Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  Cold meals and provision grounds gone to weeds and the cabin filthy, hearth piled high with ashes and walls surrounded with trash. He and his sister itching with lice and driven nearly frantic by bedbugs at night because their mother had no time to wage the slave’s endless battle against those pests. His mother falling asleep sitting in the doorway, too tired to undress and go to bed.

  “Yes, sir,” he told Fourchet. “I know.”

  “Then you should know how devastating this kind of thing can be at such a time. And it’s not the first time. God knows blacks are always doing one thing and another to get out of work. Breaking tools, or crippling a mule or a horse. You’d think they’d have the sense to know that a poor harvest will only hurt them in the end, but of course they don’t.”

  No, thought January, silent. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes when you were that tired and that angry you didn’t think very straight. When he was a child he’d wanted to kill Fourchet, after the man had flogged Mohammed, the plantation blacksmith’s apprentice, nearly to death in one of his fits of drunken rage. Remembered how the drivers had untied the slim youth’s body from the post and dropped him to the ground in the stableyard, and how the flies had swarmed around the bloodied meat of his back. Mohammed was a favorite of the children—the hogmeat gang, as they were called—a storyteller and a singer of songs. January had wanted to kill Fourchet and even at the time had known that if the big man died, at least a couple of the slaves would end up being sold to pay debts while the man’s son was still a young boy. Maybe all of them.

  And he’d known then, for the first time, that taste of helpless fear, the awareness that some things had to be endured for the sake of the slender and priceless good that endurance bought you. Being in hell wasn’t as bad as it might be, if you could sit with your family in the hot dark of summer nights, listen to the crickets and the soft sweet wailing of singing along the street of the quarters, in those short lapis hours between supper and bed.

  The thought of losing that—even that—was usually enough to make a man or a woman think twice about open revolt.

  Still he said nothing. But he felt as if the whole core of him had shrunk and cured to a rod of iron, ungiving and utterly cold.

  “Then yesterday morning the servants found Gilles, my butler, dead in the storeroom under the house.” Fourchet’s mouth hardened. “Beside him was a bottle of liquor, cognac. My cognac. The cellaret in the dining room was unlocked, the keys lying beside Gilles’s hand.”

  Bitter hatred froze the old planter’s face as he gazed unseeing at the bright slim slat of Rue Burgundy visible beyond the window louvers, remembering whatever sight it was that he had been brought down to see.

  “Livia will have told you I used to drink,” he said.” And that when I drank, it was as if there was a devil in me.”

  “My mother never spoke of you, sir,” replied January, and the dark eyes slashed in his direction again, then cut toward the straight cool figure in the yellow muslin, sipping her café crème. But since January hadn’t actually said, What makes you think she gave you a moment’s thought after she wiped your spunk off her legs and went about her business? there was nothing with which Fourchet could take issue.

  “Just as well. I’d like to say that all the evil in my life sprang from drink, but I don’t think even that’s true.” He took a cigar from his pocket, bit off the end with carnivorous-looking teeth. “For eight months now I have not tasted a drop. Nor will I. But I’ve spoken of this to no one. Only my wife knows of my decision to put it out of my life, to make some reparation for the harm I’ve caused. Not so very long ago poisoning my liquor would have been the quickest way to get shut of me.” He was silent again, as if he expected praise or admiration for this abstinence—as if every slave on Bellefleur hadn’t known to stay out of the master’s way when he’d been at the bottle. As if even the scullery maid hadn’t held him in fear-filled contempt.

  “Well, it’s clear to me what’s going on this time.” The planter shook his head. “I don’t think it’s revolt—they’re taking too goddam long over it. No—someone’s set out to destroy my land. To destroy me.” His hands balled into fists upon his knees, his face like a storm-scarred stone.

  My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Percy Shelley had written of an ancient colossus, battered and alone. A shattered visage … whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.…

  Fourchet held the cigar to his lips and glanced at January, not even expectantly, but impatiently. A slave, January realized, would spring at once to the spirit-lamp beneath the coffee and kindle a spill for him.

  So, of course, would a gentleman host who didn’t want to relegate the task to the only lady in the room.

  January fetched the spill, his anger smoldering in him like the ember at the spill’s tip. The comparison with Shelley’s poem was too grand, he thought. Yet the words would not leave his mind.

  “It might just be my neighbors, the Daubray brothers, are behind this, or paying one of my blacks to do it.” The dark glance flickered sideways to January again through the curl of the smoke. “I’ve been in lawsuit against them for near a year now, and the case is coming to court as soon as the harvest’s in. I wouldn’t put it past them to burn my mill.” For a moment the old black glint of unreasoning hate showed through his brooding self-control.

  “Sneaking bastards. They know what my land means to me.” He puffed his cigar like a caged dragon blowing smoke. “They know I was putting my blood and my sweat into its soil while that lightskirt mother of theirs was promenading the New Orleans docks in quest of a husband, and they know the land is my body and my life. I’ve done evil in my time, wasted the gifts of God and harmed those it was my duty to protect. But through it all the land was mine. It’s the one true good in my life, the only thing I have to show for living: truly my Triumph. They’re spiteful as women, the whole family is,” he added. “They’d be glad to see me lose it. Glad enough to pay my own field hands to turn against me.

