So the Parnassus hugged the banks, weaving and backing among endless, tedious snarls of submerged trees and sandbars, and January found himself listening, as if above the clatter and heave of the engines he could detect the hammer of following hooves.
Even with a day or two’s head start, Louis Verron could ride straight overland. Ride like a white man, unafraid to be seen, not obliged to keep to the woods.
Working barefoot like the other men, January kept the knife that usually resided in one of his boots wrapped under the sticking plaster that braced his ribs. On his other side he kept his freedom papers and his money wrapped up in oiled silk, and two dozen matches – also in oiled silk – stitched into the waistband of his trousers. In his pocket nestled Rose’s prized possession, a surveyor’s magnetic compass, and in the hidden parcel of emergency food – tucked behind a strut on the lower deck – were all the notes and sketch maps he’d been able to assemble at short notice, from other members of the Burial Society, of the countryside between New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish. These were neither complete nor accurate – map-making and map-reading being skills no white man would endure in any slave or in anyone who might befriend a slave – but there were men and women in the Burial Society whose families came from the thriving community of the free colored along the Cane and Red Rivers.
He had prepared as well as he could, yet he knew that his first line of defense, his first warning of trouble, would almost certainly be the other men of the deck-crew.
The moon was waxing toward full and rose early. On a high river, the pilot would have pushed on by its light. As it was, they put in at Donaldsonville, and the deckhands and Boissier the cook went ashore to buy vegetables and milk. January stayed aboard, too exhausted – hurting too badly – to have gone ashore even if he had felt it safe to do so. When the men came back and the night got deep he lay on his bedroll in the space they’d cleared for themselves on the lowest deck, listening to the men sing in the clear blue darkness.
‘Who that comin’?
Tall angel at the bar . . .
Who that comin’?
Tall angel at the bar . . .
Look like Gabriel—
Tall angel at the bar . . .
Look like Gabriel—
Tall angel at the bar . . .’
Swaying dark forms in the dimness, the lights of the little village glowing like jewels on blue velvet. Slow music, the call and response an echo of the songs his aunties and uncles would sing in the quarters at Bellefleur when he was tiny; nothing like the tomfool brightness of ‘Old Zip Coon’.
‘If I had my way,
Oh, Lord, Lord,
If I had my way,
If I had my way,
I would tear this building down . . .’
The next day below Claiborne Island they ran on to a submerged bar and spent five tedious hours while the pilot tried first to push the Parnassus through the obstruction, then tried to back her off it. Levi in the engine room cursed fit to send the entire boat to Hell, and January – sweating, aching, blistered in the hold – cursed too, knowing what those five hours of standing still in the water would cost him.
When they reached Baton Rouge an hour before dark, and the captain decided to stay on there overnight, most of the men cheered, but January went quietly to Parnassus Sam and asked if there was someone on the crew – or someone anyone knew in the town – who could describe to him the country through Avoyelles, Rapides, and Natchitoches Parishes, if for whatever reason he should suddenly find himself afoot and ashore.
Sam listened to January’s request without expression, huge arms folded. ‘I wondered if you had any particular reason for lookin’ over your shoulder twenty-thirty times whilst we was ashore. You kill somebody?’
January shook his head. ‘Playin’ piano at a whorehouse uptown, I found out somethin’ a gentleman there didn’t figure any nigger had any business knowin’.’ Which was true, as far as it went.
Sam rolled his eyes. ‘You dumb bozal. Don’t you know any time you cross their path, for no matter how much money nor how much you think you know ’em, you takin’ your life in your hands?’
January sighed, knowing there was a great deal of truth in what the deck boss said. ‘Guess I know that now.’ For the first time, he had begun to see how dangerous a thing it was to put himself that close to the place where white men habitually got drunk and made fools of themselves with girls. Even if he hadn’t been poking around for information about Martin Quennell and Sir Montague Blast-His-Eyes, it would only have been a matter of time before he’d found himself the witness to something.
‘He comin’ after you?’
January nodded.
‘Gonna have friends with him?’
Almost embarrassed, he admitted, ‘I think so.’
‘Jesus wept.’ Sam flung up his hands. ‘An’ you a grown man. What you doin’ goin’ upriver without yo’ Mama, nigger? What’s your man’s name?’
‘Verron. He’ll have a couple cousins named Ulloa with him. Maybe others.’
‘I’ll tell the boys. I shoulda known that Preacher would push some kind of trouble off on me.’ The deck boss dunked his face in the bucket of river water one of the boys had dipped up and pulled a clean shirt of checked calico from his bundle – one of the two dozen crew bundles that lay in a permanent line along the back wall of the boat’s superstructure. ‘He always got some damn thing up his sleeve. Shad Barrow that works over on the landin’, his wife got kin in the prairie de Avoyelles –’ he mispronounced it like an American – ‘and can tell you how to get from the river as far as Marksville, anyway. I got a brother works at the tavern at Morganzia Point; I can tell you how to cut off them two big loops the river takes past Cat Island. You really headed to Cloutierville?’
January nodded, changing into his own better ‘ashore’ shirt. ‘I need to speak to someone with the St John’s church there. They say there’s a fellow name of Roque . . .?’
