Dead water

TWENTY-TWO

Hubert Granville expressed great doubt and disappointment when January withdrew all but two hundred dollars of his money to pay off the house free and clear. “You're leaving yourself nothing to live on,” the banker warned, which January knew was true. “It takes time for a school to establish itself. You'll be in debt head over ears before you know it.”

“We can deal with that,” January replied.

Rose added, “At least we'll be sure of a roof over our heads while we starve.”

Granville shook his head, and drew close the branch of candles to illuminate the draft to be paid to Rosario DeLaHaye. It was again evening, as hot as it had been a month before, when he'd sat there last at the big oak table in the dining-room, to tell January that the coffers of the Bank of Louisiana were empty, and his money gone.

“At least invest it in something worth your while,” snapped January's mother, the elegant Widow Levesque. She had joined the banker in visiting the Januarys that night, a week after Granville and several unobtrusively armed bank officials had transferred the five little coffins from the cemetery back to the bank itself. Granville, January thought, had visibly lost weight during the past month, and looked like a man who had not slept much or well. His red-gold hair and beard seemed faded, and there were smudges of weariness under his piggy hazel eyes. He shook January's hand over and over again, repeatedly assuring him that if there was anything he ever could do . . .

January wondered how well that assurance would hold in times of real financial distress.

“A school will get you nothing,” declared the Widow Levesque, folding her lace-gloved hands over the ivory handle of her parasol. His mother was slim and still beautiful, and there was something in the shape and setting of her eyes that reminded January, in the candle-light, of his sister Olympe. “Even the four best schools in the parish return no more than twenty percent, and I don't think there's a school in town that returns more than five percent its first five years . . . if you can keep it open at all. If you must invest, invest in slaves, as I told you before. If you feed them on rice and beans, and sausage only once a week, it costs you only . . .”

To hear her, January thought, one would never think she'd been a slave herself. He wondered if she'd ever been chained to the side of a steamboat, if she'd been fed from a bucket and had to hang out at the end of her chains to relieve herself over the side.

It was not something he could ask her. Not if he ever wanted her to speak to him again.

“Maman,” he said gently, “Rose and I have talked this over at length, and we think a school is best.”

One couldn't really say to one's mother, We believe in educating the young, rather than putting chains on the innocent.

“Besides,” said Rose, who had learned in the past six months a great deal about handling her mother-in-law, “who knows when the State Legislature might not forbid people of color to hold slaves? They could, you know.”

Livia Levesque stared at her in horror, the first time January had ever seen anyone break his mother's armor of self-satisfaction. “They most certainly could not! We pay our taxes . . . we support their businesses. . . .”

They will do to people of color, thought January, whatever they wish. And there is nothing we can do about it, except leave.

If there is anywhere for us to go. From what he'd heard from Dodd the manufacturer, and from some of the deck-hands who'd tried to make a living in Cincinnati and Alton, the North didn't sound like any paradise either.

“The least you could do is teach people who'll pay you decently,” the Widow Levesque went on as Rose refreshed her coffee-cup and offered her a plate of pralines. “Nobody's going to pay more than fifty dollars a year to educate a colored girl . . . these are stale, by the way. Did you get them from that Vignée woman on Rue Royale? I thought so. . . . Hire a white teacher and make it into a boys' school; they pay the best. You could even get that worthless fiddler to teach Greek, if you can keep him sober. I don't expect he'd cost much. . . .”

“Dearest,” sighed Rose as January returned from seeing Granville and his mother out the door, “it breaks my heart to have to tell you this, but you're so good to me, you really ought to be warned about it: one of these days I am going to murder your mother.”

“Let me know when you're getting ready to do it so I can dig a grave for her under the house.” January slumped back into the chair and poured himself the remains of the coffee. “You shouldn't have to do everything around the school.” He added in a voice of mock horror, “Why, this coffee's Mexican rather than Ethiopian! And the plate the pralines was on isn't Sèvres.”

“The plate the pralines was on is going to be in pieces over your head, sir.” Rose settled herself comfortably on his thigh, and took the cup from his hand to take a sip herself. “I think the part I liked best was when she went around the room pinching out the candles,” she added thoughtfully, and January laughed—his mother was always lecturing them about the cost of candles, though she also expressed scorn that they burned tallow rather than beeswax. Only a single branch of them had been left burning on the table after the Widow Levesque's parting lecture on economy. It made mellow pools of light on the worn oak, leaving the corners of the dining-room and the simply-furnished cavern of the parlor in darkness.

It was after ten, and the street outside was quiet. The shutters were closed against the mosquitoes that hummed in the darkness.

