A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  In the old French town, the traditions of a free colored caste protected him. His French speech identified him with it, at least to those who knew, and his friends and family guarded him, because should ill befall his mother’s son, ill would threaten them all.

  Whatever family he might possess in the rest of the state, wherever and whoever they were, they were still picking cotton and cutting cane, without legal names or legal rights. In effect, everything beyond Canal Street was the Swamp.

  “Can’t that policeman go?” she asked. “Or won’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” said January softly. “I think they’re keeping him busy, keeping him quiet. And I think …” He hesitated, not exactly sure what to say because he wasn’t exactly sure what it was he was going to Chien Mort to seek.

  “I think he really wants to find out the truth,” he went on slowly. “But he’s an American, and he’s a white man. If in his heart he really doesn’t want the killer to be Galen Peralta, he’ll be … too willing to look the other way if Peralta Père says, ‘Look over there.’ And you know for a fact he’s not going to get a thing out of those slaves.”

  Olympe nodded.

  January swallowed hard, thinking about the world outside the bounds of the city he knew. “I think it’s gotta be me.”

  Through the open doors to the rear parlor he could see a girl of twelve or so, skinny like Olympe but with the red-mahogany cast of the free colored, with a two-year-old boy on her knee, telling him a long tale about Compair Lapin and Michie Dindon while she shelled peas at the table.

  He thought, They can walk twelve blocks downstream or six blocks toward the river and they’ll be safe … my nephew, my niece. But he knew that wasn’t even true anymore.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

  “Wait.” Olympe rose, crossed to the big étagère in the corner. Like the settle—and all the furniture in the room—it was very plain, with a patina of great age, the red cypress gleaming like satin. Its shelves were lined with borders of fancifully cut paper, and held red clay pots and tin canisters that had once contained coffee, sugar, or cocoa, labels garish in several tongues. She took a blue bead from one canister and a couple of tiny bones from another, tied the bones in a piece of red flannel and laced everything together onto a leather thong, muttering to herself and occasionally clapping her hands or snapping her fingers while she worked. Then she put the entire thong into her mouth, crossed herself three times, and knelt before the chromo of the Virgin, her head bowed in prayer.

  January recognized some of the ritual, from his childhood at Bellefleur. The priest who’d catechized him later had taught him to trust in the Virgin and take comfort in the mysteries of the rosary. It had been years since he’d even thought of such spells.

  “Here.” She held out the thong to him. “Tie this round your ankle when you go. Papa Legba and Virgin Mary, they look out for you and bring you back here safe and free. It’s not safe out there,” she went on, seeing him smile as he put the thong into his pocket. “You had that gris-gris on you for near a week, and there’s evil in it, the kind of evil that comes from petty anger and grows big, like a rat stuffin’ itself on worms in the dark. Wear it. It’s not safe beyond the river. Not for the likes of us. Maybe not ever again.”

  The sun was leaning over the wide crescent of the river as January walked back along Rue Burgundy toward his mother’s house. In the tall town houses and the low-built cottages both, and in every courtyard and turning, he could sense the movement and excitement of preparations for the final night of festivities, the suppressed flurry of fantastic clothing and the freedom of masks.

  He’d already made arrangements with Desdunes’s Livery for the best horse obtainable. Food, and a little spare clothing, and bait for the horse lay packed in the saddlebag under the bed in his room. It’s not safe beyond the river.

  The land that he’d been born in, the land that was his home, was enemy land. American land. The land of men like Nahum Shagrue.

  His heart beat hard as he walked along the bricks of the banquette. If he could get evidence, find a reason, learn something to tell Shaw about what was out at Bayou Chien Mort, he thought the man would go. And despite all the Americans could do, the testimony of a free man of color was still good in the courts of New Orleans.

  But it had to be a free man’s testimony, not that of subpoenaed slaves.

  A couple of Creole blades came down the banquette toward him, gesturing excitedly, recounting a duel or a card game, and January stepped down, springing over the noisome gutter and into the mud of the street to let them pass. Neither so much as glanced from their absorption.

