Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  Far ahead of them, somewhere past the rustling wall of darkness, January heard singing, the dim ghosts of rhythm utterly unlike the music that for so many years had been his life. The clapping of hands, rhythm that drew at the blood of the heart like the moon draws on the sea. Rags of words, African-French fragments of his childhood: Azou zouzou ziza, Legba abobo.

  Legba abobo …

  “Was it the marks made him careless?”

  “His anger made him careless,” answered Mohammed. “His anger and his greed. And marks like that, made in ill will, have a way of whispering to you when you’re thinking of other things. Reuben was angry that the men were sick that day, and he had to do more of the work with a crew not used to the task. The grinders stuck three, four, five times that morning—he was always being called from his work to pull knots of cane, and sticks and branches, free. Always working faster and faster, and not taking care. It was only a matter of time, til something spooked the mules—and they were spooky that week, and wild—while he was at the grinders. The grinders broke free, they came down on him like the lintel of the temple when Samson called on the name of Allah.”

  “This was yesterday?”

  “This was a week ago. But it was clear when they rolled the iron off him he would not live.”

  Oh, and Reuben died, Esteban Fourchet had said, casually.

  After a week of suffering. A week of knowing.

  They had entered the woods. From the river the land fell gradually, until the drained and ditched ground of the cane-fields gave place to the ciprière. The roots of red oak and loblolly pine made ridges of high ground, and between them softer wetter earth, cypress, hackberry, live oaks whose branches spread out in all directions under floating veils of Spanish moss that the men would harvest in off hours through the year, to sell for cash. Now and then small scurrying life fled the smell and tread of the men, but with the autumn’s cool at least the mosquitoes were few. The summer chorus of frogs and cicadas had long ago stilled.

  Others joined them on the pathways. Some bore candles, and others pine torches that dripped gouts of flame; some found their route by simple familiarity. Some had washed and put on what finery they had: bright-colored shirts, or waistcoats of silk or embroidered wool, tattered and patched mostly, or bought brilliantly new from river traders. The women had taken their hair out of its strings, crimped and curly, or braided it up in fantastic shapes which they wore with cocky pride; the men had combed out their hair, or cut or queued it, and put beads on their necks or clappers on their ankles. Others still had just slipped away from night-work at the mill still filthy with the dust and cane-sap of the fields, dark eyes gleaming through masks of grime.

  Exhausted, facing another day’s work in mere hours, still they’d come to give Reuben his send-off. Maybe not because they’d liked him—by what Mohammed said, few had—but because it was the proper thing to do.

  And too, January knew, even in the roulaison few folks of color, either slave or free, would pass up the chance to dance.

  Voices wailed from the darkness ahead of them, the slow shuffle of feet and the slap of clapping hands.

  “Abobo, abobo,

  Ago Legba, ago Legba,

  Abobo …”

  “Could any have got into the mill, to have made the marks?” asked January. Or tampered with the machinery? he added in his mind.

  “I don’t think so.” A man fell into step with them, thick-muscled and heavy-shouldered with one of the front teeth missing from his slow, gap-toothed smile. “Reuben, he keep the key to that mill always on a string ’round his neck. See, five-six years ago there was a fella here name Nick, that broke into the mill and tried to do the same thing and break the rollers, and Michie Fourchet had him sold off—and the sugar-boss, too, for not bein’ more careful. That’s when Reuben got to be sugar-boss, when he’d been just ’ssistant before.”

  “Nathan’s right,” added a taller, rangy man with a big cane-knife scar on his forearm. “Reuben always knowed which side of the bread the butter was on. He kept good track of that key and he didn’t leave the door open much, either.”

  Firelight glowed before them through the trees. To the hypnotic, ever-changing beat of hands was added the silky whisper of feet shuffling on the earth. They came into the clearing and January saw what he had not seen since his childhood: men and women ranged in a circle around the clearing, singing as they moved in a slow, swaying line. A low fire burned within the ring and cast gold shawls and handkerchiefs of light across the faces in the circle. Men’s faces and women’s, children watching from the edges of the clearing with enormous midnight eyes. All swaying, lost, bathed in the music as the saved on Judgment Day would be bathed in light.