But with the signing of the draft that Granville would deliver to DeLaHaye the following morning, the house was theirs.

“Mr. Granville is right, you know,” Rose added quietly. “It is going to be hard to make ends meet for a time. I'd hoped you wouldn't have to keep on with music lessons. That you'd have time to write music of your own . . .”

January shook his head. “I can teach them around the classes here,” he said. “And playing balls and the opera is really only from Christmas to Mardi Gras. And I do my best writing late at night anyway. We'll manage. . . . Now, who's that?” He looked up at the sound of knocking on the door.

It wasn't Hannibal's usual brisk long-short-short-long rap, more like the knock of a walking-stick.

January lit a candle on one of the extinguished sticks and carried it to the door.

It was Jubal Cain.

Judas Bredon.

For a moment all January could do was stand staring at him in shock. He was far too well-dressed to be a ghost, and as far as January had ever heard, ghosts walked around with their wounds still gaping and, when possible, dripping spectral blood. Bredon's left arm was in a sling, and there was a half-healed cut on his right temple as he removed his hat. The yellow glint of his eyes in the candlelight was unmistakable.

He said, “Mr. January?”

January stepped back. “Mr. Cain,” he said. And then, recollecting himself, “Mr. Bredon. Please come in. It's an honor to have you in our home, sir.”

Bredon smiled. It changed his whole face. “You've been talking to Thu,” he said. “I'm the one who's honored, Mr. January—considering the amount of money they pay for the recovery of runaway slaves.”

January nodded with mock consideration: “And thirty pieces of silver times twenty-five is how much?”

“Enough to set a man up in business,” replied Bredon. When he stepped across the threshold, January could see that he walked haltingly, limping on a stick. “Or to buy him property for his family. However you slice it, I'm in your debt.”

“Did they make it to the North all right?” asked Rose, rising from the table. “Will you have coffee, by the way, sir? It's no trouble.”

“It may bring you more trouble than you know, M'am—but yes, to answer your question, 'Rodus managed to locate every one of those two gangs, mine and Gleet's, along with those two girls, Julie and Sophie. And they picked up another runaway, too, a boy named Bobby who'd been following the river from Natchez. He said he knew you. . . .”

January grinned, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, delighted that Bobby had made it that far. “He does,” he said. “He does indeed.”

“Gleet's keeping a lookout along the river,” said Bredon, “so they're moving inland through Tennessee and Kentucky. It'll be a slow trek for such a large group, and they'll have to split up to cross the Ohio in ones and twos. But I think they'll make it.” He nodded consideringly, and repeated, as if to himself, “I think they'll make it.”

January brought him a chair. Bredon hesitated, then shook his head. “Not just yet. You did us all a great service, for which, as I said, I—and all of us—are in your debt. And though I realize it's the worst kind of bad manners to impose on a man who has helped you, I'm going to.”

“Anyone on the Silver Moon,” replied Rose with a smile, “would tell us that that's exactly what one could expect of an Abolitionist, sir.”

And Bredon smiled back, relaxing as he understood the acceptance behind her jest.

“Will you help us?” he asked as simply as a starving man asks for bread. “Oh, not tonight,” he added as January's eyes widened in alarm. “Nor this week, or this month. But we need help. There's a lot of runners crossing along the borders, where the slave states lie alongside the free. Slaves in Kentucky and Tennessee, or in Virginia and Maryland—it isn't so far for them to travel, and there are enough people from New England and Pennsylvania and New York who've moved down into those states and who don't like what they see there, who're willing to let runaways sleep in their cellars, or who will put out food. In Kentucky and Missouri things aren't the same as they are deeper south. I know a lot of slaves, instead of trying to get north, will come to New Orleans and make their living as free men. . . .”

“As men who're free to be paid pennies because they don't dare ask for dollars,” said January. “Free to live in shacks on the outskirts of town because nobody will pay them much attention there. But yes, I guess it is easier than trying to make it all the way to Ohio.”

“More and more are trying it,” said Bredon. “As more and more laws are passed to control freedmen, to limit what free people of color can do. More and more rich men who make their living from slaves are getting scared. They keep pretending that once they get everything nailed down and set, things will go on as they have, with slaves in the slave states doing the heavy work and living like animals, and ignorant as animals, kept that way by men who don't dare let them learn to read.” His deep voice was level and quiet, but anger burned in the yellow wolf eyes.

“But things won't stay the way they are, no matter how hard the slave-holders try to make them. Thu tells me you were once a slave, sir.”

“As a child, yes,” said January. “My mother was bought by a wealthy sugar-broker who made her his mistress—that is the custom here. And as the custom is here, he freed me and my sister.”

“Then you don't remember slavery clearly?”

