Ran Away (25 page)

And that business demanded slaves.

And when a white cotton-farmer paid eleven hundred dollars for a slave, he wasn’t going to listen to that slave’s protests that he was really a free musician from New Orleans who’d been captured and drugged while walking around the streets of the American quarter like an idiot one night.
Yeah, sure you are, Sambo
. And since that white man’s friends and in-laws and – more importantly – his creditors would constitute any judge, jury, and law enforcement in the district, it was unlikely that protests would garner the hapless victim anything but a beating.

Even by day, January hated to go above Canal Street and into the American town. By night it terrified him.

In the French Town, there were free blacks who could attest to his freedom, and French Creole judges who would believe a free black a lot sooner than they’d believe an American.

Above Canal Street he was in enemy territory, eleven hundred dollars in the pocket of any man who had a gun.

The code used by the slave runners in New Orleans was a simple offset. Six o’clock meant eight. Poydras Street actually meant Lafayette.

The penalty for helping slaves escape from their rightful owner was five hundred dollars – enough to sweep away everything January owned. House, hope, his son’s chances of a decent life in the world  . . .  Given the wrong judge and the certainty of an all-white jury, he wasn’t at all confident that the court wouldn’t find some more serious penalty for a black man  . . . 

And if the matter wasn’t brought to court, but only settled by angry slave-owners themselves in some alley at night, the consequences could be worse yet.

‘You sure this ain’t a trap?’ whispered Willie.

January wasn’t, but he breathed: ‘We’ll be fine.’

‘Who’s this Mr Bredon, that signed my pass?’ The field hand fished in his jacket pocket for the paper, to be presented to anyone who asked them, that said he was on business for his owner.

‘Never met him,’ said January, which was a lie. Judas Bredon was one of the men who coordinated slave escapes from New Orleans; the man who had asked January to join those who helped the fugitives. January carried his legitimate free-papers tucked into one boot  . . .  and a completely illegal knife in the other. At eight o’clock on a December night the river fog reduced visibility among the warehouses to a few yards, and the stench of sewage, garbage, and cattle pens masked the burnt sugar and smoke of the refineries; the air was so thick that it was almost palpable in the swaying glimmer of his lantern.

The glare of cressets around the wharves dimmed away behind them. The clop of hooves faded; January heard the sloosh of the river around wharf pilings.

Music drifted through the fog.

At first he thought it was a work chant, men wailing African words they’d learned as children as they worked late to unload cotton. But there were too many voices, women’s as well as men’s. Words took shape in the darkness.

Go down, Moses
,

Way down in Egypt land
.

Tell old Pharoah:

Let my people go
 . . . 

The building on the corner of Peters Street and Lafayette had probably been a cotton warehouse until the bank crash. It was brick and unprepossessing, the windows of its upper floor shuttered tight. Those on the lower glowed with the dull orange gleam of lanterns. Fog drifted through the topaz gleam of the open doors. Against that grimy light, January saw men and women, either slaves or the roughest sort of artisans and dock workers.

He thought:
It’s a Protestant church
.

Yet the music pulled at something in his chest, like the sound of the waves had the first time he’d seen the ocean.

At his mother’s that afternoon, between bouts of slandering Hüseyin Pasha, he’d heard all about Letty – the Metoyers’ maid – who was American-born and Protestant, to the great contempt of not only the three Metoyer sisters, but also their Louisiana-born Catholic cook.
I tell Elise to show a little Christian charity to the girl, but honestly, she does bring it on herself, you know  . . .  Oh, I don’t know what kind of Protestant – there are about a hundred of them, aren’t there? Methodists and Lutherans and Baptists, and heaven only knows how they can tell each other apart  . . . 

And the chuckle in Virginie Metoyer’s voice had been like the flick of a whip.

It seems like it’s harder and harder to find a good Catholic maid these days
 . . . 

He and Willie moved into the doorway.

