Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  They started moving along the rows: the work that would buy acceptance, the acceptance that would buy the right to ask questions.

  January hated Simon Fourchet, and the hatred redoubled with every stab of the muscles of his shoulders, with every slice of the sharp cane and razor-tough leaves through the flesh of his hands, with every aching hour.

  The men sang as they worked, pacing the rhythm of their strokes:

  “Madame Caba, your tignon fell down,

  Madame Caba, your tignon fell down,

  Michie Zizi, he’s a handsome man, O,

  Michie Zizi, he’s a handsome man …”

  Or they would sing the African songs, the songs in a tongue no one remembered, the words meaningless now but the music still drawing the heart.

  “Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi,

  Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi …”

  Buzzards circled overhead, scores of them, tiny as motes of pepper against the blue of the sky as the mists burned away. Rabbits in the cane fled the men, or sometimes fat clumsy raccoons; small green lizards darted to safety, or sat on the thin stalks of grass that the men called maiden cane and watched with wisely tilting turquoise-rimmed eyes. The cane in this field was second-growth cane and a lot of it lay badly, sprawling in all directions and growing along the ground rather than all of it standing straight. The sprawled cane wound among the standing and had to be dragged and wrestled out, stalks sometimes sixteen feet long, a mess of leaves and insects and dust. Dust and cane-juice plastered January’s face and he wished Fourchet had died already and all these people, innocent as well as guilty, had been hanged for the crime before he even knew about it, so it wouldn’t be his responsibility to try to save them. His shoulders hurt. His hands hurt.

  Sometimes if no one else was singing, a man would break into a holler: wailing solo notes that climbed and descended a scale Bach had never heard of. Nonsense sounds, just “Yay” or “Whoa,” but soaring like hawks with the sense and meaning of the heart. The other men would join in, as vendors in town would sometimes add their wailing to the drawn-out singsong of the berry lady or the charcoal man, catching the notes and twirling them like dancers: elemental music, like rain or wind or the heartbeat of the earth.

  Mid-morning the women came out with the carts, gathering the harvested rows. They set their babies at the ends of the rows among the water bottles of the men, with one of the hogmeat gang to keep cane-rats and buzzards off them. At noon the rice cart came, put together by Kiki the cook or more probably Minta: rice and beans, greens and pone, a little pork in the greens.

  When it got too dark to work safely, torches were lit and the men set to helping the women load the rest of the cane, and haul it to the mill. Carrying the piled cane up the short flight of steps to the grinders, January was able to see the setup of the mill. The grinders were set on a raised floor above a roundhouse, where the mules hauled on the sweeps that turned the machinery, the three huge toothed iron cylinders chewed the cane, the glinting new metal of one a vicious reminder of the dead man whose soul had been sung across to the other side last night. The green sap dripped and ran into the iron reservoir beneath, to be tipped from there into the first of the battery of cauldrons. La grande, it was called, and as each successive kettle was boiled down it was purified with alum and ash and emptied into the next: le flambeau, la lessive, le sirop, la batterie, every one smaller than the last, a seething inferno of heat and stink and boiling juice.

  Moths and roaches roared around the torches set into the walls, and the smoke pouring from the furnace beneath the cauldrons burned January’s eyes, and above everything Simon Fourchet presided, a black-coated Satan bellowing at the men who hauled wood, who stirred the kettles, who dipped out the rising scum of impurities or climbed up and down those steps endlessly to feed the chopped billets of cane into the rollers.

  Hell, thought January, stumbling on blistered feet, aching, his mind curiously clear. What window had the ancients looked through, to see that Hell would actually be a Louisiana sugar-mill on a November night?

  On his way out to the waiting cane carts for another armful he saw Quashie again, holding the hands of the girl in the purple dress. In the firelight January saw again how pretty she was, eighteen or nineteen years old and clearly the sister of the fourth of the bachelors whose cabin he shared, a second-gang youth named Parson. She was one of the women carrying cane to the grinders and Quashie had stopped her, speaking so low that all he could hear was her name, Jeanette. Her gaze, turned up toward the young man’s, was filled with a desperate pain in the face of his anger.

