Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Dust

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Benjamin January

Book 3



Graveyard Dust



Barbara Hambly



For Mary Ann



Special thanks to those, in New Orleans and elsewhere, who have helped me with this book: to

Paul Nevski of Le Monde Creole; to the Staff of the Historic New Orleans Collection; to Tim

Trahan of Animal Arts in New Orleans; to Priestess Miriam of the Voodoo Spirit Temple; to

Greg Osborn of the New Orleans Public Library; to Adrian and Victoria; to Kate Miciak; to

Diana Paxson; and always, to George.

TERMINOLOGY OF VOODOO

Since voodoo terms were originally transliterated from various West African languages through

creolized French, spelling is a matter of guesswork. I have in most cases used the modern Haitian

spellings and names as found in Metraux's Voodoo in Haiti, the starting point of much of my

research.

The shape and structure of voodoo in Louisiana in the 1830s is something that can only be

guessed at. Refugees fleeing the uprisings in Sainte Domingue (the island now divided into Haiti

and Santo Domingo) brought extensive voodoo beliefs with them to a land that already had its

own variants of these same practices, and much depended on the religion's interaction with its

immediate surroundings. In Haiti, after the black revolution, voodoo became an accepted

religion; in Louisiana its evolution was marked by external pressures from the prevailing

Christianity and culture. In addition, the voodoo loa tends to proliferate: There are dozens of

variations of the spirit Ezili (or Erzuli), of Ogu (Ogou)-Ogu Feray, Ogu Badagri, Ogu Osanyl,

and Sen (or San) Jak, Maje and others-of Baron (or Bawon) Samedi or Cemetery, also known as

Baron La Croix. I have simplified as much as I can without doing violence to what I understand

to be the basic tenets of the religion.

Some loa:

Ogzc (or Ogou)-warrior spirit of justice, often depicted as a soldier; frequently identified with

Saint James the Greater Shango-blacksmith spirit, also warrior; a spirit of iron and fire

Ezili (or Erzuli)-spirit of womanhood, in various incarnations a mother and an Aphrodite flirt

Baron Samedi (or Baron Cemetery)-lord of the dead, often depicted as an obscene trickster, lord

of the Guédé

Guédé--family of dark and dangerous spirits, spirits of power and death

Papa Legba (or Limba)-ruler of the crossroads, of doorways and bridges, and of transition states;

he is the first loa petitioned in Haitian ritual, that he may open the doors for the other loa to pass

through

Damballah-Wedo--the sacred serpent, spirit of the rainbow and of water; called also the Zombi-

Damballah

Bosou-bull spirit of potency and strength

The loa may possess worshipers of either their own identified gender, or the opposite, and may

possess them to various degrees. Some "horses," as the possessed are called, do not remember

things said and done during their possession; the woman I talked to who had been possessed by

Ogu said she was perfectly aware of herself, but observing: craving cigars, for instance (which

Ogu loves, though the woman possessed was a nonsmoker), and rum.

Other voodoo terms:

vèvès-complex designs drawn on the ground to focus or summon the loa

hougan-voodoo priest or "king" in old New Orleans terminology

mambo-voodoo priestess or "queen"

gris gris-an amulet or charm

tricken bag--amulet made of several ingredients sewn together in a bag, usually a gris-gris of ill

luck or malice

wanga (or ouanga)-spell

wangateur or root-doctor--magician, sorcerer

congris-mixture of black-eyed peas and rice, a favored food of the loa

ONE

African drums in darkness sullen as tar.

Rossini's "Di tanti palpiti" unspooling like golden ribbon from the ballroom's open windows.

Church bells and thunder.

Benjamin January flexed his aching shoulders and thought, Rain coming. Leaning on the corner

of Colonel Pritchard's ostentatious house, he could smell the sharp scent in the hot weight of the

night, hear the shift in the feverish tempo of the crickets and the frogs. The dim orange glow of

an oil lamp fell through the servants' door beside him, tipping the weeds beyond the edge of the

yard with fire.

Then the air changed, a cool flash of silkiness on his cheek, and he smelled blood.

The drums knocked and tripped, dancing rhythms. Fairly close to the house, he thought. This far

above Canal Street the lots in the American suburb of St. Mary were large, and few had been

built on yet. Ten feet from kitchen, yard, and carriage house grew the native oaks and cypresses

of the Louisiana swamps, as they had grown for time beyond reckoning. January picked out the

voices of the drums, as on summer nights like this one in his childhood he'd used to tell frog from

frog. That light knocking would be a hand drum no bigger than a vase, played with fast-tripping

fingertips. The heavy fast thudding was the bamboula, the log drum-a big one, by the sound. The

hourglass-shaped tenor spoke around them, patted sharply on both sides.

