“So what do we do now?” Velmyra poured iced tea from the pitcher into her glass and stirred it with her spoon.
Kevin had asked the woman for a FedExed copy of the contract. He’d go over it for loopholes and errors, and study land dispute cases in the Parish to see if there were any grounds for a suit appealing the sale of the land.
Everyone was quiet a moment. “I just can’t believe it’s gone—the house, the creek, all of it.” Genevieve wrung her hands together. “We’ve always had this land. It’s been in our family forever.” She looked at Julian. “Baby, we got to get it back.”
Then she reached for the jug of white lightning Julian had placed on the sideboard and held it up. “Anybody care to join me?” She poured some of the clear liquid over her iced tea and shook the glass.
Julian, Kevin, and Velmyra looked at each other. “No, ma’am,” and “Thank you,” they all said.
Julian leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. His head throbbed, and his eyes were strained and tired. Enough for today, he told himself. Fatigue draped his body like a leaden sheet, and he remembered how little sleep he’d had. Even though it was only late afternoon, the day had seemed endless. He looked at his watch. “I guess we better be getting back to Baton Rouge.”
As they got up to leave, Genevieve raised a hand.
“Wait, y’all,” she said. “ What’s your hurry? Pastor Jackson’s out visiting the sick and shut in—a few of the church members caught some awful bug. He’ll be a while, since they all missed communion last week. I could use a little company.”
They looked at each other, at their watches, and shrugged.
“Come on out on the porch,” she said, as if the decision to stay was never in question. “There’s usually a nice breeze coming through this time of day.”
Carrying the iced tea pitcher and all the glasses on a tray, Genevieve led them to the porch. Kevin and Velmyra sat in the ladderback rockers while Julian sat on the steps. Her eyes glassy, Genevieve sat in the green painted rocker and took a long drink of the spiked iced tea. She put the glass down on the wooden floor next to her chair, and leaned back with her hands folded across her lap.
“Whew!” she said, exhaling with a tired huff and fanning herself with a cardboard fan decorated with a picture of a blond Jesus, the words Elam C.M.E. written across the front.
“This reminds me of the old times.” She smoothed the wrinkles of her warmup pants with her hand, and smiled thoughtfully at Julian.
“Baby, I remember when you were nothing more than a little boy, coming up to Silver Creek in summer. When you were just a little thing, you couldn’t wait to get here. Your eyes lit up when you picked blackberries off the bushes and apples and peaches off the trees. You chased lightning bugs with those Beaulieu boys till it got so dark you couldn’t hardly see. You’d rip and run all day long in those woods if we’da let you. When the summer ended, you cried when you had to go back home.”
Julian looked down, smiled and nodded, then took a sip of tea. There was something resigned in Genevieve’s manner as she spoke. Something in her face, her manner told him there was a point to all this, a purpose to wanting him to stay.
Her words grew softer, yet more deliberate. “But I watched you, and I saw a change. Started in your eyes. The way they kinda dulled when you and your daddy and mama would pull up into the yard in that white Ford on the first Sunday in June. Saw it in your shoulders, too, drooping and sloping when we all sat on the porch at sunset, and you sat right where you’re sittin’ now, looking as bored as you could be. The last time I saw that look in your eyes and that slump in your shoulders, you musta been no more than eleven or twelve.”
“Your daddy was so proud of you. You strutted around with that horn of yours like it was the holy grail, and your mama asked you to play for us one evening after supper. You played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and had us all in tears. Remember how we made such a fuss over you? That was the only time you smiled the whole time you were here. I said to myself, ‘Umm, hmm, it’ll be a long time before I see my cousin’s young boy down here again.’”
Looking down at the yard dust on his shoes, Julian remembered that day, and how much he hadn’t wanted to come even then. The light on the porch grew dim as a cloud passed before the sun, then brightened again as the sun peeked through it. “That land? That creek? It meant everything to your daddy. But after a certain age, you got to be a real city boy.” She paused and heaved a slow, silent breath, looking across the yard at the grove of trees.
