The Black God's Drums

by P. Djèlí Clark

  “It’s not always easy,” I admit. The one thing Oya definitely isn’t is easy. “The goddess can be fickle. Most times she got her own mind, pulling me one way while I’m trying to go another. We don’t always see eye to eye. But not having her with me would be . . .” I search for the right words. “I would feel alone.”

  If the captain has anything else to say I don’t get to hear it, because we arrive just then.

  “We’re here,” I inform her, stopping at the mouth of a backstreet that opens out onto a main road. Across from us is the railway station for the New Orleans and Carrollton train lines. There’s long double-deck carriage cars too, some with small steam engines and others pulled by horses. Both will take you all around the city and to nearby towns. Boardinghouses for travelers line the block. I point to a small white one with a bright yellow sign that reads Chez Voyajer. That’s where my source tells me a Haitian man has been staying for the past two days, sometimes visited by a white-haired Cajun. I tell the captain as much.

  “This source of yours tell you what he look like?” she questions.

  Before I can answer a small black man steps out of the side door of the boardinghouse. He’s dressed in a long dark coat over a blue suit, topped with a hat like a stovepipe. He holds a large red carpetbag to him while looking around as if waiting for someone. The captain and I exchange a knowing glance—and then she starts out for him.

  I hiss for her to wait. There’s people everywhere! But she’s already gone. Cursing, I dash forward and almost get run over by a bulky covered wagon. I jump back from the trotting horses just in time, glowering up at the driver—and then stop dead as recognition hits. It’s the tall man in the black mortician’s suit! The same one from last night! He’s still wearing that skeleton mask and I can hear him humming that odd song. When his blue eyes turn to glance down at me, memories of Oya’s strange vision fill my head. And I see that grinning skull—now his face, those ice blue eyes where empty black sockets once was—rising above New Orleans like a great big moon, swallowing up everything in its shadow. Something about his stare pins me where I stand, like something done took hold of me and drove stakes through my feet into the ground. And all I can do is stare back, unable to move. If he remembers me at all, I can’t tell, because he just turns away and finishes up parking the wagon.

  It’s not until his eyes are off me that I can move again. Stumbling as my feet start working, I angle around and run to catch up to the captain. I reach her just as she gets to the small black man, grabbing him by the arm and spinning him about. He jumps at her touch, eyeing her from behind round iron-rimmed spectacles.

  “Doctor Duval?” The words are more an accusation than a question.

  “Wi?” the man stammers. His Haitian accent is unmistakable. “You work for them?”

  “Oh, I work for somebody,” the captain snaps. “You seem lost. And I here to get you back to Port-au-Prince, Doctor Duval.”

  At this the small man rears back, throwing up his hands. “No! I cannot! Not yet! I haven’t gotten my jewel!”

  “I don’t care about your blasted jewel!” the captain growls. “We going, and now!”

  She has a firm grip on the small man’s arm. And I’m pretty certain that if it comes to a fight, she’ll best him easy. But he isn’t looking at her anymore. Something else has caught his attention. I turn to follow his gaze down the street, opposite from where the wagon’s parked. There are men coming. About half a dozen. The one in front is a sun-tanned white man in plain clothes and a woven straw hat, with white hair beneath. The Cajun. The others trailing him I recognize all too well. Confederates. Yup, the same ones from Shá Rouj, even if they no longer wearing their uniforms. Pretty sure they one and the same with the men in my alcove too. I add it up in my head and find I don’t care for the bill. Them, the man in the skeleton mask, and Oya’s vision. All coming together in this same place, at the same time. And us here standing right between them. Something’s not right. I can feel it: a tingling in the air like the kind that come right before a storm. I open my mouth to shout a warning, to tell the captain we need to go, quick. And suddenly Oya is there, filling up my thoughts.

  The world slows and time takes to crawling on her belly.