  “That’s what I want you to find out.”

  He raised his chin and stared at January, who still stood before him—stood as if this man were still his master. Were still able to beat him, or nail him up in the barrel in the corner of the barn in July heat or February frost. Still able to sell him away, never to see his friends or his family again.

  Heat blossomed somewhere behind January’s sternum. Ice-heat, tight and furious and dangerously still.

  He’d set his music satchel on the floor by his feet upon coming in from the backyard—yet one more of those myriad tiny prohibitions imposed upon him in his mother’s house. Neither he nor Olympe—his full sister by that slave husband of whom their mother never spoke—had ever been allowed to enter the house through the long French door from the street.

  With the coming of the November cool, balls and the opera were beginning again. Likewise, most of January’s piano pupils had returned to town, the sons and daughters of the wealthy of New Orleans: Americans, French, free colored. He’d just returned from a house in the suburb of St. Mary’s—quite close, in fact, to where Bellefleur’s cane-fields had lain—after talking to a woman about lessons for her son. That angelic six-year-old had announced, the moment January was on the opposite side of the parlor’s sliding doors again, “Mama, he’s a nigger!” in tones of incredulous shock.

  Did he think I was going to play a tom-tom instead of a piano?

  Now he moved his satchel carefully up onto one of the spare, graceful cypress tables that adorned the parlor, and folded his hands. In the impeccable Parisian French that he knew was several degrees more correct than Fourchet’s Creole sloppiness, he said, “In other words, sir, what you want is a spy.”

  “Of course I want a spy!” Fourchet’s eyes slitted and he looked like a rogue horse about to bite. His harsh voice had the note of one who wondered how January could be so dense. “No question it’s the blacks. I just need to know which ones, and if the Daubrays or someone else are behind it. This Shaw fellow
I spoke with yesterday said you’d be the man.”

  “I’m afraid the lieutenant mistook me, sir.” January fought to keep his voice from shaking. “I’m a surgeon by training, and a musician. I’ve looked into things when friends of mine needed help. But I’m not a spy.”

  “I’ll pay you,” said Fourchet. “Five hundred dollars. You can’t tell me you’d make as much between now and the end of the harvest, playing at balls.” He nodded toward the piano in the front parlor, where January gave lessons three mornings a week to a tiny coterie of free colored children, the sons and daughters of white men by their plaçées.

  I told Monsieur Fourchet that you certainly needed the money,” put in Livia.

  January opened his mouth, then closed it, fighting not to snap, You mean YOU want—not NEED—the money. But his mother didn’t even avert her gaze from his, evidently seeing nothing amiss in charging her son five Spanish dollars a month for the privilege of sleeping in the room he’d occupied as a child, nor in reminding him of the hundred dollars he owed her.

  That debt had come about three weeks ago, when January had gone to play at a ball and, returning late, had encountered a gang of rowdies, Kentucky river-ruffians of the sort that came down on the keelboats. Coarse, dirty, largely uneducated, they were habitually heavily armed and drunk. He’d escaped with his life, and without serious injury, only by refusing to resist, putting his arms over his head and telling himself over and over that to put up a fight would escalate the situation to a killing rather than just “roughing up a nigger.” It hadn’t been easy.

  The custom of the country, he’d told himself later. And he had known, returning from France in the wake of his wife’s death from the cholera two years ago, that in the land of his birth he could be beaten up by any white man, that he had no right to resist. It was the price he’d paid, to return to the only home he had.

  But the incident had cost him the clothes he wore, clothes a musician needed if he expected to be hired to play at the balls of the wealthy: long-tailed black wool coat, gray trousers, cream-colored silk waistcoat, linen shirt. And it had cost him all the music in his satchel—torn up, pissed on, dunked in the overflowing gutters of Rue Bienville—difficult and costly to replace. The season of entertainments was just beginning, after the summer’s brutal heat. He could not afford delay in repurchasing the tools and apparel of his trade.

  But he knew, even as he’d asked her for the money, that his mother would not let him forget.

  And it was in her eyes now: that avid glitter. Envy, too, that he’d been offered the money, and the task, instead of she.

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur Fourchet,” he said again, and marveled to hear his own calm voice. “It isn’t a matter of money. I—”

  “Don’t be a fool!” Fourchet’s voice cracked into a full-out shout, as January remembered it. The child in him flinched at the recollection of the man’s capricious rages, the sudden transitions from reasonableness to violent fury. “Too proud to get your black hands dirty? Think you’re too good these days to live with the niggers you were born among?”

  “I think—” began January, and Fourchet raged.

  “Don’t you back-talk me, you black whelp, I don’t give a tinker’s reverence what you think!” He flung the cigar to the spotless cypresswood floor. “I could get a dozen like you just walking down Baronne Street who’d leap on a dollar to suck my arse, let alone do as I’m asking you to do!”

  “Then I suggest you betake yourself to Baronne Street, sir,” said January quietly. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  “I’ll make you goddam sorry…!” Fourchet thundered, but January simply raised his new beaver hat to the man, bowed deeply, picked up his music satchel, and walked through the rear parlor and out the back door. He could hear the man’s enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard and mounted the stairs to his room in the garçonnière, and only when he had shut the door behind him did he start to shake.

