Go west, young man, said Satan, and when you get there, you’ll still be a nigger.
Shortly after moving in with his older sister in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, John Paul Boudreaux quickly found work as a delivery boy for a pharmacist, Dr. Noel Stein of Hancock Park. But it wasn’t until John noticed a man trying to get a wily horse into a trailer that his old love affair was reignited.
The man was delivering the horse to Agua Dulce Canyon, where they were making a Western film. John quickly grabbed the reins, and five seconds later the crazy horse was secured in the trailer. One thing led to another, and a week later John was donning buckskins and face paint waiting for the director to yell “Action!” John Paul Boudreaux soon became well known in the Western filmmaking fraternity, always ready to take a fall or provide some acrobatic maneuver on the appointed steed and on cue.
But John had rolled the dice a bit too hard, making an error—well, several errors—that he could’ve avoided. He figured nobody would know or at least hear about it in Louisiana. He knew better, but ta hell with him, he thought. He hadn’t seen Sonnier anywhere in Los Angeles County, not even at Shepp’s Playhouse on Central Avenue when Louis Jordan came to town. But John wasn’t too far gone to know that you didn’t try to pull a fast one on the Ole Haitian, not in this lifetime nor the next. There were consequences to his actions, and despite his regular attendance at St. Bernadette Catholic Church in the Crenshaw District, no amount of prayer would cover his bet with the Ole Haitian. Loaded dice can only get you so far. The left hand was a tricky thing, and without Sonnier’s guidance, bad karma was bound to befall John. And, of course, having an affair with Dr. Stein’s wife didn’t help, particularly after they got caught.
John Paul Boudreaux had recently stopped believing in angels since those little girls were killed in that church in Birmingham a few months back, but the angels hadn’t stopped believing in him. Nor had Satan, whom John was convinced had an on-again, off-again love affair with the Negro, both rural and modern. Who else would spend so much time making Negro life so cumbersome? God? Hell no, John thought, He was too busy making sure white folks didn’t blow each other up with their newfangled atomic bombs.
So by the winter of 1963, the only thing John really concerned himself with was where he was going to sleep, when he was going to eat, how he was to going to make some scratch, and who he was going to fuck—and not always in that particular order. And now he was leaving Los Angeles very much the same way he arrived in 1949—running away from some shit. But this time he was coming back home with something—a new reputation and a new nickname. Something deserving of a swashbuckling pirate or a slick-talking politician. Something with a little flair. Something to be remembered.
It was a young, up-and-coming blues guitarist named John Watson who gave him the name one night while the two shot dice behind a ribs joint on Adams Boulevard.
“That nigga speak that French,” somebody said on bended knee as John Boudreaux rolled a seven out the gate.
“John Frenchy knows them dice,” Watson responded as John Paul Boudreaux swiped money off the concrete with the left hand.
John Paul Boudreaux paused and looked at Watson. John Frenchy born.
Sand blew in sheets across the road, but John Frenchy knew damn well that wasn’t a Dairy Queen he was looking at several miles ahead on Interstate 10 due east, having already laughed off Satan’s ploy miles back in Palm Springs as California orchards tapered into an arid dust bowl. The burgundy ’59 Caddy now resembled a lavender Plymouth covered in dust and insects from grille to bumper. But John Frenchy didn’t mind the dust or the heat and dropped the convertible top after they crossed the state line near Blythe. He even removed his ponytail, allowing his long, black, shoulder-length mane to wave in the wind. Six years had passed since his last proper haircut, since he’d found long hair a job requirement as a Comanche stand-in, along with a clean face. Movie work afforded him a gray sharkskin suit with matching Florsheims, but the Caddy belonged to Dr. Stein. Finely manicured fingers gripped the large, white steering wheel while on the radio Chet Baker lamented that they were writing songs of love but not for him.
An opal pinkie ring, gold tiepin, wafer-thin Patek Philippe, and gold bracelet were all listed on the police report after John Frenchy left. But Stein couldn’t bring himself to admit that the nigger who stole his Caddy was the same nigger who had relations with his wife. I mean, there’s only so much a man will admit.
