The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  The grayhead argued on in this tone, letting his pipe go out time and again.

  Cato—that was the name of the grayheaded chief of our Negro family—was all of sixty-five years of age, and that he was still strong and good for something was demonstrated by the fact that he had brought six hundred dollars under the hammer of the auctioneer a mere two years ago. He had already been the property of at least a dozen masters, each of whom had always sold him off to the highest bidder. He was as good a smith as he was a talented carpenter, and he knew how to keep a vegetable garden and even how to handle a hothouse. He could make trousers or jackets as well as any tailor, and he was much liked, or at least much used, on the plantation owing to his cotton-harvesting abilities. There was a time when Cato had the honor of commanding a price of twenty-five hundred dollars as a “black piece of human meat.” In this way, Cato could be called a very wealthy man, despite his yoke of slavery; certainly richer than many a white gentleman, who would hardly have brought five dollars at auction. Cato was one of those extremely active slaves—obeying the slightest motion, sweating in the presence of master like a whipped dog—but when the time came to rest and the evening shadows passed over his eyes, his jaw clamped down as he sought ways and means to flee or to inflict harm, or at least difficulties, for his masters in secret.

  He had sweated and bit down for sixty-five years, he had tormented himself and worked himself to exhaustion; he had filled the moneybags of his masters with thousands, but his price was too high to buy himself. How could he ever manage to get two thousand dollars, despite all his saving?

  The eight hundred dollars he had saved over twenty-five years, which he offered his master to buy his freedom, was accepted; yet in exchange he got no emancipation papers but rather a better, more elegant fence for his cottage.

  “Cato, I want to keep the eight hundred dollars safe,” his master said then, “and when you’ve saved another eight hundred, you can go wherever you want.”

  Cato was a nigger; he had to bow his head and could only bite his lip.

  Now Cato was free! A man he had never seen had bid a thousand dollars over five hundred, buying him and his family and setting them free. He gave them money and cared for their further maintenance in a noble fashion.

  But the yoke of sixty-five years had so pressed on him and made consciousness of his present condition so inconceivable that he still held himself to be a slave, and on occasion he whimpered and apologized in situations in which free persons would do nothing. When he committed some lapse, when he broke a glass or cooking vessel, he cringed with fear and folded his hands as if he expected the whip.

  When he wants to drink brandy, he carefully hides the bottle in some corner of the courtyard, then sneaks out during the night and takes a hefty pull on it before going back to bed, where he barely dares breathe out of fear that the smell of the liquor might betray him. So the poor man has lost his chains, but the marks they had left behind still hurt.

  The two young women who sit beside the fireplace are the wives of his two sons, who had been taken away by the epidemic the previous year. The two sleeping youngsters are his grandchildren, and the older woman is the wife, or rather the concubine, of a free Negro who owns a cigar store in one of the northern states of the Union, but she happens to be in New Orleans at the time we encounter her.

  The young maiden, or rather “woman”—for any Negress above eleven years of age is no maiden, so far as Americans are concerned—who supports herself in the corner on a chair back and has a yellow complexion, had been born free in New York and was taken in by the cigar-monger as his child.

  “My husband has been gone a long time,” the oldest of the women remarked.

  “Father has not yet finished his business, and since he wants to return to the North next week, he will make good use of his time,” the younger girl added in.

  “Have you received much money from the old man?” the first went on in an indifferent tone, turning to the two younger woman.

  “For the time being he gave us only a thousand dollars and paid the owner of this building the rent for our apartment for half a year,” Abigail responded with a good nature and eyes beaming with joy.

  The girl, who had been supporting herself on the chair back, now left it and approached the people gathered about the fire with a curious manner.

  “After half a year has passed,” Abigail continued, “we will get a house in the Rue d’Amour in the Third District, as a gift.”

  “So you don’t want to go to the North with us?” the girl asked.

  “Who said we were to go north with you?” Sarah responded.

  “Yesterday Cato promised it to my husband,” the cigar-monger’s wife answered in an irritated voice. “He wanted to go into partnership with my Sulla …”

  “Did you say that, Cato?” Abigail asked the grayhead in astonishment.

  “Yes, I promised him,” he responded, “but do what you wish.” With that he nervously looked at the two women sitting next to him, as if he feared punishment.

  “I don’t understand at all, Cato, how you could promise that. You know perfectly well what our benefactor has planned to do for us,” Sarah interjected.

  The cigar-monger’s wife and her adopted daughter threw a meaningful glance at each other.

  At the same instant, the door opened and a tall, slender Negro in the finest clothing greeted them, removing his hat and holding it stylishly in one hand.

  “I did a good bit of business!” he proclaimed. “I bought twenty thousand of the best Havanas, only eighteen dollars a thousand—the gentlemen in the Shakespeare Hotel will pay dearly when I return to New York … Now Cato, are you ready to go day after tomorrow?”

