Drum (40 page)

"Big'un, you drunk again. Oh, Big'im, whatever am I going to do with you?" he squeaked in a high falsetto.

"Bloody drunk and fightin', Cap'n masta."

"You'te naughty, Big'un, naughty, naughty, naughtyl I'll have to punish you."

"Whup me, Cap'n masta, whup me good and I'll not get drunk again."

Pablo took a step towards the little man. . "This fellow your slave?" he asked.

The captain suddenly became aware of Pablo's presence.

"He is, sir."

"Want to seU him?"

"Sell Big'un? Heavens, no!" The captain seemed shocked at the idea. "Couldn't get along without him. Keeps discipline for me aboard ship. Any man gets out of line, Big'un clobbers him. No, couldn't sell Big'un." The captain shook his head, then carefully fingered his long hair which the movement of his head had disarranged.

One advantage of being as rich as Pablo was that he never had to take "no" for an answer.

"Tell you what I'll do. An ordinary slave like this Big'im would fetch around three hundred and fifty dollars at auction here and that's more than he'd bring in Jamaica. I'll double the amount. Seven hundred dollars for him." Pablo saw the captain hesitate.

"Don' sell me, Cap'n masta," Big'un pleaded. "Won' git drunk no more, suh, never."

The captain took another look at Hernandez, making note of the richness of his clothes, the enormous diamond ring

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on his finger, the other diamond in his cravat, the elaborate watch chain and the ornate gold fobs that hung from it He shook his head slowly.

"I'll make it an even thousand." Pablo was determined to have Big'un. "And I'll go even better than that. I've got a, herd of bozals up at my plantation—^fine young bucks all of them, and some almost as big as this one. Fll throw one of them in along with the thousand. Any one of them's big enough to keep your sailors in line."

"I wuth more'n thousand dollars to you, Cap'n masta." Big'im was almost crying.

"Shut up!" Jenkins shook a tiny fist at Big'un. "Worthless, impudent nigger! Drunkard, fighter!" He turned to Pablo. "Can't sell this man to you under false conditions. I must tell you he's a wicked man when he's drunk. I cannot guarantee him. He killed a man in a fight in Barbados and another in Grenada. But when he isn't drinking he's very gentle."

'That's why I'm buying him—'cause he's a fighter."

"Then, I'll accept your offer. But on one condition."

"Name it," Pablo countered.

"You pay them to let Big'un out of here. He'll be tractable now. Rum's all scared out of him. Then we'll go to your plantation and you let me pick out the slave you are going to give me. Line them all up and strip them down and let me take my choice. Yes?"

In his present anxiety to buy Big'un, Pablo would have let the little captain pick out five slaves. He agreed eagerly and held out his hand.

"Gentleman's agreement," he said.

"And accepted as such," the captain answered.

Othon felt that this would be an opportune time for him to speak.

"I'd appreciate it, Pablo, if you'd let me buy a share in this fighter." Othon was well aware that Pablo was fully acquainted with his financial condition but he was trusting in his generosity.

Pablo slapped Othon on the back. *

"Mi amigo," —when he was excited Pablo always lapsed into Spanish—"he's half yours, if you'll take over his training, and if he's half as good as you say he is, you'll be rolling in money after his first match with Drum."

chapter xii

Rainstorms lke the one which had dogged the footsteps of Othon St. Denis in his search for Pablo Hernandez came to be a daily occurrence in New Orleans that summer. The deluge combined with the hottest summer the south had ever known to turn the city into a steaming pesthole. Lying saucerlike in the wide embrace of the Mississippi, the city collected and conserved the rains in her sordid embrace. The water lay stagnant in the streets, putrefied by rotting vegetables, ordure, and accumulated filth, until it scummed over with a poisonous verdigris of thick green velvet. New Orleans has never pretended to be a clean city. Now it seemed as though the accumulated corruption of centuries was seeping out like festering pus from the ground beneath it; vomiting up between the slimy cobbles; oozing from the very sogginess on which the city rested and trickling in from the levees. It seemed as though the river itself had gathered together the sewage of the continent and deposited it on the city. To cross the streets at midday was an excursion into hell, for either one was drenched in the descending torrents or, when the rain ceased, the sun boiled up a miasmic steam which enveloped one with a noxious exhalation of poisonous vapors. Summer had always suspended many of the activities of the city. The balls and the soirees were over, the opera house was dark, and business took a lethargic holiday. It was even too hot to make love. With many of Alix' best-paying clients in the north, where they sought the healing waters of White Sulphur or Saratoga or rocked on the big-piazza'd wooden hostelries of the Adirondacks or the White Mountains, business at the Academy dragged. Alix herself could well have afforded to close the place for the summer months. But it seemed easier to stay on rather than to disband the white girls, farm out the slaves, and then have to start all over again in the fall, which would have meant recruiting new white girls and would involve far more work than the com-

