Good Time Coming Page 4

  Mahalia and I had never got on easy together. She was constantly picking on me, poking me to stand up straight, and worrying me something fierce over one thing or another. I knew Simon had been her favorite, although I didn’t hold that against her because he’d been my favorite, too. She had mourned his death nearly as hard as my mother, but it didn’t lead her to go any easier on me.

  ‘I ain’t hungry,’ I said, giving up on the cornbread. Time was, I’d loved cornbread. But we hadn’t seen any wheat flour for nearly six months, and a steady diet of cornbread gets tiresome quick.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she corrected. ‘Don’t you let yor momma hear you talkin’ like ignorant, common folk.’

  This was one of our constant battles. I knew she blamed Finn, which was a surefire way to set up my back. ‘You say ain’t.’

  ‘That ain’t the point.’ She took my plate and scraped my leavings into the slop bucket she would later carry down to the hogs. ‘I is what I is. You is not.’

  I stared at her, baffled by her logic.

  I knew gens de couleur libres who spoke better than most white folks, who’d been educated in Paris and seen places I could only dream of visiting – London and Rome, Venice and Istanbul. They were always as careful as careful can be to differentiate themselves from the field hands and house servants, not just by their speech, but by their dress and their mannerisms and their fastidious adherence to the designated ‘done thing’. So why didn’t Mahalia?

  It would be a long time before I came to understand that different people can have different ways of coping with the pressures that strain and constrict their lives.

  Our schoolhouse was wood-framed and small, since even those who couldn’t afford to hire a private tutor used to send their older children off to finishing school or college. Some went to Virginia and Philadelphia or even Paris. But most didn’t go far, the boys heading to Centenary College up the road in nearby Jackson, Louisiana, and the girls to Silliman in Clinton.

  With the coming of the war, most colleges in the South were now closed.

  We sat on rows of long pine benches with low desks that faced the schoolmaster’s raised platform and a blackboard. Girls sat on one side of the room, boys on the other – except when a boy was punished by being forced to sit with the girls. It was intended to humiliate the boy, and it did, for he would sit there with his face bright red with shame. But it always humiliated and angered me, too, in a way that took me a long time to pin down. I noticed that girls were never punished by being made to sit with the boys, and I eventually figured out that was because sitting with the boys would have been considered an honor.

  As I slid into my place, I cast a quick glance around the room, wondering if the whispers of my mother’s supposed treasonous activities had leaked out. But everybody was talking about the Federal fleet; I didn’t hear a peep about drowned Federal messengers. I caught Finn’s eye, but he just threw me a big grin and went back to trading marbles with Tad Cooper.

  Our schoolmaster was a thick-bodied recent immigrant from Vienna named Horst Fischer, who still spoke with a heavy Austrian accent. At the time, we considered him old, although he was probably only in his late twenties or early thirties. He just seemed old, with his slow, ponderous movements, his fussy ways, and the thin cornsilk-fine hair he wore long on top in a futile attempt to disguise his prematurely balding pate.

  I’d nursed a personal grudge against the schoolmaster ever since he confiscated my copy of Voltaire’s Candide. I’d had the slim blue volume open on the bench beside me, surreptitiously reading while he was trying for the hundredth time to explain the intricacies of long division to the slower children, and he’d somehow spotted it. He said he’d give it back to me when I learned to pay attention in class. But it’d been nearly a year now, and he still had it. I’d sometimes see him reading it himself. I couldn’t understand why if he liked it so much, he didn’t just buy his own copy and give me mine back.

  In that self-centered way of children, we were cruel enough to hope that he would enlist, since that would be the end of school for us. But he kept insisting this wasn’t his war, and that was all there was to it. As more and more young men left to fight, folks started calling him a stay-at-home and a fireside brave. Some of the boys stuck white feathers in his books when his back was turned and clucked like a chicken when he walked down the street.

  He set his jaw hard and worked at ignoring them.