One of the men on the plantation where January had been born had had one of those. He'd kept it

hidden in a black oak, back in the cipridre, the swamp beyond the cane fields. Forty years ago,

when the Spanish had ruled the land, for a slave to own a drum was a whipping offense.

"Not meaning to presume, sir." Aeneas, Colonel Pritchard's cook, stepped from the kitchen's

gold-lit arch and crossed the small yard to where January stood at the foot of the back gallery

stairs. "But I'd be getting back up to the ballroom were I you." A stout man of about January's

own forty-one years, the cook executed a diffident little half bow as he spoke. It was a tribute to

January's status as a free man, though the cook was far lighter of skin. "Colonel Pritchard's been

known to dock a man's pay, be he gone for more than a minute or two. I seen him do it with a

fiddle player, only the other week."

January sighed, not surprised. The kitchen's doors and windows stood wide to the sweltering

night, and the nervous glances thrown by the cook, the majordomo, and the white-jacketed waiter

toward the house every time one of them cracked a joke or consumed a tartlet that should have

gone on the yellow-flowered German china told its own story.

"Thank you." January drew his gloves from his coat pocket and put them on again, white kid and

thirty cents a pair, and even that movement caused bolts of red-hot lightning to shoot through his

shoulder blades, muscles, and spine. He'd been a surgeon for six years at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris

and knew exactly how heavy a human arm was, but it seemed to him that he'd never quite

appreciated that weight as he did now, after an hour and a half of playing quick-fire waltzes and

polkas on the piano with an injury that hadn't healed.

A shift of the night air brought the smell of smoke again, the knocking of the drums, and the hot

brief stink of blood. His eyes met the cook's. The cook looked away.

Not my business, thought January, and mounted the stairs. He guessed what was going on.

The air in the ballroom seemed waxy and thick as ambergris: one could have cut it in slices with

a wire. Pomade and wool, spilled wine and the gas lamps over head, and-because at least two-

thirds of the guests were Americans-the acrid sweet sourness of spit tobacco. January edged

through the servants' door and, behind the screen of potted palmettos and wilting vines that

sheltered the musicians, sought to resume his seat at the piano as inconspicuously as it was

possible for a man six feet, three inches tall; built like a bull; and black as a raw captive new-

dragged down the gangplank of a slave ship from the Guinea coast, and never mind the neat

black coat, the linen shirt and white gloves, the spotless cravat.

Hannibal Sefton, who'd been distracting the guests from the fact that there hadn't been a dance for

nearly ten minutes, glanced at him inquiringly and segued from "Di tanti" into a Schubert lied;

January nodded his thanks. The fiddler was sheet white in the gaslight and perspiration ran down

the shivering muscles of his clenched jaw, but the music flowed gracefully, like angels dancing.

January didn't know how he did it. Since an injury in April, January had been unable to play at

any of the parties that made up his livelihood in America-he should not, he knew, be playing

now; but finances were desperate, and it would be a long summer. He, at least, he thought, had

the comfort of knowing that he would heal.

Voices around them, rough and nasal in the harsh English tongue January hated:

"Oh, hell, it's just a matter of time before the Texians have enough of Santa Anna. Just t'other day

I heard there's been talk of them breakin' from Mexico. . . ."

"Paid seven hundred and thirty dollars for her at the downtown Exchange, and turns out not only

was she not a cook, but she has scrofula into the bargain!"

Colonel Pritchard was an American, and a fair percentage of New Orleans's American business

community had turned out to sample Aeneas's cold sugared ham and cream tarts. But here and

there in the corners of the room could be heard the softer purr of Creole French.

"Any imbecile can tell you the currency must be made stable, but why this imbecile Jackson

believes he can do so by handing the country's money to a parcel of criminals. . . ."

And, ominously, "My bank, sir, was one of those to receive the redistributed monies from the

Bank of the United States. . . ."

"You all right?" Uncle Bichet leaned around his violoncello to whisper, and January nodded. A

lie. He felt as if knives were being run into his back with every flourish of the piano keys. In the

pause that followed the lie, while January, Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and nephew Jacques changed

their music to the "Lancers Quadrille," the drums could be clearly heard, knocking and tapping

not so very far from the house.

You forget us? they asked, and behind them thunder grumbled over the lake. You play Michie

Mozart's little tunes, and forget all about us out here drumming in the ciprière?

All those years in Paris, Michie Couleur Libre in your black wool coat, you forget about us?

About how it felt to know everything could be taken away? Father-mother-sisters all gone?

Nobody to know or care if you cried? You forget what it was, to be a slave?

If you think a man has to be a slave to lose everything he loves at a whim, January said to the

drums, pray let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholira and to her who in her life was my wife.

