sometimes she spoke, a low guttural voice January could not hear. Now and then a woman would curtsy to her or a man would kiss her hands. The thin black woman came forward, clasped the voodooienne's hands, and their eyes met, smiling with curious kinship. The two women embraced, and the one they called Marie kissed the other's cheek.

Under the trees someone set up a pot of gumbo, the smell of it thin and smoky in the air. On a packing box a man piled yesterday's bread, and a praliniere stood by with her cart. Men and women gathered around, talking softly and laughing together, then going back into the dancing, as January knew they would be doing all afternoon. But the thin woman turned and walked toward the gate of the square, her patched skirts swishing in the weeds.

She passed between the policemen there, crossed Rue des Ramparts and vanished between the buildings on the corner of Rue Saint Louis. January followed her, angling sideways to pass through the crowd of whites gathered outside the palings. He dodged a carriage and a couple of cabs on the broad street, leaped the gutter, and stepped quickly along the banquette through the shadows that were already growing long.

The attack, when it came, took him completely by surprise. His mind was focused on the woman in the orange-and-black tignon, not only seeking her—pausing at the corner of Rue Burgundy to look for her—but wondering what he would say to her when he came up with her. Wondering if she would recognize him. Or, if she did, whether she would admit to it, and if she admitted to it, whether she would speak to him or simply walk away. He had not been able to locate her before leaving New Orleans, so their last meeting had been an awkward commonplace, with angry words and bitter prophecies of ill on both their parts.

He knew subconsciously that there was someone on the banquette behind him. But only when those footfalls, the rustle of that clothing, came within a foot of him on the uncrowded walk did he turn, startled, and then it was far too late.

They were medium-size men, dark without the lustrous blackness of a pure African. One of them wore a pink-and-black checkered shirt that he remembered seeing in the square. The other man, in coarse red calico and a corduroy jacket similar to January's own, had his arm raised already and the makeshift blackjack he held coming down. January flung up his forearm to block the blow and managed to deflect it a little. It struck his temple with numbing force and stunned him, so that the ensuing struggle was little more than a confusion of punches and knees, of jarring pain in his belly and the hard, crunching smack of his knuckles meeting cheekbone or eye socket. Hands ripped and tore at his shirt and he heard the pocket of his jacket tear. One of them tried to get behind and hold his arms, but January was a very big man and turned, slamming the man in the pink-checkered shirt into the corner of the house nearby.

The next thing he knew he was trying not very successfully to get to his feet with the aid of the same house corner, and two men were propping him, saying “Okay, Sambo, that's enough of that,” while his brain slowly identified the thundering in his head as being retreating footsteps pelting away down Rue Burgundy. His skull felt as if it had been cracked, but he did notice that he was not seeing double.

The white men standing over him wore the blue uniforms of the New Orleans City Guard.

“No badge,” said one of them. “You got a ticket of leave, Sambo?”

“My name is Benjamin January,” he said, straightening up.

He still didn't remember being hit, but his head gave an agonizing throb and the next moment nausea gripped him. The police stepped back, but not very far back, as he reeled to the gutter and fell to his knees, vomiting helplessly into the muddy water.

More footfalls behind him. “Got away,” said a voice with a German accent. “What's this one got to say for himself?”

“Mostly 'Here come mah lunch!' ”

There was uproarious laughter, and January was hauled to his feet again. He was trembling, humiliated, and cold with shock to the marrow of his bones.

“My name is Benjamin January,” he said again, and fumbled in his coat pocket. His hands felt as if they belonged to someone else. “Here are my papers.”

“And that's why you was hangin' around the voodoo dance, hah?” said the smallest of the squad. He was a little dark man with the flat, clipped speech of a born Orleanian. He took the papers and shoved them into his uniform pocket, grasped January by the arm. “Let's go, Sambo. I suppose you got no idea who those fellas were you were fightin', hah?”

“I don't,” said January, stopping and pulling irritably from the man's grip. His head spun horribly and even that movement brought the taste of nausea back to his throat. Some of the vomit had gotten on his trousers and all he wanted to do was go home and lie down. “One of them was in the square, but . . .”

At the first movement of resistance the three of them closed around him, jerking his arms roughly and causing another queasy surge of weakness. Reflex and anger made him half-turn, but he stopped the movement at once, transformed it into simply bringing his hand to his mouth once more, while he tried to breathe and force back his fury.

His head cleared a little and he realized two of them had their clubs unhooked from their belts, waiting for his next move.

In their faces he saw it wasn't going to do him any good to explain.

“Disturbing the peace, fighting in public and on the Sabbath,” said the little officer, slapping January's papers down on the sergeant's desk in the Cabildo's stone-flagged duty room. The corner chamber of the old Spanish city hall faced the river, across the railed green plot of the Place des Armes and the rise of the levee, and the late sunlight visible past the shadows of the arcade had a sickly yellowish cast from the ever-present cloud of steamboat soot.

“No ticket to be out and claiming he's free, but I'd check on these if I were you, sir.”

The desk sergeant studied him with chilly eyes, and January could see him evaluating the color of his skin as well as the coarseness of his clothing.

