Those drums had not been making jokes about tussles in the grass behind the cabins.
The memories touched sore places inside him, and he pushed them aside. He didn't belong here. The fact that he looked as if he did troubled him for reasons he couldn't quite define.
January scanned their faces, moving, talking, listening in the just-turned slant of the afternoon light. Distantly, the clock on the cathedral spoke three, answered by the wail of a riverboat's whistle. Up the street, small parties of men and women-white, colored, free blacks, a few devout slaves-would be coming out of afternoon Mass at the Saint-Antoine chapel, holding their prayer books and rosaries tight and crossing Rue des Ramparts so as not to pass the square.
The people here ranged in color as widely as had the attendees at the funeral, though on the whole this crowd was darker. Some of them were almost as smartly dressed. Those would be the skilled slaves, the hairdressers and ironsmiths, the tailors and shoemakers, the carpenters and embroideresses, valets, cooks, and maids. They were outnumbered, however, by those in the coarse grays and browns of laborers and draymen, stablehands and yardmen, laundresses and ironers. The women's tignons were simple muslin or gaudy calico, rather than the silks worn by the women of color in mockery of the Black Code, but like all the colored women in the city they arranged them in fantastic variations of knots, folds, points.
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 mandt, Her-on mande, 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 of the drums, the sweet, metallic jangle of ankle clappers. January's mind groped at the meaning of the words, but they were as much African as French-and bad French at that.
"Her-on mandt,
Ti-gui li papa!
Her-on mande,
Her-on mande,
Do-se dan do-go!"
Other voices rose up, only slightly more comprehensible:
"They seek to frighten me,
Those people must be crazy.
They don't see their misfortune
Or else they must be drunk.
"I, the Voodoo queen,
With my lovely handkerchief
Am not afraid of tomcat shrieks-
I drink serpent venom!"
Someone shouted, "Marie! Marie!" Turning his head, January saw that a woman had mounted a sort of platform made of packing boxes in the center of the square. She was tall and would have topped many in the crowd even had she not been standing on the makeshift dais- handsome rather than beautiful, with strong cheekbones and very dark eyes. Gold earrings flashed in the torrent of black hair that streamed on her shoulders, and jewels- possibly glass and possibly real-glittered on her white blouse and tempestuous blue skirt. Even without moving her feet she was dancing, body rippling snakelike, eyes closed in a kind of curious ecstasy, though her face was impassive in the long, brazen light.
" I walk on pins,
I walk on needles,
I walk on gilded splinters,
I want to see what they can do..."
Other voices were shouting, "Zombi! Papa Limba!" and January's eyes passed quickly across the faces of those who crowded near. The woman had a snake in her arms, the biggest king snake he had ever seen, six feet long and thick as a man's wrist. It coiled around her neck and over her shoulders as she danced, and the droning voices rose against the driving heartbeat of the drums. Through the pickets around the square he could see white faces looking in, women in simple calicoes or the fancier twills and silks, men in the coarse clothing of laborers or the frock coats of artisans or merchants. At the square's four gates, policemen looked on impassively.
How could they? January wondered. How could they simply watch? Did they not feel what these people felt, what he himself felt against his will? The music was electric, drawing the mind and body to it with a force beyond that of childhood memory. It drew at the blood, and even from here, halfway across the square, he could sense the power of the woman with the snake.
He moved nearer. Few of the dancers seemed to notice him, the men dancing first with one woman, then with another, others leaping, shaking, twisting on their own. Looking up at the woman's face, he
wondered if she was aware of the crowd around her, or, if not, what it was that she saw and heard and felt. The snake moved its head, tongue flicking, and January stepped back. Irrational fear brushed him, that the woman would look down at him with those huge black eyes and say, You are not one of us... You are here to spy.