Libre
by
Barbara Hambly
“If they fear she has been kidnapped, why not
call the City Guard?” Benjamin January paused on the steps that led
up to the gallery of the garçonnière, looking down at his mother in
the narrow yard. He’d just returned from teaching his first
piano-class of the winter – new students, Americans, in the suburb
of St. Mary up-river – and had been hoping to get a few hours’ nap
before he had to dress up again and play for a subscription ball
over on Rue Orleans. There was a saying among the musicians of New
Orleans, You can sleep during Lent – which wasn’t entirely
true because the holy season was dotted with “exceptions,” like
Washington’s Birthday balls – but the week or two after the first
frost were always the worst. He’d played for the opening of the
French Opera House last night, and had gone on to provide
quadrilles and pantaleones at a ball at the town-house of a wealthy
sugar planter. The sellers of fresh milk and crayfish had been
beginning their morning rounds when he’d finally returned to his
room above his mother’s kitchen.
Afternoon coffee with his mother’s friends
was not something he wanted to deal with on three hours of sleep,
particularly not when his mother had that glint in her eye.
“The City Guard.” Livia Levesque sniffed.
“You know what they are, my son. If a slave disappears they’ll
sober up and hunt for the thief because the owner will give them a
reward. If a libre disappears—” She used the Spanish term
for their people, the free people of color, though Louisiana hadn’t
been a possession of Spain for thirty years now. “—they have other
things to do. You come downstairs now, Ben. Poor Madame Rochier is
nearly mad with fear and grief.”
That his mother was up to something – that
there was something about the disappearance of eighteen-year-old
Marie-Zulieka Rochier that she wasn’t going to admit in her first
pre-emptory demand that he undertake the search – January guessed
from his mother’s tone, and the way she held her head. He was
forty-one, and had consciously noticed before the age of four –
when she and he and his younger sister Olympe had all still been
slaves on a sugar-plantation upriver – all the signs when she was
doctoring some unpalatable truth.
When he followed her into the dining-room of
the trim little cottage on Rue Burgundy he was sure of it.
Casmalia Rochier was certainly afraid, and
certainly upset. But in her dark eyes and in the set of her perfect
mouth, as she turned her head to reply to a question, was a world
of suspicion and frozen rage.
Like January’s mother – like the other four
women sipping his mother’s cook’s excellent coffee around the
cherrywood table – Casmalia Rochier was a plaçee , the free
colored mistress of a wealthy white man. Many years ago, according
to custom, banker Louis Rochier had bought her a house and settled
on her the income to raise their mixed-race children in comfort and
safety. A similar arrangement between January’s mother and St-Denis
Janvier, now long gathered to his ancestors, had paid for both the
music lessons that led to his current profession, and the medical
training in France that had proved to be so completely useless the
moment he returned to the United States... and of course had paid
for this house.
A similar arrangement existed between
January’s youngest sister Dominique – currently passing Casmalia
the sugar – and a young sugar-planter; between his old friend
Catherine Clisson, who smiled a welcome to him as he came into the
room, and another equally wealthy planter. An arrangement like that
had provided the foundation of Bernadette Métoyer’s chocolate-shop
and the investments that paid for the gowns of the four daughters
Agnes Pellicot was trying to “place” in arrangements of their own.
Bernadette and Agnes were both angrily denouncing the New Orleans
City Guards to Casmalia and barely glanced at
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