He looked from January to Rose. ‘Will you come with me?’ he asked, his eyes almost shining. ‘First to Cuba, to find this Sally, or whatever her name really is – Mammy Ginette’s daughter – who can tell us exactly where the treasure lies. And then – Benjamin, this would of course be you only … to Haiti.’
THREE
Brother-in-law or not – advocate of ‘eradicating’ the ‘disgrace of slavery’ or not – Jefferson Vitrack was a white man, and so January refrained from saying, ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.’
Instead he simply said, ‘No.’
‘Your journey would not go unremunerated,’ Vitrack hastened to assure him. ‘Whatever we find, you will be entitled to half of it for your trouble. I understand it’s a dangerous undertaking, particularly as you would be going into Haiti alone. As a white man, it would be impossible for me—’
‘And as a black man,’ finished January gently, ‘the moment I set foot in Cuba, I would be at extreme risk of being kidnapped and shipped as a slave either back to the United States – where I promise you, nobody is going to ask if I’ve been enslaved illegally or not – or more likely to Brazil. The danger would be ten times worse for Rose. I don’t generally play the Roman husband and patriarch,’ he added, and he put a hand over his wife’s wrist. ‘But this time I will. I will not go; and I forbid Rose to even think about going.’
And Rose – who under other circumstances might have felt discomfort at saying nay to a younger brother whom she clearly cared for – cast down her eyes in wifely meekness, jaw-dropping to those who knew her, and said nothing.
‘We have a son, sir,’ said January. ‘And we have enough money to last us for most of the rest of the year. It simply isn’t worth the risk.’
Though Rose’s brother wore an expression of profoundest chagrin (he actually thought that any free black person in his right mind would consider for one moment going anywhere NEAR Cuba?), he didn’t argue. He would remain in New Orleans, he said, until Captain Loup de la Mer arrived, and he scribbled the name of his hotel – the Strangers, one of the best in the French Town – on the back of his card. ‘In case you change your mind,’ he said, with his dazzling smile. ‘Or should you think of a man whose complexion is sufficiently dark that he won’t be murdered out of hand as a spy the minute he sets foot on Haiti, who has not the responsibilities that keep you – as I know they must – from lending a hand to his brothers suffering in slavery.’
Though the corner of his mouth hardened a little at the imputation – intended or not – of cowardice and irresponsibility, January saw again the warmth in Rose’s eyes as she looked at her brother and said cheerfully, ‘Nonsense, sir. I hope we’re going to see you Sunday for dinner. The cook at the Strangers is good … for a hotel cook. But my nephew can cook a duck in a way that makes even an atheist understand why God created ducks.’
Vitrack laughed and said, ‘You have a guest for Sunday, then, Ben.’
It was one of the peculiarities, January had found, of the whole complicated system of what white people and black people could and could not be seen to be doing in relationship to each other, that while no white – French or American – would invite even the most fair-complected libré to eat at the same table with them (or even consume food closer to the interior of their house than the back gallery), it was perfectly acceptable for a white to eat in the home of gens de couleur librés, or even, in extreme circumstances, blacks (if they’d just saved your life, for instance, and you were starving to death … ) as long as the whites ‘didn’t make a habit of it’ and the blacks were sufficiently grateful for the honor.
Moreover, though Americans considered association with the free colored to be as socially damning as association with blacks, among the French Creoles no stigma whatever attached to whites having Sunday dinner at the home of libré cousins or aunts or brothers – the descendants of Granpère’s (and sometimes Papa’s) free colored mistress. This was probably, January guessed, because so many French Creoles did have free colored cousins and aunts and half-brothers … though of course no French Creole wife would admit to even knowing what her husband’s plaçée looked like (with the exception of the extremely wealthy young wife of the lover of January’s youngest sister Dominique … but that was another story. And even she didn’t go to Sunday dinner).
‘You think that treasure is still there, after all these years?’ January came back into the candlelit parlor after escorting Vitrack as far as the corner of Rue Burgundy to hail a cab.