fort gained by closing up for the season. So, life at the Academy of Music paced itself slowly, catering to an occasional old customer who returned to the city on business or to escape from boredom with his wife, and entertaining those from other cities who had heard of Madame's famous melees. And, of course, there were always those few reliables who had rather be hot and uncomfortable in New Orleans than be at ease in any other place on earth.

Some evenings, however, there were no customers at all and Blaise, Drum, Calinda and Rachel with the two adolescent slave girls, Marie and Yvette, congregated in a comer of the courtyard. Both Drum and Blaise had been watching the growing nubility of Yvette, whose breasts, just within the past year, had begun to stretch the thin cotton of her dress But Rachel watched the girls and guarded them like a mother hen with two lone chicks, keeping them out of reach of the men's wandering hands, and even sleeping between them in the kitchen. As for Marie, she was still in the ganghng stage of adolescence and lacked any attraction for the men, On the evenings that they sat together, Rachel saw to it that the two young slaves were carefully sequestered while she, Calinda, Blaise and Drum talked, hummed songs, or merely fanned themselves around a smudge fire of corncobs which helped somewhat to discotirage the mosquitoes.

Indeed, mosquitoes were no novelty to New Orleans, but this year they quite took possession of the city. The continuous rains multiplied their reproductive haunts and causec them to breed by the millions. That these were the deadlj genus Aedes which transmitted yellow fever was a fact abou" which the inhabitants of the steaming city were woefully ig norant. Alix, of course, had no conception of their death dealing potential, but she had a healthy fear of them. No only did she fear them for the ravages they made on her owr tender skin—of which they seemed to be particularly fonc —but they were bad for her business. The satin skins of he young ladies were certainly not made more delectable whei covered with ugly red bumps, and no man could fully ap predate the delights of her establishment when his pleas ures were interrupted by the necessity of slapping his ow backside. Consequently the Academy of Music was as wholl mosquito-proof as any house in New Orleans could be.

Every one of Alix' beds was tented in a beruifled and em broidered mosquito baire, outside of which the incessar droning of the impotent pests could be tolerated without feaa

Her own bed was equally well protected and her favorite chair was surmounted by a framework of thin bamboo over which was draped another wraithlike baire. Although the mosquito baires were hot, confining and smothering, their discomfort was as nothing compared to the stinging bites of the scourge.

It was a well-accepted fact that mosquitoes would not bite Negroes. Of course not! The whites were certain that no mosquito could possibly plunge his proboscis into their tough, black, animal hides and all agreed that black blood was far too thick to be siphoned off. Therefore, baires were unlpiown in the slave quarters of the city and the fact that Alix, in a sudden burst of pity and generosity, had once ordered one for Dnmi and then completely forgotten that he had it, made him probably the only slave in the city to be so protected. Blaise alsol For despite the common belief that mosquitoes would not bite black flesh, Blaise's continual slappings and his accompanying grunts as he lay stretched out naked on his pallet on the floor, so disturbed Drum that he invited him to share his bed.

The little closet off the kitchen, where Calinda slept with Drumson six nights out of the week, was so tiny and so secluded she had little trouble from the swarms, but Rachel, who bedded down in the kitchen between her two young protegees, was unprotected. She and the girls rubbed themselves with citronella oil until the whole kitchen stank and Drum complained that even the food tasted of the stuff. As an added precaution, Rachel kept a smudge pot burning in the kitchen doorway which discouraged a few of the pests but only a few.