When Israel was in Egypt land
,

(
Let my people go  . . . 
)

Oppressed so hard they couldn’t stand,

(
Let my people go
 . . .  )

Voices called and answered, the familiar patterns of a thousand old songs that January remembered from the village ring-shouts as a child. His mother’s voice came back to his memory, sweet as a bronze chime, though these days she denied she’d ever gone to such diversions. . . . Like the field hollers of the men in the
roulaison
, when truly, he thought, they were
oppressed so hard they couldn’t stand
 . . . 

And like the hollers, like the ring shouts, like the field songs whose words served to warn runaways in the woods when the riding boss came by (‘
Wade in the water  . . .  Run to the rocks . . . 
’ Which actually meant:
The Man’s comin’ with the dogs  . . . 
), he recognized at once that this hymn was in code.

Only, this time, the code wasn’t escape.

The code was hope, and the hope smote him like a blow with a club.

God knows our names
.

He won’t let us be slaves forever
.

He saved the Children of Israel, and he’ll save us
.

January had attended Protestant meetings before and hadn’t been impressed. The sight of the sinners on the ‘anxious bench’, down before the preacher, writhing and sobbing at the thought of their sins, had filled him with distaste and with contempt for the Americans who felt they had to turn the state of one’s soul into a show. He had felt as separate from the ranting of the preacher on that occasion – several years ago, now – as he had felt when he’d watched that ecstatic young girl in pink silk and jewels, at the Convent of St Theresa in Batignolles  . . .  As he’d felt when, as a young man, he’d been drawn by the music to the slave dances at the brickyard on Rue Dumaine and had seen men and women reeling and shouting under the influence of the African loa and West Indian rum.

There was an ‘anxious bench’ in this makeshift church, but the preacher wasn’t trying to convert anyone on it. And in an odd echo of the voodoo dances – to which Protestant blacks were not welcome – January looked around him and saw nothing but faces as dark as his own. Not even the polite
crème café
of the
librés
, nor the dusky
sang-melée
hues that everyone in New Orleans, white and black alike, preferred.

These were the American-born slaves: more African of blood than the
gens de couleur libré
, so shut out of their society; not Catholic; not French; and utterly without power.

God knows our names
 . . . 

The man at the pulpit was young. Somehow, January knew it was the P.B. he was here to see, the man who was risking his life to get men like Willie away to a country where they could be free. His voice was strong, and though he spoke in the ranting, over-familiar style favored by the white Protestant preachers, he was an excellent speaker. Men and women called out, ‘Amen!’ and ‘You tell us, brother!’ as they did during storytelling times, either at parties at the back of town or when January had been a child in the Bellefleur slave-village: not for them the respectful silence of the Mass.

‘The Children of Israel had forgotten God’s law, and so God sent them harsh masters, cruel masters.’ The preacher’s hand made a long slashing gesture, calling all eyes. Lanterns flanked his makeshift podium. Against their glow January could barely see his face. ‘But God relented and sent them a Law, for all men to obey. Even as he sends his Law to us all now  . . .’

Code
, thought January. His eyes traveled over the room, and even in the dimness he picked out the white countenance of the man sitting on a chair near the pulpit: the white preacher whose congregation sponsored this midweek meeting for the slaves. Most denominations in the south forbade black preachers to have their own congregations, so that young man who spoke so beautifully was – and always would be – merely a ‘guest’ of the white pastor.

‘If we follow that Law, we can all hope for our reward in Heaven. We can all hope to become the Children of God, welcomed into his bosom, taken up like Elijah in a chariot of flame, never to have toil or grief or pain any more  . . .’

And maybe
– January could hear it as clearly as if the preacher’s thoughts radiated from mind to mind throughout the room –
we won’t have to wait for Heaven, but can escape at least a little of that toil while we’re still here on Earth
 . . . 