‘Mammy Ginette spoke of treasure being hidden inside a wall.’ Rose had changed into her dressing gown and brushed out her hair, wavy and silken like a white woman’s when taken down from beneath the tignon that had once been commanded by law as the only headdress permitted – and in fact mandated – to women of color in Louisiana. She carried the candle behind him as he passed from room to room, closing shutters and latching them, making the house safe for the night. ‘I expect the house was burned to the ground, so it must have been a stone foundation wall if this “old blind man” who forced her to go back thought it would still be there. Maybe in the sugar mill?’
January nodded thoughtfully. The sugar mill was generally the only building on any plantation constructed of stone or brick, and it was frequently used as a hideout during hurricanes.
‘I’ll have to sit down tomorrow and write down everything I can remember of what she said to me; draw a copy of that little model of the plantation, too, if I can remember it, to give to Jeoff when he comes Sunday. I hope he won’t be fool enough to try to go to Haiti himself, like the old man did.’
‘When you’re talking about diamonds and jewels,’ replied January, ‘you’re talking about enough money to change your life if you’re an “old blind man” – whoever he was – and doubly so now.’ He followed the dim firefly of Rose’s candle back across the parlor to the bedroom: with the shutters closed against night-walkers and mosquitoes, the house was like a cave.
‘My family must have thought the slave uprising in their area was just a – a temporary problem,’ said Rose. ‘Gold is heavy. They must have shoved everything valuable in the safest place they could think of, meaning to come back.’ She bent over Baby John’s crib, the candle-gleam picking out momentarily those shut eyes, the little domed brow – like bronze silk – smoothed in sleep of the slight pucker of worry that characterized their son’s waking hours. Often and often, at the balls where he played the piano, in the winter carnival season when New Orleans came alive, January had heard family stories recounted by men and women whose mothers and fathers had somehow thought the flower-filled paradise of Saint-Domingue would go on forever: how they’d waked in the night to the sound of the shutters cracking under furious blows, to the screams of the house servants as black shadows darted across the moonlight around the house. Since he was only at those balls to make music, and was thus to all intents and purposes invisible, he had been free to think, They had it coming.
His own master, Michie Fourchet, favored hanging a man who was insubordinate, or slack in his work, upside-down by his ankles naked from two corners of the sugar-house door and working him over with a cane, the tip of which had been wrapped in brass wire. A pregnant woman would be tied spreadeagled on the ground, with a hole dug for her belly so the future slave wouldn’t be harmed. He’d heard that in Saint-Domingue it had been worse.
They had it coming.
Looking down at Baby John’s face, he hoped that those whites who’d had infants this small – this precious, though they were the offspring of monsters – had made it out the back windows and into the jungle, and to the safety of boats. They should have suffered … He put out his hand, touched the incredible silken softness of that round cheek. And what suffering would be worse than to lose a child, as thousands upon thousands of slave men had lost their children when they were sold away because of Michie’s gambling debts or needing money to send Mamzelle to school in France?
But still he hoped those people, un
known to him, dead now for years and lost in the shadows of what had been, had gotten their infants away safe.
Rose shed her dressing gown, slim sides, slim dust-brown flanks nude in the heat, and slithered under the mosquito-bar that tented the bed. January came to the bedside, blew out the candle, shed his own clothing in the black stifling velvet dark and thought about the old times and Saint-Domingue no more.
Even in fatter years than 1838, summer was a starving season for musicians. The previous February, January had had the misfortune to thoroughly offend one of the few American planters in New Orleans still wealthy enough for most of the other American planters to be leery of crossing him. After that, January had been out of the city for much of the spring and had thus returned to find what little work there was – mostly out in the resort villages of Milneburg and Mandeville by the lake – already contracted to others. It was a situation which he knew would shake itself straight eventually. He was one of the best piano players in town and pretty much everybody, French and American, knew it, and there was enough money hidden under floorboards and behind attic joists in the old Spanish house to buy beans and rice for several months yet. Ironically, his unemployment put him in the position of playing ‘man of the house’ to the wives of several of the musicians who had gotten work out in Mandeville, if they needed someone to help move a trunk or fix a jammed window or give a talking-to to an erring son.
