And then what? Wait for Rose and Hannibal to return?
Twenty-five hundred dollars was due to Rosario DeLaHaye for the house on Rue Esplanade on the first of September, just over sixty days away. If that wasn't paid, January would be back living in the garconniere behind his mother's house—if she were willing to evict the boarder currently occupying the room where January had grown up. Knowing his mother, he wasn't entirely certain she would be. She'd been of the strongly-voiced opinion that he and Rose should have used their money to open a construction business, or to buy slaves to rent out to others.
The prospect of relying on his mother for the cost of a bowl of beans, much less a place for himself and Rose to live, turned his stomach.
And after that?
He took a deep breath and raised his eyes to the willow-gray line of DeSoto Point, where the river made a hairpin bend west. “Where could I catch that boat, goin' overland?” he asked.
The stevedore grinned. He was a man of about January's age, squat and ape-like with smiling eyes. “Whoever on board, you must want her pretty bad,” he said.
January thought of Rose. Of the school that was her dream, and the scrabbling life that he wanted to save them both from. “I do,” he said.
“Then you head on straight north up Chickasaw Bayou.” He pointed along the waterfront, along the outer edge of the bend around DeSoto Point. “You cross the Yazoo River, follow it along left through the swamps till you find Steele's Bayou. That'll put you out above Miliken's Bend. It's ten, twelve miles as the crow fly, an' I guarantee you, that boat'll take so long proddin' through them bars around the islands in the bend there, you should catch 'em with time in your hand to spare. You got food? Water?”
And when January shook his head, the man only sighed, as if at a child who'd set out to run away from home with no more than a biscuit in his pocket. He wore, January saw, pinned to his belt-loop the tin badge of a slave who was rented out—who would come home every evening to his master and hand over his wages, the way January's mother wanted her son to do. Leading January to the pile of cordwood that sheltered the lunches of the dock-workers, he handed him a stoppered gourd and a bandanna bundle that smelled of cheese and fresh-baked bread.
“You watch out,” said the stevedore. “They's slave-stealers in them swamps. Don't you go speak to no white man, and you look twice at the colored ones.”
“I know that much,” January said. “Thank you.” And he gave him fifty cents he couldn't well afford, knowing the man would now have to find a lunch of his own.
“Mind how you go now. And give your pretty lady a kiss from me.”
“I'll do that.”
A mounted deputy stopped him just beyond the last few shacks up-river of the town, but seemed satisfied when January showed him the pass Hannibal had written. After that January quickened his steps along the river road. In New Orleans—and in cities on the borderline of slave states and free—there were organized rings of slave- stealers who'd keep their captives half-stupefied with opium until they were deep in the South, too far to strike out easily for their homes.
It was one thing to say
In New Orleans, January felt more or less safe, at least in the old French Town. But even that area of safety was steadily shrinking. He didn't go above Canal Street into the American suburbs if he could help it. Even in the French Town, he was careful to dress well and speak well, the marks of a man of wealth and position. The marks of a man who had family, people who would miss him and call in the law if he should disappear.
As he walked along the river road in the blazing Mississippi sun, he felt anger rise again in him, anger and fear. Fear that he had to push aside, daily, if he was to function at all. Anger that could scorch and wither his soul out of all possibility of love and joy, if for one instant he let it get the upper hand.
But how, he sometimes wondered, could a sane man not be angry?
How could a sane man not be afraid?
The anger and fear were a pain in him, like the pain in Hannibal's joints and lungs, a pain that never eased. He understood how men with that constant grinding ache of soul would seek out opium or alcohol, not for pleasure, but simply for relief from the knowledge that there was nothing that he could do.
A lizard eyed him from a gray deadfall tree a little ways down the slope of the batture, fixing him with a sharp black gaze before it flicked away like an eyeblink. In the brush beneath the willows of the bank something moved, a rabbit or a fox, but January's breath jerked hard in his lungs for a moment.
Somewhere behind him, and probably not very far away, the Reverend Levi Christmas would be trailing the
But at least if that were the case it would mean that Christmas wasn't somewhere behind him, waiting to kidnap him and sell him to some cotton planter in Texas.
The mouth of Chickasaw Bayou lay three miles up-river of Vicksburg, part of the murky bottomlands that lay between the meandering Mississippi and the bluffs along the Yazoo. The air was thick with gnats there, the sunlight greenish through the motionless leaves of cypress and willow. Turtles basked on dessicated logs that rose through the glassy brown surface of the water, arranged, as usual, largest to smallest, with an occasional tiny turtle perched on its larger cousin's back.
January cut a sapling with his pen-knife—the only knife a slave might carry—and prodded the long weeds and
