Crescent City (8 page)

David went out to the rear gallery overlooking the courtyard. The moon had risen and in the luminous night he could see the ragged outlines of massed banana leaves; a wind passed briefly and they rustled. He heard the purl and ripple of water, and remembered that there was a fountain at the end of the garden. A fresh fragrance, faintly tart, lay in the air; he remembered being told it was from those syringa bushes banked like snow against the farther wall. And a restless bird called out one startled, poignant note. Sweet night! Like no night the boy had ever seen. So sweet, so troubling!

Perhaps I came too late, he thought. Perhaps even fifteen is too late to make a change like this. I don’t know. I want to do right. I will do right. But I just don’t know about this place.

“Well, now you’ve seen the U.S. Mint,” Ferdinand said as they swung together past the foot of Esplanade Avenue. He put his arm around David’s shoulder. “You don’t know what it means to have my son here with me! My one regret—I can’t say it often enough—my one regret is that it took so long, that we’ve lost so much time. But enough of that. You’re here,” he said cheerfully, “so let’s get on with the present. What was I telling you? Oh, I was saying I do a great many other things beside merchandising, you know. It’s not enough to work for money. Once you’ve got it, you have to make it work for you! So you see, I’ve been branching out. I transact business all over the country. I hold a good many mortgages and I’m a broker for planters who need advances on their crops. It seems they always do need them, too. Well, they live high .… David, would you like to try a
cala?
They’re a kind of rice pancake, awfully good.”

In front of the cathedral a Negro woman in a starched white apron was cooking over a small fire. Ferdinand hailed her. “How are you, Sally? This is my son. I want to buy him a
cala,
but he’s not hungry. She makes the best in the city,” he said as they walked on. “Used to belong to a friend of mine, but she bought her freedom. You can always tell a free woman of
color by the
tignon,
the handkerchief knotted on top of her head. Some of them are marvelous cooks. At night they come out with hot sweet-potato cakes. You’ll have to try one.”

And suddenly, as they rounded a corner, they came upon a bustle of life; never had David seen so much color in motion or such a crowd converging on one place. All his senses tingled. Voices swirled, flower-fragrance merged with river smells, and his eyes were dazzled by the burning light. He stood, astonished.

Ferdinand was delighted with this effect upon David.

“Surprised?” He laughed. “Yes, it’s quite a sight, the French Market.”

Nestled below the levee, the stalls were strung out in a long Une. Freshly watered vegetables were arranged like bouquets. In the fish stalls, on beds of ice, the fresh catch glistened silver, black, and mottled gray. Live crabs, green as new grass, crawled alongside lobsters. An aged Indian woman squatted behind a pile of leather goods. Ladies, protected by parasols and followed by maids, moved from stall to stall, or took their beignets and coffee at small tables under a shady roof.

Silent and marveling, David walked up and down, in and out, seeing and remembering as though he were a painter marking a preliminary sketch in his head.

“Like a
café noir?”
urged Ferdinand. “No? I suppose you’ve seen enough for today, then?”

They went out beyond the stalls. At the far end a dentist’s chair, surrounded by a band of loud musicians, stood on a platform. A small crowd lingered there, watching a hapless man having his teeth pulled while the band’s noise covered his cries.

“The fellow pulling teeth has a brother at the Medical College. Fills the chair of Materia Medica. I know
him pretty well. I know plenty of others, too. In any case, you’d have no trouble being admitted. I’ll take you soon to visit, but there’s really no hurry. You have a few years’ work ahead of you first. The Americans—you know, I must give them credit—have really been agitating for education. I hear they’re bringing in a man who worked with somebody called Horace Mann up in Massachusetts—that’s way north of New York—setting up free schools. They say we’re going to have free schooling here in a few years. Well, it’ll be a good thing; Lord knows, I never had much schooling in Europe and I’ve felt the lack of it ever since. The lack of it makes a man feel a little shy at times, although I hate to admit it. Yet I’ve certainly done well enough without it, haven’t I?” He laughed. “But I want you to have all you can get, David. Fortunately, you won’t need free public schooling. People in our class here have private tutors or send their sons to private schools.”

David recalled the previous night’s talk with Pelagie. “What about Miriam?” he asked.

