‘I’m only goin’ to see my mama, ’cross the river. Where’s this place, son?’
‘Injun Pipe Plantation.’ The boy glanced back in the direction that the Big House lay, on the other side of the distant road. He was inches shorter than the cotton stalks all around them – January guessed his age at seven or eight. Older, he’d have been toting a sack himself. ‘Marse Cribb’s our marse,’ he added, a little uneasily. ‘I won’t tell him I seen you.’
There was a stirring, away among the rows; the first outliers of the picking gang. The riding boss, with his horse and his gun, wouldn’t be far behind. January whispered, ‘Thank you, brother,’ and, still crouching, slipped away among the rows. Later that day he heard men’s voices and climbed an oak tree, heart hammering with impatience, lest they reach Natchitoches Parish ahead of him and spread word to watch out for a black runaway, six-foot three-inches tall with a wounded face: had his way with a little German girl was staying with us, fifteen years old, she was . . . Or whatever the story was going to be. It seemed like hours before the men, whoever they were – he never saw them, but he heard their dogs bark long after their voices had ceased – went on their way, yet by the sun it couldn’t have been half an hour.
Where the bridle trace swung north to the village of Mansura he found a spring, shrunk almost to nothing with late season but moving briskly enough, in this drier woodland, to be free of scum and duckweed. He washed his face in it, after he refilled his bottle, and soaked his shirt and the filthy bandages around his ribs. The pain had settled into a dull constant, but he had given up even the occasional curse at Hannibal for not making this trip safer for him.
Louis Verron was out to do whatever he had to, to bury the reason Isobel had fled from Paris. Traveling as a white man’s valet wouldn’t have saved him. It would only have gotten Hannibal killed as well. Verron would have been waiting for the Parnassus when it docked at the ferry landing.
Better that Hannibal remain in New Orleans, to act on whatever it was he knew that he wasn’t telling January, or anyone else, about the Stuart family. And to find ‘Lord Montague Blessinghurst’.
January leaned his back against a dogwood, watched across the little clearing where he sat as a dozen lean, half-wild pigs came snuffling out of the trees, digging among the leaf mast for acorns and roots. Rest, he told himself, though his spirit fretted and twisted to get up, to go on . . . I’m good for another few miles . . .
You’re not. You breathe a little, or you’ll start making mistakes.
He consulted the compass, and his notes, and thought about that good-looking boy in the Cabildo cell. If what he guessed was true – if Isobel Deschamps had been with Foxford that Thursday night, and had told him why it was she couldn’t wed him – then his silence, and his honor, must not be allowed to cause his death.
The only question was . . .
No. January shook the thought away. There were a half-dozen questions, and the fact that he thought he knew what was going on didn’t mean that he was right. And he wouldn’t know for certain until he reached Cloutierville and got into the little chapel of St John there.
Only four people could tell him the whole of the truth.
One of them – Celestine Deschamps – obviously wouldn’t.
Viscount Foxford had made it clear that he would hang rather than speak.
With luck he would find Isobel at the end of his search – so certain had he been of where she had in truth gone, that he’d spent the hour or so they’d stopped in St Francisville talking to another of Parnassus Sam’s acquaintances rather than going a mile and a half outside of town to Rosetree. Even had he done so, even had she been there, he suspected that she would have proved as close-mouthed as Foxford was proving, unless he could say, ‘I have been to Cloutierville, and this is what I found there.’
And the fourth person . . .
January got wearily to his feet, knowing that if he lingered he’d fall asleep.
He suspected that the fourth person would tell him all the details that he now only guessed.
Mid-morning of the following day he came in sight of the river again, having cut off the wide loop it made around the Prairie des Avoyelles. There were fewer plantations here, and along the bayous and in the woods he glimpsed the old French style of cottages, huge slanting roofs covering deep galleries against the almost daily rainfall, ancient walls of mud and posts. At one of these dwellings he slipped in among the garden rows, as close as he dared, and helped himself to three yams and two eggs that he found in the hen coop, fleeing at the sudden incursion of a very small, but very noisy, yellow dog. Twice, late in the afternoon of that griddle-hot Friday, he saw parties of men riding along the river road.