So it was a day or two before he visited the Café des Refugies.
Like most ‘cafés’ in the old French Town, it occupied what had originally been one of the hundreds of small stucco cottages built straight on to the brick banquettes of Rue de la Levée and consisted of the usual four rooms with a half-storey overhead. Even in the stifling heat of mid-morning, when January came to the French doors that opened on to the street, he could hear the subdued murmur of voices and the click of dice in the gambling rooms in the rear. The two front rooms – knocked into one years ago – were quieter, men at the small tables reading the latest newspapers and sipping p’tit goaves or coffee. In a corner, a dilapidated fiddler lilted his way through an air from Cosí Fan Tutte. The smoke of cigars or Spanish cigarettes blurred the dense brown shade.
When January had left New Orleans for Paris, twenty-one years ago in the spring of 1817, the tables of the Café des Refugies had always been filled, summer or winter, with graying men whose bitter eyes looked back from these smelly American streets across the gap of years to Saint-Domingue – the place that the world now called Haiti, which would always in their hearts be Saint-Domingue. They’d smoked, played dominoes, and read the newspapers, talking with a kind of eager spite about the internecine fighting between Pétion and his mulattos, and Christophe and the rebel slaves; jeering at Christophe for making himself king of half of their much-vaunted ‘republic’ and predicting conquest by the Spanish, by the British, by Bolívar – anything rather than admit that men who had been slaves were capable of forming or supporting a working government.
Americans, January had noted even then, didn’t speak of the black republic at all.
When January had returned to New Orleans, and to the Café des Refugies, sixteen years later, though Haiti had still been torn apart by factional warfare, it was also still free. And though the Café had been moved from Rue St. Philippe to this location across from the market, these same few men, familiar faces crowned with white instead of gray, were still sitting here, playing dominoes and drinking guava cocktails and talking about their Saint-Domingue plantations as if some miracle were going to occur and they were going to get a letter any day now from a conquering general saying, ‘And we’re restoring your plantation to you with a full complement of slaves …’
As if they could walk along the dusty streets of Cap Francais again, to the little stucco cottages of their plaçée mistresses, and find those same lovely quadroon and octoroon girls reclining on the galleries under the shade of pomegranate and coco palms, smiling a welcome while some obliging little servant rubbed their dainty feet.
Where he stood in the French door, January could hear old M’sieu Thierry – whose hair had been black when first he’d seen him in exactly that same chair – declaiming loudly to M’sieu d’Evreux (they were both stone deaf) that it was all the fault of the mulattos. If the mulattos of the island hadn’t started the whole trouble by demanding of the General Assembly that they be recognized as having the same rights as white Frenchmen when the Revolution came (he meant the French, not the Haitian, Revolution) – if they hadn’t tried to get the blacks on their side against the whites – none of it would ever have happened …
That was FORTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO, old man …
Have you done nothing since?
‘Benjamin!’ Jean Thiot, proprietor, crossed the room to the door where he stood, white-haired now, like his customers, but his dark, thin-featured face still smiling. ‘I’d heard you were back in town.’
‘I knew it would be summer here,’ replied January gravely. ‘How could I stay away?’
Thiot laughed. ‘And how is the beautiful Madame Janvier? And le petit professeur?’
‘Madame Janvier grows more beautiful every day. And I think the first words out of John’s mouth are going to be a speech in Latin about phenomenological metaphysics.’
‘Better that than a demand for some money so he could go gambling,’ said Thiot, grinning. ‘Which was the first thing my son said when he learned to talk. What may I help you with this fine sunny day?’
Despite the brassy light crushing the street outside, thunder grumbled distantly, as if offended by the jest.