‘Don’t know nuthin’ about him, but somebody will.’ Sam paused a moment, looking sharply sidelong at January, then asked, ‘Those free papers of yours real?’
January held up his blistered hands. ‘You think big as I am I’d have prissy hands like these if I wasn’t free?’
Sam laughed. ‘You got a point there, brother. Let’s see if we can keep ’em that way.’
Thus it was that when January quietly left the Parnassus at the west-bank woodyard opposite Point Coupee, and set out afoot through the dense heat of late afternoon across the narrow neck of the Tunica Bend, he was at least armed with the most important thing a black man afoot could have: information. Had he not been certain that Louis Verron could now overtake the boat – and would undoubtedly have some story of murder or rape to account for his pursuit – nothing would have induced him to abandon its safety. Afoot, he was a stranger in a strange land and every man’s potential property; in addition to his free papers, he carried a tin slave badge, a pass, and a letter – handsomely written by Hannibal in January’s study after Sunday dinner – proclaiming him to be the property of Mr Augustus Mayerling of Rue Royale, New Orleans, which if worst came to worst might save his life.
Before quitting the boat he shaved the top of his head, to imitate a baldness that wouldn’t be in Verron’s description of him, and removed the sticking plaster from the unhealed cut on his face, lest its brightness show him up from a distance as a man carrying a wound there . . .
Yet in his heart he knew that, this far from New Orleans, his only safety lay in staying ahead of the chase.
He was in cotton country now. From the top of the low rise in the center of the Tunica neck, he could look through a break in the trees and see, all along the left bank, yellow-brown fields powdered with white, through which dark shapes waded, dragging their sacks. In less than a week, every dusty road would be heavy with wagon traffic, bearing the first of the crop to the gins and presses.
Woods and pastures rose across the river, where the plantation livestock grazed l
oose, pigs and cows rounded up as needed for food. From where he stood he could see that the land on his own bank of the river, downstream toward the bend, was the same. He made his way to the brown water and headed downstream now, following the convoluted loops of the river and straining his ears for the sound of hoof-beats on the road. Louis Verron would be following the identical route. There was no other. Because of the snag below Claiborne Island, there was every chance Verron was almost on his back.
So, like Compair Lapin, he ran.
He’d grown up on the river and knew he’d find the foundered remains of a boat or a raft somewhere among the snags along the bank, and he did – with a plank that could be used as a paddle. Once on the river itself the going was easier, for the double loop around Tunica Bend meant that he could travel downstream for some fifteen miles and still be heading more or less north. According to his map, somewhere ahead lay Angola Plantation and the point where he could cross the river, cross the neck of the Angola bend, and – with luck – cross again to Hog Point to put himself on the western bank. His heart was in his mouth the whole time he was on the water paddling, in full sight of the River Road along the shore, but it was also fifteen miles he didn’t have to walk.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, he prayed, as the patchy clouds drifted north from the Gulf, draw your veil away from the face of the moon tonight. Guide me on my way.
At least this high up there were fewer alligators.
Would Louis Verron and his cousins ride at night?
Or would their confidence that they’d catch him, still on the boat, at the Angola Ferry compound with their laziness, after a hard ride, and turn them down one of those long aisles of trees to a plantation house at its end, to beg dinner and punch and a night in a bed? Had Verron told his cousins, his henchmen, why they had to catch their prey? The reason behind the desperation of his chase?
January doubted it. It was not something a man could tell his friends and hope to have them remain his friends.
It was not something a man could tell the brothers or cousins of any woman he hoped to marry – or any man who might talk about to any man into whose family any woman of the Verrons would ever possibly wed.
He’ll make up a story, thought January as he steered and paddled his light raft along the current, and the green-blue shadow of the western trees stretched out across the green-brown water before him. Make up a reason why I must be put to death, without delay and without trial . . .
Rape was the most usual charge. It was certainly one no young white planter’s son would question.
And because the truth would not protect him – the truth that Germanicus Foxford was willing to risk being hanged himself to conceal – the only thing to do was keep moving and pray that his guess was right.
The moon rose just as he steered his raft to the left bank opposite the woodyards on Tunica Point, clear as a mirror held to silver light. In the swamps downstream he could hear coon-dogs baying as he set off across Angola Plantation’s dark cotton fields to pick up the river again a mile away, trusting that, like the Children of Israel, God would somehow get him across.
TWENTY
Far down the levee, January followed the twinkling light of a single lantern; there was a half-grown boy there with a raft. ‘That Marse Morgan over there, huntin’?’ asked January, stepping out of the woods as casually as if he hadn’t spent ten minutes cautiously circling the place to make sure the boy was actually alone.
‘Nossir, that Marse Stewart an’ young Dr Smith, gone huntin’ with the Angola folks.’ The boy relaxed as soon as he saw January wasn’t a patteroller – a member of the gangs of small farmers and swamp-trappers who were paid by the local planters to ride the roads at night, making sure all slaves stayed in their villages where all slaves belonged.
