Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (15 page)

Jeanette remained kneeling, trembling, staring mutely up into the face of this white man who had her every night.

“Boy isn't anything to you, is he?”

Her eyes fell and she got slowly to her feet. “No, sir,” she whispered. “No. He's nothing to me.” Quashie took the flogging in silence. January wasn't sure at what point the man passed out.

“Leave him there,” Thierry ordered when he was done. “Herc, fetch me a bucket of water to clean this.” He gestured with the gore-clotted whip. “You, Cotton-Patch, ain't I told you an hour ago to get them knives and get back to work?”

“Yes, sir.”
January was shaking with self-loathing, with rage, with emotions he thought he'd left behind him in childhood. “Right away, sir.”

He went around the downstream end of the mill rather than the upstream side on which the smithy lay, walked about halfway along, then staggered into the cane to vomit. There wasn't much-it was a few hours yet short of time for the rice cart to come at noon. Then he went on to the forge and collected the knives, and returning to the mill doors found Herc with the nine first-gang men released to return to the fields. Across the yard, Quashie still hung silent from the rawhide ropes on the frame.

Thierry was nowhere around.

“I'll join you in a little while,” said January to Herc.

“If Michie Thierry asks me who cut him down I'll have to tell him.” Hercules's round face was grave. January remembered him from the shout, taking the sullen pretty unweeping girl away into the woods with him. Trinette, someone had called her at Ajax's house afterward. The dead man Reuben's wife.

“That's all right. You can tell him you tried to stop me, too.”

Herc nodded. “All right.”

January walked across the yard and with two quick strokes of the cane-knife cut the ropes, caught Quashie over his shoulder, and carried him past the downstream side of the mill and along the quarters street to the twelve-by-twelve cabin the five men shared.

When he took the gourd from beside the door and stepped out again to fetch water from the cistern to wash the blood from the young man's back, he was met by Jeanette, a dripping bucket in her hand.

“Thank you.” He took it from her, and she followed him up the two plank steps and into the cabin. “The flies will have got to him. Could you run to the kitchen, ask Kiki if there's brandy or whiskey, even rum?”

“Kiki wouldn't spit on a field hand's back to wash it.” Jeanette jerked her head toward the big house. “They none of 'em would. Besides, Gilles died of drinking liquor in the big house. I be back.” She turned and he heard her dart down the steps and run, light as a deer.

She was gone many minutes. January washed down Quashie's lacerated back as gently as he could and laid a spare shirt over it, to keep out dust and flies. The quarters were silent. Chill sun slanted through the door onto the gray floor-boards, accentuating each shadow with crystalline brightness. The smell of cut cane, of burnt sugar and wet earth, were a universe of childhood griefs. Yet curiously, here in this cabin he felt a strange sense of deep peace.

His own actions had shocked him, his acquiescence to Thierry's tyranny, though he still had no idea what he could have done and yet retained his position as a slave among slaves. He felt deeply soiled and shamed, and at the same time-to his intense embarrassment-afraid of facing Thierry's anger for cutting Quashie down.

This is slavery, he thought, as if he were telling Ayasha about it back in Paris. He scratched in his armpit, the first louse, he realized philosophically, of what would be many, before roulaison was done and everyone had the time it took to keep clean. This is what I'd almost forgotten.

This was the world he'd been saved from, at the age of seven, by a Frenchman's lust for his mother. He'd been grateful for it-even at the time he'd been grateful. But for months, sitting in the classroom of the St. Louis Academy among the sons of colored women by their white protectors, or walking along the closewalled streets of the French town, or falling asleep in the narrow confines of the garçonniere of his mother's house on Rue Burgundy, he had missed the smell of the earth, the silence broken only dimly by the singing of the men in the fields.

“I'm sorry.” Jeanette's shadow darkened the doorway again. “I knew where Rodney keeps his liquor, but it's been since the dark of the moon that the onisdwd”-she used the African word for a trader-“been by, and I had to get this from Harry.” She held up a cheap clay bottle of something probably even Hannibal wouldn't have touched unless he was desperate.