  He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself—forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago. Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn’t hurt him much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.

  He found himself listening, heart racing, to the old man’s shouted obscenities as he pulled off the coat and shirt his mother had lent him the money to buy, the armor of respectability that, more even than the papers in his pocket, said: This is a free man.

  To Fourchet, January realized, he would never be free.

  Only jumped-up.

  To the Americans who saw him walking well-dressed about the streets, the Americans whose growing numbers were slowly swamping the older population of Creole French and Spanish, it was the same.

  He fought down the impulse to change clothes fast and run. With his habitual neatness he made himself fold the coat and trousers into the armoire, and set the shoes neatly under the bed. Clothed in rougher trousers, a calico shirt, and the short corduroy jacket he’d bought while a student in Paris, he descended the stairs and deposited the white shirt in the tiny laundry room next to the kitchen. It was there that his mother caught him, before he could be across the yard again, through the passway to Rue Burgundy and gone.

  “Benjamin, I have never been so mortified in my life.”

  If the statement had been true he would have heard it in her voice, but it wasn’t. She wasn’t mortified. She was angry. Thwarted and angry.

  “Neither have I, Maman, that he’d even think I’d do such a thing as he asks.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Her hands were clasped tight, like a little sculpture of seashell and bronze, at her belt buckle. Her mouth was hard as sculptor’s work. “I assumed you’d welcome the first chance that came to you, to pay back what you owe me. The quarter-interest in that property the Widow Delachaise is selling is still open for fifteen hundred, and I don’t think I need to remind you that because of those new clothes of yours, and all that music, not to mention getting the piano retuned last month, I’m in no position to—”

  “No, Maman.” January forced his voice level, as he had with Fourchet. “You don’t need to remind me.”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Benjamin.”

  Their eyes met: old wanting, old needing, a thousand griefs never comforted, a thousand things never said. January remembered her—one of his earliest memories—being beaten for stealing eggs for him and for Olympe, when a fox had killed the three chickens that constituted the only livestock they possessed. Remembered her silence under the lash.

  “We need that money,” Livia said, in a voice that took into account nothing of the other property she owned, or the funds in three separate banks. “You can’t possibly think Monsieur Fourchet would use this opportunity to take advantage of your position and kidnap you to sell to dealers, for heaven’s sake. If he told that animal Shaw about hiring you, he can’t intend—”

  “No, Maman,” said January. “That’s not what I think.”

  “Then what? It’s not as if you know any of those people. And it’s not as if you’re going to make a sou more this season than last season, teaching piano and playing at balls. Really, Benjamin, I don’t know what to make of your attitude.”

  She looked up at him, her expression and the set of her head waiting for an explanation, and those great brown eyes like dark agate forbidding him to make her wrong by giving one.

  Anything he said, he knew, he would still be wrong. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. “Can we talk about this when I get back?”

  “I think it’s something we need to settle now.” She followed him across the hard-packed earth of the yard. “I told Monsieur Fourchet I’d talk to you. You can’t judge the man by his speech. You remember how rough-spoken he always was, it’s his way. Financial opportunities like the Widow Delachaise selling up don’t re
main available for long. Monsieur Granville at the bank said he’d hold the negotiations open as long as he could, but they won’t last forever.”

  “I’m sorry, Maman,” said January. The cool sun of early afternoon flashed on yesterday’s rain puddles, on the leaves of the banana plants that clustered around the gate and along the wall. From the street came the clatter of some light vehicle, a gig or a fiacre, and a woman’s voice lifted in a wailing minor key the slurry, half-African gombo patois:

  “Beautiful callas! Beautiful callas, hot!” the melismatic notes elongated, embellished like a Muslim call to prayer, as if the words were only an excuse, a vehicle for what lay in her heart.

  “I need a little time to think. We can talk about this when I get back.”

  “And when will that be?” Livia stepped beside him into the open gate. Always wanting the last word. To have his retreat, even, on her terms.

  “At sunset,” said January, and walked away, not knowing if he’d be back by sunset or not.

  TWO

  “Rough-spoken, she said.” January turned the coffee cup in his hand, and gazed out past the square brick pillars that held up the market’s vast, tiled roof. Beyond the shadows, slanting autumn light crystallized the chaos along the levee into the brilliant confusion of a Brueghel painting: steamboats like floating barns, with their black smokestacks and bright paint on their wheel-housings and superstructures; low brown oyster-craft and bum-boats creeping among them like palmetto bugs among the cakes and loaves on a table. Keelboats, snub-nosed and crude, being hauled by main force to the wharves. The blue coats of captains and pilots; the occasional red flash of some keelboatman’s shirt; gold heaps of oranges or lemons; a whore’s gay dress. Piles of corn in the husk, tomatoes, bales of green-gray wiry moss, or tobacco from the American territories to the north. Boxes without number, pianos, silk, fine steel tools from Germany and England. A cacophony of French and Spanish, English and half-African gombo patois and the mingling scents of coffee, sewage, smoke.