  The men walking towards me look like corpses now, with pale dead faces. Their steps are twisted and shuffling. And they’re no longer on the street. Instead, they’re all heading towards a cemetery of tall crypts that litter the ground like bones, the once white stone stained and weathered by rain as distant music plays. Oya dances in front of them, her feet moving to a pounding rhythm of drums, her legs taking deep strides and her arms swirling this way and that. She’s wearing a long crimson dress that’s being whipped about by a furious wind as she leads the silent men with haunted eyes on the way to their resting place. Just as quick as it came, the vision disappears. Oya’s gone. So is the cemetery. And the dead men are alive again, walking towards us on the street. I turn around just in time to see the man in the skeleton mask pull the canvas off the covered wagon, revealing three hidden figures inside. They’re wearing skeleton masks too, and standing behind the biggest gun I ever seen. It’s pointed right in our direction. I don’t bother shouting anymore, I just shove the captain hard with my shoulder and knock her down to the road.

  Then the bullets come.

  The morning quiet is broken with the deafening bap-bap-bap! of the Gatling. It don’t hit us though. The bullets instead sail clear over our heads, hissing as they go, and catch their real targets. I watch the Cajun go down first, his white hair smeared in spatters of his own blood. The Confederates behind him get much the same. Their bodies remind me of dancing marionettes I once seen. The bullets make them jerk while standing up before dropping like their strings been cut. I seen enough. I practically drag the captain with me, and we scramble off the road to take cover behind a carriage. The frightened horse attached to the thing is screaming and kicking, its eyes rolling in terror as it tries to break free. People out on the streets are screaming too, running every which way. The shooting’s stopped and I watch two of the skeleton-masked men jump from the wagon. They make for the Haitian scientist—I didn’t even realize we’d lost him. He never moved, just laid flat there on the road, shaking all over with his hands covering his head. Grabbing his arms, the men in the skeleton masks hoist him up and run back to the wagon with his feet dragging between them. When they reach it they dump him inside like a sack before climbing in to join him.

  Beside me the captain has her pistol out. She’s shimmering with Oshun’s light, all gold and bright. And her eyes are wilder than the horse’s. She has the look of someone ready to run into battle no matter the odds and whatever may come. Her blood is up, and though she may not know it, the goddess she carries is stirred up too. I know how she’s feeling with all that power inside: like you riding a bolt of lightning, like you tied to something bigger than you can even describe, like you can go up against anything. Only feeling some way don’t make it so. She starts to rise and I grab her gun hand, jerking it down and pointing with emphasis to the Gatling that’s trailing smoke. She relents, seeming to grudgingly accept that if that thing is turned on us her pistol won’t help. The light around her vanishes and she crouches back down out of sight. Together, we watch the wagon speed away, driven by the grinning skeleton man. He’s whipping his horses so hard that they gallop and almost trample anyone in their way. All the while, I can hear him singing at the top of his lungs:

  “And when the people hear the gun!

  The men and boys they all will run!

  Expecting for to see the fun!

  When they get there will all as one!

  Huzza! for Andrew Jackson!”

  When he disappears down the street, I release a breath I think I been holding since the shooting began. My chest hurts and my heart feels like it’s going to pound right out my insides and flop about. I look out at the bodies of the dead Confederates and the Cajun lying bloody in the street, remembering the ghostly images.
Oya rules over the cemetery as much as she does the winds. The meaning of this vision don’t take much to figure out.

  Next time, I tell her, you could be quicker with the warning! My mind, however, is already spinning with what all this could mean. That man in the skeleton mask—I know now he’s the one from Oya’s vision the other night. But what he and those other men got to do with any of this? And why would they kill a bunch of Confederates? They’d taken the scientist, so chances are they know who he is. This don’t make sense. It’s just one big tangled jumble sitting there in my head. And I need answers. I turn to go but the captain grabs me, bringing me up short.

  “Eh! Where you think you going?” she barks, holding fast to my coat. I call up Oya’s winds. But they don’t come like before. There’s still a lingering jealousy from the goddess, but it’s dull and faded. Now there’s a feeling towards the captain that’s almost . . . sisterly. I groan. Should have known whatever disagreements or troubles these two got, it wouldn’t last long.