January said, “I remember it.”

There was silence then, in the deep shadows, silence like the hush of a Mississippi farm on a hot afternoon, like the dark stinking shadows of a slave-jail in Natchez.

“We need hideouts,” said Bredon at last. “We need places where runaways can come, until they can be taken north. We need places where they can sleep for a night, or two, or three. We need men—and women—who are willing to guide runaways on to the next stage; who are willing to take food to a hiding-place, or give clothing to help an escape.

“I watched you on the boat, Mr. January. I know you were pretending to be Sefton's valet, but it was clear to me who was doing the thinking. I watched you trailing that scoundrel Weems and Mrs. Fischer, and I watched you searching for the money Weems was supposed to have stolen. . . . Did you ever recover it? Thu tells me you found a key.”

“We recovered it,” said January. “And returned it to the Bank from which it had been stolen.”

Bredon nodded. “Good,” he said. “I'm glad you retrieved what was your own. I'm asking you to put your lives in danger. They hang white men for assisting runaways—slave-stealing, they call it—and for men of your own race it's worse. I'm asking you to put in danger the futures that you're trying to build for yourselves—the school Thu tells me you're opening for girls, the music that made for just about the only pleasure I had on that truly god-forsaken boat.

“But we need people with brains. We need people who are honest. . . . And we need people with houses.”

He gestured at the deep velvety dimness of the parlor, the gentle shadows thick in all the rooms where next winter—please God, thought January—a few more soft-eyed young ladies would study Latin and mathematics and history, would learn that there were other dreams in life than being beautiful and submissive so that they could become white men's mistresses.

“I won't ask for your answer right away,” said Bredon quietly. “I'm staying at the Verandah Hotel on St. Louis Street. There are others in the city I'll try and speak to as well. But think about it. You're some of the lucky ones, the ones who were given your freedom. One day, God willing, we will be able to strike down slavery root and branch, and eliminate it from this country. Until that time, we're trying to save those we can, one by one, soul by soul.”

He bowed over Rose's hand and extended his hand to January. January kept his own hand at his side and looked across at his wife.

The wife he had worked so hard to protect. The woman with whom he hoped to build as safe a life as they could make.

Rose's eyes met his, calm and gray-green, with the points of candle-fire multiplied infinitely in her spectacles.

This could ruin all we have. Take from us even what little we've fought to achieve.

She looked a question at him, and, after a moment, January nodded.

Then she smiled at Bredon, and said, “Are you sure you don't want to sit and have coffee? If . . .” She looked at January again, and again he nodded, more strongly now. “If we are going to be friends?”

After Bredon left, January found it hard to sleep. Beside him, Rose dropped off as usual within seconds of their final kiss—it was a source of never-ending wonder and annoyance to him that she could sleep with the uncaring ease of a cat, while he lay awake looking at the glowing shapes thrown by the night-light in its red glass bubble, listening to the mosquitoes whine beyond the cloudy gauze of the bar. Hearing, beyond that, the croak of frogs in the gutters outside, the unceasing throb of the cicadas in the trees.

Wondering just what the hell he'd let himself—and Rose—in for.

Five years ago Nat Turner had risen in revolt against the whites in Virginia: he and his followers had been captured, tortured, hanged. Since that time the merest whisper of revolt was punished, brutally for whites, and for blacks with the animal fury of terrors that the slave-holders would not even admit they felt.

Judas Bredon had risked his life to smuggle his fifteen runaways up-river to Memphis. At the time he'd realized what was going on, January had not even been certain he'd have the courage to do the same.

And now he was being asked to.

And had, God help him, agreed.

God help me, he thought again, groping out to the nightstand to touch through the mosquito-bar the blue beads of his rosary. Dear God, what have I done?

As if in answer to the question he slept, and dreamed of the Silver Moon again, and of young Mr. Purlie getting on the boat. Of Gleet's gloating voice saying, She's a beauty, ain't she? as he dragged the girl forward and tore open her dress. She's yours for a thousand dollars. . . . Go ahead, feel of her. . . .

In his dream January saw again the young girl weeping with shame, and the handsome and ineffectual Mr. Quince, his hands full of copies of the Liberator, standing by shaking in fury.

But Quince is more a man than I, thought January. At least he went around the boat speaking out against what he saw. And not letting mockery stop him.

His dream changed. He was with Rose, walking along the banks of a bayou deep in the Barataria country, in the old pirate-haunted lands where Jean Lafitte and his men had roved and hidden out thirty years before. Rose, in boy's garb, had been speaking cheerfully of what her neighbors in that country, former pirates themselves, had told her about the logistics of hiding treasure—and January, and the half-dozen slaves who'd gone along with them—knelt by the side of the bayou, just where January had deduced they should, and from the water drew the old iron ship's cannon, plugged with tar, from the hiding-place where one of Lafitte's captains had left it.