  After my earlier, unsatisfactory conversation with my mother, I’d once considered asking Mr Fischer why men like Finn’s daddy and Nico Valentino had enlisted when it wasn’t their fight, either. I figured he could surely explain it to me. But I decided against it. He got enough grief from everyone else; he didn’t need me adding to it. I might not like him much, but I did feel a bit sorry for him. He always struck me as dreadfully lonely.

  Before the war, Mr Fischer would ring a bell to ‘take in’ school. But the school bell, like the big brass bell in the tower of Grace Episcopal Church and plantation bells up and down the river, had been donated to the war effort. Instead of beating its swords into plowshares, the South was melting down its bells and molding them into canons.

  As a result, Mr Fischer had to tap his ruler on the side of his desk to call his pupils to order. It wasn’t very effective under the best of circumstances and even less so that morning, for the room was abuzz with talk of yesterday’s first sighting of the Federal fleet, and those children unlucky enough not to have witnessed it in person were eager to hear from those who had – or who were pretending they had. I was probably the only child in the room who simply sat with my fingers laced tightly together and my gaze fixed straight ahead as I tried to ignore the swirl of excited voices and rampant speculation around me.

  ‘I reckon Farragut himself musta been on that sloop of war—’

  ‘I heard them paddle-wheelers is carrying General Williams’s army. They embarked from Kennertown—’

  ‘My grandpa says if they take Vicksburg, they’ll be able to cut the Confederacy clean in two. My grandpa says—’

  Mr Fischer practically broke his ruler banging it on his desk again and again, trying to get everyone’s attention. ‘I vill have silence!’ he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth as he shook with rage, his face such a deep, purple hue that he reminded me of old Mr Blackburn when he choked on a fishbone and nearly died.

  Struck dumb, the entire class stared at him.

  ‘There. Goot.’ He adjusted the collar of his coat. ‘Ve vill began.’

  I breathed a silent sigh of relief. Then he told us to haul out our spelling books, and my brief, uncharacteristic enthusiasm for schoolwork evaporated then and there.

  But I didn’t need to endure that day’s tedium for long. I was just cleaning my slate for our geography lesson when a shout went up and someone ran past the schoolroom door hollering, ‘Confederate cavalry squadron coming!’

  Horst Fischer gave it up and let us go.

  Six

  The cavalry squadron was from Camp Moore, the big Confederate training camp to the east of us. Camp Moore was Louisiana’s largest training camp, and it lay on the railroad line between New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi. When New Orleans surrendered, the troops who had been guarding the city were withdrawn north up the tracks to Camp Moore.

  The cavalry thundered through town, horse hides dark with sweat and rain, filling the air with the pounding of hooves and the creak of saddle leather and a welcome reassurance after yesterday’s humiliation and intimidation. They talked to Mr Marks for a time and then rode on.

  With the sudden, unexpected freedom of the day stretching before us, Finn wanted to go off with some of the other boys and practice drilling. Because we’d spent so many hours hanging around the green to watch the militia drill, all the children knew the commands and maneuvers by heart. We could ‘file left’ and ‘about face’ far better than any batch of new recruits. Wielding broomsticks and pokers rather than muskets and rifles, we regularly shouldered and prese
nted arms with precision.

  Usually, no one said a word in disparagement when some of us girls joined in the drilling. But today seemed somehow different, yesterday’s sighting of the Federal fleet having worked the boys into a fever pitch. They swaggered around with their hands in their pockets and their straw hats tipped back on their heads, boasting to each other about which unit they were going to join when they got old enough. Finn might have welcomed me, but I knew from their sideways scowls that wasn’t true of the other boys.

  Normally, that wouldn’t have stopped me. But I had something else I wanted to do – something I didn’t want to tell Finn about.

  After he’d run off with the other boys, I headed down the bluff to Bayou Sara. Once, Bayou Sara had been a rough town, akin to Natchez-Under-the-Hill. It was considerably more respectable now, with its grand emporiums and fancy hotels and ostentatiously imposing banks. But there were still parts of town I was forbidden to enter, mainly the Point, where Irish bargemen and mulattoes and Houma Indians mingled in seedy taverns, and painted women in various stages of undress lounged in doorways or leaned out of upstairs windows.