“I know you want to get the land back,” she said. “Cause you know how much your daddy loved it. But it’s harder, fighting for something you don’t love, something that don’t move your heart. So before you go trying to get the land back, it needs to mean something to you.”
“I’m so happy you came home,” she said. “You came home to where you were born, New Orleans, and now you’re here. But I need you to know something, and for that you need to go all the way home. Home to where your people came from, to where it all started.”
“Stay just a little while longer. I’ll fix you some food if you’re hungry. Cause I got a little story to tell you.”
14
How long had he been here? A day? A year? He stared through closed eyelids toward beaming light. Was it the sun? It couldn’t be, for the surface where he lay was soft and cool and the place smelled of something pungent, like alcohol, or antiseptic. He tried to open his eyes to let in the stream of brightness, but as hard as he tried, his eyelids, dream-thick and heavy with sleep, would not part.
He drifted back into the dream, then again into a milky wakefulness, then into sleep again. He had no idea how long he had been in this place, but as he lay against the coolness, he couldn’t remember when he had last been anywhere else. His mind, it seemed, was a thing acting of its own will, a ship drifting into strange waters without a steering hand.
He was standing on a rooftop, looking over something resembling a river. Or a creek? He wasn’t sure. No, it had been a street. Only there was so much water (and so little street), more than he’d ever seen. Walking with a full sun beating against the back of his neck, throat gritty as sand, leaving heel tracks in roadside dust. Walking, walking. Hungry. Head feeling woozy. The sharp burn of sun and vibration in his feet as trucks screamed by.
Soft hands, softer voices. Women turning him over in bed.
He tried reaching a hand forward, but nothing moved. He tried to turn his head away from the light, but nothing moved.
Slowly, the name of his son gathered in his frail mind and he tried to call it out. But the word seemed trapped somewhere in his throat, fully formed in his mind, but resisting his tongue.
And then he slipped further back. Way back before his son was born, when he was a boy himself, before he’d ever heard of New Orleans. And another name came to mind. Again, he tried it out on his tongue, but it was like pulling a tooth from his mouth. His chest heaved as he tried to force the words from his lips. And finally the words came: John Michel.
Or as his father had always called him, The Frenchman.
A summer night at Silver Creek, damp jasmine-scented breezes ripple through sloping eaves. Like the ancient evenings buried deep in the memory of the live oaks, back before ropey moss hung from each branch like the beards of ancestors. His father Jacob, and Jacob’s sister Maree, seated on the narrow gallery of the cabin, tell the story yet another time.
His ears numbed to the telling of old folks’ tales, young Simon sits after supper on the cabin steps, restless; he’s heard the story a thousand times on these sultry nights while rocking chairs creak to the rhythm of cricket calls and nightbird songs from the woods. How his grandfather Moses’ mother, Claudinette, had found comfort and peace with the man who had given her the name Fortier, for he had loved her as well as any white man could love an Ashanti woman in 1855. Planter, part-time preacher, and master of thirteen slaves (including Claudinette), John Michel Fortier had truly grieved for
his wife who’d died and left him with a single boy child, but not long after found salve for his sorrow with the dark-skinned beauty, laying his grief to rest in her heart.
Claudinette had been a cook without peer. The buttery scent of her biscuits and the savory aroma of her pot pies as she brought them into his kitchen didn’t hurt her appeal, but it was in Claudinette’s heart-shaped face that John Michel had seen treasures—the Louisiana sunrise in her eyes, the wide sweeps of Africa in the broad planes of her face. An abiding love for the woman he owned was something he could never admit (to himself or the world) until his mourning was complete, after his own wife was long buried.
And Claudinette grieved too, for her husband, a man with bullhard shoulders, powerful hands, and a generous but weak heart, who had left her in his sleep one September night with two brighteyed toddling daughters.
