Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (9 page)

“I've been beneath this roof with you for a few days only, my child, but already I see how it is for you here. It fills me with rage to see him treat you so.”

“I have lived with worse.” January had to strain to hear, but could not go closer because the candlelight in the garçonniere would show him up through the French door's glass panes. “Your father isn't so bad as you think.” She said, Vótre pere, speaking as to a stranger.

Then he heard her footfalls retreat along the gallery. Robert stood where he was for a long time, while Madame Helene's voice rose from the women's side of the house: “I realize that you're now the mistress here, Madame, but it has always been the custom of this house to offer a visitor tea and sweet cakes. I was most mortified when you whisked M'sieu Sefton away as you did without so much as a sociable word. Of course I'm sure you had your reasons . . .” And in the nursery wing the older child screamed over and over, “I'll have you whipped! I'll have you whipped! I'll tell Grandpere and he'll sell you down the river!”

“Ben, this is Mohammed.” Cornwallis held up his branch of candles and with his free hand gestured to the spare gray-haired man who stood beside him. January, coming down the back gallery steps with the usual slave's luggage of a clean shirt and shaving things done up in a bandanna, had to remind himself forcibly that a youth of twenty will look pretty much the same when he's fifty-three; a boy of seven will be unrecognizable. Besides, why would Mohammed remember one child from the Bellefleur hogmeat gang?

“He'll get you settled.” Evidently Cornwallis was not a man to sully his dignity by association with field hands. The valet turned without another word and strode back toward the house, the lights of his candles blurring to golden willy-wisp in the fog.

“You eaten?”
Mohammed looked up at him, bright dark eyes as January remembered. The image of the young man he'd carried all those years settled in against the gentle erosion of sunken flesh, wrinkled skin, missing teeth; long years lived in hell while January had eaten good food, learned surgery and music, earned his bread in Paris and New Orleans, and married the woman he loved.

“Yessir.
On the Belle Dame they had pone and greens.”

“Michie Ney's boat.”
The flex in the older man's voice made January wonder whether he'd at some time had a run-in with that arrogant captain in the scarlet coat. “If you care to stay up a little there'll be some food at Ajax's-Ajax the driver,” Mohammed added. “If you're tired I'll take you on to the cabin-I thought I'd put you in with the bachelors, Gosport, Quashie, Parson, and Kadar-and you can sleep if you want. But they're havin' a shout for Reuben, that was sugar-boss here. He died yesterday. Would you care to come?”

“I'll come, thanks,” said January.

“What happened?” he asked, as they passed the dark still shapes of the kitchen and laundry, and the ground grew rough and weedy underfoot. Mohammed, who was dressed in a coarse clean calico shirt, wool trousers, and the “quantier” shoes of a yard hand, doused his pine-knot torch in the rain barrel behind one of the plantation workshops-carpentry, pottery, cobbler, cooper-and picked up another stick of pitch-smeared wood from the little stack nearby, to use later if needed. The mill rose ahead of them, fire-lit and seething with life, but January's guide led him around behind a stable and a barn, and past the long sheds where the wood was stored, and so into the dense whispery forest of the cane.

“You got to understand, it started in the dark of the moon.” Mohammed's voice came soft out of the pitchy blackness as they trod the narrow rough cart-path between the cane-rows. “And the moon's dark is the time when ill will lies strongest on the land.” Mohammed was, January remembered, a storyteller, a griot. His earliest recollections of the man were of a young animated face transforming itself from expression to expression, of a quick-frailed banjo and a voice that skipped effortlessly from Compair Lapin's cocky tenor to Bouki Hyena's deep, self-pitying drawl.

“There was a hoodoo marked the mill in anger, and the mill caught fire in the dark of the moon. Reuben was the man put the fire out before it could spread. He was a most careful man, unless he'd been drinking. He thought a lot of himself and was prideful and strong, careful even about where and how he drank lest any should carry back tales to Michie Fourchet. He said he'd checked over the grinders, and the gears beneath them, and the sweeps down below them in the roundhouse where the mules walk. He brought me in to see if the iron had been hurt, and I found no damage. But we did find marks.”

