pagan in the darkness: the bamboula, the counjaille, the pil? chactas. It was a music that brought back to him again that hurt of nostalgia and grief, memories of sitting on the plank step of a slave cabin as the old man was sitting-as three or four children were still sitting a few cabins down the way-watching the fire-gilded faces of men and women swaying in the darkness, dancing loose the ache of work in their muscles, dancing to find the only freedom their hearts could have.
The dancing was over now, but only just. A man on the step of the next cabin was still tinkering songs on his banjo, quiet songs now, a fragment of a jig Hannibal sometimes fiddled, the trace of an opera air. Young women were playing eyes with young men. Only a few crickets could be heard this early in the year. The frogs were croaking below the levee beyond the big house. He recalled the names he'd given their voices as a child: Monsieur Gik, Monsieur Big Dark, little Mamzelle Didi. It was cool enough that the fire someone had built in the widening of the street felt good.
"Just a handful of leaves, blowin' over the ground," smiled January, as the old man moved aside to let him sit. "And damn glad to hear a little music."
"You headin' for the woods?" asked the man with the banjo, a euphemistic way of asking if he were a runaway.
"Well, let's just say I'm headin' away from town." January gave him a wink. "I'm on my way down to Grand Isle, see my woman and my children. Figured what with balls and parties and everybody in town run-nin' around in masks and too drunk to tell who's who even without, nobody's gonna even know I'm gone till I'm back."
"I hear you there," said a stout, sweet-faced young woman whose calico dress and bright-colored head scarf identified her immediately as one of Peralta's hastily transplanted town house servants.
"You been up to New Orleans?" asked January, with innocent surprise.
And got the whole story.
In pieces, and with digressions concerning the conduct of neighboring servants and the husbands, wives, boyfriends, and girlfriends of the town house staff, it was this: Galen Peralta had met the mistress of Arnaud Trepagier, his fellow pupil at the swordsmanship academy of Augustus Mayerling, and had fallen desperately in love. The boy's father had taken him to Blue Ribbon Balls in an attempt to interest him in some other young sang mele, but it was of no use.
"And she wasn't pushin' him away much, neither," added the woman, who turned out to be Honey, the Peralta household cook.
"Pushin' with one hand and makin' bedroom eyes while she did it," added another woman, the wrinkles of advancing age beginning to line her strong-chinned face. "Just as well Arnaud Trepagier came down with the cholera like he did, or there woulda been trouble." She spoke with malicious satisfaction in her voice and spite in her eyes, for which January couldn't blame her. After living in New Orleans for most, if not all, of her adult life, exile to a backwater plantation at a moment's notice had to be galling, disorienting, and terrifying.
Angelique went into mourning.
("Some mourning," sniffed the elderly maid. "I seen more modest dresses paradin' up and down Gallatin Street." "Well, she did wear black," amended the kinder Honey. "I seen her in the market.")
Michie Galen sent her notes. Michie Xavier said it wasn't proper. Michie Galen didn't care. He was seventeen and in love.
("Lord, a man doesn't need to be seventeen to make a damn fool of himself over a girl," grinned a woman on another doorstep, a wrapped bundle of baby sleeping at her bare breast and a four-year-old boy, sleeping also, cradled against her other side. Her field-hand husband, sitting beside her, gave her a hard nudge with his elbow and a smile with his eyes. Everybody except January had obviously heard this story already, but it was new enough to still have bright edges of interest in the telling.)
Michie Galen begged his father to speak to Madame Dreuze. They went to the Mardi Gras quadroon ball. "First thing anybody hear about it, Michie Xavier come in when it's near light, which is late for him. He ain't one to stay out howlin' at the mornin' star. He ask, has Michie Galen come in? We say no, and just then there's knockin' at the gate, and Charles, he go open it, Michie Xavier right