In his dream he saw again the glitter of the gold in the new sun, and Rose with a necklace of blazing topazes strung around her hat.

That gold had been taken away from them—and given back.

On the other side of the bayou in his dream, January saw the woman he'd seen in other dreams: a flicker of blue robe, the gentle face that watches over the world. A halo of insubstantial stars.

She asked him, Did you think the gold was given to you to use for yourself alone?

And he knew then that God never gives anyone gold to use for themselves alone.

Then he was back in the parlor, as he had been earlier that evening, with Judas Bredon saying, . . . we're looking for people with houses.

And in the shadows, like a ghost in an aureole of ghostly stars, God's Mother winked at January and smiled. He saw that under her blue veil she wore Mrs. Fischer's green–and–cream–colored dress.

He woke and knew it was very early, not daylight, not even the early-rising summer dawn. He wondered what had waked him. The smell of smoke from the kitchen of the house next door, as their slave-woman built up the hearth-fire that would be her personal hell for another sweltering day? The clanging bell of a steamboat, far down the Rue Esplanade?

Then he heard again, from the yard below their window, a stealthy scratching, the scraping whisper of a basket laid down on the bricks.

Silent, January slipped from beneath the mosquito-bar, and by touch in the dark—for the night-lamp had long gone out—crossed the bedroom and gathered his shirt from the single chair. Slipping the garment on, he moved through the parlor on naked feet, past the pantry with its scents of candlewax and last night's coffee. He kept close to the wall, where the floor would not creak, and as he did so he heard the rustle of someone on the rear gallery.

He remembered the kitchen fire that had burst out while they were gone, started, Gabriel had said, no one knew how. . . . They were lucky the house had not burned down.

Guédé-Five-Days-Unhappy, tear the roof away from over his head. . . .

January shot back the bolt and threw the door open in time to see Queen Régine gather up her basket, preparing to leave.

The old woman whirled as January stepped out of the door and put himself between her and the stair down to the yard. In the gray fore-light of not-yet-day her black eyes glittered like a startled beast's, and she raised one skinny hand. Then she lowered it and looked down, and following her eyes, January saw, almost under his feet, a cross written in brick-dust, and the scribbled loops of a vévé in water that smelled of verbena.

He had been brother to a voodooienne long enough to know those signs meant life, not death, and his eyes went to the Queen's in questioning wonder.

She said, “You save my child.”

“What?”

“I take the cross off you,” said the old woman, “an' put blessin' on this house. You save my child. I seen you in a dream—dark, an' shoutin', an' guns firin' off. Water rushin' in, an' great black weights movin' around in that dark. You went back in that dark to save my child, and brought her up out to the light.”

My granny knows about them things. . . .

“Julie is your granddaughter?” he asked, knowing even before she nodded that it was true.

“She has the Knowin' in her,” said Queen Régine. “Since she was a little thing, she an' me, we shared the Power. But her mama take her to Church, so she don't think about Power no more, and don't want it. But between us, between her an' me, it's still alive.”

January said, “That's why you went down to see the Silver Moon off? To say good-by?”

“To kiss her,” said the Queen. “An' to put my Word on her, though she don't believe it no more; just to see her once more. Her master, he sell her to that Irish as a maid for his popotte, and they all promise, we won't sell her, we make her a good maidservant. . . . But she's afraid. And I'm afraid. I know I'll never see her again, not in the flesh. Sometimes I felt her scared so bad, scared one night. . . . But that mornin', as I was cookin' in the kitchen, her fear came on me so strong, I near fainted. And I put my head down on the table an' I see her in the dark, trapped an' scared, with things fallin' on her an' the water comin' in. . . . An' I see you. And I thought . . .”

Her few white teeth shone in a wry crone's grin.

“. . . I thought, Lord Baron Cemetery, don't let that hex take hold on him now! You went back for her,” she finished with tears swimming silver in her eyes. “You went back and you didn't have to, you didn't even know for sure she was there. But my girl, she's alive now 'cause of you. She's walkin' to freedom 'cause of you. So I put blessin' on your house, blessin' wherever you walk. Blessin' to guard you, whatever you do.”

January said softly, “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

And the little old woman winked at him, and he stepped aside to let her totter down the stair.

To himself he reflected, as she hobbled away into the half-lights and whispers of the warm, still dawn, that if he was going to start working with the Underground Railway, he was certainly going to need all the blessings he could get.

He turned, and went back into the dim sanctuary of his home.