“Oh, there are plenty of little schools around here for girls, run by gentlewomen usually, women of good family, very refined, who need the money. I don’t know how much the girls learn, but they learn enough, all the niceties. What does a girl need, after all?”

Eager little Miriam, curious, quick and fanciful! Surely that mind was the equal of David’s own? It occurred to him that a girl’s mind might be wasted just as much by idle luxury as by the meager poverty of their European village. He was about to say so when his father resumed his explanations as they walked along the river’s edge.

“Yes, these ships are my lifeline to the world.” He looked around, lowering his voice so as not to reveal any private affairs to strangers. “Last year, David, we
brought in thirty thousand dollars’ worth of specie from Mexico alone.”

Four and five deep, ships lay in tiers along the river. On foot and on horseback, in fashionable carriages and overloaded wagons, traffic surged through the streets. The city was fat and glossy with prosperity.

“You can see any type of humanity you can think of on this riverfront,” Ferdinand mused. “Every kind of confidence man and swindler. You will see a laborer shoot dice for a few cents and a rich man bet thousands on the boat races. On the river steamers, of course, you’ve got the professional gambler. You have to watch out for card sharps going up the river. Many a planter’s been fooled by one of those gentlemen. I’ve seen a man lose the profits of a whole year’s crop in one hour’s poker game. Thousands and thousands of dollars.”

They crossed to walk on the shady side of the street under triple tiers of iron-lace balconies. Someone above them, watering a pot of hanging ferns, sent an instant’s worth of pungent fragrance into the sultry air.

“That’s the Cotton Exchange, corner of Royal Street. Maybe I’ll take you there tomorrow and introduce you to some of my friends. Sure there’s nothing you want before we go home?”

David thought of something. “I’d like to buy some books in English.”

“Still insist on English? Well, all right, there’s a bookstore down this way. We’ve got about nine bookstores in the city, you know.”

At the back of a deep narrow shop sat an old man wearing a skullcap. He stood up when they came in.

“English books? Over here. Poetry, novels, history, grammar. All here.” He stood watching curiously
while David examined the shelves. “If you want a grammar, young gentleman, I recommend this one.”

“I want to teach myself to speak English,” David explained, speaking in French.

“The grammar will not be enough, then. You should acquaint yourself with the literature. Then the language will come alive for you. Do you like poetry?”

“I’ve not read very much, and that in German. But yes, I like it.”

“Then try Lord Byron, a Romantic.” The word was savored and repeated. “Romantic. A young man’s poet. Not for me any longer, but certainly for you. And for novels, Sir Walter Scott. He’ll hold your interest. There’s nothing dry about him.”

“My son can have as many books as he wants,” Ferdinand said. “On education I don’t stint.”

The old man bowed. “And most wise of you, sir.”

When a pile had been assembled and paid for, the proprietor shuffled back to the shelves and handed David a thin leather-bound volume.

“When you have finished all these others, you will have learned enough of the language to appreciate Jonathan Swift, the greatest writer of them all. He was a satirist. You know what a satirist is, young gentleman? No? I’ll tell you. He is a man with sharp eyes and a sharp tongue, or, I should say, pen. He sees the evils of the world. He ridicules and scolds.”

“I should imagine that sort of thing to be way over the head of a fifteen-year-old lad,” Ferdinand objected.

The old man shook his head. “Not this boy’s. I see by his eyes that he will understand. Here. Take it.”

After they left the shop, David asked why the old man had given him a present.

“That’s called
lagniappe,”
Ferdinand explained. “Merchants here always add something in proportion
to what you buy. And we did buy a bundle. We should have sent Maxim or Blaise to carry them home.”

“Papa, I don’t need a servant to carry a few books. You know, I liked the man, didn’t you? He’s Jewish, isn’t he?”

“I believe so. Yes.”

“The People of the Book,” David said deliberately. He didn’t know what made him say it, what it was that made him keep leading his father back to the subject that only brought discomfiture to them both.

