Alligator Bayou

by Donna Jo Napoli

  “If you miss painting in your room, why do you call the saloon mural blessèd?”

  “Hot meals, my dear Calogero. On the house.”

  “What about your afternoons? Your experiences?”

  He laughs. “All painters need experiences in order to make art. Have I told you that before?”

  “A thousand times.”

  Frank Raymond holds his brush up to the window, then cleans it some more. Maybe he’s forgotten I’m here. That same lonely feeling I had at noon dinner washes over me again. I’m the only person Frank Raymond tutors. If it weren’t for me, he could have at least Sunday free. Does he wish I’d go away? I’d miss him if he told me to. A lot. I clear my throat to remind him I’m here.

  He looks at me, solemn. Then he goes to the table, dips snuff, and turns to me. “So, question number one?”

  “How come you talk fancy?”

  He grins. “Who says I talk fancy?”

  “Mrs. Rogers said I talk fancy—and I talk like you.”

  “I’m educated.”

  “How come Mrs. Rogers doesn’t talk like us?”

  “She never went to school.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “After the war the federal government said everyone was allowed in the public schools. But the whites refused to send their children to school with the children of their former slaves. For about ten years white children in Louisiana got no education, until they built separate ramshackle schools for the Negroes. It was even longer here in Tallulah. And that’s right when Mrs. Rogers would have been school age.”

  I’m stunned. But that isn’t the whole story—it can’t be. “I’ve got friends now. They go to school, but they still talk different from you. And me.”

  “People from different places in America talk differently.” Frank Raymond spits in his little spit cup, then chews his snuff. “Your pronunciation is more and more Louisiana. Southern talk. But at least you still make good Iowa sentences, like me.”

  I don’t want to make good Iowa sentences. I want to talk like my friends, and Cirone. But that’s not worth arguing over, since Frank Raymond isn’t going to teach me Southern talk. “So, tell me, what’s lynch mean?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that since I saw you Wednesday morning. You know how I respect words. But lynch is one of the ugliest words ever. When a crowd gets it into their head to kill someone, and they do it—that’s a lynching.”

  “Like killing a murderer?”

  “The crowd might think someone committed a murder,” says Frank Raymond. “Or stole something. They think whatever they want. But, murderer or no murderer, crowds are not supposed to hand out punishments. We have a system of justice. Trials. You get to hear what you’re accused of; you get to defend yourself. And everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.” He shifts his shoulders. “What did your uncle Carlo say about lynching?”

  “Five years ago seven people got lynched on Depot Street.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They were Negro.”

  Frank Raymond nods. “Negroes have been lynched all over the South. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Killed without trials. Now that’s murder, Calogero.” He chews his tobacco. “Did your uncle say anything else about lynching?”

  “No.” I get the feeling he’s holding back. “What else should he have said?”

  “I thought maybe he was talking about the lynchings in New Orleans.”

  “New Orleans?”

  “Eight years ago. Ask him. I bet he knows more than I do.”

  “He used to live in New Orleans. All of them did.”

  “Then I’m sure they know more than me. Ask them.”

  “All right. Why do people call Sicilians dagoes? What’s it mean?”

  “It’s an insult, that’s all I know.”

  “One more question: who was Jefferson Davis?”

  “Come on. We talked a lot about the Civil War.”

  “I forget parts.”

  Frank Raymond purses his lips and looks out the window. “Jefferson Davis died in 1889,” he says at last. “I think December.”

  “And his birthday was yesterday,” I say impatiently. “But who was he?”

  “Not a bad man. Born nearby—in Mississippi. Went to West Point, the famous military academy. Then he was a cotton planter. Somehow, he wound up a senator.”

  “He doesn’t sound important enough for the whole state of Louisiana to celebrate his birthday.”

  “Well, I’m no history teacher. Just your language tutor. Though your English is good now, except for that twang.” Frank Raymond goes to the window and rests his forearms on the sill. “So. Eventually, Mr. Jefferson Davis wound up president of the Confederacy.”