He was too far off to see their faces, or their numbers, or how they were dressed, or anything about them except that they were there. And that they rode at a canter, like men with a purpose.
It could be anything, of course. There could be a slave escaped, or a brother who had shot his brother over a grasping woman. There could be a woman driven to desperate flight with her husband’s money crammed in her reticule.
In his heart he knew they were hunting him.
He slept Friday night in the woods, in a shelter of cut boughs against the sudden drumming rain. He slept well, having roasted his yams and sucked the eggs and set a makeshift funnel of leaves to run rainwater into his bottle, secure in the knowledge that no matter what Louis Verron was saying he’d done – who he was supposed to have robbed or raped or murdered in their beds – nobody was going to be out hunting a fugitive in weather like this. If his directions were correct, he knew he should be getting close to Alexandria.
Noon had passed – and he had crossed the ill-kept wagon-road that had to lead into Alexandria from points south – when he became aware that men were hunting him.
As he paused in the woods to take his bearings, at the back of the cotton fields of some plantation that ran down to the river, the song of the field hands came to him distantly:
‘Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
I done, done what you told me to do . . .
Yo’ mother an’ father was born to die,
I done, done what you told me to do . . .’
Then, in mid-song, the words changed, weaving themselves around a different tune:
‘Wade in the water, wade in the water, children,
Wade in the water,
Angel’s gonna trouble the water . . .’
As swiftly as he could without drawing attention to himself, January retreated into the woods, till he came to the bayou he’d passed a half an hour before. ‘Wade in the water’ – no matter what verses of the Bible it had been taken from – meant only one thing, when sung by the field hands: they’ve got the dogs out after you, brother. Whoever you are, whyever they’re after you, wade in the water, till they lose your scent.
The bayou led back into marshy ground. It was late in the day. If he had to hide too long, January knew he ran serious risk of becoming lost in the woods when darkness fell.
Crotch-deep in the motionless black stream, fearing every second he’d feel the teeth of a three-foot gar in his leg, January waded, until he found a tree limb low enough to pull himself up on to, to climb to where he’d be hidden by the leaves. He was some distance from the bayou, hidden among the dense crown of a pecan tree, when he heard the dogs and men come cursing past along the watercourse, too far off to see.
Damn. Hannibal, he thought, clinging to the rough round strength of the bough, you owe me . . .
It was an old imprecation, casually spoken. It had only to cross through his mind to be dismissed: the thought that the fiddler would ever be capable of paying back anything he owed to anyone was ridiculous on the face of it. Yet he was trying, January understood. Trying to pay ancient debts – to Patrick Derryhick, to Lady Philippa Foxford – for kindnesses done in some other lifetime.
Pay me when we meet on the Other Side, old friend . . .
And if I don’t w
ant to end up on the Other Side by this time tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to have to get myself out of these woods.
TWENTY-ONE
He was twenty miles the other side of Alexandria, and thoroughly lost in the woods, when he was taken, by a couple of trappers he suspected had been trailing him for miles. The worst thing about being a black man in cotton country was that there was no such thing as a black man, slave or free, minding his own business. Every white man – and a good number of black ones as well – felt it was their business to ask who you were and what you were doing.
By the time he’d evaded the dog patrol on the road it was dark, and among the pine trees he had not dared to kindle fire even long enough to check his compass. He spent the night in exhausted sleep among the roots of a hollow tree, and through the following day he tried to work his way back to the woods that edged the cotton fields, beyond which would lie the river. Yet he had either come further south-west than he’d thought, or was on a stretch of the river where the woods came straight down to the water, or – most probably – the sketchy map he had of the territory was simply wrong. He listened for the sound of plantation bells but heard nothing, and he knew that wherever he was, he would be too far yet from Cloutierville to hear its Sabbath-bells ringing.