Now twenty-six, John Frenchy had adopted an entirely new attitude, colder and more calculated, optimism disintegrated to disappointment—the unwilling punch line to a bad joke. The world knew him as a “Negro,” but he saw himself as John Frenchy. Damn what the world thinks, he reminded himself, I got a gift.
Twelve hours had passed since Watson had jumped into the Caddy with his guitar. Watson figured he’d try his hand at pimping in Houston. Plenty big-leg gals without a pot to piss in over there in Fifth Ward, he told John Frenchy.
“If I had your hair, shiiited. Them white broads would go crazy over me, just crazy,” Watson said while running a jeweled hand against his freshly conked pompadour tied down with a floral silk scarf that still smelled of teenage pussy and Chanel No. 5. On the backseat next to Watson’s guitar case was a box wrapped in manila paper.
“John Frenchy, you something else. You mean to tell me you got down with that cat’s old lady and that cracker didn’t kill you?” asked Watson.
John Frenchy just stared at the black road cutting across the desert. He didn’t believe in answering rhetorical questions.
“Ain’t that a gas, you something else. But what I don’t understand is how you made out with this big-ass hog. With the keys and that nice finery you sportin’ and whatnot,” Watson said.
“She gave me the keys,” John Frenchy replied in a low, uninvolved voice. His lanky buddy burst at the seams in a high-pitched cackle with both hands holding the fragrant scarf in place.
They turned off the interstate to fill up at a damn near dilapidated Texaco on the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Watson was still cackling as John Frenchy brought the Caddy to a stop at the pump. Hot wind blew dust against his face and hair. He didn’t like that, so he found a water hose on the side of the building and ran hot water over his head. Hunched over facing the ground, he watched droplets of water fall off the strands of his hair, forming small mud puddles on the New Mexico dirt. He thought of Basile.
Every time somebody in Basile decided they needed a brick fireplace or stove, all of the nearby children gathered pine needles. A pile of wet clay would be dumped near the house and the pine needles thrown into the clay. The children’s job was to stomp the clay and needles with their feet until the mixture was appropriate for forming bricks. Their little brown legs would be covered in tan sheaths as abler hands grabbed clumps of the mixture with wooden planks and shaped earthen rectangles. The result would warm someone’s home for the winter.
While rinsing his hair, John Frenchy drew a rectangle in the mud before him, then cupped his right hand, collecting warm water in his palm. He doused his face and blew his nostrils. Damn sand. He heard a nearing roar. A westbound passenger train came out of nowhere on tracks hidden by the blowing, sticky dust. Emerging from the tan haze, the massive train pushed by with steam, steel, and hope. If only he could tell them that the air would never be cool, but would stay hot no matter where the damn train stopped. Central Avenue or Timbuktu. It would always be hot. Nigga hot.
No way to make out an anxious face from the blurry windows that passed before him. Everyone rushing to the shimmering pond marooned in unwelcoming blankness.
The tail end of the train rushed by with a young black boy and an old black man leaning against the caboose railing smoking cigars. They waved at John Frenchy as he stood up and watched them pass. He wanted to wave back but he couldn’t. He didn’t believe in lying to the hopeful.
As the train’s roar lowered to a distant hum, he could hear the argument.
He walked toward the front of the station and found Watson pinned against the dirty lavender hood by a redneck with time to kill. Watson was scared and eyed John Frenchy as he casually strolled to the disinterested clerk at the register.
“What I owe you for the gas?” he asked the suspicious clerk.
“Two thirty-eight. You need to go see about yer buddy, fella. Jasper don’t take too kindly to coloreds,” the clerk advised.
John Frenchy laid three dollars on the counter, then watched Watson try to talk himself out of an ass-whipping. The clerk put his change on the counter.
“You got a phone, boss?” John Frenchy said in a voice he’d learned from TV.
The clerk pointed to a small phone mounted on the wall near the front. John Frenchy headed out.
“Yer change?”
“Keep the change,” said John Frenchy as he yanked the phone off the wall, disabling the line.