  The dancers didn’t lift their feet, like those who danced in Congo Square in town on the Sunday afternoons of their brief freedom. This wasn’t that kind of dance. January remembered one of his mother’s friends telling him, “It’s ’cause you have to keep touch of the earth.” No instruments played—no fiddle or banjo or bones. Only the clapping of hands, the steady beat of open palms on thighs.

  An old man knelt in the center of the ring, bowed to the ground, singing. Those in the circle would call out in response, words January dimly recalled from dirges he’d heard in French, in English, in town …

  “Who’ll close my eyes in death?”

  “Abobo, abobo.”

  “Who’ll close my eyes in death?”

  “Spirit come down.”

  “Who’ll close my eyes in death?”

  Slow music rolled over January like the sea’s breaking waves, sadness and farewell with the smell of smoke and sugar thick in the misty air. He picked out faces from the shadow and fireglow of the circle, people he’d be living with for days or possibly weeks. Big maingang men, strong enough to swing an eighteen-inch knife and cut cane tough as bone. Some had come straight from the field to hauling wood in the mill, and so here, with a second and more ragged pair of cut-off trousers on over the first to protect from the sharp leaves, the razor-edged ends of the cut stalks, and a second shirt. Second-gang men, older or smaller, the soot of the mill striped with streaks of sweat. Here and there an artisan or groom stood out in gaudy finery, colors chosen and matched as no white man would choose or match them. Women stood among the trees with their babies at breast, and they too swayed to the music, crooned the responses to the wailing cries.

  “Dig my grave with a golden spade. “

  “Abobo, abobo.”

  “Dig my grave with a golden spade.”

  “Spirit come down.”

  “Dig my grave with a golden spade.”

  At the edge of the fire’s light a tall thin field hand stood with his arms around a beautiful girl in a purple calico dress. Two young boys, brothers by their faces, practiced exaggerated swaying, swinging their bodies in ecstatic double-jointed unison. A good-looking man who’d spruced up with a yellow silk waistcoat slipped and shifted through the torchlight shadows to speak to first one, then another of those new-come from the mill, and January saw something—salt? candles? a bottle?—change hands.

  “Lower me down with a silver chain.”

  “Abobo, abobo.”

  “Lower me down with a silver chain …”

  No house-servants, January noted without surprise. Like Cornwallis, house-servants as a rule looked down on the field hands, scorning them as an alien race. And in fact they were. These people had probably all been baptized, but generally that was as far as it went. January’s mother, and the other women on Bellefleur, had told him of God and the saints, but they were curious tales, dark and odd and very little like what he heard later from Père Antoine in town.

  The music itself, he understood, was what spoke to these people in the wordless words of God.

  Only one—a girl, slim and sullen with her dark hair lying in thick corkscrew ringlets over her shoulders—did not sing. Bitter-eyed, bitter-mouthed, she stood apart from the ring, holding a baby in her arms and watching with her back a
gainst a cypress tree. In time a heavy-muscled giant in the long-tailed coat and beaver hat of a driver came to her, to draw her away with him into the dark of the trees.

  Now and then a woman would shriek or cry out, head lolling in grief, but on one face only did January see actual tears. His attention was drawn to this woman because she was the only person who wore mourning, and her black dress was better fitting, despite her short round body and immense breasts. Her mahogany-black hair had been crimped into long streams, and waved as she rolled her head in a kind of solitary ecstasy, tears flowing from her closed eyes and down her velvet-dark apple cheeks.

  “Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.”

  “Abobo, abobo.”

  “Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.”

  “Spirit come down.”

  “Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.”

