Libre (3 page)

Another universe.

“Your cousin is white,” he said at last. “And
presumably lives in a land where law applies to everyone. Maybe the
law isn’t always just, and maybe it’s not enforced equally, but it
is recognized to apply. You have to understand, that nothing that
concerns the free colored here in New Orleans is legally clear, or
as it seems to be. Rules change with a few degrees difference in
the color of a woman’s skin. They shift from one hour to the next,
from one house to the next. It’s all the custom of the country, and
nothing that concerns us – slaves, or ex-slaves, or the children or
grandchildren of ex-slaves – is official or truly legal or truly
illegal.

“Casmalia Rochier and her children are
legally free. But since she isn’t legally married to Louis Rochier,
he can make things far more difficult for her and her family than
your uncle could ever make things for your aunt. It isn’t simply a
matter of Uncle Freddy going to the spunging-house. Rochier has it
in his power to end the education of the boys, possibly to sell
Casmalia’s servants – the yard-man and the cook. If he’s angry
enough to cast Casmalia off it would be disaster for the family.
Free or not, there was no question of the girl not agreeing to
become the mistress of anyone her father ordered her to. And no one
who matters to him – none of his white relatives or acquaintances –
will think or say a thing about it.”

The fiddler opened his mouth to say something
– probably along the lines of,
Would a man do that to his own
children?
– and closed it. The lights of the Salle’s kitchen,
where the other three musicians joked and laughed with the cook and
waiters who served both Salle and Theatre, reflected in the dark of
his eyes. Reflected the recollection, January guessed, of the
number of Englishmen and Americans and Irishmen and Frenchmen
they’d both known in their lives, who were capable of doing exactly
those things to even their legitimate families, let alone their
mistresses and bastards.

Some white men of January’s acquaintance
loved and cared for their “Rampart Street families,” their
“alligator eggs,” as tenderly as they did their white wives and
white children.

Some didn’t.

The difference was that for the
libres
, there was neither legal, nor social, recourse.

No wonder women like his mother, and Agnes
Pellicot, and Bernadette Metoyer, made damn sure the money was in
the bank and in their own names.

In time, Hannibal asked, “Do you think
Nicholas Saverne kidnapped this girl?”

January shook his head. “He might have, but I
doubt it.”

“Then where is she?”

A clamor of voices from the kitchen broke his
thought. Uncle Bichet, who played the bull-fiddle, called out,
“Gotta get back to the ballroom, boys, ‘fore old Davis has an
apoplexy and fires the lot of us.”

January extended a hand down, to help
Hannibal to his feet. “I think I know; by noon tomorrow I’ll be
sure.”

*

Though Nicholas Saverne wasn’t at either the
respectable Théâtre ball that night, or the quadroon festivities
next door, Louis Rochier attended both. January observed him on
those occasions when he was in the Théâtre with his wife and
daughters, a square pink-faced man with an incongruous cupid-bow
mouth. Most of the time, however, Rochier spent in the Salle
d’Orleans with his mistress Casmalia, with his son and the other
men of the New Orleans business community who likewise either had
mistresses or simply liked to flirt with lively ladies.

After the whites went home – and French
Creoles were notorious for the lateness of their dancing – January
and the other musicians drifted down the passageway and sat in with
their colleagues in the Salle’s little orchestra until nearly four,
when the quadroon ladies and their patrons finally, as they said,
“broke the circle” and headed home. Rochier had sent his white
family home in the carriage; January saw the tension as the man
spoke with Casmalia, and guessed that the banker had demanded where
his daughter was, and had been fobbed off with a lie.

It was still pitch-black, and thickly foggy,
when January returned home. Dim clamor still drifted from the
wharves along the levee, and the gambling-rooms of Rue Royale, but
as he walked along the Rue Burgundy the stillness was eerie, thick
with the molasses reek of burnt sugar from the plantations along
the Bayou Road, and the cold-stifled stench of the gutters. At his
mother’s house, Bella the cook was already starting the kitchen
fires. She sniffed in disdain – like her mistress Bella had little
use for musicians – but gave him a cup of coffee and
bread-and-butter, before he went upstairs to his garconiere to
change clothes. She didn’t even come to the glowing kitchen door
when he came down again a few minutes later, and crossed to the
passway beside the house that led back to the street.