Harry,
reflected January as he daubed the liquor on a clean rag and gently squeezed it over the puffed and bleeding welts, was the kind who always had a cache of whatever others wanted and would trade for. He wondered what she'd paid for it, or promised to pay.

“Did Gilles buy from the onisowd, too?”

She nodded. He saw where Thierry's slap had left a bruise on the side of her face, puffed up now. Saw also a half-healed split in her lip, and a small fresh scar on her chin, the kind a woman gets from her own teeth when a man belts her hard. She was still an extraordinarily pretty girl, slim-boned and strong, her closewrapped tignon making her head seem small, like a deer's.

“Gilles used to trade candles from the house-not the fresh ones, but the ones that'd already been burned-and coffee grounds and tea leaves after they'd been used. Only somebody stole his stash and drank it up, way before False River Jones was due back.”

“He ever steal from Michie Fourchet's liquor before?”

She nodded. “About two years ago.” She settled herself on the rough plank floor by the cot-of course there were no chairs-and very gently touched Quashie's hand. “We thought Michie Fourchet was going to kill him. Kiki nursed him, though she was Reuben's wife then-and Reuben, he wasn't pleased. Gilles was laid up three days, ribs broke and everythin'. He should have known better. Should have known that liquor was like gold to Michie Fourchet. Everything he touches, everything he owns, is like gold to him, that other people can't touch.”

Her lips tightened. She'd been working in the fields, and her old dress was kilted up to show long, slim legs. The stink of dirt, of cane-juice and sweat on her was not unpleasant to January, only an accounting of who she was. “Gilles wasn't like most men, though. You know how most men, they get liquor and drink it all up and get silly and get sick and then they're fine. They wait til the next chance comes along, and if it don't come along, they say, `Damn fuck I'd like a drink,' and it's gone from their minds the next second. But Gilles . . .” She shook her head.

“He was the sweetest man in the world, Michie Ben. Kind and good and friendly. And funny-he could always make us laugh. Most of them house niggers, they don't care whether we live or die out here. But he'd sometimes sneak food to those women that was nursin' or about to give birth, or give the children worn-out stuff from the house, blankets and things. But if he couldn't get liquor, liquor was all he thought about until he could.”

January was silent, recalling some of the insanely stupid things Hannibal had done, in the course of their two years' acquaintance, when he couldn't get money for opium.

“I was glad when he could finally marry Kiki,” Jeanette went on. “She may be stuck up, but nobody deserved bein' married to Reuben.”

And January remembered what Mohammed had said, about Reuben's carelessness. About his wanting to win from Michie Fourchet a woman who'd been given to someone else.

“Michie Ben, you better get on back or you'll get a whippin'. I'll stay take care of Quashie a little.”

As she spoke she touched Quashie's hand again, where it lay limp on the corn-shuck mattress. The tenderness on her face was free of any shame or fear. Confident, like a child, not in the world, but in the knowledge of love.

Ayasha had been like that, thought January-the beautiful Berber woman who had been taken from him by the cholera. Like a summer tree, rooted in and watered by love. And Jeanette's eyes told him all he needed to know about Quashie's love for her.

“You left Thierry's house to meet him last night?”

She nodded. “I got out the parlor window. He keeps the door keys under his pillow. He has a couple drinks, and sleeps like a dead man. Quashie waits for me in the trees by the levee.”

To comfort you, thought January, knowing you come to him from another man's bed. Shakespeare, and Marvell, and all the other poets had missed that one, when they'd written about the nature of love.

“You left the window open?”

“Yes. I had to go back to him, you see. He likes to fuck in the mornin' as well as at night. That's how the hoodoo got in, isn't it?”

“I think so, yes.”

Her eyes filled with fear and she swallowed hard. “Please don't tell him that. Don't tell anyone,” she added, when he shook his head. “Michie Ben, you know how these things get around. That Leander, he's like a magpie squawking. Cornwallis, too.”

“It won't get past me,” promised January. “How long were you at the levee?”

She thought about it a moment. January remembered his silver watch, safe in Olympe's bureau drawer, and remembered too how long it had taken him to learn to think in terms of anything shorter than morning and afternoon. As a child, the first six months of his lessons he was always late.

