Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Read Online Free PDF Page B

the rag pickers what they found in the garbage and the gutters outside the big town houses on Rue Chartres and behind the American mansions on Nyades Street; from the maids and laundresses of every wealthy family in town what stains they found on whose sheets. The slaves of bankers and brokers and planters from the Belize to Natchez sold her letters, or names whispered by night, or combings of their owners' hair; and as a hairdresser herself, to white and colored alike, she heard still more. She was queen of secrets, paid sometimes in money and sometimes in kind.
    And this was, not all she was.
    But she only answered, “There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man. Don't you know that, Michie Ben?”
    Thunder shivered the night again, lightning limning the roofs around them, and the sudden cold breath of storm made the seven points of her tignon nod and flicker.
    She added, “Mostly men don't understand.”
    He saw the dark winds lift and ripple her dark skirts as she passed along the banquette in the direction of Rue St. Anne, and the swaying light of the next intersection splashed her briefly with color, blue and orange and red. Then she was gone.
    There was a brickyard on Rue Dumaine, back in the days before the war with England, where the slaves of the town would meet at night. Sometimes it was only to talk or to sell things pilfered from their owners-a chicken, a shirt, a bundle of half-burned candles, a bottle of American whisky poured artfully off the tops of the master's supplies. But sometimes, after the whites were asleep, the drums would speak in the darkness.
    As a young boy January had gone, although his teachers at the Academie St. Louis told him this was not a thing young gerrs de cauleur libre did, and his mother vowed she'd wear him out with a broom if she ever heard of him acting like a slave brat. . . . But he'd been a slave brat only a few years before. And he missed the music and the dancing and the dark lusciousness of forbidden excitement that fired the air at the dances. Later, old Père Antoine had told him that what went on in the brickyard was the worship of devils. Though January never quite believed that, he came to understand that he could not be a child of God and a friend of the loa as well.
    Olympe had taunted him with cowardice-Olympe who was then slipping out of the house regularly to dance with the voodoos and to learn from a woman named Marie Saloppe the secrets of herbcraft and poisons and the names of the African gods. From the first his sister had turned from her mother, and all her mother's efforts to make her a proper fille de couleur. You think about how you're doing Ben and me a favor, every time you open your legs to that white man? he remembered Olympe saying to their mother, bitter and mocking and wild-Olympe had spent a great deal of her girlhood locked in her bedroom. But she would always slip out at night.
    One night she had simply not come back.
    Their mother had made no effort to inquire about where she might have gone. But three or four nights after that, when lying in the dark of the garçonnière January had heard the thick swift heartbeat of the drums, he had put on his clothes and made his way to Rue Dumaine, knowing that if she was in the city at all, that was where she would be.
    The drumbeats drew him on. They'd built a fire behind the shelter of the brick kilns, but they kept the fire low. He saw only the yellow touch of it, outlining the square shouldering shapes of piles and pallets, of drays half-loaded, of sheds. The world was a stink of smoke and wet clay. But as he edged his way between those hard damp structures, like cemetery tombs in their closecrowded solidity, the blood stirred hot and unexpectedly behind his breastbone and in his loins at the tripping rattle of the hand drums, the tidal pull of the clapping hands.
    He smelled blood.
    They'd killed a chicken and a young pig and thrown them in the cauldron seething over the fire.