A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “There was a k-kind of Turk in an orange t-turban,” he went on after a moment. “He was in the c-courtyard. I remember thinking his t-turban looked like a p-pumpkin under the lanterns in the trees. And as I c-came down the steps I s-saw Angelique’s little f-f-friend, C-Clemence. She was st-standing in the courtyard, looking for s-someone. But I c-couldn’t stand to talk.”

  His face contracted again with sudden pain, and he turned away. “Duh-duh-don’t … Don’t let my father know I s-said all this,” he whispered. “I have to g-go. I have to be out at the w-woodlot now. I just wuh-wuh-wanted you to know I d-didn’t … I d-didn’t kill her. Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you,” said January. You cowardly little wretch. And, hearing the anger in his own voice, the threat of sarcasm fighting to rise to the surface, he added humbly, “Thank your father for me. And thank you.”

  “It’s all I can d-do,” said the boy softly. “I hope … I hope your friends c-can find who really d-did it. I hope what I’ve t-told you is some help. Because I c-can’t even c-confess this, you know? I cuh-cuh-can’t … I cuh-can’t c-confess that I left her alone.”

  You’re condemning me to exile from everyone I know, thought January, as the door closed behind Galen, the labored squeak of the bolt echoed again. From the only home I have. And you expect me to pity you because you can’t confess?

  Have your own nightmares, boy. I’ll shed a tear for you on my way back to New Orleans on foot.

  He turned back, gritting his teeth hard as the steel arms of Christ’s cross pressed, then grated, in the raw meat of his palm, and began to gouge at the clay once more.

  “Boss-man say, Gonna sell that big black boy,

  Boss-man say, Gonna sell that big black boy.

  Tell the Big Boss he run off in the night,

  But take him out, take him on up to Natchez

  town …”

  January swung around, heart pounding hard at the sound of the thin, wailing song beneath the jailhouse window. A woman singing, he thought, standing in the near-complete early darkness of the evening, her voice almost hidden by the singing of the hands as they came past on the pathway to the cabins.

  Singing to him. There was no other reason for her to be there, close enough to the jail for him to touch, had he not been chained.

  “Mama, take this food, hide it in the black oak tree,

  Mama, take this food, hide it in the black oak tree,

  Where the bayou bends,

  My food, my boots, they wait for me …”

  Something dark flashed between the bars of the windows; a moment later he heard the soft strike of metal on the packed dirt of the floor.

  Uhrquahr, thought January, in a sudden flash of cold rage. So Uhrquahr had his own plans to benefit from the windfall his employer had too much honor to pick up.

  The anger helped him. Exhausted, the agony in his hand sapping the rest of his strength, without that fury he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to tear free the loosened chain from the wall.

  The thought of Uhrquahr did it, though. He wrapped the chain twice around his arm and wrenched, half-blind with anger, and the staple popped free with a force that sent him staggering into the opposite wall. He stumbled, fell, gasping and in a pain he had never experienced in his life, aching in every muscle.

  And knowing that he wasn’t done yet, for he had to cut through the wooden bars.

  He couldn’t even stand up to cross the cell to the window. On hands and knees, in the pitch dark, he crawled, back muscles crying out with agony as he swept the invisible dirt before him with his left hand. His right was a useless root of pain. He literally had no idea how he’d manage to cut the bars.

  He knew he’d have to manage. There was food and his boots waiting for him in the black oak where the bayou curved—a short distance from the path that led back to Ti Margaux’s house, for he’d noticed the tree there. God knew how he’d get the spancel off his wrist or where he could get sufficient alcohol to keep his hand from mortifying—at a pinch, a willow-bark poultice would probably suffice, if he had time to make one. But once he ran, he’d better not get caught again.

  His fingers touched metal, lumpy and heavy. It was the head of a mattock, razor-sharp on its edge and capable of chopping through the toughest roots.

  Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he thought, reaching down to touch the rosary in his trouser pocket, with its battered and twisted steel cross, I owe you as many Masses as you want to name.

  And I owe you too, Papa Legba—the opener of doors.

  NINETEEN

  A waxing moon had risen midway through the afternoon, and pale silver flickered on the waters through a gauze of mist when January finally reached the black oak where the bayou curved. Heart pounding with fear of snakes, wildcats, and nests of sleeping hornets, he groped in the crotch of the brooding dark shape, wreathed with fog and Spanish moss, and almost at once his fingers touched cloth. It was a slave’s blanket, not his own, wrapped around a good store of ash pone and dried apples, a holed and ragged linsey-woolsey shirt, a corked gourd, which even from the outside smelled of raw cheap rum, and his boots.

  Thanking God with every breath he drew, January pulled on the boots first. His feet were bleeding from a dozen scratches and so swollen he could barely get the boots on, but even at this early season, he knew there was danger from snakes. His own shirt he’d torn to make a bandage to keep the dirt out of his raw and throbbing hand, and to tie up the chain to his right arm. He shed the remains and replaced them with the linsey-woolsey garment, which if old and ragged was at least whole.

  He tore another strip from the old shirt, squatting in a broad fletch of moonlight on the edge of the field, and gritted his teeth as he pulled the crusted, sticky wrapping from his hand. The new strip he soaked in rum and wrapped tight, put another on top of it, the pain of the alcohol going right up his arm and into his belly and groin as if he’d been stabbed.

  The river, he thought. They’ll search the west bank first.

  As the thought went through his head his heart sank. He was a strong man, and after Galen Peralta had left him, one of the children had brought him pone and pulse and greens on a cheap clay plate, probably what they all lived on in the quarters. But he’d been living soft. He could feel the exertions of yesterday in the muscles of his thighs and back and legs; his bones telling him in no uncertain terms that he was forty. Even with the logs and planks and uprooted trees that drifted down and caught in the snags of the river bars to float his weight, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to swim the river at this point. The current was like a millrace below the city, powerful and treacherous.

  But he didn’t really have a choice. He knew that.

  The stream was high, but by the weeds and mud on the banks the peak of the rise was past. There was no guarantee that another rise wouldn’t come down while he was halfway across, and if that happened he could be carried halfway to the ocean and perhaps drowned. As he picked his way among the moonlit tangle of weed and scrub on the levee, one or perhaps two plantations up from Chien Mort, he understood why slaves became superstitious, praying to whatever saint or loa they thought might be listening and collecting cornmeal, salt, mouse bones and chicken feathers in the desperate hope that they might somehow avert catastrophes over which they had no control.

  It was the alternative to a bleakness of despair he hadn’t known since his childhood.

  And in his childhood, he recalled—waist-deep in water, his boots hung around his neck as he struggled to clear a floating tree trunk from half-unseen obstructions, the chain weighing heavier and heavier on his right arm—he had been as avid a student of the rituals of luck and aversion as any on Bellefleur. If he’d thought it would do him any good in reaching the east bank in safety he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have taken the time to snap his fingers, hop on one foot, and spit.

  Thin mist veiled the water in patches, but he could discern the dark line of trees that was the far bank. Above him the sky was clear, and the moon fa
r enough to the west that the stars over the east bank were bright. From the tail of the Dipper he sited a line down the sky to two brilliant stars, identifying their positions and hoping he could do so again when in midriver and fighting the current’s drag.

  He tied his food, clothing, blanket, and boots to the tree trunk he’d freed, took two deep swigs of the rum, which was worse than anything he’d ever tasted in his life, laid his chained arm over the trunk to carry the weight of his body, and set out swimming.

  I didn’t kill her, Galen Peralta had said.

  And January believed him.

  He didn’t want to, because the alternative it left would be even harder to prove … and hurt him with the anger of betrayal.

  The Indian Princess at the foot of the stairs. The flash of buckskin, half-glimpsed through the crowd around the ballroom doors. I must see her … I MUST.