‘We must be faithful. We must have hope. God knows our names, brothers and sisters – for you are all my brothers and sisters. You are all EACH OTHERS’ brothers and sisters. God knows where every single one of his children lives, what they do each day, who they love, and what dreams they dream at night. There isn’t a word you whisper in prayer that God doesn’t hear  . . .’

Could that white preacher, sitting there smiling, really be that stupid?
Probably
, reflected January. Whites didn’t grow up with that sense of the world being one way and everyone saying it was different. Didn’t grow up with the sense of a double universe, visible and unseen equal and alike, laid over one another like two colors of light. With a sense of coded meanings that sounded innocent and really meant
wherever you are hiding, brother runaway, duck down NOW ’cause the Man’s coming
 . . . 

He knew full well that no state government would permit an all-black church, for precisely that reason. Hope was too strong a thing to let it go blazing up on its own. You had to make sure the whites kept an eye on a black man preaching hope  . . . 

And he smiled as the congregation burst into song again, right under that smug nose:

Swing low, sweet chariot
,

Coming for to carry me home  . . . 

He glanced sidelong at Willie’s face and saw – almost with a sense of shock – the wide eyes, the tears flowing down silently. Willie, too, knew that home wasn’t Heaven.

Home was where he could be free.

Willie and January lingered as the congregation drifted into the night. Curfew was at ten. January guessed that more than a few of the men and women here had slipped away without their masters’ knowledge and had to hasten back before the master returned. From the shadows by the door, he recognized Bernadette Metoyer’s little housemaid, Letty, and Sillery, Jones, and Delilah from the livery. He nodded a greeting to a tall young man named Four-Eyes he’d met while playing piano last winter uptown, and others that he’d seen when he went to the uptown grocery where, after hours, the American-born black musicians would go to play American tunes with African rhythm, syncopated and wry. Up by the pulpit, the young preacher was besieged with handshakes and those who clustered close to speak. As he and Willie slipped through the knots of men and women, January saw the pastor’s face slick with sweat, like a man who has been working the
roulaison
furnace. The sweat also made his hair look black, curly like Rose’s rather than nappy (
What does it look like under a microscope?
he couldn’t stop himself from wondering) and soaked to dripping points.

January smiled. No congregation of Africans was going to listen to a man who stood still while he preached.

And his face had a glow to it, an inner joy that January understood. He had felt like that, those nights playing for his own people at the back of town, when the music would take hold of everyone in the room like magic, and they’d dance the moon down out of the sky.

Rather to January’s surprise, he recognized the white preacher as the saintly-looking Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Promise, who had come so close to pulling the Reverend Dunk’s hair last night over the attentions of the Widow Redfern. He, too, beamed, with patronizing pride at his  . . . 
Pupil?Dependant?

‘You’re doing quite marvelous work here, Paul, quite marvelous.’ Promise stepped in as one parishioner moved away, in front of the next woman in the line.

Having better manners, she didn’t object. Or maybe she’d just been severely schooled that you didn’t object to whatever a white man did.

‘You know, it’s quite piquant to hear so moving a message delivered in – shall we say – the language of the country?’ He chuckled at his own little jest.

The young Reverend Paul smiled too, but he looked a little embarrassed –
as well he might
, thought January.

‘Thank you, sir.’ His speaking voice was soft, with the accent of New England. ‘I hope and trust you understood that no disrespect was meant—’

‘No, no!’ The Reverend laughed again: a tall, slender man with the refined features of an emaciated saint. ‘When St Paul taught in Athens he spoke Greek, and when he preached in Jerusalem he spoke Hebrew. You must call the straying sheep in the language they’ll understand. This is quite an impressive congregation you have for these Tuesday meetings, and when the new church arises, you can be sure they will have a place there.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The young man wiped his face with a spotless handkerchief – any other African in Louisiana would have had a bandanna. The light, long bone-structure of a Fulani was overlaid with at least two crossings with whites. The expression of eager naivety made him look very young, and even without it, January guessed, he wouldn’t put the pastor’s age above twenty-five.