January had nearly forgotten how completely the eight-foot walls of the cane shut out air, sound, light, reducing everything to dense narrow slots of rustling gloom. What little moonlight struggled between the razor-edged leaves showed Mohammed's breath, and his own. It was only the walls themselves, and the puddled ditches at the walls' feet, that guided them on toward the woods.

The house, and the mill, and the kitchen and barns and shops-those were the white man's kingdom. Squared and neat, comely as January had been taught to understand beauty.
A world where Mozart and Shakespeare had lived, where the surgeons of the Hotel Dieu had taught him how to set bone and relieve suffering.

But beyond that small neat realm lay the cane. And beyond the cane, the woods, the cipriere. That world was measured differently. It was a network of interlacing paths, which led to places identified only by the presence of certain trees or certain water: old Michie Lays-Along-the-Ground, they'd called a big oak in the cipriere behind Bellefleur plantation where the slaves had met for dancing in January's childhood, or the Big Slough where the men had sneaked away from their work to catch fish and swim. It was a world of inference and small signs, a world where snakes could be made to talk if you addressed them right and eyes you couldn't see watched you from the shadows. It was a world where les blankittes didn't often come.

This was the world toward which Mohammed led him, and as they walked, January was aware, over the murmuring of the cane, of the mutter of other voices, the soft stealthy passage of other shadows on this narrow track.

“Now Reuben was an angry man,” the griot went on. “He thought that every morning when Allah woke up His first thought was, How can I make this day harder for Reuben? And that He set about it before He even had breakfast. Reuben knew all about the marks. But Reuben had his reason for wantin' to stay on Michie Fourchet's good side. If he worked fast and saved the whole of the roulaison, he knew he could get Michie Fourchet to give him back a woman he wanted, a proud strong woman Michie Fourchet had took away from him and give to the butler Gilles. So Reuben checked the mill once, and didn't call up Mambo Hera to come from Daubray, or Mambo Cassie from Prideaux, or even Jeanette here that was daughter of old Mambo Jeanne. He didn't put store in marks. But he forgot how marks sometimes have a way of puttin' store in you.”

Far ahead of them, somewhere past the rustling wall of darkness, January heard singing, the dim ghosts of rhythm utterly unlike the music that for so many years had been his life. The clapping of hands, rhythm that drew at the blood of the heart like the moon draws on the sea. Rags of words, African-French fragments of his childhood: Azou zouzou ziza, Legba abobo.

Legba abobo . . .

“Was it the marks made him careless?”

“His anger made him careless,” answered Mohammed. “His anger and his greed. And marks like that, made in ill will, have a way of whispering to you when you're thinking of other things. Reuben was angry that the men were sick that day, and he had to do more of the work with a crew not used to the task. The grinders stuck three, four, five times that morning-he was always being called from his work to pull knots of cane, and sticks and branches, free. Always working faster and faster, and not taking care. It was only a matter of time, til something spooked the mules-and they were spooky that week, and wild-while he was at the grinders. The grinders broke free, they came down on him like the lintel of the temple when Samson called on the name of Allah.”

“This was yesterday?”

“This was a week ago. But it was clear when they rolled the iron off him he would not live.”

Oh, and Reuben died, Esteban Fourchet had said, casually.

After a week of suffering.
A week of knowing. They had entered the woods. From the river the land fell gradually, until the drained and ditched ground of the cane-fields gave place to the cipriere. The roots of red oak and loblolly pine made ridges of high ground, and between them softer wetter earth, cypress, hackberry, live oaks whose branches spread out in all directions under floating veils of Spanish moss that the men would harvest in off hours through the year, to sell for cash. Now and then small scurrying life fled the smell and tread of the men, but with the autumn's cool at least the mosquitoes were few. The summer chorus of frogs and cicadas had long ago stilled.

Others joined them on the pathways. Some bore candles, and others pine torches that dripped gouts of flame; some found their route by simple familiarity. Some had washed and put on what finery they had: bright-colored shirts, or waistcoats of silk or embroidered wool, tattered and patched mostly, or bought brilliantly new from river traders. The women had taken their hair out of its strings, crimped and curly, or braided it up in fantastic shapes which they wore with cocky pride; the men had combed out their hair, or cut or queued it, and put beads on their necks or clappers on their ankles. Others still had just slipped away from night-work at the mill still filthy with the dust and cane-sap of the fields, dark eyes gleaming through masks of grime.