  He’d offered to take the message. Had she assented only to be rid of him, to make him think that she’d left? The desperation in her eyes came back to him, when she’d spoken of her grandmother’s jewels, cold desperation and anger. The way she’d set her shoulders, going in to talk to the broker who held her husband’s debts. That trash McGinty, her husband’s relatives had said … A man who undoubtedly was using the debts to urge marriage on a widow. For an upriver American on the make, even a run-down plantation was better than nothing.

  She was a woman, he thought, backed into a corner, and the way out of that corner was money enough to hang on to her property. Money that could have come through those jewels that had been her grandmother’s, and then hers. Jewels she would still regard as hers by right, and the woman who took them a whore and a thief.

  Mist moved between him and the bank. He kicked hard at the moving water beneath and around him, stroked hard with his left arm, and kept his eye on the clearer of the two guiding stars. The sheer size of the river, like a monstrous serpent, was terrifying, the power of it pulling at his body, as if he were no more than a flea on a dog. The willow trunk he held on to, bigger than his own waist, was a matchstick on the flood, and he wondered what he’d do if a riverboat, or a flatboat, came down at him from the north, without lights, emerging from the fog.

  There was nothing he could do about that, he thought. Just keep swimming.

  The problem was, in spite of all of the information he had he knew she hadn’t done the murder.

  He could probably have made a case against her—possibly one that would even stick, given that her family had half disowned her and her husband’s relatives wanted clear title to Arnaud Trepagier’s land and she was refusing to marry any of them.

  But it might not save him, even at that.

  And he knew she hadn’t done it.

  In all the trash on the parlor floor, there hadn’t been a single black cock feather.

  Yet she was lying and had been lying from the start. She knew something. Had she seen something, staying on as she did? Spoken to someone?

  Sally. Hannibal could find out from the girls in the Swamp, if he asked enough of them. Possibly even Shaw would be able to track her down, once January had told him.

  Told him what? he thought bitterly. That a white Creole lady might know something, when Angelique’s father can see a perfectly good man of color to convict of the crime to satisfy Euphrasie’s vengeance on the world?

  He supposed the gentlemanly thing to do was to keep silent about whatever his suspicions were, to help Madeleine Trepagier cover whatever her guilty secret was. But he knew he’d have to find it and twist her with it; he’d have to threaten to tell to force her to give him whatever answers she could.

  He felt like a swine, a swine running squealing from the hammer and the rope.

  He kicked hard against the drag of the water around him, struggling with waning human might against the King of Rivers. Weariness already burned in his muscles, weighted his bones.

  He could flee he supposed. Ironic, that Xavier Peralta had offered him exactly what he’d been planning to save his money for. Père Eugenius always did say, Be careful what you pray for.

  Not that Uhrquahr would let the chance of $1,500 clear profit slip out of his hands so easily.

  He was a surgeon, and there were surgical hospitals in London, Vienna, Rome …

  Cities where he knew no one, where there was no one. He wasn’t sure exactly when his feeling had changed, or how. Perhaps it was Catherine Clisson’s smile of welcome, an old friend glad to see him, or the voices of the workers singing in the fields. He understood that he had been lonely in Paris, until he’d met Ayasha. He had been a stranger on the face of the earth, in every place but New Orleans, where his family was and his home.

  In New Orleans he was a man of color, an uneasy sojourner in a world increasingly American, hostile, and white. But he was what he was. At twenty-four he’d been strong enough, whole enough, to seek a new life. At forty, he didn’t know.

  He’d spoken to Angelique in order to help Mme. Trepagier, Madeleine, his student of other years, trying to play the part of the honorable man. Trying to reestablish his links with that old life. And this was his reward.

  The water rolled against him, a wave like a solid wall, his leaden limbs fighting, driving him across the currents toward the shore. His two cold stars watched him, disinterested, as the moon dipped away toward the tangled west.

