A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [64]
And they all moved differently, spoke to each other differently, from the reserved, careful, soft-spoken members of colored society. The laughter was louder. The men smoked cigars, despite the law that neither black nor colored was permitted to do so in public. Many of the women flirted in a way the carefully reared Catholic young ladies of color never would have dared.
For no reason he remembered a morning, seven or eight weeks earlier, when he’d come to the chapel for early Mass, passing by this square and smelling blood. He had crossed the damp grass and found the beheaded body of a black rooster nailed to one of the oaks, its blood dripping down on the little plate of chickpeas and rice beside the tree’s roots, surrounded by a ring of silver half-reale bits. His confessor had told him only a few days ago that he and the other priests would now and then find pieces of pound cake, cigars, or bits of candy at the feet of certain statues in the church.
The drums seemed to have reached an understanding. One could hear it, like the pounding of a lust-quick heart. A banjo joined in, sharp as crickets in summer trees, and a makeshift flute called a nightbird’s rill.
“Calinda, calinda!” called out someone. “Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!”
It was nothing like Rossini, nothing like Schubert. Nothing that had to do with Herr Kovald or Paris at all.
Already, men and women had begun to dance.
Leaning against the iron palings of the fence, hands in his pockets and uneasy shame in his heart, January searched the crowd.
The woman he was looking for he hadn’t seen in sixteen years.
Dark faces under bright tignons, white smiles gleaming. Shabby skirts swirling, moving, breasts swaying under white blouses, arms weaving. A smell of sweat came off the crowd, and with it the memory of nearly forgotten nights sitting on the step of his mother’s cabin, watching the other slaves dance by the smoky blaze of pine knots. Considering how much there had been to do on Bellefleur, the endless weeding and chopping at the heavy cane, repairing barns and outbuildings, cutting cypress, digging mud for levees and causeways, he still wondered how any of them had had the energy to dance, how he himself had managed, even with the wild energy of a child.
More and more were joining in, though, even as they had then. People were shouting, singing, wild and pagan and utterly unlike the music he had been trained to make. Tunes and fragments of tunes unwound like dizzy pinwheels, reeling off into space. A thin girl with a red tignon coiled high like a many-knotted turban danced near him, teasing and inviting, and the brass rattles she wore on her ankles clattered in alien music. He grinned, shook his head. She flashed him a glimpse of calf and petticoat and spun on her way. Across the crowd a face seemed to emerge, half familiar—he realized with a shock it was Romulus Valle, and looked quickly away.
How many others were here? he wondered in momentary panic. Bella—would Bella come here on her Sunday afternoons? His mother’s cook? He realized he didn’t even know if she was still a slave, or had been freed. It had never occurred to him to ask. She was part of his mother’s household from time immemorial.… In either case she’d never let him hear the end of this if she saw him.
He wondered suddenly if the girl Judith would be here, and what he could possibly say to her about the thing he carried in his pocket.
“Her-on mandé,
Her-on mandé,
Ti-gui li papa!”
Thin, whining, almost hypnotic, the voices rose from deeper in the crowd. More and more were dancing, to the counterpoint rhythm