Dance on the Wind (48 page)

“Pleasure doing business with you too,” Beulah said as she came to the gunnel and peered after them.

“Seven dollars a day, just to tie up. That’s near robbery.” Kingsbury wagged his head.

“We just be sure to get this cargo sold and off the boat in a couple of days,” Ovatt reminded them optimistically.

“Stop all your fretting now,” the woman snapped at them. “That fee ain’t nothing, nothing at all—not compared to the small fortune you boys are bound to make when you go sell all this: hemp, flour, tobacco, ironworkings, and all.”

A smile slowly crossed Kingsbury’s face. “I suppose you’re right. A small fortune. Yes. Well, maybeso.”

“You’re all gonna be rich men,” the woman buoyed them. “Drink the finest wine. Smoke the finest cigars—not have to chew that poor stuff you boys been sucking on since you pulled me out’n the river. Times gonna change for you now.”

“R-rich men?” Root asked, looking at the faces of the other three crew.

“Even Titus Bass,” the pilot said. “You got your pay coming—”

“Pay?” Beulah demanded. “You three figure on giving Titus nothing more’n regular pay?” She whirled on Bass. “That’s only some fifty dollars for a crewman to come all the way downriver with a Kentuckyboat.”

“It don’t rightly seem fair he gets a full goddamned share,” Root snorted. “Not since’t he wasn’t with us when we put this here boat into the Ohio way up—”

“I don’t ’spect it to be a full share, now,” Titus interrupted with an apologetic wag of his head.

“Wait a minute,” Beulah demanded. “What’d Ebenezer Zane pay you fellas ever’ trip down? He pay only boatmen’s wages? Like every other patroon on the river?”

Kingsbury’s face went more sheepish than the others’ as they dropped their eyes. “Naw,” the pilot answered. “After he sold everything, Eb took his half off the top and split the other half atween all four of us, him included.”

She nodded in wide-eyed admiration, saying, “That’s a damn fine proposition for a boatman, I’ll say. No wonder you boys stayed on with him so many years. Likely you all was making five, maybe six times or more what you’d make working any other man’s boat down the river.”

“We all had us a little piece of the cargo that way, Ebenezer always said,” Hames explained.

“And all of this is yours to sell off now,” Beulah replied. “So to my way of thinking, I say you boys do like Ebenezer done for you: give Titus here what would be one man’s fair split of the boat’s profits, and with all that’s left you can split up atween yourselves. How’s that strike you?”

Root and Ovatt looked at one another quizzically, then both turned in unison to Kingsbury for help. After cogitating on it a few moments, working it over in his mind a handful at a time, he nodded and replied, “Sounds fair; fair to everyone. Fair to Titus ’cause he’ll get better’n a boatman’s wages for the trip … and better for all the rest of us ’cause we ain’t not a one ever had so much to split atween us before! It sound good to you, Titus?”

“I ain’t never … didn’t even count on no money coming—”

“Don’t matter. You earned your money,” Kingsbury interrupted, slapping Bass on the shoulder. “That settles it. What’s fair is fair—right, boys?”

When they went ashore that afternoon for the first time, Titus sensed his excitement swell with every step they took down the meandering levee, moving closer and closer to the city’s central business district. Never before in all those weeks and all the miles Bass had put behind him in coming downriver had he seen such a mix of colors and tongues, dialects and costumes, as there were here on the streets of New Orleans. Besides gaily dressed Indians from the region’s various tribes, Bass jostled against pale-skinned foreigners from faraway European principalities, coffee-colored visitors from a host of Caribbean islands, as well as stopping dead in his tracks to watch long lines of half-dressed Africans—some dull-eyed with privation, others wide-eyed with fear at certain death—each one as dark and shiny as charred hardwood glistening after a rain, all of them chained together with massive iron shackles, their feet bound two by two, led along with the accompanying beat of a drummer, perhaps even a fife or two adding a lively air above the sad procession of human cargo making for the middle of the marketplace, where the Africans would be offered up—man, woman, and child alike—to the well-heeled bidders who journeyed here to this slave market from throughout the gulf coast.

Even now near the end of a busy day, slave traders cried out in voices shrill and falsetto, bass or soprano, announcing what they were buying. Each barker screeched or sang louder and louder to outdo his competition as the hawkers moved along through the throbbing mass of upriver boatmen, local stevedores, and sailors come from ports across great oceans.