  “What just happen here?” the woman demands angrily. “Who the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know!” I answer truthfully. My first thought is one of the Guildes. But I didn’t recognize their skeleton dress. And Guildes don’t have guns—not like that, nohow. “I need to go—talk to my source!”

  “Oh yes!” the captain agrees. “But I going with you, you hear? No more of this damn sneak-about business!”

  I glare up at her but she only glares back. Frustratingly, Oya seems to find this all agreeable. No help there. I glance around to see constables running from up the street and hear the telltale clanging of an approaching mudbug. Can’t stay here long. “Fine, then!” I give in. “But we have to go—now!”

  We leave the railway, heading back into the Quarter. I move quick, hoping I might lose the captain in the maze of backstreets. Besides, thinking of that man in the skeleton mask makes me not want to see anyone in a costume right now. But she keeps up easy, even with her mechanical leg. Still, it’s a long go. And we’re both short of breath by the time we arrive.

  “What’s this place?” she asks when we come to a stop. She’s staring up at the large two-story Creole town house of wood and stone in front of us. It’s painted white, with a pitched roof and a balcony ringed by a banister on its upper floor. On the very top of the building is a big cross made of iron. The dark metal catches bits of sunlight that reflect off it like a shiny crown.

  “A convent,” I answer. “The Sisters of the Sacred Family.”

  She twists her head to frown down at me. “Your source is a nun?”

  “Two nuns,” I correct. “They watch the city. I mean, they watch over the city.”

  The captain’s jaw goes slack for a moment, open like she’s trying to take in air.

  “Nuns,” she repeats, disbelieving. “Who watch over the city?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “Oh, and there’s Féral. Be careful with her. She bites.”

  She glares as if I’ve not made a bit of sense, but follows me into the building.

  * * *

  A short time later we’re seated at a table in the lower kitchens of the convent. It was probably a nice table once, with flowery carvings all over like ma maman used to like. But now the gold paint is peeling, and I pick at the bits absently to see the yellowing wood underneath. Spices mixed with the hickory scent of wood burning in black stoves hang in the air of the hot room. And my stomach rumbles when I look to the boiling cast-iron pot on the fire, reminding me I haven’t eaten nothing all day but some beignets. I pull my eyes away before my belly starts bawling even louder, and return them to plump Sister Agnès, who it seems has been talking now forever in her honey-sweet voice.

  “. . . and we became the only order of free women of colour in the parish—before such a thing was even legal,” she’s saying. “It was mostly quadroons and such back then. Our founder Sister Henriette was an octoroon herself. Her mother took her to fancy balls in this very place, when it was a ballroom. White men would fight duels up on the promenade over those coloured women! Scandalous!” Both chins on her round beige face tremble as she shakes her head beneath a black veil that drapes her like a hood. “Today we’ve turned this from a den of concubinage to a place of refuge. And we welcome all women, no matter caste or colour.” She pauses, her blind eyes squinting as she touches a hand absently to a silver cross at her chest. “Sister Eunice, you’ve cut that okra much too small. Just a half-slice will do, non?”

  A thin woman, in a long black tunic like Sister Agnès, complete with that white covering over her neck and shoulders, looks up from where she’s chopping and tossing things into a skillet. “Lese mwen trankil!” she snaps. “I’ve cut them fine! Been making gumbo a long time. Longer than you!”

  “That doesn’t mean you always get it right,” Sister Agnès reprimands her gently.

  Sister Eunice’s brown face tightens up and her lips pucker. “You can’t even see me cutting it.”

  “That’s rude,” Sister Agnès says. “For Lent this year, I suggest you give up that sharp tongue, wi? Besides, I can hear you cutting.”

  Sister Eunice throws up her hands, dumping the okra with determination into the skillet. I just sit listening. I’m more than used to it. The two women are old enough to be my grandmaman. But they get on like this all the time.

  “Féral, non!” Sister Agnès commands sternly. “You keep your fingers out of that pot!”

