A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [63]
His mother had confirmed that these days a man of color, no matter how well dressed and well spoken, needed to carry proof of his freedom—and a slave of his business—in order to walk the streets alone.
“That is how it has come, p’tit,” she said, while in her eyes he saw the reflection of his own blackness—part contempt, but part concern. “It is the Americans, moving in from all sides, with their new houses and their tawdry furniture and their loud women who have no manners. Now more and more they control this town. What do you expect of men who won’t even free their own children when they get them on Negro women? They have no understanding of culture, of civilization. To them, we are no better than their slave bastards. If they could, they would lock us all in their barracoons and sell us to make a profit. It is all they think of, the cochons.”
She had been, he reflected now, more right than he knew.
She had taken a certain amount of pains, those first few weeks, to introduce him to her friends among the more influential men of color, not only to let them know that he was a music master and in the market for pupils, but to remind them that he was her son, and a free man. For his part he noticed that in the years of his absence, those friends had almost entirely stopped speaking English. It was a way of setting themselves off by language, by style of dress, and mostly by attitude and actions from any association with either the slave blacks or the black American freedmen who worked as laborers in the city.
Another voice came back to him: He could no more pass himself for a gentleman than our doctor here can pass himself for a white man.…
Or a black one, thought January, shaking his head at himself as he slipped through the gate into the open space of dirt and grass called Congo Square. He wondered whether his blackness, and the memories of a childhood long past, would be sufficient to let him pass for what his mother had been trying for years to get everyone to forget.
The drums beat quicker, two distinct voices, one deep, one high. Somebody laughed; there was a ripple of jokes. The drummers were mocking up a conversation, the deeper drum a man, the higher a woman, and January could almost hear the words: “Come on out behind my cabin, pretty girl?” “Yeah, what’s that gonna git me, ’sides sore heels and a round belly?” “Got me some pretty beads here,” said the deep drum. “You call them pretty?” laughed the higher drum. “I spit prettier out’n that watermelon I ate last week.” You could hear the inflection, the flick of the woman drum’s eyelashes and the sway of her hips. More laughter at the deep drum’s speculative grumble.
Many plantations—Bellefleur had been one of them—forbade slaves to have drums at all, and when old Joseph had played his reed flutes for dancing after work was done, rhythm was kept on sticks and spoons. There was something about that blood beat speaking across the miles of bayou, swamp, and silent, stifling cane fields in the night that made the owners uneasy. It reminded them of how isolated they were among the Africans they owned.
Those drums had not been making jokes about tussles in the grass behind the cabins.
The memories touched sore places inside him, and he pushed them aside. He didn’t belong here. The fact that he looked as if he did troubled him for reasons he couldn’t quite define.
January scanned their faces, moving, talking, listening in the just-turned slant of the afternoon light. Distantly, the clock on the cathedral spoke three, answered by the wail of a riverboat’s whistle. Up the street, small parties of men and women—white, colored, free blacks, a few devout slaves—would be coming out of afternoon Mass at the Saint-Antoine chapel, holding their prayer books and rosaries tight and crossing Rue des Ramparts so as not to pass the square.
The people here ranged in color as widely as had the attendees at the funeral, though on the whole this crowd was darker. Some of them were almost as smartly dressed. Those would be the skilled slaves, the hairdressers and ironsmiths,