Drum (30 page)

chapter t

Alix entirely approved of Calinda from a business point of view, for there was no denying that she was a most valuable slave. But from the moment of their first meeting, each felt a deep-rooted hatred of the other. Calinda resented the fact that she had to relinquish Drum to the authority of another woman and Alix did not approve of his affection for a| woman blacker than himself. She had eventually intended] to get some valuable light-skinned progeny from Drum's loins that she could dispose of at a profit. Bright-skinned fancies were becoming more and more in demand but anything this girl produced would be only a griffe.

Calinda, of course, obeyed Alix in the household and kitchen duties allotted her, but did everything perfimctorily and sulkily. Her attitude barely stopped short of being disrespectful. Alix threatened several times to have her disciplined, once even going so far as to summon the police to take her to the public whips, but Rachel intervened and managed to convince her that the girl was scarcely housebroken and would in time be more amenable. Alix doubted that but she agreed to give her another chance.

In private with Drum, in the hours they shared together in the little room of the gargonniire, Calinda railed and ranted against Alix. Drum himself had no particularly deep affection for his mistress, but he tried his best to quiet Calinda's resentment. Like Rachel, he lived in terror of the time when Calinda might go too far, when it would be too late to save her from the whips.

Yet Calinda was capable of deep affection, as she showed plainly in her relations with Drum, She was his, body and soul, and there was no demand he could make she would not try to gratify. But she sensed that she could never possess him as completely as he possessed her, and she was maniacally jealous. If her man so much as looked twice at one of Madame Alix' girls, or regarded overlong an admiring

wench on the rare occasions when they were permitted to visit Congo Square on a Sunday afternoon, she either brooded and sulked or stormed at him. Drum had only one remedy for her moods. When she was sulky he cajoled her into bed, and when she screamed with jealous rage he knocked her down and carried her to bed. Making love to Calinda was the only way he knew to bring her aroimd.

When his duties as barman, fighter or exhibitionist for the evening were over, she would be waiting for him to subdue her and thus reassure her. The white man's civilization had failed to change her primitive nature, or soften her fierce pride and possessiveness. Drum's body, she felt, belonged to her and she resented even the thought of another's touching it. But also her own body was utterly and completely his, and he could use it as he wished, even offer it to another man if he chose to do so.

One afternoon Marigny came to the Academy of Music and asked permission of Alix to go to Drum's room in the gargon-niere. There he found Drum and Calinda in their hour of siesta and announced that he had come to claim the thanks that were due him for bringing them together. With Drum's assent, Calinda readily accommodated herself to Marigny's demands, but when he turned from her and laid his hands on Drum, she lay stiffly incensed beside them, bitterly resenting their intimacies. Had not Drum been anxious to remain in the good graces of Marigny, he might at least have made some token show of resistance; as a slave he could do no more than that. But Marigny's influence was too important to him, and he warned Calinda with a meaningful look not to interfere. That her man was willing to submit to Marigny was something quite beyond her comprehension. It was not a matter of moral outrage; Calinda knew nothing of morality. All she could see was that another person was usurping the place she felt was rightfully hers.

Later, at the more elaborate performance which she and Drum staged in the Orleans four-poster, for the benefit of the group of men who had purchased her, she was quite at ease and entirely unembarrassed. Despite the thirty pairs of eyes watching them, she had her man entirely to herself and the applauding audience made no difference. However, when, as often happened, Drum was commanded to assist in one of Madame's tableaux vivants —for which Alix was famous from Boston to New Orleans—and Drum's co-performers were the lovely quadroons of the third floor instead of herself, Calinda

would be in such a state they had to lock her in the little room of the gargonniere. It took all of Rachel's and Drum's best efforts for several days after that to render her tractable again.

If the tableaux vivants consimied her with insane jealousy, the fights which Madame's patrons demanded affected her even more. When Drum fought she was so worried fo; fear he would receive some lasting bodily injury that sh( would become actually ill. As painful as it was to her, sh( insisted on watching, and during the fight she would cowe under Rachel's protective arm, feeling each one of the blows suffering from each thud of the other man's fist on Drum'i flesh until, at the end of the fight, she was physically an( emotionally exhausted. She was never too ill, however, t< bathe him, tend to his cuts and bruises and spend the nighf beside him, listening to every breath he drew and praying blindly to her pantheon of African gods that he would nevei have to fight again.

