Dance on the Wind

there’s nothing left but your moccasins!”

With a shudder he let Root turn him away, hurrying past the gay dancers to duck within the saloon behind Kingsbury and Ovatt. This mingling of dialects and tongues, a cacophony of odors and aromas that assaulted his nostrils as they pierced the lamplit gloom of that teeming grogshop, were enough to make Titus believe he had entered a whole new world. This could not be part of the United States.

“Lookee there,” Heman Ovatt cried out, indicating the bar where stood a long line of customers, most of whom were copper-skinned Indians and indigo-eyed freedmen, “drinking just like they was white men.”

“You of a sudden got something against a Negra having hisself a drink?” Kingsbury asked, slamming an open palm into Heman’s chest.

Ovatt shook his head. “Naw, I s’pose not—just as long as they don’t drink my share.”

“You ever see a Injun drinking?” Root asked Titus.

“Nary a slave neither,” Bass replied.

“Them ain’t slaves,” Kingsbury explained. “Them’s the Negras bought themselves their freedom, or had it bought for ’em by their owner.”

“Still ain’t never gonna be like a goddamned white man,” Ovatt grumbled.

“Negra works his job, same as you and me,” Reuben began. “How you figure that’s so bad?”

Shrugging, Ovatt declared, “Don’t know what to think about it. I guess I just figured there’d allays be slaves, and there’d allays be those what owned slaves. It were the way of things when I was growing up—simple as that.”

Sliding his arm over Titus’s shoulder, Kingsbury said, “Down here things aren’t near as simple as they likely was for you back home. Now, fellas—we ain’t having ourselves but a couple of drinks tonight before we get on back to the boat and the woman. We all need our heads clear tomorrow while’st we sell our cargo.”

“Just two drinks,” Reuben repeated, looking at Titus. “Then we’ll go.”

Then Ovatt turned to Bass. “So I s’pose that means Reuben and me gotta keep a eye on Titus here, just so he don’t go getting in any trouble with no fat whores this time!”

“Ah, leave the young’un be,” Kingsbury protested as they reached the long, crude counter and waited for one of the bar lackeys to amble over. “Ain’t his fault them two yellow-striped back-stabbers walked right onto Annie Christmas’s gunboat when they did. Young’un was just there to get hisself diddled.”

Ovatt turned to the pilot, asking, “Ain’t we gonna visit none of them knocking shops cross the way this time down, Hames?”

“Back to Natchez, taking care of your pizzers near got us all killed,” Kingsbury said as a barman approached. “So we get our work done, you just be sure this time you have your fun with some gals what won’t try to lift your purse or slit your throat.”

Came the bored question, “What’ll it be?”

Kingsbury replied, “A goodly portion of your finest phlegm-cutter for my crew, good man!”

“Lemme first see the color of your money,” advised the wary barman.

Onto the bar the pilot promptly hammered down his hard money.

“Don’t want none of your usual stuff,” Ovatt demanded. “Only your best antifogmatic will do for us’n!”

“Twenty shillings a bottle,” the barman said, sweeping up what he needed from the scattering of coins. All manner of specie was welcomed in trade anywhere along the river, but no more so than in New Orleans itself, where a brief roll with a woman would cost no more than a mere fivepence.

“Just have you a look at these, Hames,” Reuben complained a few minutes later as the mugs and bottle were slammed down before them and the raucous noise swelled around them. “These are all coarse frolickers and braggarts what ain’t got no bottom! Hell—give us a chance and we could drink the balls off any of ’em!”

Instead, the four did as they were ordered and drank slowly at their green bottle of smooth corn whiskey, something of a pleasant change from their fillee of Monongahela rye that had been their mainstay on the trip down—that daily ration usually no more than a gill, or quarter pint. Why, to pick up and leave these riverside grogshops and beer-sties before he had himself a head of alcohol-powered steam under his belt went completely against character for most any Kentucky boatman. More often than not for those who reached New Orleans after a long, ofttimes monotonous, sometimes invigoratingly dangerous journey, it seemed the greatest desire was to determine who among them could swallow the most liquor, whoop up with the most abandon and brawling, and carouse with one whore after another until the peep o’ day. After all, a riverman must always drink his full share, or he might well catch what their breed chose to call the “dry rot.”

Come now to this most southern port of call, the watermen did their best to live up to that compelling reputation they had acquired: the “alligator-horse”—a hard-drinking, lawless, straight-shooting, crude, and ferocious fighter—the ultimate drifter.

But with that evening still young, they devotedly followed Hames Kingsbury from the rambunctious Mad Dutchman, threading the noisy, bustling alleyways, past lamplit corners, making for their flatboat secured at the far end of the levee.

In the midst of the marketplace, where vendors were closing their shacks and shanties in the murky twilight, Reuben dropped back a bit to walk beside Titus, where he whispered, “I truly do believe Kingsbury’s gone soft for that woman we drugged outta the river.”

“She seems a nice enough woman,” Bass replied.

“Was a time it didn’t matter to Hames how long we all stayed out the night afore Ebenezer was to sell off his cargo,” Reuben explained. “Truth is, Hames was one alligator-horse what’d howl all night. A real damned snapping turtle! So tell me now: ain’t it strange how a woman can change a man?”

“I … s’pose it is,” Bass replied as Kingsbury hurried them all along.

Indeed, it was likely very strange for the three veteran rivermen from the Ohio country to be plying their way back to the boat so early on their first night come to New Orleans. After all those downriver miles, most new arrivals had a spree to get out of their systems, every bit like men who had wandered too long in a wilderness, making stops only at Louisville, Natchez, and eventually here to slake their thirst for strong drink and their appetite for soft-skinned women. Most of the commerce in the Swamp, that dangerous section of New Orleans catering to the rivermen, relied primarily on satisfying every last one of those intense hungers magnified by the long downriver journey for those half-feral American frontiersmen. Truly, the watering holes, whorehouses, and gambling dens here on the lower Mississippi helped the river live up to its reputation as “the spillway of sin.”

Without hesitation the fun-loving, hospitable Creoles and Acadians of New Orleans opened their arms to all their visitors, gladly providing for the rivermen what those visitors wanted most. So warm was that welcome for the lusty boatmen that many Americans decided to stay on after cargo and boat were sold. A good number took up residence, never to return to the states from which they originally hailed.

Despite the hospitality of the longtime residents, Creole mothers in these parts nonetheless commonly scolded their children with the oath, “Toi, tu n’es qu’un mauvais Kaintock!”

“You, you’re nothing but a filthy little Kentuckian!”

The wharf and levee this night were alive around them with crowds and music, laughter and torchlight. They found the woman sitting atop a cask near the awning, where she could watch the bustle of New Orleans after dark.

“Beulah?” Hames called out.

“That you, fellas?”

The four of them scrambled over the gunnel one at a time.

“Thought you’d make it a late night,” the woman explained as she eased herself over by Kingsbury. “Our crew always did.”

“We got us a shitload of hard work come early in the morning,” the pilot explained. “After that these fellas can have their fun.”

She watched the skinny boatman move past her, then asked of his back, “And what about you, Hames? What you gonna do for fun now you come to Orlins?”

He stopped, but without turning around, Kingsbury shrugged, saying, “I been to Nawlins many times. Ain’t nothing new I gotta see. Ain’t nothing new I gotta do. Maybeso a man comes to a point where he’s had him enough of the bad whiskey and humping on them bang-tails.”

She replied softly, “Maybe a man comes to where he figures he wants a little more outta life’n what he’s already had so far.”