Here in the market below the trees where the grass moss hung like tatters of dirty linen, the autumn air did not move near so well within such a crushing mass of bodies. It was then that Titus began to smell people. As he thought on it, he could not remember the last time he had been confined in a crowd, forced to smell the sweat and
stink of other folks—but, surely, it must have been only last summer. Back in Boone County. Perhaps at the Longhunters Fair, where so many gathered. Yet nothing at all like this.

Back upriver at the ports on the Ohio, the commerce of a few prosperous communities, perhaps a few states at best, was all that was conducted. Yet here lay the crossroads of many cultures, many countries, all bringing their wares to this southwesternmost port of an infant nation.

The smells of these people from different lands mingled now with the fragrances of exotic spices, the hearty tang of generous quarters of beef, veal, and pork, along with headless poultry and monstrous, glassy-eyed ocean-going fish, all hung in the public market that crowded most of the levee’s length, every morsel baking beneath the autumn sun, crusted with clusters of flying insects. In addition, from the backs of their carts some vendors hawked wild ducks and game from upriver in the Indian lands, while others sold what they held captive in their nearby cages: live turkeys, ducks, and geese, as well as varieties of barnyard fowl. As well, those men from upriver could purchase such exotic wares as packed vermilion from the Orient, French girdles of fine silk, embroidered shirts of Spanish linen, tiny round looking glasses, and dainty slippers for the tiniest of women’s feet. Here at New Orleans the world came knocking at America’s door.

On the docks lay a dizzying maze of goods just off-loaded from the downriver flats. Most Kentucky boatmen ran what they termed a “straight” load—consisting of one product easier to load, maintain, and unload en route. Things like pork, flour, coal, hay, and even cordwood. Fewer preferred a “mixed” load, hauling what they could buy cheap and sell for a considerable profit upon reaching New Orleans. Here on the wharf sat crates and kegs and casks of potatoes, dried apples, rolled cigars, lime, and tallow, very important to a lardless community. As well, the boatmen dodged around stacks of millstones and sprawling bundles of pig iron and corn brooms. Tobacco was a favorite of the Kentucky shippers: cured leaf purchased in Cincinnati or Louisville for $2.00 American for
a hundredweight would increase in value to $9.50 by the time it reached the end of the line.

Everywhere was a splash of color and texture, with all the fruits and vegetables displayed at the top of open sacking or in huge wagon-borne boxes: all manner of melons, cucumbers, and Irish potatoes, both red and brown, along with the yams and sweet cherries, plums, and strawberries. Initially nervous at stealing—no matter how trifling—Titus nonetheless followed the example of the other boatmen as they threaded their way through the maze of vendors and displays, snatching up a treat here and there when they passed a veranda where no one was watching. Quickly stuffing their stolen treasure between their lips, sucking noisily, and commenting on the relative merits of the various purloined wares—finishing some while tossing the rest beyond the levee, where the refuse landed among that garbage floating on the chocolate-colored surface of the grand old Mississippi.

Originally founded by the French in 1718, New Orleans likely boasted a population of some ten thousand souls late in 1810. While the great fire of 1788 had destroyed nearly all of the original buildings, those tile-roofed wood and brick houses that arose from the ashes couldn’t help but impress even the most cosmopolitan or international of travelers. A constantly expanding dike protected this low-lying city, that dike ever in need of repair. Within the confines of the old colonial port, New Orleans had long ago divided itself into three sections: Spanish, American, and the dominant French community. In a city French by birth and French at its marrow, the French inhabitants rarely dealt with other residents save for matters of business. At the center of town stood the grand cathedral, the town hall nearby, as well as a convent, hospital, and public market house, in addition to a large complement of army barracks and a notorious prison, which was used by the local constables for the many, many troublemakers who haunted the city’s disreputable and world-infamous “Swamp.”