  “The steamer leaves at four—Everything has been arranged! …”

  “The people are staying here, Sulla,” the cigar-monger’s wife said, “Cato made his promise too hastily.”

  “But I have arranged everything for you down to the last detail, paid passage for all of you and made several purchases … When you you think about it, it’s your fault and you’ll have to compensate me for outlays I have made without any return … Here are the tickets, the captain won’t take them back!”

  He handed them the tickets and went to his wife’s side, who silently poked him without the others observing.

  “That is a total of eighty dollars, and we will repay you at once,” Abigail responded, getting up and leaving the kitchen.

  “Where is Abigail going?” Sulla asked Sarah.

  “She’s going to the bedroom to get you the money you spent on our behalf,” she thoughtlessly replied, then she added: “If you need any further compensation, just say it and it will be yours. You should not be upset about that; you can stay here until your departure, and we shall part as good friends.”

  Abigail entered with the money in her hand.

  It consisted of eight gold pieces of the newest minting.

  The cigar-monger’s wife looked at her husband, then at her adopted daughter.

  “That is enough!” Sulla said, as Abigail handed him the money, “I will ask for no further remuneration from you, although I did spend some twenty more dollars and change for provisions which are now unnecessary. Since you refused to take money from me for board, I will ask for no more. I am only sorry that you won’t be going north with us, but rather are compelled to remain here … But tell me, how did the old man come to buy you, free you, and then give you so much money?”

  “We ourselves have no idea,” the two women said almost in the same breath. “He was as much a stranger to us as you were, and he will probably remain as much a stranger in the future, since we saw him today for the last time.”

  “How so?” the cigar-monger’s wife asked tensely, then she continued: “I would really like to see this strange man, who is so full of money through and through; if he is so generous, perhaps he is so for others as well …”

  “You could see him yet today if you wait for him!” Sarah responded.
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br />   “If he is not too late, I would certainly like to meet him,” Sulla said.

  “If he is not too late?” his wife remarked, “Are you that tired?”

  “Yes, I want to rest soon; you may remain awake until you have satisfied your curiosity.”

  “Do you want to go to bed right away?” Abigail asked attentively. “Then take this light. You don’t need to close our doors; we will close them ourselves when we go to bed.”

  Sulla gave a studied yawn, and, after signaling with a look to his adopted daughter that she follow him in a little while, he left the kitchen with the light in his hand.

  After Sulla was gone, one of the two little woolly-heads, who had been quietly sleeping, began to cry and look around in terror. The other child, a girl, awoke from her sleep and rubbed her drowsy eyes.

  “Tom woke me up, and I was sleeping so well!” she cried.

  “Tom must have had a bad dream,” Sarah said, rushing up to the little one.

  While the two women were busy with the youngsters, Sulla’s adopted daughter also left the kitchen and joined her father.

  The cigar-monger’s wife did not seem to pay any attention to this. No more than the two other women did.

  Let us look after Cato.

  As soon as the cigar-monger had appeared, he had withdrawn from the fireplace and arranged his bed, which consisted of a few blankets and an old pad placed under a table on which several kitchen utensils lay.

  The two women had repeatedly tried, with no success, to convince him to sleep in a comfortable bed that they had set up next to their own bedroom, which he had climbed into only once. Cato had been unable to shut his eyes that night, as he was in a continual state of anxiety that he might damage or endanger the bed through some movement.

  Since then, he never got into a bed but instead slept on the floor every night.

  As often as the women criticized him for it, he always answered, “A couple blankets are plenty for an old nigger like me,” and so they left him with his illusions.

  When everyone else was deep asleep, he would already be up putting the kitchen in order, setting the fire or cleaning the courtyard. When the Negro cannon fired, he always cringed and seemed to wonder whether he should be back at home with his master.

  So the poor man had no peace, either by day or by night, and it was a serious question whether he would not have been happier had he never been freed.

  Chapter 12

  SULLA

  The supposed cigar-monger, this veritable prototype of the fashionable Negro from the New England states, was about twenty-five. Despite his youth, he had already passed through the whole scale of trials and tribulations that a man of his years could encounter. Through this he had not become better, but worse.

  He is, as it happens, a man with the most handsome form of face and a candid appearance, with burning eyes and impeccable lips, a rarity among those of his race, a slightly curved, fine nose, and a high forehead—one should say an intelligent forehead, if his black color did not preclude intelligence, according to our prejudices.

  In spite of the peril that we might irritate the monopolists of the white race, his hair, piled up in wild curls, could be called handsome. At least it becomes him better than it does Monsieur Alexandre Dumas,30 who is known to have made the acquaintance of some slave-breeders’ fists in a New Orleans billiard salon because of his kinky hair.

