A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [101]
He collected his rented horse from a sleepy stable-hand and rode down to the levee, where the flatboat captain he’d contracted yesterday waited for him in the white ocean of mist that rose from the river. The river itself was very still, the levees on either side rising like ridges of mountains from the thinning vapors. Behind them in the last starlight the town dozed, exhausted at last.
There was only so much—deception financial and romantic, the monstrosity of slavery, and the waiting horrors of yellow fever—that could be masked behind the bright scrim of music, the taste of coffee and gumbo, the shimmer of the moonlight.
Mardi Gras was done. The greedy consumption of the last good food, the draining of the last of the wine, a final, wild coupling in the darkness before the penitential death of Lent.
He watched the dark shore of the west bank approaching with terror in his heart.
SIXTEEN
Morning found him eight miles from the city, riding west along the levee with the rank trees and undergrowth of the batture at the foot of the slope on his left, the dark brown earth of fields on his right. In places they were rank with winter weeds, but as the sun first gilded, then cleared the writhing stringers of the Gulf clouds, groups of slaves could be seen threading their way along the paths, hoes on their shoulders, bare feet swirling the ground mists. Once a white man called to him in slurry New Orleans French and asked to see his papers, but when January produced them—and a receipt from Desdunes’s Livery, to prove he hadn’t stolen the horse—the patroller seemed to lose interest and barely gave them a glance.
The man had to tuck his whip under his arm to take the papers. Down in the field below, the workers sang as they hoed, a steady-paced song in almost incomprehensible gombo, clearing the land for the new crop of cane.
January remembered that song from the plantation on which he had been born.
Since he had been back, he had been afraid to leave New Orleans, fearing for his liberty—fearing, too, the sight of the changes that had taken place as Americans took control of the land and that the whites would see him as a slave and perhaps make him one again. The smell of the earth and the sweat of the workers; the beat of the morning sun on the backs of his hands and the twitterings of birds in the oaks that surrounded the fields; the occasional drift, like pockets of lingering mist, of the field songs brought back to him his own days of slavery, of childhood, of innocence, a terrible mingling of sweetness and pain.
For thirty years, like Livia, he had pretended it wasn’t he who’d been a slave. Now it came to him, as it hadn’t in years, that he never knew what had become of his father.
Or of that child, he thought—that little boy running through the cane fields before first light or lying on the batture picking voice from voice in the chorus of the frogs when the sun went down.
For a time it seemed to him that he still didn’t know.
He stopped frequently to rest the horse, knowing that there was no chance of trading for a fresh one between the city and Bayou Chien Mort. He cut overland to avoid the wide loop of the river past McDonoughville, passed through swampy woods of cypress and hickory that hummed and creaked with insect life in the dense sun of the forenoon. The land here was soggy and crossed with marshes and bayous like green-brown glass under hushed but wakeful trees. Some time after noon he bought a bowl of gumbo and half a pone of corn bread for a picayune from a trapper whose cabin lay in a clearing among the marshes. The house was barely a shack and only with difficulty distinguishable from the byre that sheltered the single cow and the litter of pigs, but he knew, by the man’s eyes, that had he asked to come in he would have been denied. They were Spanish,