  There was nothing of this in Bach, he thought, his mind striving to throw off the creeping weight of exhaustion, the growing insistence that even on the breast of the river, what was best for him now was sleep. Skirls of music flitted through his mind, Herr Kovald’s light touch on the piano keys, Mozart, Haydn, the Water Music …

  Swimming against the river’s might, struggling with exhaustion and the heavy smells of the mud and the night—fleeing injustice and servitude toward a town where those things passed under other names—the only songs that came to his mind were those of his childhood, the dark wailing music of the African lands. Those spoke in his muscles and his bones, as he pulled against the current and kept his eye on his guardian stars.

  He reached the far bank aching but knew he dared not stop. Plantations stretched in an almost uniform forty arpents inland—two or three miles—before petering out in a wilderness of bayou, cypress swamp, and pine wood. He climbed the levee on his hands and knees, like an animal, and lay on the top, panting, staring at the dark water, all sparkling with the silver of the sinking moon. It was early spring, the world very silent but for the lap of the river below. Inland all creation breathed one damp cold breath of turned earth, where a new crop of sugar was being prepared for, trenches chopped like bridal beds in the long dirt hills. He knew it wouldn’t be many hours before the slaves would be out again.

  He ate some bread, which was wet in his pack, and drank as much of the rum as he dared spare, knowing he’d need it for his hand, and got to his feet again. His legs felt like rubber.

  Daddy, wherever you are, he thought, for no particular reason, your son’s thinking of you.

  He traveled like this for two days, and a little more.

  He struck the chain off his arm as soon as he was far enough from habitation that the hard clang of the mattock head on the shackle wouldn’t be heard—or he hoped it wouldn’t be heard—and carried the iron half of Friday before he decided the drain on his strength wasn’t worth the possibility that he might need it. He buried it under a hollow log.

  He kept close enough to the rear of the plantations to follow the line they made, the line of the river that would lead him eventually back to town, but it terrified him. He guessed Peralta would be offering a large reward for his capture—Big black buck, it would say. Runaway. And there were always patrols. In older times there’d always been coming and going between the plantations and little colonies of runaways—marrons—in the woods, but heavier settlement and the death of the rebel leader Saint-Malo had put a stop to that. Sometimes he heard riders in the woods and hid himself in the thickets of hackberry and elder, wondering if he’d been sufficiently
careful about keeping to hard ground, wondering if he’d left some sign. He was surprised how much of his childhood woodcraft came back to him, but he knew himself incapable of navigating, once he got out of sight of the thinning in the trees that marked the fields to his left.

  In the afternoons the singing of the work-gangs in the fields came to him, and as it had on the breast of the river the music took him by the bones. Lying in the thickets with the gnats dense around his head, drawn by the scent of the rum on his hand as he bandaged it, and of his sweat, he listened to those voices and thought, This is the music of my home.

  “Ana-qué, an’o’bia,

  Bia’tail-la, Qué-re-qué,

  Nal-le oua, Au-Mondé,

  Au-tap-o-té, Au-tap-o-té,

  Au-qué-ré-qué, Bo.”

  African words, not even understandable by those who sang them anymore, but the rhythm of them warmed his tired blood. He wondered if Madeleine Trepagier’s girl Sally had felt anything like this, running from her mistress—running to New Orleans.

  Probably not, he thought. She’d fled with a man and had had his promises to reassure her: his gifts and his sex to keep her from thinking too much about whether he’d keep his word, from wondering why a white man would suddenly get so enamored of a slave.

  If she hadn’t been in the Swamp three days ago, he thought—with the tired anger that seemed to have become a part of his flesh—she would be soon.

  On the Saturday he met Lucius Lacrîme.

  He heard the tut of hooves, the rustle and creak of saddle leather, at some distance, but the woods were thin. He turned and headed inland, not fast but as fast as he dared, seeking any kind of cover that he could.