  Thierry stepped through the mill door. Jeanette instantly dropped Quashie’s hands and hastened to gather an armload of cane. More deliberately, Quashie also scooped up a long, awkward bundle of stalks and followed. Thierry did nothing til he’d passed him, then turned casually and licked out his whip in an underhand cut to the young man’s calf. Quashie stumbled, dropping the cane, which rolled and flopped everywhere.

  The overseer watched the slave, still silent, chewing on the corner of his mustache, while the latter picked it up, a far more difficult task when it wasn’t in a pile in the cart. January noticed how careful Quashie was to make sure he got every six-foot stalk.

  Thierry let Quashie get a few more steps toward the doors, then he cut him again, this time on the elbow, and with such violence that the young man couldn’t keep his grip. The heavy stalks spilled down again around his feet.

  For a moment Quashie stood, staring at his tormentor, his hands clenched at his sides. From the mill door Jeanette watched. Then Quashie lowered his eyes respectfully and gathered up the cane again. Blood ran down his arm.

  Thierry walked past him to the mill door, took Jeanette by the elbow, and thrust her in the direction of his cottage. The girl glanced back at Quashie once, then went. Quashie didn’t look after her, only continued to pick up the cane.

  The last of the cane was fed into the grinder a few hours before midnight. Most of the men were released, and the night crew came on, to stoke the fires and tend the cauldrons until dawn. Walking back to the cabin, aching in every limb and shivering as the sweat dried in his filthy clothes, January felt a rush of gratitude that Gosport, who seemed to be headman of the bachelor cabin, had roasted yams and ash-pone in the embers of last night’s fire so they’d be ready to eat now. The mere thought of preparing any kind of food before falling asleep was agony.

  As the men walked from the mill down the long row of cabins January slipped away from them, into the cane and the darkness, and circled—cautiously, because of snakes—back toward the house.

  Moving through the uncut cane-rows themselves was a trick he’d mastered as a child, feeling for where the sharp, leathery leaves would give. You swam through the heavy foliage, slithered. Everyone January had seen that day except the house-servants had those little cuts on their faces and hands, from pushing through those secret ways.

  The slight drift of air from the river brought him the smells of food from the big house kitchen—chicken and compotes, biscuits and potatoes and ham—and his belly clenched with hunger that had gone beyond any desire for food into the realm of nausea.

  From the fields that day he’d looked back toward the big house, seeing it from the upriver side, and he’d asked at nooning about the high dark hedge. “That’s old M’am Camille’s garden,” Harry had said. “She was Michie Fourchet’s wife years ago, Michie Robert’s mother. It’s all growed over and weeds, though young M’am Fourchet’s had Mundan diggin’ it up again for her to plant herbs.”

  “Better herbs than the truck M’am Camille grew,” had added Will, a small man—even in the second gang he would have been considered small—with the round head and neat features of Ibo ancestry. An “R” had at some time in the recent past been burned into his cheek with a poker—“R” for “runaway.” “Flowers you had to wrap up with burlap on cold nights—I used to be Mundan’s helper back when M’am Camille was here—pineapples that you couldn�
�t grow ’cept under glass, and them hedges imported from Italy or Greece.”

  “You got to admit them oleanders are pretty,” said Gosport in his mellow deep voice. “And fine apples—the only Ashmead apples in Louisiana, M’am Camille said. She set a store by them.”

  The conversation had turned to the merits and shortcomings of fruit pies, but January had kept the information in his mind, and now in the darkness pushed and wriggled his way like a huge cat through the cane that grew close up on that side of the house.