For a moment Ferdinand made no comment. Then he said, “You know, David, I understand you, even though you may not think I do. Your religious feelings are entirely natural at your age. At fifteen one likes to feel virtuous! Even I did, though I must say for a much shorter time than most.” He spoke with a kind of amused tolerance. “You’ll outgrow it, very likely, now that I’ve gotten you away from village life. But if you don’t, that will be your affair. If only for the sake of your mother of blessed memory, I shall never interfere.”

“I will not outgrow it.”

“Well, time will tell. As I believe I told you once before, Heine himself said that Judaism is a misfortune. Why do you think that in the last ten years alone under Friedrich Wilhelm III more than two thousand Jews were baptized? Because it’s the only road to survival under an oppressor, that’s why. Fortunately here it’s not necessary to convert, and as I’ve also told you, I never wanted to. All I want is to be let alone.”

“If they will,” David said.

On Chartres Street Ferdinand exchanged bows with a stout young man in a rich black suit.

“That was Judah Benjamin,” he whispered, “one of our rising young lawyers. A Jew, too, but he doesn’t keep to it, either. And here’s the St. Louis Hotel. Very
good dining here; I’ll take you to lunch one day soon. And they’ve got the biggest auction exchange in the city. You can buy anything from a ship to a house, a houseful of French furniture, or a thousand acres of land. Anything.”

A placard on the wall caught David’s attention. He stopped. Carefully he spelled out the words.

“Young Negro boy, not yet twenty, excellent gentleman’s valet, speaks English and French, can do some tailoring, honest, good appearance.”

Something drew him on, a vague and dawning comprehension which at the very same time repelled him.

“I’d like to go in,” he said.

“Now? To watch the auction? All right. We have an hour to spare.”

Chairs in concentric circles surrounded a raised platform on which stood an energetic man wearing a bright shirt. Ferdinand squeezed his way through rows of hats perched on broadcloth knees, nodding and greeting as he went. Men stood clustered in the aisles; conversation buzzed as at the theater before the curtain rises, or as at some village fair, David thought, before the start of the entertainment, the jugglers or the dancing bear. It was only when he was seated with a clear view of the platform that he saw the true nature of the event. Even with the handicap of language and in spite of the auctioneer’s rapid veering between French and English, he understood.

They were selling human beings! A small assemblage waited at the side of the platform, waited mutely, like horses at those same village fairs. And David strained to see: a humped old man; three stripling boys; some fat women, one of whom wore a strange, ingratiating smile; a young woman, very light of skin—three-quarters white, he estimated—crying
without a sound. His eyes went to the man whose lively voice boomed out over the crowd.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen! Quiet! We’re doing business, we can’t hear. How much am I offered for Lucinda here?”

His hand rested on the shoulder of a handsome Negress in a neat green cotton dress. Tall and quiet, she stood as if oblivious to the hand or the voice. Her own hands were clasped at her waist. Her head was high. She seemed to be looking far beyond the spectators.

The demand was repeated. “How much am I offered for Lucinda here? Who’ll start the bidding? She can launder, she can cook. The only reason she’s available is that her master died without heirs and the estate has to dispose of her. Come, now. Who’ll start?”

“Six hundred,” someone called.

“You can’t be in earnest, sir! Why, I could never let this woman go for that!”

“Pretty long in the tooth,” the man objected.

“Old, sir? You’re not talking about a woman of sixty. Why, she’s hardly a day over forty. She’s strong and well-behaved and healthy. None of your rebellious, inferior Kentucky stock, either. She was born and raised not fifty miles upriver from here.” He swung his head to the other side of the ring. “What am I offered?”

“Seven hundred.”

“Eight hundred.”

“Eight hundred, I’ve got eight hundred. What am I bid?”

Down the back of his neck and under his arms, David felt the gathering sweat. The sweat was cold even in that crowded hall. His hands were cold. He thrust them into his pockets.

The woman Lucinda still stood looking into whatever lay beyond this place and this room. It seemed to
David in his horror that only her body was present, indifferent and patient; her spirit had removed itself.

“A thousand.”

“One thousand fifty.”

“Eleven hundred.”

“I have eleven hundred. Does anyone offer eleven fifty? Eleven hundred once, twice, three times. Sold for eleven hundred dollars. Lucinda. Next, please. Come, come, bring them up, step up. We’ve a long list and the day’s already half over.”