In French, and with his most consciously Parisian attitude of body and voice, January said, “Is it possible to send for my mother, the widow Levesque on Rue Burgundy, Monsieur? She will vouch for me.” His head felt like an underdone pudding and his stomach was even worse, and the damp patch of vomit on his torn trouser leg seemed to fill the room with its stink, but he saw the expression in the sergeant's eyes change. “Or if she cannot be found, my sister, Mademoiselle Dominique Janvier, also on Rue Burgundy. Or ...” He groped for the names of the wealthiest and most influential of his mother's friends. “If they cannot be found, might I send a message to ... to Batiste Rodriges the sugar broker, or to Doctor Delange? The papers are genuine, I assure you, though the mistake is completely understandable.” The sergeant looked at the description on the papers again, then held them up to the light. There was sullen doubt in his voice. “It says here you're a griffe.” He used one of the terms by which the offspring of full blacks and mulattos were described. In January's childhood, the quadroon boys had used it as an insult, though generally not when they were close enough to him to be caught. His mother and his mother's friends had a whole rainbow of terminology to distinguish those with one white great-grandparent from those with two, three, or four. “You look like a full-blood Congo to me.”

The papers also said very dark. January knew, for he had read them carefully, resentfully, furious at the necessity of having them at all. Behind him, two officers dragged a white man through the station house doors, paunchy, bearded, and reeking of corn liquor and tobacco.

“You stinkin” Frenchified pansy sons a hoors, I shit better men than you ever' time I pull down my pants! I'm Nahum Shagrue, own blood kin to the smallpox and on visitin' terms to every gator on the river! I rucked an' skinned ever' squaw on the Upper Missouri an' killed more men than the cholera! I chew up flatboats and eat grizzly bears and broken glass!"

One of the guardsmen loitering on the benches gestured to the prisoner and said something to another, and January caught Lieutenant Shaw's name. Both men laughed. The sergeant jerked his head toward the massive oak door that led to the Cabildo's inner court. January's papers stayed where they were on his desk.

The central courtyard of the old Spanish city hall ran back almost as far as Exchange Alley, flagged with the heavy granite blocks brought as ballast by oceangoing ships and surrounded on two sides by galleries onto which looked the cells. As the guardsmen led January to the stairway that ascended to the first of these galleries, they passed a sturdy, stocklike construction of stained and scarred gray wood, and January realized with a queasy contraction of his stomach that this was the city whipping post.

No,
he thought, quite calmly, pushing all possibility from his mind that his own neck might feel that rubbed tightness, his own arms and ankles be locked into those dirty slots. No. They don't just keep people here indefinitely. Someone will send for Livia or Dominique. In any case nothing will be done without a hearing.

The knot of ice behind his breastbone did not melt.

The plastered walls of the cell looked like they had been whitewashed sometime around the Declaration of American Independence, at which time the straw in the mattresses of the cots had probably been changed, though January wouldn't have staked any large sum on it. Both cots were already occupied, one by an enormously fat black man with hands even bigger than January's—although January suspected that spanning an octave and a half on the piano was not what he did with his—the other by a scar-faced mulatto who sized January up speculatively with cold gray-green eyes, then turned his face away with an almost perceptible shrug. Another mulatto, elderly and gray-haired and incoherent with drink, was fumbling around trying to reach the bucket in the corner in time to vomit. Three other men, two black and one white, were seated on the floor. Roaches the length of January's thumb scampered over the sleeper and in and out of mattresses, bucket, and the cracks in the walls.

“You heave in that bucket, Pop,” said the mulatto on the bed, “or I'll make you lick it up.”

The old man collapsed back against the wall and began to cry. “I di'n' mean it,” he said softly. “I di'n' mean nuthin'. I di'n' know them clothes belonged to nobody, settin' out on the fence that way, I thought some lady throwed 'em away, I swear—”

“—said I was impudent. What the hell 'impudent' mean?”

“It mean twenty-five lashes, is what it mean—or thirty if you 'drunk an' impudent.' ”

No,
thought January, putting aside the dread that had begun to grow like a tumor inside him. Not without seeing a judge. It won't happen. His palms felt damp, and he wiped them on torn and dirty trousers.

The white man spat. Daubs and squiggles of expectorated tobacco juice covered the wall opposite him and the floor beneath. The sweetish, greasy stench of it rivaled the smell of the bucket.

From beyond the strapwork iron of the door, muffled by the space of the court or the length of the gallery, women's voices rose, shrilly arguing. From further off came a scream from the cells where they kept the insane: “But they did all conspire against me! The king, and President Jackson, they paid off my parents and my schoolmasters and the mayor to ruin me. . . .”

A guard cursed.

The light in the yard faded. Voices could be heard as the work gangs were brought in from cleaning the city's gutters or mending the levees, a soft shush of clothing and the clink of iron chain. The splash of water as someone washed in the basin of the courtyard pump. The cell began to grow dark.

Half an hour later Nahum Shagrue was dragged along the gallery, stumbling, head down, fresh blood trickling from a scalp wound he hadn't had when he'd been brought into the duty room. Mercifully, he was locked in another cell.

About the time music started up in Rue Saint Pierre below the narrow windows in the cell's opposite wall, a youth came along the gallery carrying wooden bowls of beans and rice, gritty and flavorless, and a jug of water. The guards came back with him to collect the bowls afterward. The man who had been 'impudent' smashed a roach with his open hand and cursed drunkenly against someone he called 'that stinkin' Roarke.' The white man continued to chew and spit, wordless as an ox. Outside it began to rain.

The bells on the cathedral struck six, then seven. At eight—full dark—the cannon in Congo Square boomed out, signaling curfew for those few slaves who remained abroad, though the rain, January guessed, would have broken up the dancing long ago.