  Lights still burned in Fourchet’s office, and in the corner chamber on the nearer side of the house that the women of the household used as a sewing room. The dim flush of candle glow flecked the weed-choked beds and neglected paths. Lying on his belly in the hedge’s black shelter, January could just make out the intricate pattern of quatrefoil and circle formed by the curved brick walkways. A statue, indistinguishable in a garment of lichen and resurrection fern, presided over a scummed and stagnant fountain. In summer it would stink, January guessed, and be hellish with mosquitoes. Low box hedges had once outlined each minute, fussy bed, and these, too, had been suffered to run wild in neglect, except in one corner where they’d been pulled out, the pattern of the paths simplified, and beds of earth tilled, presumably to sprout herbs in spring.

  What had Shaw said about Camille Bassancourt? A Parisian lady who’d come to Louisiana with an aunt. After bearing five children she herself had died—six years ago?—to be replaced by a girl of fifteen or sixteen. January wondered how old Camille herself had been at the time of her marriage, and at her death.

  She’d put in this garden, with its impractical Asian lilies, its hedges of Italian oleander, to look at during the eight months of the year when planters’ families were required to be on their land. A work of art? January wondered. Or an act of defiance? Clearly Robert’s wife Hélène hadn’t kept it up. Hélène’s French, like her gown, was very Parisian, but with a Creole intonation, speaking of education there rather than birth.

  Fourchet’s voice rose from the direction of the house. “God damn it, when I say I want—” Followed by a crash.

  Cornwallis? January wondered, remembering the valet’s cynical aloofness. The maddeningly slow-spoken Esteban? Madame Hélène, whose grating voice and whiny petulance would be almost certain to set off the old man’s temper in short order? The young Madame? He treats you like a servant, like a dog.…

  You. Tu.

  Belly to the ground, he crawled slowly around the whole of the hedge, peering under the dark skirts of the oleanders and turning the leaves carefully—very carefully, with one of his colored bandannas protecting his fingers—until he found what he had been almost certain he would find.

  In the rear corner of the garden a small brick shed had been built, clogged now with trash, old pots and wheelbarrows and broken sugar-molds. Behind it, where the shadows were most dense, twelve or fourteen branches had been stripped of their leaves, and a dozen more cut off and barked, to get the milky sap.

  Last night Mohammed had spoken the name of Mambo Jeanne.

  In his mind January saw the old woman again. He and Olympe used to go gathering herbs with her in the Bellefleur woods. Under her blue-and-white striped tignon, her narrow, wrinkled face had borne two small scars on each temple—most of the Congo women had them. Now that one she’s a bad one, he heard her deep, surprising voice, and saw the glossy dark of spear-shaped leaves in her callused fingers. She didn’t handle the leaves directly, but wrapped a rag from her collection of rags around her hands, before she’d pluck leaves or flowers or twigs from Simon Fourchet’s oleander bushes. You boil this one, boil it thick, make obé—but you throw away the pot you make it in, and you throw away the mortar and the pestle both. You burn the rag you pick them with and you don’t inhale the smoke.

  Four-year-old Olympe had nodded gravely, and wrapped a rag around her own stubby little fingers to handle the sprig.

  In Italy, January remembered, the pink blossoms were used to decorate the caskets of the dead.

  He followed the hedge back to the house’s foundations, and kept to the wall under the gallery where he wouldn’t be seen in the shadows. Earlier he’d heard Hannibal playing his violin in the garçonnière, a graceful glancing Mozart waltz that was a favorite at the balls they’d play in town. When January passed among the brick piers beneath the house now, however, he could hear Robert’s voice, fretful with self-pity:

  “But he will not listen. I’m sure that, as an educated man, M’sieu Sefton, you’ve had the same problem. Cotton can’t be that different from sugar-cane. Mother made sure I had a very good education—well, as good as one can get in this country. By the time I was twelve I was giving my tutors lessons, though of course none of them would ever admit it. But all these planters will persist in their outmoded empiricism. You know how they are.”

  The jalousies of the French door stood open, and the light that fell through onto the oaks wavered and glittered as Robert made a gesture of resignation and despair. “They ‘know sugar’ or can ‘feel’ when the juice is ready to crystallize—like old women prophesying weather through their bones!”