Toward noon he stopped long enough to eat the last fragments of bread and cheese that he’d brought from the Parnassus, and he re-shaved the stubble on his crown as well as he could in the stagnant water of a bayou. Since Verron would have described a clean-shaven man, he trimmed and shaped the beard that was beginning to come in, rather than remove it. Later, when he heard a dog bark distantly in the woods for the second time in an hour, he knew they were catching him up.
Climb a tree and wait until they passed? Or would delay only increase the chances of another searcher coming on his trail? Parnassus Sam’s friend in Baton Rouge had described Bayou Lente Plantation as lying ‘a piece’ on the upriver side of Cloutierville, and he wasn’t certain he could find it without knowing exactly where the town was. Moreover, he didn’t know if the man he wished to speak to there would admit him, or listen to what he had to say, unless he visited the church first. He moved on, changing his direction toward where he thought the river should lie, until he found his way blocked by the dilapidated fences and straggly cornfield of a small farm. He retreated south-westwardly into the woods to give it wide berth, and heard, in the woods’ stillness, shockingly close, the voice of a man.
Among the pines the underbrush wasn’t thick. Movement could be seen a good distance off. He tried to slip from tree to tree, keeping an eye out for a thicket of laurel or hackberry, or an oak with branches low enough to climb on to, but moving away from where he thought the voices came from, he saw the trees thinning toward an open field of some sort – another farm? – and tried to backtrack. The day was overcast, and even this late in the afternoon – it was getting toward evening by this time – it was impossible to tell direction, and before he felt safe enough to stop and take his bearings again he saw movement away to his right among the trees.
At the same moment the dogs started barking again, off to his left. Flight wouldn’t work, and he had only moments to prepare for the inevitable. Swiftly, he pulled his free papers from the dilapidated bindings around his ribs, along with the notes he’d made in St Francisville, rolled their oiled silk covering tight around them and thrust them deep under the roots of the most distinctively-shaped tree he could see, a stunted water-locust that branched so near the ground as to be shaped almost like a V. After a moment’s mental struggle he added his knife to the cache and walked away from it, in the direction of the men and the dogs, his hands raised up.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, keep me safe . . .
‘There he is!’
‘You stay right there, boy!’
He froze, raised his hands higher, and called out, ‘Please don’t loose them dogs, Marse! I ain’t goin’ nowhere!’
Like Compair Lapin, do whatever you need to do to survive. Show yourself to be as much a man as they are and be killed. Show that you’re smarter than they and be killed. Show them anything except exactly what they want to see – an eye-rolling caricature of dim-witted subservience – and be killed, your death accomplishing nothing.
Like Compair Lapin, you could laugh when you were safe back in the briar patch.
His heart raced so hard that for a time he feared he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands from shaking. Let them shake. You’re a poor lost nigger who’s scared of dogs.
But he knew the first few minutes would be touch and go. ‘Don’ hurt me, sirs – don’ hurt ol’ Jim!’ He made his speech as rough and upriver as he could, and he used the name Hannibal had put on his faked slave pass. It took everything he could muster to simply cover his head when they surrounded him, struck him with rifle butts, knocked him to the ground. There were five of them: lean, bearded, dark men who smelled like animals. Swamp trappers, he guessed; men descended from the French and Spanish who’d first inhabited these areas and intermarried with Chickasaw girls. They knew the area and once they’d seen him, he knew he’d never have gotten away.
He tried to cover his cracked ribs and cried out in agony as a boot connected, his mind blurring as he huddled in the circle of barking dogs. Above him he heard one of the men say, ‘Get that rope, Jean-Jean. We show this black bastard what we do to bucks what tamper with white girls.’
‘That wasn’t me, sir! That wasn’t ol’ Jim!’ January gasped the words out and couldn’t stifle another cry as the tallest of the men kicked him again. ‘Please sir, please—’ Not far from him on the ground was the broken remain of a deadfall hickory, half crumbled-away with age and rot. He made a move to rise, ducked another blow and threw himself as if stumbling by accident on to the harsh mess of splintery wood and bark, grinding into it the injured side of his face. When they pulled him to his feet – the wounds from Verron’s beating masked with fresh blood and fresh swelling – he saw one of them did in fact have a rope, and he let his voice break with the terror he felt.
