And so it was when Nadyha sang. It was a song in Gypsy, with a simple theme, also in a minor key. She and Simza played guitar, Mirella played the recorder, and Niçu accompanied them in a quiet, tuneful background. Though Gage couldn’t understand the words, he knew the song expressed longing and a lost love, though he didn’t know what kind of love. Nadyha had a lovely voice, a low throaty contralto. Mirella joined her in the last verse in a soft soprano.
When the last notes died out, Gage wanted to say something, but he was so overcome by the beauty of the music that he couldn’t think of anything at all. But the Gypsies paid no attention to him and Denny. They exchanged glances, and began to smile, and Nadyha said, “Ha Ne Ne Ne!”
She handed her guitar to Mirella, jumped in front of the campfire, put one foot forward, and held her arms over her head. They started playing, a jaunty, happy, fast-moving song whose main words were obviously “ha ne ne ne.” And Nadyha danced.
Gage was fascinated, and not just because it was Nadyha. He was amazed at the dance. It was wild and exotic, but not at all suggestive or vulgar. Most of it was very clever fast footwork, with acrobatic turns and graceful gestures with her arms held over her head. When she whirled, Gage saw no flash of ankles; instead, she untied the scarves at her waist and used them to create exciting movement all around her. She smiled the entire time, her eyes bright. Unlike the songs, the dance had no motif of longing and desire; it was an expression of happiness and gladness, in the moment and unfettered.
The dance finished, and Nadyha wasn’t even out of breath, though the color in her cheeks was high and her eyes flashed brilliantly. “Two guitars!” she said, and held her hand out to Mirella. Now Niçu took the guitar and he and Simza started playing, with Niçu performing some very complicated plucking while Baba Simza played a slow rhythm. It started out slowly, and Mirella and Nadyha danced exactly the same movements. Gradually the tempo increased, and faster and faster they danced, keeping exact time with their footwork and clapping their hands together in unison. Gage and Denny started clapping—Gage watched Baba Simza carefully for approval—and she nodded and yelled, “Hai!” After that, on the strong beats, they all at one time or another would shout, Hai! The dance went faster and faster—Mirella’s and Nadyha’s scarves were big whirls of color—and then Nadyha called out, “Boldo! Come dance with us!”
The bear, as if he’d been waiting for the invitation, came to his feet, not all-fours but standing upright, and went to stand by Nadyha. He beat his paws together and put one bear-paw in front of the other in a slow shuffle. He snuffled loudly and looked as if he were having fun. Nadyha laughed, and Gage and Denny found they couldn’t help but laugh, too. Boldo seemed pleased, and tried a whirl that made him fall to all four paws, but he heaved himself up again and kept his bear dance going until the dance ended.
When they finished Nadyha led him back to his cushion, gave him a small basket of muscadines, and came to throw herself down by Gage and Denny. “That was pias, baro pias!” she exclaimed.
Gage knew that was “big fun,” and he said, “For us, too. You’re all so talented, so gifted! I can’t sing a note, and I’ve never tried dancing but I think I’d probably be a lot like Boldo.”
“I think Boldo dances very well,” Nadyha teased.
“I sure didn’t mean to offend Boldo. I guarantee you I couldn’t dance nearly as well as he does.”
“He always makes lots of pennies when he dances at French Market,” Nadyha said. “Sometimes more than the rest of us do.”
With sudden interest Denny said, “Do all of you dance at Market? Dance, and sing, like tonight?”
“Of course. The gaje love it. And we’re proud of it, it’s how we tell our sorrows, our hopes, our longings, in our songs. Romoro dance too, it’s different from women’s dance. You should see Niçu, he’s very good, but he always plays violin or guitar with just the four of us. In our dance we tell our happiness, our joy, our gladness at the Gypsy life. And the gaje never even know it, or understand it. They think we’re just performing tricks, like Boldo,” she finished with disgust.
“That’s not true of all gaje,” Gage said in a fervent, low tone. Nadyha turned to him to search his face, and seemed about to ask him something, but Denny interrupted.
“Nadyha, does Anca go to Market, too?”
“If she wants to. Usually she does.”