Exhausted, facing another day's work in mere hours, still they'd come to give Reuben his send-off. Maybe not because they'd liked him-by what Mohammed said, few had-but because it was the proper thing do.

And too, January knew, even in the roulaison few folks of color, either slave or free, would pass up the chance to dance.

Voices wailed from the darkness ahead of them, the slow shuffle of feet and the slap of clapping hands.

"Abobo, abobo,

Ago Legba, ago Legba, Abobo . . . "

“Could any have got into the mill, to have made the marks?” asked January. Or tampered with the machinery? he added in his mind.

“I don't think so.” A man fell into step with them, thick-muscled and heavy-shouldered with one of the front teeth missing from his slow, gap-toothed smile. “Reuben, he keep the key to that mill always on a string 'round his neck. See, five-six years ago there was a fella here name Nick, that broke into the mill and tried to do the same thing and break the rollers, and Michie Fourchet had him sold off-and the sugar-boss, too, for not bein' more careful. That's when Reuben got to be sugar-boss, when he'd been just 'ssistant before.”

“Nathan's right,” added a taller, rangy man with a big cane-knife scar on his forearm. “Reuben always knowed which side of the bread the butter was on. He kept good track of that key and he didn't leave the door open much, either.”

Firelight glowed before them through the trees. To the hypnotic, ever-changing beat of hands was added the silky whisper of feet shuffling on the earth. They came into the clearing and January saw what he had not seen since his childhood: men and women ranged in a circle around the clearing, singing as they moved in a slow, swaying line. A low fire burned within the ring and cast gold shawls and handkerchiefs of light across the faces in the circle. Men's faces and women's, children watching from the edges of the clearing with enormous midnight eyes. All swaying, lost, bathed in the music as the saved on Judgment Day would be bathed in light.

The dancers didn't lift their feet, like those who danced in Congo Square in town on the Sunday afternoons of their brief freedom. This wasn't that kind of dance. January remembered one of his mother's friends telling him, “It's 'cause you have to keep touch of the earth.” No instruments played-no fiddle or banjo or bones. Only the clapping of hands, the steady beat of open palms on thighs.

An old man knelt in the center of the ring, bowed to the ground, singing. Those in the circle would call out in response, words January dimly recalled from dirges he'd heard in French, in English, in town . . .

“Who'll close my eyes in death?” ''Abobo, abobo."

“Who'll close my eyes in death?” “Spirit come down.”

“Who'll close my eyes in death?”

“Dig my grave with a golden spade.” “Abobo, abobo.”

“Dig my grave with a golden spade.” “Spirit come down.”

“Dig my grave with a golden spade.”

At the edge of the fire's light a tall thin field hand stood with his arms around a beautiful girl in a purple calico dress. Two young boys, brothers by their faces, practiced exaggerated swaying, swinging their bodies in ecstatic double-jointed unison. A good-looking man who'd spruced up with a yellow silk waistcoat slipped and shifted through the torchlight shadows to speak to first one, then another of those new-come from the mill, and January saw something-salt? candles? a bottle?-change hands.

Slow music rolled over January like the sea's breaking waves, sadness and farewell with the smell of smoke and sugar thick in the misty air. He picked out faces from the shadow and fireglow of the circle, people he'd be living with for days or possibly weeks. Big main gang men, strong enough to swing an eighteen-inch knife and cut cane tough as bone. Some had come straight from the field to hauling wood in the mill, and so here, with a second and more ragged pair of cut-off trousers on over the first to protect from the sharp leaves, the razor-edged ends of the cut stalks, and a second shirt. Second-gang men, older or smaller, the soot of the mill striped with streaks of sweat. Here and there an artisan or groom stood out in gaudy finery, colors chosen and matched as no white man would choose or match them. Women stood among the trees with their babies at breast, and they too swayed to the music, crooned the responses to the wailing cries.

“Lower me down with a silver chain. ”
“Abobo, abobo.”

“Lower me down with a silver chain . . .”