‘They sound like they havin’ a good hunt,’ remarked January, and he fished in his pocket for a silver Mexican half-reale – common coin, this close to New Orleans. ‘You think you got time to pole me across to the Point?’
The boy hesitated, and January added, ‘I ain’t runned away or nuthin’,’ and showed his slave badge. ‘Marse Mayerling, that’s stayin’ down to Sebastopol Plantation, he give me the evenin’ to visit my wife in Williamsport, an’ I got to get there sometime tonight an’ get back as well.’
Only when they got across did January give him another couple of silver bits and say, ‘You do me a favor an’ not speak of this to anyone? Maybe Marse Mayerling didn’t ’xactly give me permission –’ he winked – ‘but what he don’ know won’t hurt him.’
The boy grinned back and crossed his heart. ‘You got my promise.’ He pushed the raft off again into the moon-bright water. Two miles upriver at the ferry-landing, lights twinkled. There was a tavern there, and a small store, where the road in from Texas came down to the ferry.
January remembered the place from his trip upriver at the beginning of summer. Remembered sitting on the lower deck of the Silver Moon as it rounded Angola Point and hearing one of the other valets remark, ‘You think this river’s bad at low water? Lord, you should see the Red. Time was you couldn’t get a rowboat up that stream, let alone one of these contraptions. You could walk across it on the snags – like a beaver dam a hundred miles upriver an’ down.’
He swatted at a mosquito and wished he’d dared bring the aromatic oil Olympe made to drive the filthy creatures away. But, as long as there was the possibility that at some point he might find himself chased by dogs, it was probably better not to give them too much of a scent to go on. Just get to high ground, he told himself, and you’ll be fine.
Unfortunately, in the area where the Red River flowed into the Mississippi amid a maze of bayous, swamps, shallow lakes, and cut-off oxbows, the closest high ground was Baton Rouge. January got off the road as quickly as he could, but save for a strip of cotton fields barely two hundred yards across, it was as if the countryside were a single huge mosquito-ranch. Go bite the patterollers, why don’t you?
He moved through the cotton fields, keeping the river on his right; steered cautiously through the tufts of woods on the drier ground where the ferry-landing stood. Then he checked the compass by moonlight and turned inland, where the Texas Road branched off toward Mansura and Marksville in the place called the Prairie des Avoyelles – thin woods and round open spaces of phlox and butterfly weed. Stillness held the sleeping land, broken only by the throb of cicadas, the whine of mosquitoes, and the constant peep-peep-peep of frogs where the land lay low. Sometimes he would see a raccoon making its stealthy way through the cotton rows, or his brother-in-flight Compair Lapin. Once he heard the screech of a hunting owl.
When he was a child, he recalled, his mother was always telling him and Olympe to stay indoors with fall of darkness, lest they encounter mulberry witches and the Platt-Eye Devil. But there was magic in the humid darkness that no threat could overcome, and they’d wait until their parents were asleep – January seven, Olympe five and swearing if he and his friends didn’t take her along she’d scream to wake all their parents so that no one could go. Then they’d creep out, scorning evil ghosts and patterollers alike, to run through the cane rows in the striped light of the moon . . .
It was a miracle none of them had ever got snake-bit, but January had no recollection of any of his friends of those far-off days coming to harm. The danger was not in the woods and the night but in the Big House, with its laws and the actions of the whites. When his mother had been sold to St-Denis Janvier, and he’d freed her and they’d gone to live in that small pink cottage on Rue Burgundy, January had sorely missed the noises of the countryside at night. Many nights, in his eighth year and his ninth, he had sat on the gallery outside his little room, watching the street in the hope that somehow his father would find his way there, would take him up in his arms as he’d used to – those nights he’d come to know the deep-night sounds of New Orleans. The squeak of far cartwheels; the low, constant noise of the levees, which went on till any hour of the night; the wailing song o
f the scissors-grinder as he made his rounds.
It was good to hear the breathing whisper of owl wings, the voices of the nightbirds. To see Compair Lapin’s jaunty white shirt-front as the wily little trickster slipped past him in the dark to steal Bouki Hyena’s dinner and tup Bouki Hyena’s wife.
Once he heard hooves on the road, far off in the stillness, and moved in along the cotton rows, stepping wary for fear of snakes. When the riders, whoever they were, had passed, he moved on, knowing the moon would soon be down. In the end he had to cut brush and branches in the woods at the far end of the fields and sleep in the shelter of one of the old Indian mounds that dotted that part of the country. His water bottle was empty, and he turned over in his mind schemes for getting it refilled – only a fool would drink groundwater in this stagnant, low-lying country – for about three seconds, before he crashed into profound and exhausted sleep.
The plantation bell woke him, ringing far off in the darkness. He heard the eerie wailing hollers of the field hands as they came out to the harvest in the first whispers of light. Thirst clawed him, but his first thought was to wonder if Louis Verron had gotten ahead of him in the night.
He moved on through the woods, paralleling the road with the cotton fields lying between. Farther on, he moved out, crouching between the rows, until he got near enough to the gang to call out softly to the water-boy and refill his bottle. ‘You runned away?’ the child asked, and January shook his head.
Dead and Buried Page 19