  As he crossed back on some householder’s plank to the pavement, January cursed Euphrasie Dreuze in his heart. At his mother’s house he edged down the narrow passage to the yard and thence climbed to his own room above the kitchen. At the small cypress desk he wrote a quick letter to Abishag Shaw—keeping the wording as simple as possible just to be on the safe side—then took his papers from his pocket and copied them exactly in his best notarial script. He started to fold the copy, then flattened it out again, and for good measure made a second copy on paper he’d bought last week to keep track of his students’ payments. The inaccuracy of the official signature didn’t trouble him much, given what he knew about the educational level prevalent in rural Louisiana. He placed the original in the envelope with the letter to Shaw, and closed it with a wafer of pink wax. One copy he folded and put in the desk, another in his pocket.

  As a lifeline it wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

  It was half a block from his mother’s house to Minou’s. The two houses were nearly identical, replicas of all the small cottages along that portion of Rue Burgundy. He edged down the narrow way between Minou’s cottage and the next and into the yard, where his sister’s cook was peeling apples for a tart at the table set up outside the kitchen door. The afternoon was a cool one, the heat that poured from the big brick kitchen welcome. Inside, January could see Thérèse ironing petticoats at a larger table near the stove.

  “She inside,” said the cook, looking up at him with an encouraging smile, which also told him that Henri Viellard was not on the premises. It would not have done, of course, for his sister’s protector to be reminded that Dominique had a brother at all, much less one so dark. She had been her usual sweet, charming self when she’d told him to check whether Henri was present before approaching her door, but after the morning’s events, and after Sunday night in the Calabozo, he felt a surge of sympathy for Olympe’s rebellion.

  “But I warn you, she in God’s own dither ’bout that ball.”

  In a dither over the ball, was she? thought January, standing in the long French doors that let into the double parlor, watching his sister arranging the curls on an enormous white wig of the sort popular fifty years before.

  And how much of a dither would she be in if someone told her that she could be murdered with impunity by a white man? Or was that something she already knew and accepted, the way she accepted that she could not be in public with her hair uncovered or own a carriage?

  “Ben.” She turned in her chair and smiled. “Would you like tea? I’ll have Thérèse—”

  He shook his head, and stepped across to kiss her cheek. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I’m playing tonight, and it seems like all morning I’ve been up to this and that, and I need to go to church yet before the ball.”

  “Church?”

  “I’m leaving right after the dancing ends,” said January quietly. “Riding down to Bayou Chien Mort to have a talk with the Peralta house servants—and to have a look at Michie Galen if I can manage it. The girl you mentioned him being affianced to—is he in love with her?”

  “Rosalie Delaporte?” Dominique wrinkled her nose. “If you’re planning to deliver a letter, you’d have better luck saying it’s from that fencing master of his. That must be who he’s missing most.”

  January shook his head. “His father
approves of the fencing master.”

  “His father approves of Rosalie Delaporte. Skimmed milk, if you ask me.” She removed a nosegay from too close attentions by the cat. “You might tell him you have a note from Angelique’s mother. But his father approved of that, too.”

  “Did he?” January settled onto the other chair, straddling it backward. The table was a litter of plumes, lace, and silk flowers, hurtfully reminiscent of Ayasha. The apricot silk gown lay spread over the divan in the front parlor, gleaming softly in the light of the French doors. “I wonder. And what he approved of when Angelique was alive, and what he’ll countenance now, are two different things. Do you have anything of Angelique’s? Something that could pass as a souvenir, something she wanted him to have?”

  “With her mother selling up everything that would bring in a picayune? Here.” Dominique got to her feet and rustled over to the sideboard, returning with a pair of fragile white kid gloves. “She and I wore the same sizes, down to shoes and gloves—I know, because she borrowed a pair of my shoes once when a rainstorm caught her and never returned them, the bitch. These should pass for hers.”

