A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [106]
“Michie Xavier wouldn’t do that to us, Anne,” said Charles gently. “I know him. I worked in his house forty years. He said to me, as we were gettin’ in the wagon, that we’d all be back soon.”
“Ha! So where is he?”
“On his way, most like. He had to stay around for Ash Wednesday, to go to church at the cathedral, and have fish supper at the Bringiers’. Now he’ll be on his way, to see Michie Galen, if nuthin’ else.”
“Besides,” pointed out January, remembering his own childhood terror of leaving Bellefleur Plantation for the city, “who’s he got cookin’ for him and brushin’ his clothes? If you all are here clearin’ cane fields, what are those folk from Alhambra up there doin’ in place of you? He’ll get sick of wrinkly shirts and dust bunnies under his desk in no time.”
The maid Anne did not look convinced, but Honey smiled gratefully. The talk ran on a little longer, about the death of Xavier’s first wife in childbed with the boy Galen, and his second in the yellow fever four years ago. There were evidently three little girls as well. Every detail of the family’s life and movements were aired—January had almost forgotten how much house servants knew about their masters’ business. He’d been too young to care much during his own days in the quarters, though it was one of the maids who’d kept him posted on the progress of his mother’s sale. Later, Livia had tried to keep him separate from the slave children in the French town, though with poor success. He remembered, too, Olympe’s stories about how the voodoo doctors and voodoo queens gathered information from subtle, far-flung networks of informers, learning everything about who went where and for what purposes about people who were totally unaware of how closely they were observed.
At length the old man with the panpipe said, “Little Dog-Star risin’. Ol’ Uhrquahr look out his window and still see fire here, he be out. Uhrquahr the overseer,” he explained to January. “I’d tell you spread your blanket here in one of the cabins, but Uhrquahr, he mean. Better not chance it.”
“Thank you kindly,” said January. “Fire and a chance to talk was what I needed, and to set a spell. I’ll be movin’ on before it gets light.”
It had been a long time, he thought, striding quietly through the starlit fields toward the cornfield and its sycamores, since he’d sat listening to that kind of talk, the lazy back-and-forth of the field hands and yard servants as they wound down for sleep. It was not that he missed that life, though he knew whites who would claim he did, in his heart of hearts. The anxiety, dread, and helplessness that were the underpinning of those days were too strong, even yet, in his memory. The whites were fools who said that slaves enjoyed their slavery, much less that they “liked a strong hand.” Like most people they got along as best they could, taking happiness where and how they found it, in the knowledge that even that could be taken away at some white man’s whim.
What he had missed, without being aware of it, was the beauty that had slipped in between the bars of that childhood cage: the soft chill of the spring evening, the smell of the newly turned earth. The rattle of the bamboula in the darkness and the friendliness of those companions in misfortune.
That he had never had his mother’s love, he had known at the time. But he had had his father’s, and every woman on Bellefleur had been his aunt. He had not realized how deeply he had missed that feeling. Having been raised in so close-knit a community—first on Bellefleur and later in the French town—it was no wonder he yearned for it all the years he had been in Paris.
No wonder, he thought, that when he had been wounded unto death in his heart, it was to that community he returned. It’s here that I belong, he thought, without even a sensation of surprise. Not Europe. Not Paris. Not Africa. Here among these no-longer-Africans, not-really-French.
And Nahum Shagrue?
It was a riddle he couldn’t answer.
Behind him he heard far-off voices, raised in one last song, like