  Now I’m confused. “And he wasn’t bad? That’s what you said.”

  “You think everybody in the Confederacy was bad?” Frank Raymond’s still leaning out the window, so I can’t see his face. But the rise at the end of his question tells me he’s baiting me.

  I’m not stupid. Something as big as the Confederacy has to have had good people as well as bad. But taking the bait is half the fun. “Yes. Francesco says it’s the old Confederacy way of thinking that led to the new voting laws.”

  Frank Raymond turns. “Are you asking me about the voting laws?”

  “I guess.”

  “No one can vote in Louisiana unless they’ve been residents for five years and pay the poll tax.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “There’s a third requirement: you have to read English. That alone is enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To knock out Sicilians, even if they’ve become citizens. Most Negroes, too.”

  All my uncles except Giuseppe have become American citizens. But they can’t read. So with the new law they can’t vote. “How can they make a law like that?”

  “The justification goes like this: if you can’t read, you can’t understand the Constitution. And if you don’t understand the Constitution, you shouldn’t vote.”

  “People can read you the Constitution. And I could translate for my uncles.”

  “Exactly.” He crosses his arms and leans against the windowsill. “So there’s a silent motive.”

  “They want to keep Sicilians and Negroes from voting,” I say slowly.

  “There’s more of you than there are whites. If you took control, the whole state would change.”

  “But what about Mr. Rogers? What about the white men like him who didn’t go to school after the war? They don’t read. How can they vote?”

  Frank Raymond walks over to a corner and spits in the brass spittoon this time. “You see the problem. The law knocks out whites, too. Mostly poor ones. But the state leaders want whites to vote. So they added a handy little condition: if your father or grandfather was a registered voter in 1867, then you can vote even if you can’t read.”

  In 1867, two years after the end of the war—just two years after slavery ended. I bet there isn’t a Negro in the state whose father or grandfather was a registered voter in 1867. I’m sure there is no Sicilian. “Confederate thinking. That’s what Francesco hates. So how can Jefferson Davis not have been bad?”

  Frank Raymond smiles. I smile back. We love these debates.

  “He made a reputation for himself of treating people fairly,” says Frank Raymond. “Black Hawk, the great chieftain, was his prisoner and Davis won his respect.”

  “What’s a chieftain?”

  “Don’t you know what Indians are? I really am a bad teacher. We’re going out.” Frank Raymond puts on his shoes and flips through the canvases of paintings, choosing one of a deer in a field. He rolls it up. “Time for experiences. Are your horses free?”

  “Everyone gets Sunday off. Even animals.”

  “Well, I hate to rob them of their one day off, but we can feed them something nice when we get back. We’ll talk as we ride and keep our time together an English lesson. Officially.”

  eightr />
  We ride east toward the river, Frank Raymond on Granni and me on Docili. Frank Raymond talks about the Indians, who lived all across this country once. They were here long before the Europeans.

  He cuts off the road, and we wind through trees draped in moss. “Stay behind me from here on. The ground gets soft, so you need to know the way. There’s a small swamp south of here.”

  The trees thicken and the sky grows narrow between them, so when we finally come out at the river, it seems the world is opening up to us, water and sky forever.

  The Mississippi River thrills me. Wide and rolling. The first time I saw it, Giuseppe and Cirone and I went to the town of Delta and watched the Vicksburg port from our side of the river. Wagons pulled up at the dock and bales of cotton were loaded onto a steamboat. Steamboats bring millions of bales to New Orleans all the time. Tallulah people say this is cotton land like nowhere else on earth.

  But where Frank Raymond and I have come out today, there are no boats. Nothing to look at but the river itself. I’ve always loved water and swimming. From the hilltop where the cathedral stands in Cefalù, you can watch the sea. This river is different from the sea. No waves, no tides. But it calms me, all the same. The air above the water shimmers alive with spirits. Ghosts—but good ghosts. It makes my soul feel…cradled. It’s as good as stepping inside any cathedral. I make a promise: when I’m grown, I’m going to live near water.