“Does she do tricks, too, like Boldo? I mean, can you make her, like jump through hoops, or things like that?” he demanded with an urgency neither Gage nor Nadyha understood.
But, being in a good mood from the dancing and singing, Nadyha humored him. “Of course not. I wouldn’t embarrass her by making her do silly things, she’s not like Boldo. He loves the attention, I think if he could he’d laugh at his own silly self. But . . .” she slid Denny a sly look. “There is one thing that Anca and I do. If she will, I’ll show you.”
She got to her feet and went to the cougar, who had watched all the goings-on with cool interest. Nadyha put her hand under her chin, and Anca rose to her feet. Then, with Nadyha’s hand on her head, they walked together to the campfire and began to circle it. In a low, intense voice Nadyha said, “The wicked man says, ‘There is a lion in the way!’” She turned to walk in front of Anca, who paced silently behind her. Looking over her shoulder as if with fear, Nadyha cried, “A lion is in the streets!” Then she turned around and walked backward in front of Anca, bending over to look her in the eyes as they paced. “Yes, the wicked run when no man pursues them—but the righteous are as bold as the lion.” Now they slowed, and with a small flick of Nadyha’s hand Anca sat down. Nadyha went to her knees in front of her. In a soft, low voice now, she said, “Oh, lion, you are comely in going. The lion is strongest among beasts . . .” Now Nadya raised her head and called out loudly, “. . . and turns not away for any!”
Anca’s right paw came up with blinding quickness, cruel claws unsheathed, and she opened her mouth and growled savagely, a loud snarl that seemed to rent the night.
It startled—if not frightened—Gage and Denny, and they both jumped. Gage started to scramble to his feet, but then they saw that Baba Simza and Mirella and Niçu were all smiling. The moment, and Anca’s wildness, only lasted maybe three seconds. Nadyha took a piece of meat out of her pocket and gave it to Anca, and then they touched noses.
Denny looked at Gage, his brown eyes wide and gleaming. “I’ve got such a whale of an idea, Gage, you’re not going to believe it. If only . . . if only . . .”
“What?” Gage demanded.
“You’re sure, you can shoot a handgun as well as you do a rifle?” Denny blurted out.
“Huh? Uh—yeah, I can. Why?”
But Denny merely shook his head. “I’ll let you know. For now, just do this for me: practice up on your sharpshooting, and have Niçu practice up on his knife-throwing. And leave the rest to me.”
“Ho-kay,” Gage said. Both he and Denny had picked up the Gypsies’ whimsical way of saying it.
“But Gage?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t shoot any deer.”
ON THE NEXT THURSDAY afternoon, Mirella and Nadyha and Niçu and Baba Simza were wearing all of their finest clothes as the two vardos pulled out of camp. Tinar and Saz had harnesses of the finest leather and silver, with headpieces only, no bits in their mouths. Gage rode Cayenne. Nadyha and Denny sat together in her vardo, Mirella and Niçu drove theirs, while Baba Simza rode in their wagon. Anca, Boldo, and Matchko rode in Nadyha’s wagon. Boldo stuck his head out of the side window and occasionally waved at nothing.
All that day they had loaded up the wagons with all the goods that the Gypsies were taking to the French Market to sell: shawls, woven scarves, the tignons that the gens de couleur libres—the free women of color—wore; dozens of baskets; decorated palmetto fans; all kinds of tinware that Niçu had made; thirty jars of honey that Nadyha—with Boldo’s eager help—had collected from the tupelo trees; and jars and tins and bottles of herbs and spices and her
bal remedies that Baba Simza and Nadyha specialized in.
Riding beside Nadyha’s wagon, Gage asked, “Why are we going to town so late?”
“We want to get there on Thursday night and get our place, so we’ll be ready in the morning. Friday is the day that the Blue Beasts get paid,” she said, her mobile lips curling in disdain. “Saturday and Sunday are big market days for the criollos.” The Creoles—the word actually simply meant “native,” but in New Orleans it had come to mean those French-Spanish descendants who had been born here, yet retained their own unique culture. Then she smiled brilliantly; she had been happy and excited all day, and she and Mirella and Baba Simza were all wearing their fine “dancing” clothes. “But this time, maybe we get to stay until Wednesday, because it’s the big gaje party, for the freedom. Or something like that.”
