A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [67]
“And that’s why you was hangin’ around the voodoo dance, hah?” said the smallest of the squad. He was a little dark man with the flat, clipped speech of a born Orleanian. He took the papers and shoved them into his uniform pocket, grasped January by the arm. “Let’s go, Sambo. I suppose you got no idea who those fellas were you were fightin’, hah?”
“I don’t,” said January, stopping and pulling irritably from the man’s grip. His head spun horribly and even that movement brought the taste of nausea back to his throat. Some of the vomit had gotten on his trousers and all he wanted to do was go home and lie down. “One of them was in the square, but …”
At the first movement of resistance the three of them closed around him, jerking his arms roughly and causing another queasy surge of weakness. Reflex and anger made him half-turn, but he stopped the movement at once, transformed it into simply bringing his hand to his mouth once more, while he tried to breathe and force back his fury.
His head cleared a little and he realized two of them had their clubs unhooked from their belts, waiting for his next move.
In their faces he saw it wasn’t going to do him any good to explain.
ELEVEN
“Disturbing the peace, fighting in public and on the Sabbath,” said the little officer, slapping January’s papers down on the sergeant’s desk in the Cabildo’s stone-flagged duty room. The corner chamber of the old Spanish city hall faced the river, across the railed green plot of the Place des Armes and the rise of the levee, and the late sunlight visible past the shadows of the arcade had a sickly yellowish cast from the ever-present cloud of steamboat soot.
“No ticket to be out and claiming he’s free, but I’d check on these if I were you, sir.”
The desk sergeant studied him with chilly eyes, and January could see him evaluating the color of his skin as well as the coarseness of his clothing.
In French, and with his most consciously Parisian attitude of body and voice, January said, “Is it possible to send for my mother, the widow Levesque on Rue Burgundy, Monsieur? She will vouch for me.” His head felt like an underdone pudding and his stomach was even worse, and the damp patch of vomit on his torn trouser leg seemed to fill the room with its stink, but he saw the expression in the sergeant’s eyes change. “Or if she cannot be found, my sister, Mademoiselle Dominique Janvier, also on Rue Burgundy. Or …” He groped for the names of the wealthiest and most influential of his mother’s friends. “If they cannot be found, might I send a message to … to Batiste Rodriges the sugar broker, or to Doctor Delange? The papers are genuine, I assure you, though the mistake is completely understandable.”
The sergeant looked at the description on the papers again, then held them up to the light. There was sullen doubt in his voice. “It says here you’re a griffe.” He used one of the terms by which the offspring of full blacks and mulattos were described. In January’s childhood, the quadroon boys had used it as an insult, though generally not when they were close enough to him to be caught. His mother and his mother’s friends had a whole rainbow of terminology to distinguish those with one white great-grandparent from those with two, three, or four. “You look like a full-blood Congo to me.”
The papers also said very dark. January knew, for he had read them carefully, resentfully, furious at the necessity of having them at all. Behind him, two officers dragged a white man through the station house doors, paunchy, bearded, and reeking of corn liquor and tobacco.
“You stinkin’ Frenchified pansy sons a hoors, I shit better men than you ever’ time I pull down my pants! I’m Nahum Shagrue, own blood kin to the smallpox and on visitin’ terms to every gator on the river! I fucked an’ skinned ever’ squaw on the Upper Missouri an’ killed more men than the cholera! I chew up flatboats and eat grizzly bears and broken glass!”
One of the guardsmen loitering on the benches gestured to the prisoner and said something to another,