‘They talkin’ about that girl, an’ I swear t’wasn’t me! I’m Jim Blanc that belong to Marse Mayerling in New Orleans, an’ I swear I’m sorry, I’m sorry I runned away!’
Virgin Mother of God, let them believe – let them believe. I’m going to God-damn kill Hannibal when I get back to New Orleans . . .
‘You lyin’, nigger.’
‘I swear! I swear!’
The tallest hunter put the muzzle of his rifle to January’s head, but the oldest – gray and small with one wry shoulder – reached down and pulled him to his feet. January immediately raised his hands again as the hunter searched him, whispering thanks that the light was beginning to go.
‘What’s this?’
‘That a cumpus, sir.’ January ventured a timid little smile, like a child, disgusted with himself but telling himself he had to make Compair Lapin proud. ‘Marse Mayerling, he say it tell him which way to go an’ how to find your way aroun’, but I can’t make heads nor tails of it an’ that’s the truth. I got a pass, sir. That piece of paper, that from Marse Mayerling. I swear I meant to go home when I was s’posed to, an’ I would have, ’cept for gettin’ lost—’
‘Shut up.’ The man slapped him, open-handed, across the face, turned Hannibal’s carefully-forged document over in his hands, then looked at the tin slave badge.
The tall man said again, ‘He’s lyin’, Toco. Buck that’s bulled a white girl, he’ll say anythin’, keep his neck out of a noose.’ And the little man with the rope grinned and shook the noose in his hands, clearly enjoying the prospect of causing that much fear.
‘Anyhow, he stole that cumpus thing,’ The tall man mispronounced the word exactly as January had.
January shook his head desperately. ‘I just borrowed the cumpus, sir, to find my way with! I sure was gonna give it back.’
‘Where’s your master?’
January didn’t dare let the relief that washed over him show on his face. The
longer you kept them talking, the likelier you were to come out safe. ‘I think he musta gone on downriver by this time. He stop at Alexandria, an’ wrote me a pass to see my mama, that’s at Indian Pipe plantation—’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mammy Sally.’ January gave one of the commonest names of black women. ‘Please, sir, please, you write my Marse Mayering, on Rue Royale in New Orleans, an’ he send me up money for me to come home. An’ I swear I never run away no more.’
As he stumbled among his captors toward the bells of Cloutierville – suddenly loud in the softening Sabbath twilight – January remembered Celestine Deschamps, as he’d seen her last: a woman of striking beauty, her face alight with joy as she’d stood with her hands on Isobel’s shoulders, saying, ‘Her Aunt has said that she might take a season in Paris . . .’
And Isobel, almost as beautiful, lips parted and turquoise eyes bright as if she already saw the towers of that gray old city. Tell me about Paris, M’sieu Janvier . . .
Paris is the place where this kind of thing doesn’t happen to those with African blood in their veins, Mamzelle.
Paris is the place where white young ladies of fifteen are not taught that it is perfectly appropriate to call a man their father’s age ‘tu’ as if he were a child or a dog.
Where white boys – like the one who walked beside Toco with his rifle trained on January – aren’t told that hanging a black man on no evidence but rumor is something that white men can do without a second thought . . . Without a single consequence, either legal or moral, for taking another man’s life.
Coming into Cloutierville – a store, a church, a cotton press, a couple of warehouses, and a handful of houses ringed by dusty trees – in the last of the daylight, January breathed a prayer of thanks that they hadn’t met Louis Verron and his cousins on the way. There was a certain amount of discussion among his captors about where Verron might be staying:
‘Beaux Herbes?’
‘No, ain’t nobody there but the overseer, an’ that wife of his can’t cook for sour owl shit . . .’
Dead and Buried Page 20
