A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [103]
“Papa, he up the bayou, him,” explained the oldest girl to January’s question. The smoke he’d smelled an hour ago had been from her cook fire, the kitchen being also the main room of the little house, rich with the smells of onion, pepper, and crawfish. “But Val, he take a message to Peralta, if you want.”
Val—fetched from the shed where he was scraping muskrat hides—proved to be fourteen, with black hair and the strange pale gray-green eyes the Acadians sometimes had. All the children grouped around the kitchen table while January wrote his message, marveling either at the fact that a black man could write or at the miracle of literacy itself; then they sat on the gallery with him while he ate some of the jambalaya the girl had been cooking (“It ain’t sat long enough to be real good,” the girl said.), and he left them marveling over the coins he gave them as he went on his way.
They reminded him of Ayasha’s description of the Moroccan peasants who lived on the edge of the desert: They know their prayers, she had said, and how to tell genuine coin from the most convincing counterfeit. And that is all.
He smiled. He wondered what she would have made of all this: the Spanish woodcutters, the Italian ice-cream vendors in the market, the strange, tiny colony of Tockos in the deep Delta who fished for oysters and sang Greek songs and occasionally drowned themselves when the moon was full, the Germans and the degraded remnants of the Choctaw and Natchez nations. There was supposed to be a colony of Chinese somewhere on the Algiers bank of the river.
And Africans, of course.
In the shifty dimness of twilight he sought out a place to hide the horse. He hadn’t dared ask the children about such a thing directly, having represented himself as a man in too much of a hurry, and going in the wrong direction, to stop at the plantation himself. But he’d gathered that “Ti Margaux, up the bayou,” had recently died, and there was no one occupying his house or barns. In the jungly stillness of the swamps it was anybody’s guess which way “up the bayou” was—bayous flowed sometimes one way, sometimes another, and frequently lay eerily still under the dense green canopy of cypress and moss—but after considerable searching and backtracking January located the place, raised on stilts and built, like most of these small houses, of mud and cypress planks.
Already neighbors and family had carried away everything of any conceivable value, including about half the planks of its gallery roof. The barn had been likewise stripped, but its doors remained, at least. In gathering darkness January found a holey and broken bucket whose chinks, once stopped with moss, didn’t leak too badly while he carried up water for the horse. He rubbed the animal down, gave it fodder, and latched the door behind him, praying that no neighbors would be by to glean behind the earlier reapers. He didn’t think so. The place looked comprehensively sacked.
Bedroll on his shoulder and Minou’s kid gloves in his pocket, he set off once more for Chien Mort.
“Hey, who dat, settin’ out in the dark?”
His mother—or any of his schoolmasters—would have flayed him alive. He’d said to Olympe she’d got him talking as he used to when he was a child, and it was startling how easily his tongue burred js into zs, how the ends of