The clerk protested, but John Frenchy walked steadily toward the Caddy.
“Sir, is my friend bothering you?”
The redneck turned around with one hand on Watson’s neck.
“Well, lookie here. Tonto done ran off the reservation. I’m teachin’ yer lil’ nigger buddy some manners,” he said.
“Hey, mister, you done taught him enough today.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I figure this nigger got a few more lessons to learn.”
Before the redneck could turn back to Watson, John Frenchy delivered a right cross that sent the man to the ground. John Frenchy jumped on his chest and started pummeling him until he was bloody and unconscious. The clerk ran out with a service revolver pointed at John Frenchy. His hands were shaking.
“Put yer hands up right now or I’ll shoot!” said the fearful clerk.
John Frenchy stopped and turned to the clerk. Eyes reduced to hot slits, blood covering his hands—
“Mister, how many bullets you got in that gun?” John Frenchy asked while standing up to look at the clerk eye level.
“I got enough,” he said.
“I ain’t got no quarrel with you, so put that gun down,” John Frenchy told him as he walked slowly toward the clerk with his hands up.
“Stop right now! Stay yer nigger ass put ’fore I blow a hole in yer gotdamn head!”
But he moved closer. The ground was fairly soft, two or three inches of loose dirt and sautéed sand. Then John Frenchy delivered the inveterate Negro compliance statement—
“We don’t want no trouble, mister.”
“Too late for that,” the clerk blurted but—
With the toe of his right Florsheim dug four inches deep into the ground, John Frenchy kicked dust at the clerk’s face and disarmed him in a flash. He’d learned this trick on the movie sets. He chucked the gun past the train tracks and headed for the car. The clerk yelled, rubbing his eyes. Watson quickly went through the redneck’s pockets, swiping some coins and a few bills, then joined John Frenchy in the car. They drove off.
Several miles later, John Frenchy, staining the white steering wheel with good American redneck blood, grabbed the silk scarf from Watson’s head and cleaned his hands. Watson didn’t say a word, staring from the passenger seat at hills, sand, and cacti. John Frenchy’s expression returned to its earlier quiet resolve.
Being a free-moving black man in those days was something akin to being an outlaw. John Frenchy didn’t like rules, especially when they were aimed at him. Watson managed to fall asleep. John Frenchy turned to the backseat and glanced at the manila box.
The next morning, John Frenchy sat in the sparkling, clean ’59 Coupe de Ville. He’d gotten the Caddy cleaned in Third Ward after he dropped Watson off at his granddaddy’s church. He’d been parked on Washington Street in Lafayette, Louisiana, for about a half an hour, parked in front of his aunt and uncle’s home. Much time had passed since he’d set his uncle on fire, and the burnt old drunk was now a widower. John Frenchy eased out of the car and grabbed the manila box. It was around six thirty in the morning. He carefully walked to the porch and placed the box at the front door. He stared at the door for a minute, contemplating an apology for his uncle, but he couldn’t find one so he turned and headed back to the car.
“I see you, Coon. I see you. I knew you’d bring your lil’ bad ass around here. I see you.”
But Coon didn’t turn; rather, he moved with intention back to the driver’s seat with Lot’s discipline, then drove off.
On the porch, his horribly disfigured uncle stood at the open door watching him drive off, then reached down and grabbed the box. He shook it first. No sound. He opened it carefully.
A tattered, gray Stetson hat.
After visits with several relatives in the area, Coon had learned that his younger brother, Alfred, had recently left for Los Angeles to join him. And this worried Coon because Alfred had a hotter temper than him. That boy gonna get himself killed, he thought. But even if he had reached Lafayette before Alfred left, Coon knew he wouldn’t have been able to talk his brother out of leaving. And what the hell was in Lafayette anyway? Alfred was a Boudreaux too, and Boudreaux men have to learn things on their own. Besides, Coon came back to Louisiana in a Caddy, many of the relatives commented, maybe Alfred’ll have some good luck too. But there ain’t no such thing as good luck for nigga boys. There just ain’t.