  “Thank you.” He slipped them into his pocket. “What do I owe you for them?”

  “Goose.” She waved the offer away. “It’ll give Henri something to get me on my next birthday. Why is it men never know what to buy a woman? He has me do the shopping when he needs to buy gifts for his mother and sisters. Not that he ever tells them that, of course.”

  “You sure he isn’t having some other lady buy the presents he gives you?” suggested January mischievously.

  Dominique drew herself up. “Benjamin,” she said, with great dignity, “no woman, even one who wished me ill, would have suggested that he buy me the collected works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

  “I abase myself,” apologized January humbly. “One more thing.” He took from his breast pocket the envelope and handed it to her. “I should be back Sunday. I’ll come for this then. If I’m not—if I don’t—take this to Lieutenant Shaw at the Calabozo immediately.”

  And if worse came to worst, he added mentally, hope to hell somebody—your Henri, or Livia, or somebody—would be able to come up with the $1,500 it would take to buy me out of slavery.

  If they could find me.

  As he had predicted, the crowd at the public masquerade held in the Théâtre d’Orléans was far larger than that at the quadroon ball going on next door, and far less well behaved.

  The temporary floor had been laid as usual above the seats in the Théâtre’s pit, stretching from the lip of the stage to the doors. Bunting fluttered from every pillar and curtain swag, and long tables of refreshments had been set out under the eye of waiters to which—both John Davis, the owner of both buildings, and the master of ceremonies had informed the musicians in no uncertain terms—only the attending guests would have access. In the vast route of people bustling and jostling around the edges of the room or performing energetic quadrilles in the center, January recognized again all the now-familiar costumes: Richelieu, the dreadful blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Henry VIII—sans wives—the laurel-crowned Roman. The Roman was accompanied by a flaxen, flat-bosomed, and rather extensively covered Cleopatra, and some of the other American planters and businessmen by their wives, but they were far fewer, and the Creole belles evident were of the class referred to by the upper-class Creoles as chacas: shopgirls, artisans, grisettes.

  The young Creole gentlemen were there in force, however, flirting with the chaca girls as they’d never have flirted with the gently bred ladies of their own station. Augustus Mayerling, who for all his expertise with a saber seemed indeed to be a surprisingly peaceable soul, had to step in two or three times to throw water on incipient blazes. Other fencing masters were not so conscientious. There were noticeably more women than men present, at least in part because the Creole gentlemen had a habit of disappearing down the discreetly curtained passageway to the Salle d’Orléans next door, where, January knew, the quadroon ball was in full swing. Occasionally, if there was a lull in the general noise level, he could catch a drift of its music.

  Philippe Decoudreau was on the cornet again. January winced.

  He didn’t hear them often, and less so as the evening progressed. In addition to the din of the crowd, the hollow thudding of feet on the suspended plank floor and the noise of the orchestra—augmented for the evening by a guitar, two flutes, and a badly played clarinette—the clamor in the streets was clearly audible. The heavy curtains of olive-green velvet were hooped back and the windows open. Maskers, Kaintucks, whores, sailors, and citizens out for a spree thronged and paraded through the streets from gambling hall to cabaret to eating house, calling to one another, singing, blowing flour in one anothers’ faces, ringing cowbells, and clashing cymbals. There was a feverish quality to the humid air. Fights and scuffles broke out between the dances, sometimes lasting all the way out of the hall to the checkroom where pistols, swords, and sword-canes had been deposited.

  “Do you see Peralta?” asked January worriedly at one point, dabbing the sweat from his face and scanning the crowd. The press of people raised the temperature of the room to an ovenlike stifle, a circumstance that didn’t seem to affect the dancers in the slightest degree. Almost no breeze stirred from the long windows and the air was heavy with the smells of perfume, pomade, and uncleaned costumes.

