marketplace, where the Africans would be offered up—man, woman, and child alike—to the well-heeled bidders who journeyed here to this slave market from throughout the gulf coast.
Even now near the end of a busy day, slave traders cried out in voices shrill and falsetto, bass or soprano, announcing what they were buying. Each barker screeched or sang louder and louder to outdo his competition as the hawkers moved along through the throbbing mass of upriver boatmen, local stevedores, and sailors come from ports across great oceans.
Here in the market below the trees where the grass moss hung like tatters of dirty linen, the autumn air did not move near so well within such a crushing mass of bodies. It was then that Titus began to smell people. As he thought on it, he could not remember the last time he had been confined in a crowd, forced to smell the sweat and stink of other folks—but, surely, it must have been only last summer. Back in Boone County. Perhaps at the Longhunters Fair, where so many gathered. Yet nothing at all like this.
Back upriver at the ports on the Ohio, the commerce of a few prosperous communities, perhaps a few states at best, was all that was conducted. Yet here lay the crossroads of many cultures, many countries, all bringing their wares to this southwesternmost port of an infant nation.
The smells of these people from different lands mingled now with the fragrances of exotic spices, the hearty tang of generous quarters of beef, veal, and pork, along with headless poultry and monstrous, glassy-eyed ocean- going fish, all hung in the public market that crowded most of the levee’s length, every morsel baking beneath the autumn sun, crusted with clusters of flying insects. In addition, from the backs of their carts some vendors hawked wild ducks and game from upriver in the Indian lands, while others sold what they held captive in their nearby cages: live turkeys, ducks, and geese, as well as varieties of barnyard fowl. As well, those men from upriver could purchase such exotic wares as packed vermilion from the Orient, French girdles of fine silk, embroidered shirts of Spanish linen, tiny round looking glasses, and dainty slippers for the tiniest of women’s feet. Here at New Orleans the world came knocking at America’s door.
On the docks lay a dizzying maze of goods just off-loaded from the downriver flats. Most Kentucky boatmen ran what they termed a “straight” load—consisting of one product easier to load, maintain, and unload en route. Things like pork, flour, coal, hay, and even cordwood. Fewer preferred a “mixed” load, hauling what they could buy cheap and sell for a considerable profit upon reaching New Orleans. Here on the wharf sat crates and kegs and casks of potatoes, dried apples, rolled cigars, lime, and tallow, very important to a lardless community. As well, the boatmen dodged around stacks of millstones and sprawling bundles of pig iron and corn brooms. Tobacco was a favorite of the Kentucky shippers: cured leaf purchased in Cincinnati or Louisville for $2.00 American for a hundredweight would increase in value to $9.50 by the time it reached the end of the line.
Everywhere was a splash of color and texture, with all the fruits and vegetables displayed at the top of open sacking or in huge wagon-borne boxes: all manner of melons, cucumbers, and Irish potatoes, both red and brown, along with the yams and sweet cherries, plums, and strawberries. Initially nervous at stealing—no matter how trifling—Titus nonetheless followed the example of the other boatmen as they threaded their way through the maze of vendors and displays, snatching up a treat here and there when they passed a veranda where no one was watching. Quickly stuffing their stolen treasure between their lips, sucking noisily, and commenting on the relative merits of the various purloined wares—finishing some while tossing the rest beyond the levee, where the refuse landed among that garbage floating on the chocolate-colored surface of the grand old Mississippi.
Originally founded by the French in 1718, New Orleans likely boasted a population of some ten thousand souls late in 1810. While the great fire of 1788 had destroyed nearly all of the original buildings, those tile-roofed wood and brick houses that arose from the ashes couldn’t help but impress even the most cosmopolitan or international of travelers. A constantly expanding dike protected this low-lying city, that dike ever in need of repair. Within the confines of the old colonial port, New Orleans had long ago divided itself into three sections: Spanish, American, and the dominant French community. In a city French by birth and French at its marrow, the French inhabitants rarely dealt with other residents save for matters of business. At the center of town stood the grand cathedral, the town hall nearby, as well as a convent, hospital, and public market house, in addition to a large complement of army barracks and a notorious prison, which was used by the local constables for the many, many troublemakers who haunted the city’s disreputable and world-infamous “Swamp.”