Here all manner of music screamed for attention from every open door as the four boatmen muscled their way along the crowded, rutted, garbage-strewn streets to reach
that most dangerous yet ultimately alluring section of New Orleans where few streetlamps glimmered. As the sun sank from the sky, life in the Swamp grew more animated. Bustling billiard rooms and brothels, overflowing gaming houses and watering holes, the doorway of every public place teeming with those moving in and those coming out, along with those who shouted, barking to entice passersby with the prospect of whiskey, or women of all hues and colors, proposing that sailors come within for the sheer fun of unbridled debauchery now that they had reached this famous port.

“You never wanna go in there,” Heman Ovatt warned.

Titus stared, mule-eyed, at the oversize barker waving, dancing, shimmying all his rolls of fat while chattering to all at once in the doorway to a card room. On each side of the door was painted a brightly colored hand of cards.

Bass asked, “Why not?”

“Swindlers,” Ovatt said as if it hurt his tongue to have the word cross it. “Steal a man’s money and throw him in the street with their cheating games. And the girls in some of these places ain’t there to pleasure a man, neither.”

“Then what for?”

“They just help get a man drunk. Help him drink up his likker so others can see to it he loses his money at their swindling tables. And that poor turtle won’t even have a chance to get his pants down and climb a’tween their legs a’tall. Not in that sort of place. Stay close to us, young’un. And don’t dare let yourself get hauled into one of them dark dens.”

Dogs snarled at one another, fighting over the mounds of filth tossed from the many kitchens that lined these muddy, wheel-rutted, hoof-pocked streets. Men dead drunk lay propped here and there against the buildings, sleeping off their excesses, most with their pockets already turned inside out by casual thieves who leisurely worked over their unconscious victims. Not one of those drunks still boasted a pair of boots on his feet, most already stripped of hat and coat, perhaps a fancy shirt or sash—anything that might bring a thief a few pennies, ha’pence,
shilling, or doubloon in exchange. The unwary and stupid proved themselves fair game.

In front of one busy saloon a large ring of people danced and cavorted in the lamplight, flowing this way and that in a great circle in time to the music of a fiddle and a concertina, along with a third man clanging out a steady rhythm on the bottom of a brass kettle.

Across that narrow lane from the revelers half-dressed women leaned on their elbows from open windows on both floors of a two-story brothel, many drinking and smoking expensive meerschaum pipes as they conversed with those below in the street. Flesh advertised because flesh was for sale. Necks and shoulders bared, breasts all but spilling forth from skimpy, wispy turns of cambric and calico, some of it trimmed with lace. Titus stood agog as one woman caught his eye, beckoned him over as she leaned out, her exposed and pendulous breasts hanging like fat udders craving a man’s fondling.

He looked over, staring, unbelieving at their size.

“Get along here, Titus,” Reuben snarled, snagging Bass’s arm and yanking him away from the whore’s outstretched arm. “We ain’t here tonight looking to find a knocking shop for you. Think back to the last time you had diddling on your mind—we nearly got us all kill’t.”

Then Bass remembered Annie Christmas’s gunboat. Natchez, and that mob intent on something unspoken, but murderous all the same. Recalled that bloodied scene: those dead men and the whore Kingsbury had gutted. Thinking on the look in those yellowed eyes, the dangerous, feral fear chiseled across the shiny black face of that big, smooth-headed slave who had worked the bar for Annie Christmas.

“Hey, you there: Kentucky boy!” the bare-breasted whore called out in singsong, lisping slightly what with missing some of her front teeth. She waved, tilting her head and lifting one of her breasts, beckoning him to her window. “C’mon over here and show me what it is all you Kentucky boys know about a woman!”

“That’s Madame Laforge’s place,” Reuben declared, tugging Bass away from the window. “You go in there—a feller like you won’t ever come back out!”

“W-why … they likely to kill me in that place too?”

The boatman snorted. “Hell, no! Not in there! Madame Laforge’s girls just hump a young’un like you till there’s nothing left but your moccasins!”

With a shudder he let Root turn him away, hurrying past the gay dancers to duck within the saloon behind Kingsbury and Ovatt. This mingling of dialects and tongues, a cacophony of odors and aromas that assaulted his nostrils as they pierced the lamplit gloom of that teeming grogshop, were enough to make Titus believe he had entered a whole new world. This could not be part of the United States.

“Lookee there,” Heman Ovatt cried out, indicating the bar where stood a long line of customers, most of whom were copper-skinned Indians and indigo-eyed freedmen, “drinking just like they was white men.”