And so the Academy of Music dozed in the steamy heat, as did the whole city, while disaster headed for it aboard the barque Guadelupe out of Panama via Merida and Havana. Sickness had broken out on the Guadelupe and she had already had three burials at sea when she arrived in New Orleans with two of the sailors' faces yellow with jaundice, their bodies burning with fever and tiieir mouths spewing the black vomit. The health authorities—politicians who knew nothing about health or sanitation—^rushed them from the ship to the hospital where they promptly died and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. But by the end of the week there were twenty-four cases of yellow fever, commonly known as Bronze John, in the city. "Nothing to worry about," the authorities said. "Keep it quiet Bad for business if it gets

noised about." And life in New Orleans went on in its usual sununer lethargy. The rains fell, the city steamed, the citizens slapped wildly at mosquitoes and the deaths increased. But few persons—outside of the authorities, who vainly tried to keep the matter quiet; the doctors, whose nostrums were powerless to save the victims; and the mourners of the dead, who fortunately were the ragtag and bobtail of the city— were even aware that Bronze John was a visitor, and business went on as always. Consequently Dominique You accepted Pablo Hernandez' challenge, conveyed to him through Othon St. Denis, and the fight between Drum and Big'un was set up, with odds fifty to one.

Othon had been remarkably efficient in his subtle propaganda. To claim too much prowess for Big'un would have been to lower the odds, but not to create the impression that he was a worthy adversary would cause people to lose interest in the fight. He managed by certain innuen- ** does and meaningful glances to let it be known that his man was a well-known fighter—champion of Jamaica, in fact— and to substantiate his claims, he brought Big'un in from the Hernandez plantation a week before the event and exhibited him to a selected few in the slave quarters of the St. Denis home. Here he invited friends and acquaintances to come to see Big'un work out, neglecting to mention that he was only co-owner of Big'un with Hernandez and referring* to him as "my fighting nigger." One glance at the ebon giant convinced all who saw him that here was such an opponent as Drum had never met before, and the odds rose somewhat, although there was still a comfortable margin to make plenty of money. Othon also sent out letters to many of his friends who had left the city for their plantations, hinting at a most unusual event which might take place at Drum's next fight, and painting such a mysteriously exciting picture of his fighter that many planned to come back to the city, if only., for that night.

On the night of the bout, there was a goodly crowd at the Academy of Music, despite the heat, the rains and the mosquitoes. Seated under her transparent white canopy which had been carried out onto the balcony, Alix, as usual, held the bets. For a wonder, the rain held off. It was a clear evening with only an occasional rumble of thunder in the distance and streaks of heat lightning in the sultry skies that promised more rain to come.

Drum himself had seen. Big'un. Dressed in their best, he

and Blaise had gone uninvited and unaccompanied to the St. Denis house and rapped on the back door. The ancient slave in his threadbare livery who opened the door looked up in astonishment at the two young Negroes, dressed far more richly than his young master. Their appearance caused him to be surUer than was his wont.

"Whaflfor you niggers ringin' dis heah do' bell? Who'n you wants to see heah? We ain' buying no catfish from no ped-dlahs today."

"Not selling catfish," Blaise answered. "Selling good manners, we are. Figured you could use a-plenty."

"And we're not wasting words with you, old man." Drum could be siurly too. "We are here to see Monsieur St. Denis. Please ask him if he would kindly see Drum."

The old slave straightened himself up till his eyes came nearly to Drum's chin.

"Monsieur Othon St. Denis he don' truck wi' fancy niggers all dress up in dey mastah's cas' off clotheses, even if they name' Drum or Banjo or Gee-tah. Monsieur St. Denis, he ain' to hum to no Drum-nigger today, he ain'."

"Who wants to see me, Louis Phillipe?" Othon, in shirt sleeves, walked across the courtyard.

"Some picayune nigger name Drum, suh, I tells him yo' cain't be bothered."

"Dn^? Tell him to come in and mind whom you turn away after this."

"And de oddah popinjay wid him?"

"All right."

Drum did not forget his manners. Othon St. Denis was a familiar sight around the Academy of Music, at least when he had five or ten dollars to spare. He clicked his heels together smartly, bowed from the waist and addressed Othon very respectfully.