The house itself was silent, and dark.

Walking downriver along Rue Burgundy, January
had almost reached Rue Esplanade when he realized he was being
followed. In the fog it would be a waste of tiime to glance behind
him, even when he passed the intersections where the city’s iron
lanterns hung on chains across the streets. To stop and look back
would let his pursuer know that he’d been detected, though January
was almost certain who it was. He turned down Rue Ursulines, and
then along Rue Dauphine, and still his own footfalls on the wet
brick banquettes were echoed by the muted drip-drip of following
boot-heels. Lantern-light up ahead outlined the dark shape of a man
washing down the banquette ahead of him: Country Ned, that would
be, he guessed, Mâitre Passebon the perfumier’s yard-man.

As he came even with the old man January
called out a greeting in the sloppy gombo French of the
cane-fields, the half-African patois that the tutors his mother’s
patron had hired for him in childhood had never quite been able to
beat from his memory. “Got a buckra hound-doggin’ – you be a mama
partridge for a dollar?” he said. “No
ewu
—” He used one of
the several African words for danger, and the tribal scars on
Country Ned’s face twisted their patterns with his grin.

“Shit, Ben,
ewu
just fluff up my
feathers.” He took the proffered dollar, passed his broom to
January and walked off down the street without breaking the rhythm
of January’s steps. January himself continued to scrape the broom
on the bricks, and swept himself back into the moist dark of the
carriage-way from Passebon’s courtyard as the pursuer solidified
out of the fog.

That it was Nicholas Saverne on his heels,
January had never had a doubt. Casmalia’s yard-man Tommy might have
told the young lawyer that Marie-Zulieka was being hunted by the
big piano-player, or the maid might have given that information,
for fifty cents or just because they sympathized with any girl
who’d flee from an “arrangement” with Jules Dutuille: it didn’t
matter. As Saverne passed through the ravelly blotch of
lantern-light that had illuminated Country Ned’s sweeping, January
identified the blink of expensive watch-fobs, the sharp cut of
M’sieu Bourdet’s tailoring and the varnished shine of Parisian
boots. He’d meant to wait til Saverne’s footfalls died away into
the distance before himself emerging from his hiding-place and
circling around in the opposite direction, but at a guess Country
Ned stopped too soon.

While January was still waiting in the
carriage-way, he heard Saverne stop, then come striding back, fast.
He turned to duck down the carriage-way and into the dark yard but
the yellow light veered and jerked as the lantern was snatched up
from the pavement where it had rested, and a voice called out,
“You, boy, stop!”

Since Saverne almost certainly knew who he
was anyway, January halted, stood waiting in the high brick arch
for the white man to stride up to him, Country Ned’s lantern in
hand. “Are you Janvier?” He used the familiar address
tu
–
as most white Frenchmen did, to children, pets, or slaves. One day
January supposed he’d get used to being called that again.

“I am.”

“Have you found her?”

January folded his hands, replied, “No, sir,
I have not.”

“You’re lying.” A white man would have called
another white man out for the words – a custom January had always
regarded as perfectly insane. “Where’d you be going at this hour,
if not to her?”

“I guess I’m going home, sir.”

Saverne’s cane came up, the instinctive
gesture of a man who doesn’t take even respectfuly-phrased
impudence from niggers; January steeled himself to take the blow
rather than risk escalating the violence by warding it off. But
when he didn’t flinch, Nicholas Saverne stopped, as if the idiocy
of assaulting the one man who might possibly help him penetrated
his shapely skull and golden hair. He stood for an instant, his
mouth hard with frustrated anger, struggling with the idea that
there were things a black man – or any man – could not be forced to
do.

The rage died out of his eyes. The cane came
down. “You know where she is?” Though he still used
tu
, his
tone had changed, as if he spoke to a fellow-man, of whom one must
ask, rather than casually command. “Where she might be?”

