"Them rich people couldn't
convince y'all to fight for their cotton, no. So they got all them
newspapers to start y'all t'inking about what's gonna happen to your
jelly roll. That done it when nothing else did," Jean-Jacques said.
"That's not called for,
Jean-Jacques. We're all serious men here and we speak respectfully of
one another," the older man said.
"What y'all fixing to do is
ruin my bidness. You t'ink a black man who work all day in the field
got nothing on his mind except sticking his pole up your wife's dress?"
Jean-Jacques said.
"You should give some thought
to your words, sir," the older man said, lowering his eyes, his throat
coloring. Then he collected himself and said to the bartender, "Give my
friend Jean-Jacques another drink."
Jean-Jacques belched so loudly
the men at the billiard table turned around, startled.
"Better enjoy your own drink,
suh. The liquor in here come off my boats. What y'all gonna drink after
them Yankees shut me down?" Jean-Jacques said.
But Willie had long ago given
up listening to the self-serving arguments about the moral validity of
Secession. Rarely did logic and humanity have any influence over the
discussion. Instead, the most naked form of self-interest always seemed
to drive the debate, as though venality and avarice had somehow evolved
into virtues. He thought about the slave girl Flower and the fact that
her literacy had to be concealed as though it were an object of shame.
He wondered if Rufus Atkins
had found Flower's notebook as well as the collection of William
Blake's poems. What had he done? Why had he not listened to his mother
or his friend Jim Stubbefield?
He drank the rest of the
whiskey in his glass, then sipped from a pitcher of warm beer that he
was using as a chaser. He looked at the mouth and breasts of the woman
in the painting and through the open window heard someone playing a
piano in the brothel next door. His head reeled and the room seemed to
tip sideways, and his ears buzzed with sound that had no meaning. The
oil lamps in the saloon were like whorls of yellow color inside the
cigar smoke that layered the ceiling. The whiskey had brought him no
relief and instead had only created a hunger in his loins that made him
bite his lip when he looked at the woman above the bar mirror.
Oh Lord, quiet my desires, he
thought. And immediately focused his gaze on the woman's form again. He
swallowed the rest of his whiskey in one gulp and thought he was going
to fall backward.
"Gag and buck," he said to no
one.
"What did you say, Willie?"
Jean-Jacques asked.
"What does 'gag and buck'
mean?"
"You don't want to find out.
You ain't gone and signed up for the army, you?"
"I did."
Po' Willie, why ain't you
come to see me first?" Jean-Jacques said, and cupped his hand on the
back of Willie's neck.
"You're a criminal," Willie
said.
"But I got my good points too,
ain't I?"
"Undoubtedly. Oh,
Jean-Jacques, I've made a mess of things," Willie said.
Jean-Jacques put his mouth
close to Willie's ear. "I can put you on a boat for Mexico when it's
the right time. Let's go next door to my sister's and get your ashes
hauled," he said.
"That's a grand suggestion,
and please don't hold it against me for not acting on it. But I have to
puke," Willie said.
He reeled out the back door
into an overgrown coulee and bent over behind a tree just as an
enormous volume of whiskey and beer and pickled food surged out of his
stomach. He gasped for breath, then rinsed his face in a rain barrel
and dried it on his shirt. The night air was soft with mist, the moon
buried in the clouds above the cane fields. Next door the piano player
was playing a minstrel song titled "Dixie's Land." Willie shouldered a
mop propped against a cistern and began a parody of close-order drill
in the yard behind the brothel, then flung aside the flap on the tent
in the side yard and marched through the row of cots inside, counting
cadence for himself, "Reep . . . reep . . . reep," saluting two naked
people caught at the worst possible moment in their coupling.
He continued out the far end
of the tent and on down the road, passing a horseman whose face was
shadowed by a wide hat. The wind changed, and he saw dust blowing out
of the fields and a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. He left
the road and crossed the dirt yard of the laundry where Flower worked
and walked through the iron pots in the backyard and the wash that was
flapping on the clotheslines and stopped by the back window of her
cabin.
"Flower?" he said.
He heard her rise from her
bed, then push open the wood flap on the window with a stick.
"What you doing, Mr. Willie?"
she asked.
"Did Rufus Atkins come upon
the poetry book I gave you?"
"Yes, suh, he did."
"Did he report you?"
"No, suh, he ain't done that.
I mean, he didn't do that."
"Come close, so I can see your
face."
"You don't sound right, Mr.
Willie," she said.
"Did Rufus Atkins make you do
something you didn't want to?"
"I ain't got no control over
them things. It don't do no good to talk about them, either."
"I've done you a great harm,
Flower."
"No, you ain't. I mean, no,
you hasn't. You better go back home now, Mr. Willie."
He was about to reply when he
heard horses out on the road.
"Who's that?" he said.
"The paddy rollers. Oh, suh,
please don't let them catch you here," she said.
He walked back through the
yard and the darkness of the oaks that grew on each side of the
laundry. He was sweating now, the wind suddenly cold on his face. He
heard thunder crack in the south and rumble across the sky, like apples
tumbling down a wooden chute. He stepped out on the road and walked
toward the lights in the saloon and the tinny music in Carrie LaRose's
brothel, his pulse beating in his wrists, his palms damp, a tightness
in his throat he could not quite explain.
There were six riders spread
across the road in front of him, led by a seventh man in a rain slicker
and flop hat, like cavalry advancing on an enemy position, their
saddles hung with pistols and coils of rope and braided whips, their
faces bladed with purpose.
"Hold your hands out by your
sides, friend," the leader said.
"I think not. Unless you have
governance over a white man talking a walk," Willie said.
