A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [94]
He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. Then he sighed. “Looks like it’s my day to be double stupid. Now you got me talkin’ gombo,” he added, realizing he had slipped, not only into the softer inflections of the Africanized speech, but into its abbreviated forms as well.
“You always did set store on bein’ a Frenchman,” smiled Olympe. “You as bad as Mama, and that sister of ours with her fat custard moneybag, pretendin’ I’m no kin of theirs because I’m my father’s child.” Her mouth quirked, and for a moment the old anger glinted in her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” His hand moved toward the money. She regarded him in surprise.
“You change your mind ’bout Doctor John?”
“I thought you just told me you wouldn’t tell.”
“I won’t tell on the person who paid me,” she said, as if explaining something to one of her younger children. “Might be some completely different soul went to John Bayou, and that’s none of my lookout. I should know in two, three days.”
“I’ll be back by then.” He thought he said the words casually, but there was more than just interest in the way she turned her head. “I’m leaving town for a few days. Riding out tonight, as soon as the dancing’s through.”
He felt his heart trip quicker as he spoke the words aloud. It was something he didn’t want to think about. Since he had returned to Louisiana, he had not been out of New Orleans, had barely left the French town, and then only for certain specific destinations: the Culvers’ house, the houses of other private pupils.
In the old French town, the traditions of a free colored caste protected him. His French speech identified him with it, at least to those who knew, and his friends and family guarded him, because should ill befall his mother’s son, ill would threaten them all.
Whatever family he might possess in the rest of the state, wherever and whoever they were, they were still picking cotton and cutting cane, without legal names or legal rights. In effect, everything beyond Canal Street was the Swamp.
“Can’t that policeman go?” she asked. “Or won’t he?”
“I don’t know,” said January softly. “I think they’re keeping him busy, keeping him quiet. And I think …” He hesitated, not exactly sure what to say because he wasn’t exactly sure what it was he was going to Chien Mort to seek.
“I think he really wants to find out the truth,” he went on slowly. “But he’s an American, and he’s a white man. If in his heart he really doesn’t want the killer to be Galen Peralta, he’ll be … too willing to look the other way if Peralta Père says, ‘Look over there.’ And you know for a fact he’s not going to get a thing out of those slaves.”
Olympe nodded.
January swallowed hard, thinking about the world outside the bounds of the city he knew. “I think it’s gotta be me.”
Through the open doors to the rear parlor he could see a girl of twelve or so, skinny like Olympe but with the red-mahogany cast of the free colored, with a two-year-old boy on her knee, telling him a long tale about Compair Lapin and Michie Dindon while she shelled peas at the table.
He thought, They can walk twelve blocks downstream or six blocks toward the river and they’ll be safe … my nephew, my niece. But he knew that wasn’t even true anymore.
“I’ll be back,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
“Wait.” Olympe rose, crossed to the big étagère in the corner. Like the settle—and all the furniture in the room—it was very plain, with a patina of great age, the red cypress gleaming like satin. Its shelves were lined with borders of fancifully cut paper, and held red clay pots and tin canisters that had once contained coffee, sugar, or cocoa, labels garish in several tongues. She took a blue bead from one canister and a couple of tiny bones from another, tied the bones in a piece of red flannel and laced everything together onto a leather thong, muttering to herself and occasionally clapping her hands or snapping her fingers while she worked. Then she put the entire thong into her mouth, crossed herself three times, and knelt before the chromo of the Virgin, her head bowed in prayer.
January recognized some of the