  “For a long time the Mississippi was the dividing line in America.” Frank Raymond walks his horse beside mine as we turn north. “Everything civilized happened to the east of it, and no one got too flustered about what happened to the west of it. That’s why the government decided to make the Indians move west, across the river. But Black Hawk stood up for his people. He said they didn’t want to cross over.”

  “So there was a war?”

  “You understand American history!”

  Sicilian history has plenty of invasions in it, I think. “Will I get to meet Black Hawk?”

  “Black Hawk’s long dead. No, we’re going to visit my friend Joseph. I haven’t seen him for a month.”

  The horses pick their way along the bank of the winding river, then we cut inland through grasses, till we come out on a small, still pond with a cluster of purple flowers in the water at the far end. There’s a little shack on one side with a stovepipe sticking out the top.

  We get off and drop the reins so that the horses can wander, drink, and graze. They won’t run off.

  The sun is high and hot. I walk to the water and kneel to drink.

  “Hana!”

  I turn at the strange word.

  An old man emerges from the trees with a musket pointed right at me. All I can see is the wavering mouth of that barrel as he approaches.

  “Hello, Joseph,” says Frank Raymond.

  Joseph squints at Frank Raymond and lowers the musket. I can see his face now. Bags under his eyes, hanging jowls, loose earlobes. He looks ancient. His shirt is embroidered with white seed. A necklace of red-and-white-striped beads glints in the sun. And his white hair is held back by a bead band around his forehead.

  Joseph sits beside Frank Raymond, not even leaning on anything as he lowers himself. He’s agile for someone so old.

  “Joseph, this is my friend Calogero.”

  Joseph nods as I walk up to them.

  “A pleasure.” The instant I say that, I feel stupid. Americans say hello, not a pleasure. I’m translating from the Sicilian, ’cause that gun made me so nervous.

  “Calogero had never heard of an Indian before today.”

  Joseph sits taller, his eyes on me. “Now you see the whole tribe. I am Joseph. I am the Tunica tribe.”

  I sit beside him. “How can you be a whole tribe?”

  “A hundred years ago they drove my tribe from the lower basin of the Yazoo River south into Louisiana. Near where the Red River comes closest to the titik—the big river—the Mississippi. People there still call themselves Tunica. Maybe fifty of them. But they are mixed breed. I am the only full-blooded Tunica left alive.”

  “What does mixed breed mean?”

  “It is your blood. They have names for different blood. If one parent is white, the other Negro, they call you mulatto. If one or both are mixed, they call you griffe or sacatra or quadroon or octoroon, depending on how much Negro blood and how much white blood you have.”

  “Why? Who cares?”

  “The French fools over in Cane River country. They are strict about who can do what—who can eat where, what people can walk ahead of what other people. But with the Indians it is just are you full-blooded, or do you have Negro or white blood in you—then, mixed breed. I am full-blooded Tunica. The only one. I am the Tunica tribe.”

  “I guess that means I’m full-blooded Sicilian. Not the only one.”

  “Sicilian?” Joseph shakes his head. “We do not let Sicilians off the boat in Indian ports. You brought the yellow fever.”

  “We did?” What’s yellow fever? I look at Frank Raymond.

  “That’s just putting blame where they want it to go,” says Frank Raymond.

  “You sure about that?” asks Joseph.

  “Yellow fever breaks out when people are poor and crowded together and dirty and hot and the bugs are biting like mad. It doesn’t matter what blood you have. Sicilians didn’t bring yellow fever.”

  “So why would anyone say that?” I ask.

  “If you don’t want people to like someone, just call him disease infected.”

  “Lies.” Joseph clicks his tongue. “They tell lies about Indians, too. If I had stayed by the Red River, well… yaxci …”

  “What’s that mean?” I ask.

  “I would get angry. I would get sick.”

  “Which one? Angry or sick?”