So when the grief clogging both their hearts had thinned to a fine stream of longing, John Michel came to Claudinette, removing his hat and bowing his head at her cabin door. He scuffed the Louisiana mud from his boots, the small rose in his hand nearly wilted from the August heat.
Peering into John Michel’s evening-gray eyes, Claudinette saw advantage and a way to take it. She examined the proposal budding in them and offered one of her own—her whole hand and a piece of her heart, in exchange for freedom for her and her children.
Jean Michel mopped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his jacket.
“I’m an old man. When I die, you and your children will be the freest of the Lord’s creatures. I swear it on the written word of God.”
The sun turned her almond eyes into stones of fire.
“Free my children now,” she said.
John Michel looked into her eyes and saw winters warmed by wood flame and her long brown arms. He saw a child with his shoulders and her upturned chin, a future where she would have what pleased her, and he would find his joy in the pleasing.
So John Michel cared for Claudinette as kindly as he had his own wife—keeping her distant enough for the sake of southern propriety, but close enough to bear him unbounded joy, and a second son. And so they lived, John Michel in the modest main cottage, Claudinette in a cabin in the quarters near the creek with her two girls, and John Michel’s two sons by the two women (one white and one black but each equally free), scampering back and forth on the packed earth in between.
The two half brothers—John Paul, blond and fair as southern white pine, and Moses, dark as river stones—had grown up close as twins, and not until they were seven and five did they sit laughing beneath the sweetgum tree near the creek comparing the stark difference in the skin of their arms, the texture of their hair. Their curious wonder soon turned to casual indifference. Both boys enjoyed the favor of their father, and Claudinette doted on the smiling blond boy as much as she did her own three children. But after the boys grew to strapping young men, the differences that had seemed inconsequential before loomed larger.
John Paul, who grew into a smallish young man with eyes like his father’s and golden hair that curled to his shoulders, was bighearted, foolhardy, and aimless. He loved to wander along Silver Creek, empty-minded and full of drink, and had a predilection for gambling, lying for sport, and slim-waisted women who belonged to other men. Moses, who stood half a head taller than most young men his age, with thick eyebrows set at an angle of worry that nearly met in the center of his forehead, worked hard, smiled infrequently. The laughter he’d shared with John Paul as a boy quieted the more he learned the real differences that separated him and his father’s first-born.
But Moses was a hopeful man. By the time he’d reached his full impressive height and learned to carry his shoulders like a man with purpose, slavery had been over a while. Men who looked like him now had their own land. While his brother sat on the creek bank with a bottle of Kentucky rye and played on the bugle his father had given him, or traveled down to New Orleans for a midnight stagger through the Vieux Carré, Moses sharecropped a parcel of his father’s land, fancying himself one day a successful planter the way his father had been. Why not? He was a strong, free man. As strong and as free as anybody.
But the more his plow-hands callused and bled, the more he understood that sharecropping was a long, hard road that led to an empty ditch. A sharecropper just picked at the crusted rim of freedom, and could never enjoy its sweet center. No way to earn enough to buy anything of real value, let alone a decent spread of land. No way to see a time of ease and rest in his old age. No way to have something to leave to his own children, should he have them. So when John Paul became twenty-one, and Moses watched as his father gave his older brother two hundred acres of fertile black earth veined with a sparkling creek, the frown between Moses’ eyes deepened.
He went to his father, who now walked with a stoop and a cane. Moses still loved his brother, but fair was fair. After all, John Michel was his father, too. Wasn’t he entitled to land as much as his white brother, who’d done nothing to earn it?
John Michel stroked his yellowing beard. His beloved Claudinette had been dead for years now. In both his son’s eyes were the gentle smiles of their mothers. But give Moses his own land? Afraid not.
“But when I reach twenty-one years?”
John Michel had witnessed the heedless pride, the erect walk and upturned head of his son. Black skin, a straight spine, an unbowed head and eyes that looked straight on at white men—all were an open invitation to trouble. Make him a landowner too? John Michel shook his head.
