A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [109]
Distantly, like the sound of wind around the eaves at night, the singing from the fields still came to him.
Little ones without father,
Little ones without mother,
What do you do to earn money?
The river we cross for wild berries to search,
We follow the bayous a-fishing for perch,
And that’s how we earn money.
Mechanically his trained mind analyzed the eerie, descending scale, the loose embellishments of the rhythm, and the meandering syncopation of implied drums, but the song whispered to something deeper in his heart. Like the calinda, it had nothing to do with Schubert and Rossini, but its power called his name nonetheless.
A warbler sang in a thicket of hackberry. Farther off, a buzzard cried.
Then stillness.
Silence.
January halted, listening, wondering if the winds had shifted over. Far off he heard the alto hoot of a steamboat.
The cane fields lay between him and the river. The singing had ceased.
Something tightened, a knot behind his sternum, and he quickened his pace, trying not to run, for running would leave more sign and put him in danger of tripping, a serious matter in the leaves and fallen branches underfoot. If he ran, he would very likely lose his way.
In his mind he could see a horseman—two horsemen, perhaps—riding out from the big house, waving for the overseer (Uhrquahr, he mean …), the workers silent as they watched.…
Or maybe it was just that someone was getting a talking-to. That would be enough to stop the singing, for as long as it lasted. He strained his ears, but the singing did not resume.
He moved on, quicker now, trying to remember the landmarks. They’d looked different in last night’s gathering darkness from the way they had in the afternoon, and far different now, coming back the other way. He found one of his own trail markers near a red oak veiled in Spanish moss like a mourning widow, and had no recollection whatsoever of the place. He knocked the sticks flying as he moved on. How soon would it be, he wondered, before they organized to follow?
At Bellefleur when he was six one of the field hands had run away. He remembered how the overseer had called for men to hunt, and the men had gathered. There had been more white men in the posse from neighboring plantations, since Bellefleur, close to New Orleans, had not been nearly as isolated as Chien Mort, but it was planting time and few could be spared. Most of the hunting had been done—and done willingly—by the runaway’s fellow slaves.
He’d as much as told them he was a runaway. And he was no kin nor friend of theirs. For a break from the monotony of clearing the fields, of course they’d follow.
Rain started, thin and steady. It would cover his scent if they were using dogs but made tracks likelier in soft ground, and it further obscured the landmarks. A respectable music master in Paris, he’d worn boots for sixteen years, and Livia had seen to it in the years before that that he’d gone shod like a respectable colored, not barefoot like a black. Though his boots would leave a sharper track he didn’t dare take them off and try to flee barefoot.
Around him the woods grew thicker and the ground boggy, cypresses rising ghostly among the oaks. It was farther than he had thought to the small tributary bayou he’d followed to old Ti Margaux’s shack. His clothes grew leaden on his back and dragged at his limbs. His mind, always too active, conjured the picture of that exhausted, hag-ridden young man coming back to the whitewashed plantation house to meet his father standing on the threshold, newly returned from the steamboat landing.
Who brought you those gloves?
A b-big n-nigger from town.
And you let him see you? You let anyone from town see your face?
He thought about the girl Sally, simply walking away from Les