  Like all forbidden things, the Point fascinated me. I listened with rapt attention to snatches of conversations I knew I wasn’t supposed to be hearing, tales of wild brawls and knife fights, of men’s naked bodies dumped in the river and women found slumped with their throats slit.

  Yet as much as the Point intrigued me, it also repelled me. No one had ever explicitly explained to me what might happen were I to wander alone down those forbidden alleyways. But I knew. I’d grown up surrounded by pigs and cows, sheep and horses, dogs and cats. The mechanics of the creation of new life were no mystery to me, and I hadn’t been very old before I figured out the connection between what I saw happening in the fields and the swelling bellies of the talcum-scented, hoop-skirted, oh-so-respectable ladies who filled our church pews every Sunday. My mind boggled at the details, for I was still very ignorant and innocent. But I grasped the essence of what men did to women, even though I gathered they generally did it at night, in bed, rather than out in the fields.

  Just the thought of such an intrusion into the very core of my being revolted me. I’d long ago decided that, while I’d probably like to be married some day, I would never allow my husband to do that to me. I couldn’t understand why any woman would willingly submit to it.

  I’d expressed this conviction to my mother, once. A strange, secret smile softened her features and she said, ‘I remember feeling much the same way when I was your age. I think you’ll find you’ve changed your mind when the time comes.’

  I knew I never would.

  But I knew, too, that such congress could also occur outside the matrimonial bed, in which case the consequences were dire. As with so much else, these matters were never explicitly addressed. Yet every girl my age understood quite clearly that her purity and innocence were considered her most prized possessions, to be safeguarded at any cost. We knew that an unmarried woman would be utterly ‘ruined’ if she had relations with a man, even if such attentions had been forced upon her against her will. Whether she succumbed willingly or under threat of violence made no difference; any woman known to have done that with a man not her husband became an object of scorn and pity, forever outcast from polite society. Yet when I look back on it, I can’t recall anyone actually using the word rape. The expressions of choice included ‘outraged’, and ‘grievously insulted’, and, of course, ‘a fate worse than death’. As far as most people were concerned, that’s exactly what it was.

  I stayed away from the Point.

  My objective that day was the dry goods emporium of Mrs Hilda Meyers. My mother might be unwilling to speculate on the identity of ‘Dear Madam’, but I had never been known for my self-restraint.

  Meyers Dry Goods Emporium and Grocery Store stood just off Principal Street, beside the livery stable owned by Castile Boudreau, a free man of color, and his son, Leo. Meyers Emporium was an impressive establishment, two stories tall and built of brick, with a covered gallery shading the broad wooden sidewalk across the front. Beneath this overhang clustered baskets, barrels, and crates heaped with everything from blackberries and potatoes to tomatoes and sweet peppers and goober peas. Before the war, the shelves inside had been generously stocked with all sorts of wonders: ladies’ parasols and high-top shoes, delicate linen drawers and chemises, dresses of silk and cashmere, stays and hoops and handkerchiefs, crochet hooks and skeins of brightly colored wool, lace tablecloths, buttons, tapes, bolts of cotton, and any manner of other delights, while the smell of new leather, starch, rose water and lavender filled the air. But the blockade had bit hard into Hilda Meyers’ business, depleting her shelves as well as her customers, as men marched off to war and the women they left behind found themselves scrambling just to feed their families.

  I had to draw up just inside the entrance, for despite the cloud cover the day was bright enough that the sudden gloom of the shop’s interior left me momentarily blind.

  ‘Vhat are you doing here?’ Hilda Meyers’s husky voice boomed out of the darkness. ‘Vhy aren’t you in school?’

  I squinted in the general direction of the voice. ‘Mr Fischer let us off for the rest of the day ’cause of the cavalry in town.’

  She snorted. ‘Vhat a fool.’