  People came, and people left, as those who’d slipped from the mill vanished again in the darkness, lest the overseer and the drivers note too many gone too long. A big strong woman and a lovely girl, clearly her daughter, gathered seven smaller children—including the dancing boys—and led them away to their beds, with an eighth tucked in the front of the mother’s dress at breast. The thin field hand and the girl in purple calico faded into the dark of the woods, hands entwined.

  These people were the pattern he had come here to learn, January thought. The warp and the weft of the lives whose telltale break, somewhere, would point the way to the killer whose deed would condemn them all.

  And yet looking at them, it was hard to remember that one of these was a killer and a calculating despoiler. All he felt in his heart was a curious and profound sadness, rooted in a darkness his memory couldn’t pierce.

  They were still singing when he left.

  FIVE

  There were twenty-five men in the main gang, including three drivers: Ajax, Herc, and Dice. Two of the men, Ram Joe and Boaz, were out sick, Boaz with pneumonia and Ram Joe snakebit. In January’s opinion at least three others working in the field should have been laid up as well, for he heard the hum of pneumonia in Lago’s breathing, and Java and Dumaka both were running fevers. But the most that would happen with Fourchet was that the men were put back as trimmers, working behind the cutters to lop the cane-tops and slash off the leaves. Of the four men whose cabin he shared, three—Gosport, Quashie, and Kadar—were in the main gang as well.

  “Whoo, lord!” Quashie exclaimed, as they left the cabin in predawn mist and cold, and held up his hand as if shielding his eyes. “We got us a bozal here! Right off the boat, looks like!” He was the thin tall man January had seen at the ring-shout last night, holding hands with the purple calico girl. Ajax the driver and his wife Hope—she of the nine children—had kept their cabin open long into the night, people bringing in food to share after the shout, but January hadn’t seen Quashie or the girl there. The young man had not returned to their own crowded dwelling until nearly dawn. “It ain’t a tar baby, it’s a tar daddy!” he told January. “You so black when you come outside the chickens think it’s night again, go in to roost!”

  “Don’t matter none,” replied January good-naturedly. “I’m just thinkin’ how you so yellow when you step out at night, all the roosters get up an’ crow, wake up everybody in the place.” He was tired, for he’d sat up long at Ajax the driver’s last night, meeting as many people as he could, and afterward had walked down to the bank above the landing in the pitch-black fog, to tie a black bandanna to the arm of Michie Demosthenes the Oak, knowing he’d be too weary to do so in the morning.

  And he’d been right.

  Quashie contemplated him for a moment, hearing the challenge in his words. Then he said, “And ugly!” He cringed exaggeratedly as they walked along between the rows of shabby wooden cabins toward the open ground that lay between Thierry’s house and the mill. “I never seen a man so ugly! Your whole family so ugly, I hear there’s a law in town against more’n three of you walkin’ down the street at once.”

  “Now, I don’t know nuthin’ bout your family,” returned January mildly, as they grouped around the two-wheeled rice cart, set up in front of the line of plantation shops just upstream of the mill. “But you so ugly I hear you was five years old ’fore you realized your name wasn’t ‘Damn!’ ”

  As a matter of fact, neither man was ugly—January had heard himself described as good-looking and Quashie was handsome—but the rules of the game had to be observed.

  “Yeah, and your mama ugly, too,” retorted Quashie, as the men and women around them laughed, holding out their bowls for Minta the cook’s helper to fill. “And fat. Your mama so fat when I hump her the other day, I had to roll over two times ’fore I rolled off her.”

  “Oh, that was you?” January raised his eyebrows in mock enlightenment. This was an old game that wasn’t quite a game, and in his childhood years at school, he’d been called hulking and black and dirty, and told he looked like a field hand or a newly-arrived African by sharper-tongued opponents than Quashie. “I wondered about that. She said at first she thought she been stung in the ass by a mosquito. Spent half the night lookin’ around for lemon grass to burn, keep them bugs out of her room.”