  There is a significant difference between a free Negro who lives in the southern states and a free Negro from the free states. Such a free person in the South will always be dominated by the New England Negro whenever they happen to meet.

  Sulla exercised this power to a high degree over his southern compatriots, or rather his compatriots living in the South. After he left them, they discovered all too late that he had looted them, and then they cursed the damn’d Yankee nigger to the deepest cranny of hell, even to the calaboose.

  This was the third time Sulla had visited New Orleans, and each time he had presented himself as the owner of a significant cigar business in the East, a situation that garnered him high profits.

  Sulla was too smart and too experienced not to realize how dangerous it would be to let people suspect that he was lying about his profession.

  He had met the Negro family we came to know in the previous chapter by pure accident. Encouraged by Cato’s foolish talk, he had made himself known to the family, though he had been a stranger; he had visited them a few times, until, in their extreme friendliness, they had opened their home to him, his supposed wife, and his adopted daughter and let them stay until their departure.

  He immediately dropped some of the intrigues he had been spinning with the help of his wife and child, because the inexperience and good nature of the new family appeared to make complex routines unnecessary.

  He had to get their money, which he happened to have wildly overestimated in his imagination. That was a firm goal of his. He was now prepared for the most extreme acts if any unforeseen obstacles got in his way.

  For him it was enough that they were in possession of a large sum of money. He must find the rest without delay.

  He had not the slightest intention of taking the family with him to the East. That was only a means of swindling them of their money, eliminating his current shortages. He had chatted up Cato away from the two women until Cato had finally promised to go along and—as he said himself—go into partnership with him. He knew only too well that the women would not agree, so he had surprised them with the forged tickets and the irritated remark that he had already paid out so much money for other arrangements. The women were easily deceived by this maneuver; they did not consider that the tickets could be fakes, so they paid him eighty dollars.

  With these funds, he intended to make his getaway if need be; since he was otherwise entirely out of money, he had to resort to such measures—besides, it was not unheard of for such a plan to fail.

  A truly demonic, horrifying story is bound up with Sulla’s origins.

  We will briefly summarize here the principal data of his past, and also make the reader acquainted with his supposed wife and his adopted daughter.

  Sulla’s parents lived seven English miles west of Montréal, in Canada, in the little village of Marytown, where they owned a kind of tavern called a “traders’ inn.” The trade sign displayed a white rose on a black field, with large gold letters underneath proclaiming hony soit, qui mal y pense! How the owners of this bar came by these arms would be hard to say. One popular opinion was that it meant “Since the rose on this sign is white, but the owners are black, don’t take it badly!” This was, however, a very dry explication, which required no Sphinx to compose it. Whatever was the case, the tavern was called “the White Rose,” and the owners of the White Rose did a splendid business. Every stranger who visited Montréal had to have visited the White Rose at least once, and, moreover, he must have spent the night there.

  When we speak of spending the night, this does not mean that a person actually slept there.

  The thorns, which the artist had inexplicably left out of his sign painting, were all the more evident in the interior of the tavern.

  A collector of insects was likely to find virtually anything there but sleep.

  For starters, there was never enough room for visitors, so they often ended up in the ten-foot-wide marriage bed of the owners, who were naturally present themselves.

  Victoria, the publican’s wife, was honorable enough not to allow such excess guests to lie next to her, and she always used her fat husband, Sullivan, as an insurmountable barrier.

  Although he had long since passed fifty years of age, Sullivan had a wellfed belly and small sparkling eyes, and fat was not lacking on his cheeks either. His pace was stately, and he knew how to keep his servants—most of them French—in excellent order. Many an Anglo who came over from New England forgot his ill humor when he heard Sullivan explain that he was descended from princes who had once ruled over twenty Negro realms and had founded citie
s and built forts on the Ivory Coast at a time when no Englishman knew that such things existed, let alone that ships might someday sail there from Baltimore harbor.

  On such occasions, he would show a long dagger on whose blade there were several oval hollows, to be filled with the sap of a poison fruit only to be found on the Ivory Coast.

  This dagger was the heirloom of a Negro prince, supposedly more than fifteen hundred years old. It was a valuable instrument, not just in practical terms but according to the worth of the metal of the handle. One Englishman who was a great enthusiast for curiosities once offered him five hundred pounds sterling for this weapon, but he had declined. He soon had occasion to regret this.

  Victoria, who was twenty-five years younger than he, surprised him one day with the news that she thought she was pregnant. In her enthusiasm she went so far as to declare the names her child would have. A boy would be Sulla, and, if it pleased Providence that a girl see the light of day, she should receive her mother’s name, Victoria.

  Sullivan had no objection to the two children’s names, but he could not quite understand how his Victoria could be feeling pregnant.