“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten, it’s the Fourth of July,” Gage said. “I’d lost track of time.”
Beside her, Denny watched Nadyha curiously. “You really are looking forward to this, aren’t you, Miss Nadyha? You like going to town?”
“Oh, yes! I love the town, all of the many kinds of people, the Market, but most of all I love the river and the steamboats.”
“Oh, really!” Denny said with a big grin. “You like to watch them? The boats?”
“I love to watch them! I look at them, and I think, and I wonder, where do they go? What wonderful sights and places do they see? What’s the big river like, away from New Orleans? What kinds of people are so lucky they travel up and down the river in these boats, some of them that look like mansions?” she said eagerly. It was a very long, and unguarded, speech for Nadyha.
Gage was surprised, but then he thought he shouldn’t be. Nadyha was daring, and she was adventurous, all the things that he wasn’t. But then again, it seemed her dreams were very much like his own. The Big River, wandering up and down it, seeing all those places and people . . . she sounds just like me!
He looked at Denny to see if he had noticed that Nadyha had said, almost word for word, the things that he’d told Denny about himself.
But Denny wasn’t looking at him; he was looking at Nadyha with a big, wide grin on his face, and then he began to laugh.
Nadyha frowned and said, “Gajo, what’s the matter with you? I didn’t think I was so funny!”
“No, no, it’s not that,” he said hastily. “I just want to say, Miss Nadyha, maybe you’ll find out that sometimes dreams can come true.”
Looking with longing, already deep and unwavering, at the Gypsy girl Nadyha, Gage secretly said to himself: How I hope they do!
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cara Cogbill walked down the same dusty road that she had traveled every Friday afternoon for the last seven years. On either side were endless sugarcane fields, an untidy jungle pressing close on either side of the dirt track, the tall green stalks looming far over her head. She was slight, only 5'4", and delicately built, with tiny hands and feet and waist. To her bemusement, she had developed an hourglass figure at the late age of seventeen; until then she had been as skinny and straight as a short fence pole. Cara couldn’t really be considered beautiful, because she didn’t have that sort of exotic look that the word implied. She was kittenish, with a tiny heart-shaped face, and she had inherited her mother’s unusual coloring, a wealth of fine strawberry-blonde hair, but instead of china-blue eyes, she had wide, dark, big brown eyes and thick, dark lashes.
But right now Cara was much more concerned about her complexion than her shape or her hair. Her skin was very fair, and tended to freckle with even the least bit of direct sun. On this summer afternoon, she was dressed horribly for the heat and humidity. She wore a big bonnet with a wide brim to shadow her face, a muslin fichu tied tightly around her neck to shield it, a long-sleeved homespun blouse, and a pair of rough leather work gloves that were two sizes too big for her. Not one inch of skin was exposed, and she kept her head down, staring at the road, so that the high noon sun wouldn’t graze her face.
She wasn’t surprised to hear a buggy coming up the road in front of her, because this was a well-traveled road, leading to about a dozen farms just east of town. It came close, and she glanced up to greet the buggy, for she would surely have met whoever it was many times before. But to her surprise it was Harrison Stokes. His family owned sugarcane and cotton fields out this way, but their house was a smallish mansion, in the popular Greek Revival style, in the town of Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Sometimes she had met Reverend Stokes coming out to check on the fields, but she’d never seen his son Harry out this way. He stopped the buggy in front of her, blocking the road, and said, “Hi, Cara. You look awfully hot and miserable. How about a ride?”
“Hello, Mr. Stokes. That’s nice of you, but you are going the opposite way,” she said pointedly.
“Call me Harry. I’m turning around. I was coming to see you anyway.” He hopped down and took the horse’s harness to lead him in a circle. The road was narrow, and he was no hand at backing a buggy.