  They had barely ten minutes to slop down the congris from the gourd bowls, chickpeas and rice with a little sausage in it to give it heart. The men of the night shift were just leaving the mill, men January recognized a little now from one or another slipping away to Ajax’s cabin last night for rice or raisin pudding. Rodney the second-gang driver, in his stylish purple coat and half-boots, counted off the day men as they filed in to take their places, like the damned passing through the glowing mouth of Hell.

  Pér me si va ne la città dolènte. Dante’s words echoed in January’s mind.

  Through me the way into the suffering city,

  Through me the way to eternal pain,

  Through me the way that runs among the lost …

  “You ever cut cane, boy?” Thierry stepped up to January. His voice was soft, coming from beneath a mammoth wall of black mustache. His eyebrows were long, too, shelving out in a way that should have been comical and wasn’t. His eyes were blue.

  “No, sir,” replied January, lowering his eyes respectfully to the overseer’s boots. “Michie Georges, he grew cotton on his place. I worked the main gang there, til they put me to look out for Michie Hannibal.”

  “Fucking useless shit,” said Thierry.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Past his shoulder January saw the girl Quashie had been with last night slip out the back door of Thierry’s house, spring down the step, and lose herself into the women’s gang. The gay purple calico, newer than the frocks of the other women, glowed in the morning dark like a flower. She avoided Quashie’s eye, and the women of the gang stepped aside a little to let her pass.

  “They give me some fucking useless cotton-hand …Gosport!”

  The tall man with the scarred arm came forward, one of January’s cabin-mates, steady and pleasant. He’d been sold south two years ago from Georgia, for running away.

  “Teach Cotton-Patch here how to use a knife and make sure he doesn’t cut his fingers off. You use him for trimming?” The overseer turned to Ajax, who tilted back his beaver hat and nodded.

  “We sure need somebody, sir.”

  So January had been handed a cane-knife, marked down by the overseer against his name.

  “Most of the men who cuts the cane wears an old shirt and an old pair of pants on over their regular clothes, ’cause of the dirt.” Wearing the same engaging smile that had gone last night with the yellow waistcoat, Harry fell into step with January as the men walked out through the darkness to the fields. The cold was brutal, numbing the fingers and the toes through the cheap heavy brogans the men wore. January could see his own breath. The whetstone slapped his thigh through his pocket, and the dripping gourd-bottle hanging from his shoulder cut into his flesh with its strap. “I brung extra for you, knowin’ you’d need them.”

  Having se
en Harry in action last night, swapping candles and the stubs of sealing wax for eggs and salt and string at the shout and later at Ajax’s, January guessed the young man had ulterior motives in his offer. There’d been a man like that on Bellefleur when he was young—Django, his name had been. You accepted a gift or a favor, and you owed a favor in return. But looking around him January knew he didn’t have much choice about refusing. He’d been given a shirt and trousers of coarse osnabrig cloth—new, heavy, and board-stiff—and a pair of badly fitting brogans from the plantation store, and knew they wouldn’t last long with the kind of wear they’d get in the cane-fields. So he made his face look as if there weren’t a Harry on every plantation up and down the river and said, “Why, thank you. That’s sure good of you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” smiled Harry, and handed over a worn pair of pants, too large at the waist and cut off at the knees, and a second shirt, faded and patched. These January put on over his new things, and Gosport showed him how to hold a cane-knife—which he knew, having watched the men as a child, though he’d been far too young to wield one himself—and how to top the armload of cane-stalks the cutter would shove at him, cutting off the unripe portion with quick, flicking strokes and then slashing off the leaves.

  “Cane piled on the stubble, trash piled between the rows,” instructed Gosport. “Watch out for snakes. When you feel the knife start to labor on the cuts you brace it on your shoe like this, give it a couple swipes with the stone. But you be careful with that knife, understand? You got to cross a ditch, or cross the pile row, you throw your knife over first. That cane’s slippery, and if you’re not careful you’ll see your blood.”

  “Gonna teach him how to tie his shoes, too?” jeered Quashie.

  He cuts his hand off, you want to carry him back?” retorted Gosport, which got a laugh, because of January’s size.