  A scrawny young girl, wearing a ragged dress the color of faded moss, flinches. She pulls her hand away from the boiling gumbo and sits back on the floor with her skinny legs out in front. Her freckled face turns sulky and her two green eyes shrink to slits that stare out from behind a mess of long tangled hair, gold as straw. I make a face at the swamp girl, who’s just a few years younger than me. She wrinkles her pug nose and sticks a pink tongue back out in turn.

  “Mondjé!” Sister Agnès frets wearily. “Now where was I? Oh yes, so our order—”

  “Sister,” the captain cuts in. There’s not much patience in her voice. I’m surprised she’s lasted this long. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I come here on important business.”

  “Important business,” Sister Agnès repeats. She props her chins up on a set of plump fingers. “And what happens when that business has shoot-outs disturbing the morning’s peace? Leaving men dead in our streets? Whose business is it then, Ann-Marie?”

  The captain throws a startled glance my way and I shrug. The two odd sisters know everything that goes on in this city. Most of it comes from their charity work. Feed folk and they like to talk, I guess. They have more connections than anyone can count. It was them I came to when I overheard the talk between the Cajun and the Confederates, knowing they’d find out quick what was going on. They told me about the captain and her arriving airship, and where best to meet up with her. But how this morning’s happenings reached the two before we even arrived, I can’t begin to figure out.

  “Enough of your prattle!” Eunice growls. She stomps over to stand in front of us, waving a dripping spoon. Féral leans forward, stretching to try and catch drops on her tongue. “This scientist you looking for, the Jeannots have him! They killed those Confederates and snatched him up right in front of you! Now he’s somewhere in La Ville Morte and who knows what they have him doing! Nothing good! Mo sèrtin!”

  Sister Agnès lets out another weary sigh. “You see? This is why I do the talking, Eunice. You just confused them.”

  The thinner sister rounds about, waggling her spoon. “Better than all your preening!”

  “Jeannots?” the captain interrupts before they can start up. “What’s a Jeannot?”

  That I already know. Knew it the minute Sister Eunice said the word. And I also know that means trouble. “Johnny Boys,” I say, gritting my teeth. Those men in skeleton masks were Johnny Boys. And that means the tall man in the mortician’s suit, the one from Oya’s vision: he’s a Johnny Boy too. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

  “Johnny Boys?” the captain re
peats, confused. “One of allyuh Guilde gang?”

  I shake my head. It’s worse than that.

  “The Jeannots were originally a Confederate regiment,” Sister Agnès answers, clearing her throat and taking back control. She seems happy to have something else to recite. “When the Confederacy signed the neutrality treaty with the Union and withdrew from New Orleans, not all of their soldiers agreed, especially those from the region. Some deserted to the swamps to carry on ‘the cause.’ Most of those original soldiers have died or drifted away now, of course. But there are those in the city who still haven’t taken to the changes we’ve made. They slip off to the swamps and name themselves after the old regiment.”

  A bunch of fools who liked to play dress up and at soldiering, if you ask me. Most folk stayed clear of the swamp because of them, hollering and carrying on like banshees like they do. The city sent constables in to clear them out more than a few times, but never could get them all. “But how did the Jeannots even learn about the scientist?” I ask.

  “I would look to your Cajun,” Sister Agnès replies.

  “Likely he was selling information to both sides,” Sister Eunice adds. “To get an increase in his share.”

  “It get him dead,” the captain snaps. “What these Jeannots want? Why they kill they own Confederates?”

  “The Jeannots don’t claim the Confederacy,” Sister Agnès says. “They believe the Confederate States betrayed them by signing the treaty. They consider themselves patriots to Old New Orleans and hope to set up their own country right here. They used to carry out raids in the early days, riding around dressed as ghosts or skeletons to harass the former slaves. It caused quite a bit of trouble. People were beaten, even killed. The Jeannots took a blood oath: to take back the city or destroy it.” She waves a hand in the air, twirling her fingers as if clearing away nonsense. “But the worst of that stopped years ago. We’d come to believe they’d abandoned most of their politics, and were now given to simply stealing and smuggling. Events this morning may have proven us . . . premature in our assessment. It may be that the taking of your scientist is a means for them to fulfill their oath.”