“It is for your own good. You think you can hold on to this land after I am gone? Ha! These folks around here, they will ruin you, take your land, if they do not kill you. Likely, they will do both.”
Moses turned away, his resentment brick-hard at the bottom of his heart. Was it really fear for his safety that was his father’s concern? He didn’t know, and his ire toward both his father and brother grew darker as time passed.
But on a late summer Sunday evening, John Michel knocked on Moses’ cabin door, his eyes wide and breath short. John Paul was missing, and Moses was to go and look for him.
Moses shook his head sardonically. Probably playing that bugle, down by the creek. But at the creek he was nowhere to be found, so Moses hitched his horse to the wagon and drove into town. And there was John Paul in his favorite watering hole, drunk out of his mind, a dazed look on his face, staring down the barrel of a gun.
Flickering light from the oil lamps outside the saloon glowed through the dirty windows and glazed the bald head of the man holding the gun. He was the biggest white man Moses had ever seen, even taller than he was and twice as wide, and his hateful smile revealed a large gap between his teeth. From what Moses could tell, he’d caught John Paul with his woman, and was determined to end any possibility for another tryst.
The gap-toothed man stepped toward John Paul and cocked the trigger. Moses raised his hand toward the man and glowered at his brother with narrowed, contemptuous eyes.
“Wait. Let me do it,” Moses told the man. “I’ve got more issue with this man than anybody. If somebody’s going to kill him, it ought to be me.”
The gap-toothed man looked up at Moses incredulously. To prove his words, Moses lunged toward his brother and landed a heavy blow on the side of his face, then planted another deep in his gut. John Paul cried out, doubled over in pain and fell to his knees, his blue eyes gazing in confusion at the brother who was now betraying him.
The man tossed Moses the gun. “Be my guest,” he said, the vision of his enemy being shot by this tall darky gleaming in his mind.
Moses took the gun, aimed it at his brother’s heart.
Then he grinned and tossed it back.
“Don’t need that,” he said. “I’ll finish this fool with my own two hands.”
The man laughed as Moses dragged his bloodied brother out of the saloon. Outside, he put John Paul into the wagon and headed it back toward Silver Creek.
When he arrived at his father’s house, Moses carried
his brother over his back past John Michel, sitting in his parlor with his Bible open, up the staircase to John Paul’s room. There, he dressed the wound he’d inflicted, and rubbed ointment on the gut he’d bruised with his own fist. Then he undressed his drunken brother and put him to bed.
John Michel understood the heart of his darker son, who had beaten his beloved, feckless brother to save his life. The dusk-gray eyes brimmed with gratitude. Not speaking, Moses walked past him, watered his horse, and went to bed to get up early and tend his fields.
When John Paul recovered, he came to his brother, his head bowed in contrition.
“Thank you,” he said, “for my life.”
Moses placed a hand solidly on his brother’s shoulder and gave him a hard, determined look.
“He’ll be looking for you. Always. You’ll never be safe here.”
John Paul looked down at the ground, kicked the dirt off one boot with the heel of another. Then, hearing a fluttering overhead, looked up as three blackbirds winged north toward the unknown world. It was as if he needed to hear the words to do the sensible thing, the thing that was already flitting around his mind. The next day, at dawn, Moses woke his brother and pressed eight silver dollars into his palm.
“You best go now, before it gets light.”
And without saying goodbye to his father, John Paul saddled his horse and rode as far away from Silver Creek and the gap-toothed man as he could get.
Months passed and John Michel listened in vain for his son’s hearty laugh, the wail of a brass bugle coming from the creek. Moses measured the bloom of grief in his father’s eyes, and as the winter turned to spring, then summer, then winter again, John Paul did not return.
But John Michel never forgot that wherever his son was, he was alive, and for that he had Moses to thank. After John Paul left, John Michel studied his black son—the manly set of his brow, the back muscled by hard work, the large hands toughened by plow handles, the intelligent eyes that seemed to know more of the world than most of the white men he knew.
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