‘I wondered if you knew anything about a planter named Absalon de Gericault. Turns out Madame Janvier is related to the family.’
‘Lord, yes! I can’t tell you more than I told the other fellow who came asking yesterday—’
‘Madame Janvier’s half-brother?’
‘Didn’t say, but now you speak of it, yes, he had the look of her. Same nose, same chin … De Gericault was only in here once, back in ’ten or ’eleven, but everybody knew him, of course. His place was only a few hours’ ride from the Cap, and he was a good man, his home and his hands open to all.’
‘Was he wealthy, as planters went?’
‘Heavens, yes! In those days it was impossible not to be wealthy, if one raised sugar. The world could not get enough of it. And even among the grands blancs, de Gericault was rich. Madame his wife coruscated with diamonds: she was famous for them. A colorless woman, always ailing, and thin as thread-paper. Her jewels wore her. And La Châtaigneraie plantation was like a town house. Furnishings of mahogany and ormolu, mantels of real marble, not wood painted to deceive. I suppose the other plantation he had in the south was like the plantations here, a business office, furnished only for the making of money. But La Châtaigneraie was his Trianon. Always the brokers and the merchants from town were on the road there.’
‘You sound like you were one of them.’ January studied the lined face, trying to guess how young Thiot would have been, forty-seven years ago.
‘Once only, when I was eight. My father owned a theater in le Cap, so of course we saw everyone. He remembered me, too, when he came here, though Papa and I went to Havana in ’ninety-one and he to the far end of Cuba near Santiago. He recognized everybody. A very great gentleman.’
The blotched sunlight in the Rue de la Levée faded behind him. Thunder rolled again, stronger, and the smell of the storm swept the streets like cherubim announcing the coming of the Lord. Two men came out of the gaming rooms and moved in the direction of the bar, and Thiot went to greet them – white men, after all, and more worthy of the proprietor’s attentions than a man who could only come through the doors on an errand from his betters. January noted that though they were French Creole, they weren’t the fallen aristocrats of the Caribbean. New men, clerks or brokers – petits blancs, they would have been called then – who hadn’t even been alive during those wild and rumor-filled days. Probably Napoleonistes or Orleannistes or some
other flavor of politics utterly anathema to those last few refugees from the vanished world, the lazy tropical paradise that reeked of sugar and blood.
Looking up, January saw for the first time that the sign on the front of the building had been changed as well. It no longer said CAFÉ DES REFUGIES, but instead THE PIG AND WHISTLE.
‘Thiot had it changed last week,’ said Hannibal Sefton, when he’d packed up his fiddle and joined January on the street. ‘He’s been talking about it since Mardi Gras, but I think he was waiting for some of his oldest customers to die.’
They crossed the street to the market as the rain began, to buy coffee in tin cups from La Violette’s stand among the brick pillars; both waved a greeting to Laurent Lamartine, playing the clarionet among the half-empty tables. It was summer, and if one could make a few pennies playing in the market rather than rolling cigars down on Tchapitoulas Street, that was all to the good.
‘He thinks an English name will bring in Americans – or at least not turn them away.’ The fiddler dug in the pocket of his long-tailed coat for the few cents that coffee would cost. La Violette – who had a soft spot in her heart for Hannibal – added a couple of pralines on a square of newspaper as lagniappe, and Hannibal bowed low and kissed her hand.
‘Is it working?’ asked January.
‘Doesn’t seem to be. Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, but Kaintucks seem naturally to shy away from any building which includes French doors and old men playing dominoes.’ He settled in one of the rickety cane-bottomed chairs and slid a praline across the table to January. Hannibal was one of the few whites in New Orleans who didn’t care who he was seen to associate with, with the result that he was regarded as rather degenerate by his fellow blankittes. ‘But it’s the first dandelion of what I assume will be an infestation of weeds within a year. And how fares the beautiful Rose?’
Crimson Angel Page 3