  Hannibal may or may not have made a sympathetic noise. There was movement in the shadows beneath one of the large water-cisterns and January froze, flattening himself back under the piers. He was on the downstream side of the house, within full view of the window of Thierry’s three-room cottage, and he could imagine what the overseer would have to say about a slave out spying on his betters. Then he heard a woman’s giggle, and Harry’s voice: “I knew I could count on you, beautiful.…”

  Robert Fourchet continued with barely a pause, “When I was only ten or eleven I read journals for months and came up with a primitive form of multiple-effects evaporator of the kind that they’re even now experimenting with in France. But will my father invest in such a thing?”

  The window of Thierry’s cottage creaked sharply, bringing January’s heart to his throat. He reminded himself desperately that he had to be invisible, here under the house; that in the event of a confrontation Hannibal would defend him.… Then a slim shape wriggled through, and dropped noiselessly to the deep carpet of weeds and long grass that grew thickly and patchily among the oaks. It was so dark, away from the house, that January didn’t see where that shadow went, but he heard the muted crunch of feet on last year’s dead leaves. The cane lay only a few yards beyond the cottage, and at this point stretched to the levee.

  Harry’s voice, in the dark beneath the cistern, whispered, “It’s nothing, darling. Come here.” And there was a woman’s soft moan of delight.

  “Will he even consider using a polariscope to determine concentrations of sugar in the various stages of production?” demanded Robert pettishly. “Heaven forfend! And Esteban is just as bad. All he thinks about is getting away to town, and not from any concern about the more civilized things in life, I might add. Tell me, M’sieu Sefton, what is the point of being civilized men—of living in the nineteenth century, in the world where rationalism and scientific methods have finally begun to make inroads against the benighted clutch of outmoded traditions—if no one pays the slightest attention to one’s advice? My mother made sure I was exposed to the finest …”

  The woman beneath the cistern gasped, and whispered, “Again!” January wondered where Harry would get the energy to do anything but fall asleep.

  “I suppose one has to feel sorry for him,” remarked Hannibal later, when after many more minutes Robert took his leave and January slipped up the back steps to scratch quietly on the garçonnière door. “Or at least I did before that endless lecture on the subject of how dilute sulfuric acid makes a better defection agent for sugar than lime does. He very kindly left me books, lest I be bored.”

  Hannibal hefted one volume in either hand. Clothed in a linen nightshirt, long dark hair spread loose over his thin shoulders, he looked like a disreputable wood-elf in the chamber’s dim light. “Thomas Brown on the philosophy of the human mind, or th
is roguish little romp of Saint-Simon’s on the industrial system. I wonder if Madame Hélène reads?”

  “How do you feel about Sir Walter Scott?”

  Hannibal shuddered. “It may come to that, God forbid. Nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt/Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. Are you all right?”

  “Compared to what I’ll be like a week from today,” January replied, surveying his cut hands and filthy clothing, I’m Bellona’s very bridegroom, disdaining fortune with my brandished steel.” He flexed his hands gingerly, cursing the stiffness that he knew he’d be weeks getting rid of. “Since you’re on your feet I assume the answer to my question is No: You didn’t touch any of the liquor in Simon Fourchet’s cabinet, did you?”

  Hannibal shook his head, and padded back to the bed. “I did set little pans of it about in the storeroom under the house. I tried to set them in different areas, but of course there’s no guarantee which particular rat supped which particular dish. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked. They all died, manifestly in the same conditions attending the death of the unfortunate Gilles, of which Cornwallis treated me to the fullest possible description. Cheery fellow. After that I wasn’t thirsty for some reason.”

  “Throw away the dishes.” January started to bring up the Hitchcock chair from beside the desk, then remembered the filthy state of his clothes and sat instead on the floor near the bed. “Oleander, boiled up in water. By the look of the branches, it was done several weeks ago. Mambo Jeanne, the plantation midwife when I was a child, told me and Olympe about that one, and I ran across a number of cases when I was in France. There were two children who died of making whistles from its bark.”

  “So mortal that but dip a knife in it,

  Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,

  Collected from all simples that have virtue

  Under the moon, can save the thing from death