The leader rode his horse
forward. Lightning rippled through the clouds overhead and the wind
flattened the tops of the young cane in the fields. The leader of the
horsemen leaned down on his pommel, the saddle creaking with the shift
in his weight.
"We've got five niggers
unaccounted for tonight. It isn't a time for cleverness, Mr. Willie,"
he said.
"Oh, it's Captain Atkins, is
it? This is a coincidence. I'm on a mission of recovery myself. I took
my laundry to the Black girl, whats her name, Flower, the one owned by
Mr. Jamison? I think I dropped one or two of my books out of my saddle
bags.You didn't find them did you?"
"Maybe you and I will have a
talk about that later," Atkins said.
"Mr. Jamison often visits at
the Shadows. I'll mention it to him. Is there anything I should report
about amorous relationships on your part with his niggers?" Willie said.
Atkins' ringed finger clicked
up and down on the stitched top of his pommel.
"A word of caution to you, Mr.
Willie. You were at the home of the abolitionist woman this evening.
Now I see you in a neighborhood where five slaves didn't report for
bell count. Be aware there are others besides I who feel you bear
watching," Atkins said.
"Say again?"
"Robert Perry saved his little
tit-sucking momma's boy of a friend from being gagged and bucked today.
Don't expect that kind of good fortune again," Atkins said.
"Thank you, sir. It's a great
honor to be excoriated by a miserable fuck and white trash such as
yourself," Willie said.
He brushed past Atkins' horse
and walked through the other riders, the cane in the fields whipping in
the wind, dust and rain now blowing across the lighted front of the
saloon.
He heard Atkins' boot heels
thud against his horse's sides and barely had time enough to turn
before Atkins rode him down, whipping the lead ball on the butt of his
quirt handle across Willie's head.
He felt the earth rush up at
him and explode against his face. Then the booted legs of the paddy
rollers surrounded him and through a misting rain he thought he heard
the song "Dixie's Land" again.
"Since he likes the
abolitionist woman so much, dump him in the nigger
jail,"
Atkins said.
Then Willie was being lifted
over a saddle, his wrists and feet roped together under the horse's
belly. As the horse moved forward blood dripped out of Willie's hair
onto his shirtsleeves and the dust from the horse's hooves rose into
his nostrils.
But a huge man stepped into
the middle of the road and grasped the horse's bridle.
"You're a constable and I
cain't stop you from taking him in, Mr.
Atkins. But if there's
another mark on him in the morning, I'm gonna strip the clothes off
your body on Main Street and lay a whip to your back, me," Jean-Jacques
LaRose said.
Atkins was dismounted, his
stature diminutive in contrast to Jean-Jacques LaRose. He pressed his
quirt against Jean-Jacques' chest, bowing the braided leather back on
itself.
"Would you care to see your
sister's business establishment shut down? . . . You don't? ... I knew
you were a man of reason after all, Jack," he said. He tapped his quirt
softly on Jean-Jacques' chest.
A half hour later Willie lay
on a wood bunk inside a log jail, an iron manacle around his ankle. Two
Negroes sat on the dirt floor against the far wall, barefoot, their
knees drawn up before them. Their clothes were torn, their hair bloody.
They smelled of funk and horse barns and night damp and fish that had
soured on their stomachs. He could hear them breathing in the dark.
"You men ran from your
owners?" Willie asked.
But they would not answer him.
In the glow of the moon through the barred window their faces were
running with sweat, their eyes red, their nostrils cavernous. He could
see the pulse jumping in one man's throat.
He had never seen fear as
great in either man or beast.
LATER that same night Flower
left her cabin and crossed the cane field through layers of ground fog
that felt like damp cotton on her skin. She entered a woods that was
strung with air vines and cobwebs and dotted with palmettos and
followed the edge of a coulee to a bayou where a flatboat loaded with
Spanish moss was moored in a cluster of cypress trees.
The tide was going out along
the coast. In minutes the current in the bayou would reverse itself,
and the flatboat, which looked like any other that was used to harvest
moss for mattress stuffing, would be poled downstream into a saltwater
bay where a larger boat waited for the five black people who sat
huddled in the midst of the moss, the women in bonnets, the men wearing
flop hats that obscured their faces.
Two white boatmen, both of
them gaunt, with full beards, wearing leather wrist guards and
suspenders that hitched their trousers almost to their chests, stood by
the tiller. One of them held a shaved pole that was anchored in the
bayou, his callused palms tightening audibly against the wood.
A white woman with chestnut
hair in a gray dress that touched the tops of her shoes had
just
walked up a plank onto
the
boat, a heavy
bundle clasped in
both arms. One of the white men took the bundle from her and untied it
and began placing loaves of bread, smoked hams, sides of bacon and jars
of preserves and cracklings inside the pilothouse.
Flower stepped out of the
heated enclosure of the trees and felt the coolness of the wind on her
skin.
"Miss Abigail?" she said.
The two white men and the
white woman turned and looked at her, their bodies motionless.
"It's Flower, Miss Abigail. I
work at the laundry. I brung something for their trip," she said.
"You shouldn't be here,"
Abigail said.
"The lady yonder is my auntie.
I known for a long time y'all was using this place. I ain't tole
nobody," Flower said.
Abigail turned to the two
white men. "Does one more make a difference?" she asked.
"The captain out on the bay is
mercenary, but we'll slip her in," one of them said.
"Would you like to come with
your auntie?" Abigail asked her.
"There's old folks at Angola I
got to care for. Here, I got this twenty-dollar gold piece. I brung a
juju bag, too." Flower walked up the plank and felt the wood bend under
her weight. The water under her was as yellow as paint in the
moonlight. She saw the black head and back and S-shaped motion of a
water moccasin swimming across the current.