  Hannibal, white with fatigue and face running with sweat, swept the room with his gaze, then shook his head. “Doesn’t mean he isn’t here,” he pointed out. His hoarse, boyish voice was barely a thread. “He might be in the lobby—I went out there a few minutes ago, it’s like a coaching inn at Christmas. Or he might be next door.”

  Or in Davis’s gambling rooms up the street, thought January. Or at some elegant private ball. Or riding back to Bayou Chien Mort tonight, to make sure no one comes asking awkward questions about his son.

  In the cathedral, where he’d gone to make his Lenten confession early and pray desperately for the success of his journey, January had been tormented by the conviction that Peralta would walk in and see him, recognize him, somehow know what his plans were. It irritated him that he should feel like a criminal in his search for the justice that the law should be giving him gratis. Confession and contrition and the ritual of the Mass had calmed his fears for a time, but as the evening progressed and Peralta did not make an appearance, like scurrying rats the fears returned.

  The band occupied a dais set on the stage, and with the temporary floor slightly below even that level, January had a good view of the dancers. Dr. Soublet was there, arguing violently with another physician who seemed to think six pints of blood an excessive amount to abstract from a patient in a week.

  Though the buffet tables were situated on the opposite side of the room from the windows, Henri Viellard—duly garbed as a sheep—seemed to have chosen gourmandise over fresh air; he patted his forehead repeatedly with a succession of fine linen handkerchiefs but refused to abandon proximity to the oysters, tartlets, meringues, and roulades. In his fluffy costume he bore a more than passing resemblance to a bespectacled meringue himself, with an apricot silk bow about his neck. His sisters, January noticed, were likewise clothed as fanciful animals: a swan, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse (that was the little one who looked like she’d escaped from the convent to attend), and something which after long study he and Hannibal agreed probably had to be a fish.

  “Which I suppose makes Madame Viellard a farmer’s wife,” concluded January doubtfully.

  “Or Mrs. Noah,” pointed out Hannibal. “All she needs is a little boat under her arm.”

  He glimpsed both William Granger and Jean Bouille, moving with calculated exactness to remain as far as possible from one another while still occupying the same large room. As Uncle Bichet had remarked, Bouille’s wife did seem to disappear up to the screened private theater boxes every time Bouille vanished down the passageway to the Salle next door. When the dance concluded and Granger and Bouille led their respective pa
rtners toward the buffet in courses that threatened to intersect, the master of ceremonies scurried to intercept Bouille before another disaster could occur.

  While Monsieur Davis’s eye was elsewhere, January rose from the piano and moved discreetly along the wall to the buffet. He didn’t like the white look around Hannibal’s mouth, or the way he had of leaning inconspicuously against the piano as he played. He looked bled out, the flesh around his eyes deeply marked with pain, and the watered laudanum, January suspected, was not doing him very much good. As he drew close to the buffet Mayerling caught his eye, signaled him to stay where he was, and wandered over himself to collect a glass of champagne and one of the strong molasses tafia, then strolled back up to the stage as January returned to his place at the piano.

  “I wanted to thank you again for standing physician the other day,” said the fencing master. “You behold your competition.”

  Soublet and his adversary had reached the shouting stage and were brandishing their canes: It was obviously only a matter of time until they named their friends.

  “Maybe not being able to practice in this city is what the preachers call a blessing in disguise,” said January.

  “And a fairly thin disguise at that. You know Granger is now claiming that he deloped—fired into the air—and Bouille is hinting to everyone he thinks will listen that his opponent flinched aside at the last moment—in other words, dodged out of cowardice, surely one of the most foolish things to do under the circumstances since most pistols will throw one direction or the other, especially at fifty feet.”

  He nodded toward Bouille, deep in conversation with Monsieur Davis, who was steering him in the direction of a group of Creole businessmen and their wives. “So now we can only hope to keep them apart for the evening. After tomorrow, of course, they will both be sober more of the time.”

  “Thompsonian dog!” screamed Dr. Soublet, his opponent evidently favoring the do-it-oneself herbalist school of that well-known Yankee doctor.