He pulled a wallet from his pocket, fished
coins from it that flickered gold in the oily orange light. January
remained standing with his hands folded, and neither reached for
nor looked at the proffered money.

Saverne lowered his hand. “Don’t tell me you
agree with that harpy mother of hers, that’d turn her over to a – a
boar-pig like Dutuille. Talk about pearls to swine! What do you
want, then, to take me to her?”

“Her word that it’s what she wants.”

For one instant, January thought the young
man was going to snap,
Girls don’t know what they want!
There was certainly something of the kind on his lips as he drew in
breath, then let it out again.

January said nothing.

After a moment, slowly, the young man said,
“Girls – sometimes they let themselves be pushed, by their families
and their friends. Make no mistake, Janvier: I love that girl. And
she loves me, I know she does. I will treat her like a princess,
like a queen; I’m not a rich man now, but I will be one day soon.
She will never have cause to regret it, if she comes back to Mobile
with me. I swear that to you. I swear that to
her
, if you
speak to her.”

“
If
I speak to her,” said January,
“I’ll tell her.”

Saverne stepped closer, pleading in his pale
eyes. “Tell her not to worry about her father. I’ll keep him away
from her, no matter what he tries or says. In Mobile he can’t get
to her.”

It wasn’t a black man’s place to ask whether
Saverne had considered what Louis Rochier might do to the rest of
the family, and he doubted whether the man would consider it if
reminded how completely in Rochier’s power Casmalia and Lucie and
the several brothers were.

“I love her,” Saverne repeated softly. “Make
her understand.”

*

The sun had risen, turning the fog to milk,
by the time January reached Rue Marigny. He loitered outside Number
53, smelling the smoke of kitchen fires all up and down that quiet
street of tiny wooden cottages, until he saw the white-haired Alois
Vouziers emerge, resplendant in a rusty black coat, and totter off
down the street, a satchel of books on his back. Not long after
that a stout young woman came out the same door, ushering four
blonde boys of stair-step ages, from about thirteen by the look of
him down to about eight, dressed as boys would be who are
apprenticed to craftsmen or clerks. Not so very different, thought
January, from Marie-Zulieka’s brothers, except that these boys
didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped on their way to and from
work, and sold up to the newly-opening cotton territories in
Missouri. Though the neighborhood was one of poor French and poor
Germans, the refugees from the continuing turmoils in Europe that
had followed Napoleon’s downfall, the woman called after the boys
in the pure French of the educated Parisians, not to be late for
their Grandpere’s lessons that night.

When the younger children came out to play
January crossed to the oldest of them, a little girl of six or so,
and said, “Would you take in a note for me, to the young lady who
is staying with your Grandpere?”

“Senorita Maria?” asked the girl, and January
nodded.

“Senorita Maria would be her name.”

*

“She’s passing herself off as a Spaniard,
then?” inquired Hannibal, when January met him later in the day, at
one of the coffee-stands at the downstream end of the market. From
the rickety table where they sat between the market’s square brick
pillars, January could see the wharves, piled with cargo and
milling with stevedores, sailors, and whores. Down at this end of
the market where the river turned around Algiers Point, they were
crowded with the ocean-going ships: the
Constellation
and
the
Tribune
, the
Waccamaw
and the
Martha
,
bound for Baltimore, Vera Cruz, Liverpool, New York.

Paris
, thought January, feeling the
stabbing pinch of regret. As if he’d inadvertantly put weight on an
unhealed break in his leg, he drew back from the thought that he
one day might return to the city where he had truly been free.

He lived in New Orleans now, despite all
things, because it was the home of the only family he had. But he
remembered what it had been like, to know that one’s family wasn’t
enough.

“I thought she would be,” he continued. “I
knew from what Casmalia said – and from the color of her dresses
and her jewels – that Marie-Zulieka was fair enough to pass. And
she’d clearly planned her escape. The only reason she would have
wornevening jewels to the market was because she planned to sell
them and flee.”