  I could see her now. She stood behind the massive, heavily carved wooden counter that stretched along one wall of the emporium, her upper lip pinched in a way that made her nose wrinkle as if she’d smelled something foul. She was probably in her early sixties, although there was nothing frail about her. She towered over the other women in town and most of the men, too. Her carriage was fiercely upright, her movements quick and strong, and when she walked, her stride was so long that most folks had to trot just to keep up with her.

  If she’d been a more pleasant person, I might have admired her, for her strength and her shrewdness and the bull-headed courage that had brought her halfway around the world to open a shop in a strange land. But she was a sour, brusque, and unhappy person, the lumpy features of her face having long since settled into a scowl that only deepened whenever she saw me. She knew I was Finn’s friend, and she hated Finn with a special passion that was more than mutual.

  ‘Vhere’s that good-for-nothing Irish thatch-gallows I see you with all the time?’ she demanded.

  I wandered the aisles, unexpectedly saddened at the sight of empty, dusty shelves that had once been overflowing with goods. ‘He’s off practicin’ drillin’ with the other boys.’

  She let out a grunt that heaved her massive, shelf-like bosom. ‘Huh. They’ve ambitions to become canon fodder, have they? More fools. This state is full of fools. This country is full of fools.’

  I threw her a quick, studied glance. Hilda Meyers had never made any secret of her contempt for the idea of Southern independence. She owned three slaves she frequently hired out as day laborers, so I knew she was no abolitionist. But I suspected she’d give just about anything to bring back the flow of commerce up and down the river.

  I said, ‘D’you see the Federal fleet yesterday, Miss Hilda?’

  ‘I did not.’ Her frown deepened with her suspicions. She knew I was up to no good; she just couldn’t figure out what. ‘I’ve better things to do with my days than spend them on the levee, gawking at the river with all the riffraff in town.’

  ‘Some folks are saying there’s Federal messengers in the woods, too. You believe that?’

  I watched her face. But I couldn’t tell if her fierce scowl was because I’d hit a nerve or if she was just fed up with me.

  ‘Vhat you doing here?’ she demanded again. ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Just lookin’ around.’

  ‘Vell, go look someplace else.’ She reached for her broom. ‘You heard me. Go, go, go!’

  I knew better than to turn my back on that broom. I retreated slowly toward the door, one foot behind the other, my gaze locked with hers, my hands tense at my sides, ready to do battle if it ca
me to that.

  ‘Don’t come back; you hear?’ she shouted after me. ‘Not unless you got money to spend. And I mean real money; not that worthless paper script.’

  I backed to the end of the gallery, then stopped, one arm wrapped around the support post, my gaze fixed thoughtfully on the emporium’s plate glass windows. I wasn’t sure what if anything I’d learned, although there was no denying the encounter had underscored my antipathy for the woman.

  ‘I guess Mizz Hilda don’t want your bidness, child,’ said a deep, amusement-filled voice behind me.

  I turned to find Castile standing at the entrance to his stable, a bridle dangling from one hand. He was a big man – big enough to tower over even Hilda Meyers. His skin was a deep ebony, his head bald and bullet-shaped, his nose wide and flat, his lips full. He told me once he figured he was somewhere in his fifties, although he didn’t know exactly where.

  He might be free now, but you didn’t need to see the scar tissue on his back to know that he’d once been a slave. He’d been branded with an ‘AD’ on his face, the letters seared into both cheeks. I’d never had the impudence to ask him what it stood for, or who’d put it there, or why.

  Castile was one of Finn’s and my favorite people. He came often to see Priebus, the older man who worked for Papa. Over the years, Castile had taught us all sorts of wondrous things – how to make and bait bird traps, how to track animals in the woods, and how to fashion a bow from hickory and sinew. Priebus told us once that Castile had lived with the Choctaw for a spell when he was a young man, back in the day when the tribe could still be found along the banks of the Mississippi and up the bayous.

  I let go the post and hopped off the end of the boardwalk, my face still hot from my recent encounter. ‘I think she has to be just about the nastiest person I’ve ever known.’