By afternoon he was driving down the scenic Highway 190, headed home to Basile. None of his immediate family members lived there anymore, but something was calling him.
When he reached Basile and turned off Bearcat Road, his heart sank. Woods. The entire area was covered in woods, no longer parceled out into farming land. Neglected. Forgotten.
He continued down the road, hoping to find the trail that led to his childhood home. All around him he noticed that other lands had been maintained. The Guillorys’ parcels remained portioned for rice. The Fontenots’ parcel was mixed between cattle and peas. But the Boudreaux rice fields that were once the pride of the parish had morphed into a thick, overgrown Acadian forest. For two centuries, Boudreaux rice was the standard. Exceptional rice. Long grain. Evangeline pride grown from the ground to the stalk. After the harvest, the rice fields soaked and coveted water, nesting thousands of crawfish, providing steady income with crawfish farms in the off-season, but now only a thick mess of trees and bushes remained.
Where was that road? he asked himself until finally he found it. The town of Basile had recently given it a name. Repast Road.
He pushed along the dirt road until he found an opening. The Caddy idled at the woods’ edge. He put the car in gear and floored it through the woods, knocking down lesser branches and brush. But the woods fought back as he plunged deeper into its entrails. Soon the trees started tearing the Caddy apart, side-view mirrors swiped off with grille and bumpers, all yanked from the car by the defiant old woods until he crashed dead center into a huge oak, slamming his head into the big steering wheel. He cut the car off. It was quiet again but for the cold winter breeze singing through the treetops. It was always quiet this time of year. He got out of the car and examined the wreckage for the remission of sins, acknowledging the resurrection of the dead.
He could smell the pine needles in the trees above and under his feet. He stooped and grabbed a handful, then held them to his nose. The scent reminded him of bricks and labor, reminded him of community. And now, all of that seemed gone, replaced by woods and breezes. Then he heard something. The unmistakable chopping of wood. The heavy thunk. Not to be confused with the higher-pitched thunk of cutting sugarcane, no, this was chopping wood, a familiar chopping. A certain cadence and rhythm between chops. It was his father, Paul Boudreaux.
He carefully removed his gray Florsheims and matching thick-and-thin socks, then dashed through the forest toward the sound of his father.
Coon once again ran through the familiar forest with crunching pine needles under his bare feet. The air chilled, and Coon noticed that he was running on soft ice, yet he continued.
The chopping got louder. He could smell
his father’s pipe. Sweet cavendish with dried mint leaves. He could smell it. The last time Coon had heard the chopping of wood and smelled the cavendish, Paul had told his family that Pearl Harbor had just been bombed. He never saw Paul after that evening, an evening like this one. The last time it all happened just like this.
Coon sprinted now. Ice on the ground. This time he wanted to say good-bye. He leaped over a fallen oak, just missing a massive bull nettle. The chopping got louder. Nearer. Paul usually chopped wood for half an hour. No more, no less. Coon continued running until he approached a clearing. At the clearing’s edge, near the rear of where his old home once stood, he could make out a large building. It was his old home built of cypress planks and a tin roof. He stopped. How could that house still be here? he thought. A tin stovepipe jutted out of the side, bellowing white smoke. The chopping sound ceased abruptly. Paul wasn’t there, but Coon wasn’t alone. He noticed a peculiar tiny white hand jutting from the soil. A familiar hand. Quickly, he dug around the hand and retrieved the body. Bébé Blanc. Then a chorus began from the front of the house—
Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.
Le Seigneur est avec vous.
Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes,
et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni.
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,
priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs,
maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.
Amen.
A dark figure in a tattered gray suit huddled over a small black kettle on the ground in what used to be the backyard. It was the Ole Haitian, his great-uncle, Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, or Nonc Sonnier. Coon froze. He feared Nonc Sonnier even though they were blood relations.
But there was no way Nonc Sonnier could be sitting over a black pot in the cold in 1963, Coon thought. Sonnier had been lynched by the Klan in 1953 under the auspices of a McCarthy-type witch hunt for spiritual subversives, or at least that was the official account.
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