  “It is one word in Tunica. If you are angry, you are sick. Too much ugly in that part of the world. I would have ended angry and sick; so the Tunica tribe would have ended angry and sick. That is not an honorable ending for an honorable people. I crossed the titik—the big river—back to our land, so the tribe could end properly. But Vicksburg people are nosy, and would not leave me alone. I had to cross the great titik yet again to find quiet.” He looks around. “This is my burial ground.”

  He’s come here to die. I pull my knees to my chest, wrap my arms around them.

  Frank Raymond goes over to Granni. He unties the rolled-up canvas from his saddle, and brings it to Joseph.

  Joseph inspects the painting, and smiles. “Ya–deer. Are you hungry?” He goes into his shack and comes out with two blackish brown squares.

  Frank Raymond chews on his. So I try it. Salty and tough and wonderful.

  “Dried venison,” says Frank Raymond.

  Joseph goes into the shack again and comes out with a bundle wrapped in wet cloth. He opens it. It’s a large lump of gray clay. He uses a thin sheet of bark to slice off a hunk for Frank Raymond, and another for me, and a third for himself. Then he wraps up the rest and puts it back away in his shack.

  Joseph looks at me solemnly. “Every Tunica man knows how to make pottery.”

  “Every single one?”

  “I know how. So it is true.” He smiles.

  He caught me. I laugh.

  “Wixsa. Every Tunica man knows how to joke, too.”

  Joseph and Rosario would like each other.

  We pass the afternoon making bowls. Joseph hums, but Frank Raymond talks a blue streak. He explains the clay came from the bottom of a stream. When we add handfuls of grit, he explains it’s crushed shells. Clams and mussels.

  We press the heels of our hands into the clay, then rock it down and press again. That removes the air bubbles so that the clay won’t explode in the fire. We pinch the clay to shape it, pinch and smooth.

  Cracks form in my bowl. Joseph gets a wooden bowl from his shack. He lines it with a fine net, sets my bowl in it, and goes back to working his own. I stare. Then I get it. I press my clay into the wooden bowl. The outer bowl gives the inn
er one shape. Now it’s easy to smooth out the cracks.

  We wet our bowls and run the blunt, fat-lipped edge of a clam shell over the surface to smooth even more. Joseph eases my clay bowl out of the wooden one. I peel off the net. It leaves a nice crisscross design.

  Then we decorate our bowls, using bits of antler to draw with. Frank Raymond hums with Joseph.

  I add pear-shaped loops inside the diamonds of my crisscrosses. The loops look like pawpaw fruit. And I hum, too—that song Patricia taught me about picking up paw-paws.

  Joseph sets the bowls on a wooden tray with a wet cloth draped on top.

  “That’s so they can dry slowly,” says Frank Raymond. “Then he’ll bake them in a pit fire.”

  I watch Frank Raymond and Joseph, and I understand why they’re friends. I understand why someone would go someplace to spend his last days making bowls.

  Joseph didn’t come here to die, after all. He came to live. In beauty.

  nine

  Monday night the boys are waiting for us at the end of South Street.

  “What’d you tell him?” asks Charles. “The tall one. Frank.”

  He means Francesco. But I like it that he’s made the name sound American. I wish he’d do that to mine and not call me “Mr. Calo-whatever.” “I asked if we could go exploring.”

  “Didn’t tell him it was a ’gator hunt?”

  I shake my head.

  Charles smiles in approval.

  “That hairy bear?” says Rock. “He let you go that easy?”

  “He belong in Alligator Bayou with them other bears,” says Ben.

  The skin on my scalp tightens. “The bayou has bears?”

  “You scared?” Charles slaps my shoulder lightly. “Don’t waste your energy. Bears hide. You need a bloodhound to hunt them down, like what the sheriff have for tracking criminals. We ain’t hardly never lucky enough to see them.”

  “What y’all want to worry about…well.” Ben turns his back for a second and takes something from his pocket. Then he swirls around and goes, “Ahhh!” His mouth is open wide and full of cotton.

  I stare.

  Ben takes the cotton out of his mouth and laughs as though he’s the most hilarious person in the world.