But fight again he did, with increasing regularity. It had become quite the fashion for masculine Creole New Orleans to repair to Madame's one night a week to see Drum fighl and wager money on the outcome. Marigny had brought in a big black from his cane fields and pitted him against Drum. Pablo Hernandez of the loose wet lips, not to be out of fashion, recruited a big bozal he had just purchased, for the same purpose. LeToscan was about to send a strong young marabou to the plantation whips for punishment, but instead decided to match him against the champion. De Marigny'i big buck was strong and husky but slow witted and no match for his competitor's strength and sagacity. The Hernandez bozal was equally strong but even more stupid; Drum had him pinned to the ground in less than ten minutes.

However, LeToscan's marabou proved much more formidable, driven as he was by the knowledge that he was literally fighting for his Ufe. LeToscan had told the fellow that if he won over Drum, his entire punishment would be waived but if he lost it would be tripled. No man could take one hundred and fifty lashes and live.

The marabou was indeed a fierce antagonist. At first hi was canny and careful, slipping away from Drum and danb* ing outside the reach of his powerful arms. Indeed, hi showed too much care for his own safety to please his mas ter. LeToscan called for a poker to be heated and rammec the red-hot iron against the slave's buttocks. With a yelp o:

pain the marabou grappled with Drum until they fell to the floor. As Drum struggled to get up, the fellow grabbed his ankles and he fell again. Drum seized the marabou's hands and managed to pinion them behind his back, but as he did this he felt his opponent's teeth sink into the calf of his leg. It required a gigaatic effort to raise himself suflBciently to get his hands over the fellow's head. Locking his fingers in the marabou's eye socket, he pulled the head back sufficiently to free his leg from the savage teeth. With his eyes gouged out, Drum's antagonist was helpless. A final clout on the head knocked him into insensibility. The fight was over.

Drum was not to know until several weeks later that Le-Toscan had led the bhnd, stumbling, half-conscious wretch down to the levee. There he had stood the fellow up with his back to the river and fired three shots into him. The body had rolled down the incline of the levee to the Mississippi and been carried away,

A couple of days after the fight, the bite in Drum's leg became badly infected. At the insistence of Marigny, Dr. Roberts, who had been educated in New England, was persuaded to bring his medical knowledge to aid in Drum's recovery. But in spite of all the doctor could do, the infection grew worse, until Drum's condition grew so grave that Roberts decided the leg would have to be amputated, and he so informed Alix.

"If I amputate, madame, you'll have a one-legged nigger on your hands—a practically worthless slave. After all when a horse breaks a leg we shoot it."

"I'm not going to have Drum shot." Alix was emphatic. "Is there nothing you can do but cut off his leg?"

Roberts shrugged. "I don't know, madame, I just don't know. But it looks like it. I've never treated a nigger before and I never thought I would. I'm no veterinarian. But I've come to like this black boy of yours. He's been in intense pain but he has never complained. Instead of letting him suffer like an animal, I've given him opium to reduce the pain. I've done everything that I would for a human being and I'm not so damned sure but that he is a human being and a pretty good one at that. I'll save him if he can be saved, even if I have to cut off his leg,"

After he had gone, Alix descended the stairs to the courtyard, made her way across it and up the narrow steps to Drum's room in the gargonniere. Calinda was with him, kneeling on the floor beside the bed, fanning his fevered

I

body. She looked up at Alix and the malevolence in her glance said plainly that she held her mistress accountable for Drum's suffering. Alix ignored her. She walked to the bed, pulled down the sheet and looked at the puffed, discolored and swollen leg. She saw the suppurating pus and she recoiled. To her it looked hopeless—this misshapen lump of flesh could never be a leg again. Drum's eyes opened and he looked up at her. He knew that his life depended on her decision. Although it was illegal to kill a slave, it was a law which was frequently broken without compimction by slave owners. On the plantations, aged and maimed slaves were taken out into the field and shot. City slaves were treated with a little more j&nesse: they were poisoned.