Cara sighed. She’d known Harry Stokes for quite awhile, for Cara’s family attended his father’s church, St. Luke’s Methodist Church, and Reverend Stokes had been the pastor for ten years. However, though Cara “knew” Harry, he had never paid her the slightest bit of attention, for her family were poor hardscrabble farmers and Reverend Stokes was a successful planter of high standing in the town. Until Harry had returned a month ago from the war, she didn’t think he even knew her name. In that month, however, he had been paying marked attention to her at church. They’d had one “dinner on the ground” two Sundays ago, and he had stuck to her like a burr. She didn’t exactly dislike Harry—she really didn’t know him at all—but she had always thought that he was a snob, like his three sisters, who openly snubbed Cara. And Harry had the kind of looks that appealed to some women, but Cara secretly had labeled him a “pudding-face.” His mouth was too short and pouty, his cheeks too full and rosy, his brown eyes too round and big.
Now Cara was in a quandary. At seventeen, when men had first started paying attention to her, she had been confused and even a little frightened. But by now, at twenty, she knew all about it all too well. She knew what Harry was after, and it wasn’t to go to her ramshackle farmhouse and meet her mother and father and nine brothers and sisters and court her. She didn’t want to ride with him. But how could she say no? It would be silly for her to keep walking and for Harry, as she knew he would, to keep driving the buggy right alongside of her, hounding her. Resignedly she waited until he got turned around, and then climbed up into the buggy. It was typical of Harry—or at least, of the way he treated girls like her—that he didn’t assist her.
He barely snapped the reins so the horse started up the slowest trot imaginable. “I just had to talk to you alone, Cara. I can’t believe it, you’ve changed so much since I left.” Harry had formed a company of twenty men from Donaldsonville, and by all accounts had accredited himself well in the Confederate Army.
“Yes, so I’ve been told, sir,” Cara said formally.
“You hardly look like the same girl. You’ve turned into a really beautiful woman. And now, I understand that you’re not Mrs. Tabb’s servant any more, you’re her ‘companion.’” He laughed. “I figure that must have happened about the same time Widow Hacker’s niece arrived from Philadelphia to be her ‘companion.’ Hoity-toity, am I right?”
P. M. Tabb and his wife, Octavia, had hired Cara when she had been thirteen to come and work for them on weekends. Mr. Tabb, though very prosperous, was notoriously tight-fisted, and it had frustrated Octavia to no end that he flatly refused to buy any slaves. They cost too much, he said. Why should he pay $500 for a healthy young slave woman when he could pay pennies to one of the poor farm girls to come clean on weekends? Octavia had told him—rightly—that running a household was a full-time, all-day, everyday job, but he had remained adamant. Octavia had hired Cara to come on Friday afternoons and stay Friday and Saturday night. She then went to church with the Tabbs, worked Sunday afternoon
s, and went home on Sunday evenings. For this she was paid a dollar a weekend. And she earned every penny of it, too. She didn’t just clean, she did laundry and cooking, too. In fact, she worked almost as hard at the Tabb’s house as she did on the farm.
But Cara really hadn’t minded, because Octavia Tabb, who was determined to be the most sophisticated, elegant woman in town, had decided that if she couldn’t have six slaves in her household she would have a maid that was comparable to any snooty French lady’s maid that any highborn Creole had in New Orleans. She gave Cara uniforms, dark blue blouses and skirts with ruffled white aprons and a frilly cap. She taught her how to speak, how to walk, how to serve with quiet grace, even how a lady sits, with her back not touching the chair, and how to use a fan gracefully. On Saturday evenings Mrs. Tabb had conducted her musical salon, with all of the important people in town in attendance, and they were served by a dignified, unobtrusive white maid that could have come from any elegant drawing room in London. For all of her hard work, and in spite of Octavia Tabb’s fatuousness, Cara knew that she had received an invaluable education on how to be a proper lady. She was grateful to Mrs. Tabb.
Now she answered Harry a little defensively, “It wasn’t just that, you know. Mrs. Tabb came to see that I had a little musical talent, and she has very generously helped me develop it. In the last two years she’s been kind enough to teach me to play the piano and the guitar, and helped me with voice lessons, and has taught me to read music. And your mother has been kind, too, Mr. Stokes. She’s taught me to play the organ. Anyway, as time has gone by, Mrs. Tabb allowed me to join her Saturday night salon. But I still work for her, you know, it’s not really like I’m a ‘lady’s companion.’”
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