Here all manner of music screamed for attention from every open door as the four boatmen muscled their way along the crowded, rutted, garbage-strewn streets to reach that most dangerous yet ultimately alluring section of New Orleans where few streetlamps glimmered. As the sun sank from the sky, life in the Swamp grew more animated. Bustling billiard rooms and brothels, overflowing gaming houses and watering holes, the doorway of every public place teeming with those moving in and those coming out, along with those who shouted, barking to entice passersby with the prospect of whiskey, or women of all hues and colors, proposing that sailors come within for the sheer fun of unbridled debauchery now that they had reached this famous port.
“You never wanna go in there,” Heman Ovatt warned.
Titus stared, mule-eyed, at the oversize barker waving, dancing, shimmying all his rolls of fat while chattering to all at once in the doorway to a card room. On each side of the door was painted a brightly colored hand of cards.
Bass asked, “Why not?”
“Swindlers,” Ovatt said as if it hurt his tongue to have the word cross it. “Steal a man’s money and throw him in the street with their cheating games. And the girls in some of these places ain’t there to pleasure a man, neither.”
“Then what for?”
“They just help get a man drunk. Help him drink up his likker so others can see to it he loses his money at their swindling tables. And that poor turtle won’t even have a chance to get his pants down and climb a’tween their legs a’tall. Not in that sort of place. Stay close to us, young’un. And don’t dare let yourself get hauled into one of them dark dens.”
Dogs snarled at one another, fighting over the mounds of filth tossed from the many kitchens that lined these muddy, wheel-rutted, hoof-pocked streets. Men dead drunk lay propped here and there against the buildings, sleeping off their excesses, most with their pockets already turned inside out by casual thieves who leisurely worked over their unconscious victims. Not one of those drunks still boasted a pair of boots on his feet, most already stripped of hat and coat, perhaps a fancy shirt or sash—anything that might bring a thief a few pennies, ha’pence, shilling, or doubloon in exchange. The unwary and stupid proved themselves fair game.
In front of one busy saloon a large ring of people danced and cavorted in the lamplight, flowing this way and that in a great circle in time to the music of a fiddle and a concertina, along with a third man clanging out a steady rhythm on the bottom of a brass kettle.
Across that narrow lane from the revelers half-dressed women leaned on their elbows from open windows on both floors of a two-story brothel, many drinking and smoking expensive meerschaum pipes as they conversed with those below in the street. Flesh advertised because flesh was for sale. Necks and shoulders bared, breasts all but spilling forth from skimpy, wispy turns of cambric and calico, some of it trimmed with lace. Titus stood agog as one woman caught his eye, beckoned him over as she leaned out, her exposed and pendulous breasts hanging like fat udders craving a man’s fondling.
He looked over, staring, unbelieving at their size.
“Get along here, Titus,” Reuben snarled, snagging Bass’s arm and yanking him away from the whore’s outstretched arm. “We ain’t here tonight looking to find a knocking shop for you. Think back to the last time you had diddling on your mind—we nearly got us all kill’t.”
Then Bass remembered Annie Christmas’s gunboat. Natchez, and that mob intent on something unspoken, but murderous all the same. Recalled that bloodied scene: those dead men and the whore Kingsbury had gutted. Thinking on the look in those yellowed eyes, the dangerous, feral fear chiseled across the shiny black face of that big, smooth-headed slave who had worked the bar for Annie Christmas.
“Hey, you there: Kentucky boy!” the bare-breasted whore called out in singsong, lisping slightly what with missing some of her front teeth. She waved, tilting her head and lifting one of her breasts, beckoning him to her window. “C’mon over here and show me what it is all you Kentucky boys know about a woman!”
“That’s Madame Laforge’s place,” Reuben declared, tugging Bass away from the window. “You go in there—a feller like you won’t ever come back out!”
“W-why … they likely to kill me in that place too?”
The boatman snorted. “Hell, no! Not in there! Madame Laforge’s girls just hump a young’un like you till