Drum's eyes pleaded with her mutely.

"Don't worry, boy." There was an odd tenderness in Alix* voice—something which Drum had heard only once before and Calinda never. "Nothing's going to happen to you. You have my word for it. Calinda, call Rachel."

"I'm here, madame." Rachel had spied Alix going to Drum's room and had followed, standing just outside the door. She realized that Alix' decision meant life or death for Drum.

"Rachel,"—all sentimentality had departed from Alix and she had once again become impersonal and eflBcient—"how long has Dr. Roberts been treating Drum?"

'Two weeks, madame."

"And is he better or worse than when Roberts started?^

"Worse, madame."

Alix looked down at Drum, moving closer so that hei hand rested on his forehead. It was dry and hot.

"Does that old nigger woman still sell simples at the corner of St. Claude and the Place Publique?"

"As far as I know, madame." '■

"Then go and see if she is still there and if she is, give hef a dollar and bring her here. Dr. Roberts' northern medicineskj may cure those white-livered people in Boston but it takes old-fashioned black medicine to cure a nigger. Hurry, Rachel! I'm not going to have Drum lose a leg. He's going to get well to fight again."

"Oh, madame." Calinda was down on her knees before! Alix. "Don't let him fight again."

"Shut your mouth, girl! We're either going to have one-legged Drum or a fighting Drum."

"Oh, don't let them cut oflf his leg," Calinda sobbed. "Don't, madkme, don't."

"Then let me handle this." AlLx motioned for Calinda to place the one chair in the room beside Drum's bed. She looked around at the bare room, the narrow bed, at Drum's gaudy suit hanging from a nail on the wall and Calinda's dress hanging limply beside it. The room was clean—she gave the girl credit for that—but lacking in every comfort. Well, that was the way it should be! Slaves didn't need luxury and Drum had a bed, which was more than most slaves had. But the bed lacked a mosquito baire and that was one thing a sick man needed. He shouldn't be subjected to the swarms of mosquitoes which made the hot nights a misery. Alix had a fear of insects which bordered on a phobia.

"When Rachel returns," she instructed Calinda, 'Tell her to have a baire fitted over this bed. "And you, Calinda, keep on fanning him."

Alix sat watching Calinda fan Drum, stopping only fo soak a cloth in water, wring it out and apply it to his forehead, then resume the fanning again until it was time to freshen the cloth once more. Only once did Alix move and that was to puU the sheet down over Drum's shoulders. She saw the little silver box, rising and falling on his amber chest with his labored breathing. She leaned over and tapped it with her forefinger. Drum opened his eyes and focused them on her.

"Do you remember what I told yoa about this?" Alix asked him.

"Yes, madame," he replied with difficulty.

"Your father once said that it contained his spirit. He told me that nothing could happen to him while he wore this. Perhaps it will help you. I only know that when he lost it, he died. You have it and you still live."

A commotion on the stairs outside announced the arrival of Rachel and the herb woman. They came into the room, Rachel gaunt and distressed, the old woman even more obese than Alix. A black face, huge, round and sag^ng with pendulous cheeks, rose from an assortment of evil-smelling rags that caused Alix to pinch her nostrils together with her fingers. From one ham-sized arm hung a wicker basket filled with wilted leaves, scrubbed white roots, short lengths of bark-covered withes, and an assortment of little bundles of dried herbs, tied together with string. In the other hand she carried a live red rooster by his tied feet. In contrast to

Rachel, the old crone was in exuberant spirits. The rich Gombo she spoke was barely intelligible.

"Dis yeah de sick homme?" She cackled in a series of words that ascended pitch by pitch. "Waa-for dis whoppin' big buckeroo sick?"

At a motion from Alix, Calinda drew back the sheet and the old woman stared first at Drum's naked body, clucking in unfeigned admiration, and then at the suppvirating leg. She leaned over to examine the wound, touching the swollen flesh with her black fingers.

"Him's bad. Tres malade. Meybe he a-gonna die. Wha-fer you want Mere Angelique to do? Aie, mo connai! You wants Mere Angelique make him well again, hein?" Somehow her high-pitched cackle created confidence.