master.
“You go ’head an’ get off on your own now—anywhere you want,” the teamster boss cried over his shoulder as he brought the leather straps down onto the backs of his plodding oxen. “From here on out only place I stop is in town.”
When they realized the wheels would keep on rolling, the wayfarers crawled to the sidewalls and leaped to the hoof-pounded trail where mud puddles lay crusted in ugly ice lace.
Fearing that someone might well recognize them from the killings aboard Annie Christmas’s gunboat, the five hid among the thick undergrowth at the edge of town. Not far away stood the first of the immense canebrakes, each shaft standing nearly thirty feet tall, measuring a good two inches in diameter. Nearby squatted a jumble of run-down shacks where a woman might well take in wash during the day and work at keeping her legs spread at night, all to provide for a growing brood of children. Even in this chill as a metallic sun sank in the west, children scampered and played near enough that Titus could not just hear them, but watched them through the timber and underbrush.
How these dirty, poorly dressed urchins reminded him of his own brothers and sister in earlier days, reminded him of Amy Whistler’s own siblings.
“I could use a drink,” Ovatt grumped. “Ain’t had much of any since’t we was at Annie’s place.”
“What’d that drinking get us?” Root demanded dourly.
Turning to Kingsbury in disgust, Ovatt asked, “Can’t we just move around these here shanties and get on through town?”
The pilot shook his head. “You two just hush. We’ll wait.”
“Maybeso I can find something for you fellas to warm up on,” Beulah declared as she started to rise.
“What you got in mind?” Kingsbury demanded, seizing her wrist.
“A little liquor for the bunch of you,” she replied, glancing down at the hand he held around her arm. “A little ain’t gonna hurt, will it, now?”
He let her go. “No, no hurt it be. A damn fine idea, you have.”
As Beulah stood and straightened out her skirts beneath that secondhand coat purchased in New Orleans, then moved off toward the town as nonchalant as could be, Titus leaned back against the trunk of a chinaberry. Above him in its branches hung gray moss suspended like winter’s own tatters, tormented by the chill wind. Only yards away the streets of Natchez this sunset were beginning to bustle with barkers and pimps and highly rouged women emerging into the coming night, along with an assortment of tame pigs and wild dogs, as well as more of those dirty, unclaimed children.
Beyond the last of the poor shanties, Bass watched Beulah reach the first of the low, broken, half-sunken plank sidewalks. She stopped, as if she wanted to wave back at them, then turned without a gesture and kept on until she disappeared into the gloom of those dark streets. Into the bowels of the wildest hellhole on the Mississippi River.
Whereas the French were the first to build there around 1716, establishing their colony some three hundred miles—or ninety leagues—north of New Orleans, it was the Spanish who first sent their military expedition to that part of the new world. Late in the summer of 1540, de Soto, governor of the Island of Cuba, traversed the plains out of the southwest before he crossed the Mississippi near the future Natchez, packing along his own Negro slaves. There the knight commander of the Order of St. James of Compostela made contact with the peaceful Choctaw Indians, who for generations had performed their own bloody sacrifices at their White Apple Village. De Soto marched on with his army to reach the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, then the Cherokee in turn. By and large a peaceful people, these natives did not at first resist the intruders, even when de Soto’s priests began attempting to convert them from their heathen ways. For such Christians come to save unclean souls, their mission became a simple matter of converting the savages or killing them.
Yet it wasn’t until de Soto asked too much of his hosts by demanding Choctaw women to warm the beds of his soldiers that the tribe finally revolted. They drove the Spanish back to the banks of the great river. As the terrified soldiers and priests fled from the forests that seemed alive with an enemy behind every tree, the Spanish left behind their holy vestments, their eucharistie ornaments, even their sacramental wine. Suspicious, the Choctaw broke the clay jars used in the white man’s ceremonies, letting the fragrant crimson fluid soak into the ground. Every bit like that wine the priests had blessed, de Soto’s blood was soon to seep into the mud, and there beside the Mississippi the governor of Cuba lay down to die, his anonymous bones to rot for all of eternity.
It took nearly two hundred years more until a European culture would again dare to settle in the Mississippi Valley. By 1716 the French had come up from the West Indies to establish an outpost close by the White Apple Village of the Choctaw. Like the Spanish, the French were Catholic, bringing with them their own black-robed priests in charge of the vestments, sacraments, and wine. With only a brief interval when the British assumed temporary rule over the great river valley, the Spanish next took over under Governor Galvez just prior to the coming of the Americans in 1795. That same year the first steam-powered cotton gin arrived on the lower Mississippi. Already the Natchez District had proved itself as good a region as any other in the south for the growing of tobacco, sugarcane, and corn. Now it prepared to stand head and shoulders above the others in cotton.
To the north, east, and south of Natchez sprang up the great plantations scoured from the canebrake and cypress swamps. Great houses were raised, fields were cleared from the bayous, and roads blazed. All of it accomplished on the backs of the African slaves brought to New Orleans on tall-masted ships, auctioned on that great, bloody block of misery in the market square, then hauled north into the wilderness, not quite able to understand they were now the property of one of those wealthy landowners.
More than an hour later Beulah returned, the four corners of a scrap of blanket suspended over her shoulder to form a pouch. Coming awake in the dark and the cold, Titus moved with the other three boatmen into a tight circle as the woman set her bundle at her feet, then sank beside it.
Beulah pulled apart the corners, exposing two clay jugs, and said, “I got you fellas some tafia.”
Titus watched Ovatt pull the cork from one of the jugs and sniff it before turning the jug up to drink. He asked, “What’s tafia?”
“Rum.”
“But it’s better’n that Monongahela we drunk all the way downriver,” Root said, smacking his lips as he handed the second jug to Kingsbury.
“Try some,” Ovatt suggested, giving the first jug to Bass.
It truly tasted sweeter than the American backwoods rum, and well it should—as it was made of the finest sugarcane in the French West Indies.
“What else you get us?” Kingsbury inquired, fingering a slab of something dark. He brought it to his nose for a sniff.
Beulah said, “You’ll like that.”
“I bet I will,” the pilot replied, and took a bite.
“Salt meat fried in bear’s oil,” she told them. “Enough for you all to have a goodly portion for supper.”
For the most part they drank their tafia in silence, using it to wash down the seasoned meat and what biscuits she could find to purchase. At the same time, Kingsbury made it clear none of them were to drink enough to hobble them when it came time to push on through town. Overhead more clouds rolled in, shutting out the stars completely as some of them dozed on their full bellies.
It was near the middle of the night when Kingsbury tapped on the sole of Bass’s moccasin. The others were awake, dusting and shifting their clothing, shivering in the cold. Beulah stood at the edge of the brush, waiting expectantly.
“Like I told you, Hames—I figure you can keep to the edge of the woods until you get to the north side of town, where we’ll pick up the Trace.”
“There by Kings Tavern?”
With a nod she continued, “Place ain’t as dangerous as it might be. ’Pears there’s a train of slavers pushing through. They gone and chose to make a night of it at Kings Tavern.”
“Slavers?” Ovatt asked. “Jesus God!”
“Wagons and cages and such?” Kingsbury asked intently, ignoring Heman’s grumbling.
“Yeah,” Beulah replied. “The place is packed with wagons. Men was all over the yard, in and out. Though most of ’em gone inside to the fires when it got cold.”
“We’ll keep to the woods,” Kingsbury said, turning to the other three men. Then he led them out.