“The moon was just about straight up overhead when I got there,” she said at last. “Maybe not halfway down to the trees on the other bank, when I left.”

About two hours, thought January. Plenty of time to load up an old blanket with as many knives as a man could carry in a single load, even if the hoodoo hadn't been watching for the exact moment of her departure. “You didn't see anyone as you were coming or going?”

“If I had,” said Jeanette, with a grim twist to her mouth, “you think I'd have left or come back?”

“And you didn't go in that back room after you came back from the levee?”

“No. There's no need for me to, and it's cold in there.” She glanced at him under her lashes, still afraid to trust even a man who'd risked Thierry's wrath by cutting Quashie down.

“Mohammed tells me your mother was a hoodoo. Did she teach you any, you or Parson?”

He knew she'd deny it, and she did, shaking her head immediately and vigorously. “Oh, no. She died when we were only little, Parson and me.”

It might even have been the truth.

“There anyone else on the place who'd know the hoodoo marks?”

She hesitated a long time. “I think Hope knows some, Ajax's wife. And Emerald, and old Fayola. Auntie Zu knew, that was Lisbon's wife. Well, everyone knows a little, you know? Enough to keep witches away from the door anyway, and make juju bags an' that. But not the big stuff. Not like what was wrote on the wall. I saw Mama make signs like that, but she never taught me, nor anyone else as far as I know,”

And that, too, might have been the truth.

“He all right?” asked Ajax, when January returned to the fields.
January nodded. “You want to watch yourself,” cautioned the driver. “You think Thierry won't beat another man's boy, but you're wrong. He told me to lick you if you got behind.”

“Thanks for the warning,” said January. “I'll remember.”

Ajax put him into the row behind Gosport again, topping the cane and trimming the trash, and piling the stalks in the stubble as the cutters advanced. They were still working ratooned fields upstream of the house. Rats darted and rustled among the sprawled stalks, and now and then a man would pull back with a cry and the brown-patterned buff sinuosity of a snake would flick out of sight.

The sun grew hot, and moved in the sky, and the hawks overhead watched for rats.

At noon, when the boys brought the rice cart out, Harry ambled over to January and said, “That working out well for you, the extra pants and shirt?”

January nodded, grateful for the protection from the sharp leaves and also from some of the chafing annoyance of field-dirt creeping into his clothing. But he braced himself, hearing in the other man's voice that the next words out of his mouth would concern payment of some kind for the gift.

“You like to give me a hand tonight with a little project I've got going?”

January wanted to ask him when or if he ever slept. Instead he said, “It can't be tonight. I'm working night shift in the mill. Thank you,” he added, as a little boy named Cato handed him a gourd bowl of dirty rice with sausage in it, and his water bottle that he'd brought down from the end of the row.

“Tomorrow night, then?
Old Banjo tells me it'll be clear for a couple nights and the moon's still full.”

“Tomorrow night,” January agreed. Harry strolled jauntily away to flirt with one of the girls by the cane cart; January shook his head.

Because he was to work in the mill through the night, when full dark fell January was allowed longer for supper than the men who'd be working for only a few hours. This was so that he could get a few hours of sleep, but after eating and washing, and shaving as well as he could in the rain barrel behind the cabin, instead of immediately seeking his bed like a sensible person, he went to the levee to change the bandanna on the tree from white to red, knowing he'd be too exhausted to do so when released from work at dawn.

As Harry had said, the night was clear. The full moon's milky light glittered on the river, as it had glittered last night for Quashie and Jeanette. North and east, and all along the dark shore, red dots of light marked other mills, other men who labored through the night, and between them tiny sprays of sparks traced the passage of the steamboats, hugging the ebony banks.

Coming down from the levee January saw in the moonlight the narrow trail away into the thickets of buttonwood northeast along the river, where the trees divided it here from the cane. Earlier in the day, one of the men had spoken of the slaves' graveyard that lay by the river upstream of the house. Curious, January turned his steps in that direction. In time he came to the small cleared space between the levee and the trees, apposite the woods of what was now Catbird Island.

Side by side, two dark mounds marked the newest graves. Rough-nailed white crosses at their heads bore painted inscriptions: REUBEN. GILLES.