And with a flirt and a leap, the music sprang forward, like a team of bright-hooved horses,

swirling the drums' dark beat away. Walls of shining gold, protecting within them the still center

that the world's caprices could not touch.

In the strange white gaslight, alien and angular and so different from the candle glow in which

most of the French Creoles still lived, January picked out half a dozen women present in the

magpie prettiness of second mourning, calling cards left by Monsieur le Cholera and his local

cousin Bronze John, as the yellow fever was called. Technically, Suzanne Marcillac Pritchard's

birthday ball was a private party, not a public occasion, suitable even for widows in first

mourning to attend-not that there weren't boxes at the Theatre d'Orleans closed in with

latticework so that the recently bereaved could respectably enjoy the opera.

And in any case, it would take more than the death of their immediate relatives to keep the ladies

of New Orleans's prominent French and Spanish families from a party. Marion Desdunes-that

very young widow gazing wistfully at the dancers-had lost a brother to the cholera last summer

and a husband the summer before. Delicate, white-haired Madame Jumon, talking beside the

buffet to Mrs. Pritchard, had only last summer lost her middleaged son.

Always entertained by the vagaries of human conduct, January distracted himself from the pain in

his arms and back by picking out exactly where in the ballroom the frontier between American

and French ran, an invisible Rubicon curving from the second of the Corinthian pilasters on the

north wall, to a point just south of the enormous, carven double doors opening to the upstairs hall.

French territory centered around Mrs. Pritchard, plump and plain and sweet faced, and the

brilliantly animated Madame Jumon, though now and then a Creole gentleman would pass that

invisible line to discuss business with the Colonel's friends: bankers, sugar brokers, importers,

and landlords, the planters having long since departed New Orleans for their acres. Every so often

one of the younger Americans would solicit the favor of a dance with one of Mrs. Pritchard's

younger Marcillac or Jumon cousins and to do them justice, January had to admit that for

Americans they were as well behaved as they probably knew how to be. For the most part, the

damsel would be rescued by a brother or a cousin or a younger uncle twice-removed who would

reply politely that Mademoiselle was desolate, but the dance was already promised to him. When

MadamMjumon's surviving son, a craggily saturnine gentleman of forty-five, showed signs of

leading Pritchard's middle-aged maiden sister out onto the floor, Madame quickly excused herself

from conversation and intercepted the erring gallant; January was hard put to hide a smile.

"Don't see what they got to be stuck-up about," grumbled a short, badly pomaded gentleman with

a paste ruby the size of an orange pip in his stickpin. "I don't care if their granddaddies were the

King of Goddam France, they're citizens of the United States now, just like we are. I got a good

mind to go back and take that gal's brother to account. . . ."

"Mr. Greenaway, please!" Emily Redfern, a stout little widow-who a moment ago had been

bargaining like a Levantine trader with the burly Hubert Granville of the Bank of Louisiana-laid a

simpering black-mitted hand on the pomaded gentleman's arm. "That was Desiree Lafrenniere!

Of course her family. . . ." The Widow Redfern, January knew, had been trying for years to get

on the good side of the old Creole families. Little did she know how impossible that task was.

Mr. Greenaway's pale blue eyes moved from the widow's square-jawed, cold-eyed countenance

to her exceedingly expensive pearls. He smiled ingratiatingly. "Well, if it wouldn't intrude on

your grief too much, M'am, perhaps you would favor me by sitting this one out with me. . . ."

"I'll lay you it'll be Greenaway and Jonchere, before midnight," said Hannibal Sefton, when an

hour and a half later he and January slipped down the back stairs for a breath of air. "Greenaway's

been drinking like a fish and he always starts up on the Bank of the United States when he does

that. Jonchere's called out the last two men who supported Jackson. . . ."

"I'll put my money on the Colonel himself," said January, and gingerly moved his shoulder again.

There had to be some position in which he didn't hurt.

"Call out one of his own guests?" Hannibal took his laudanum bottle from his pocket and took a

swig; then offered it hospitably to January, who waved it away. He'd seen, and heard, Hannibal

play like the harps of Heaven when he was so lubricated as to be barely coherent, but for himself

music was a matter for the mind as well as for the soul. And the thought of being that defenseless

terrified him. Being barely able to lift his own arms was fearful enough.

"A Frenchman? I think he'll call out either Bringier or Madame Jumon's son. . . ." For close to a

year now January and Hannibal had entertained themselves at every engagement they played by

laying wagers on who would challenge whom to an affair of honor before the evening was

through. It was fortunate they played for pennies-or picayunes, at this low ebb of the season-for

January could have won or lost a fortune at the game.

"Mathurin? With the Jumon money I'd think Pritchard would thank him for showing interest in

that poor sister of his."

A sharp rustle sounded in the trees to the side of the house. January held up his hand, listening.

The drums were silent.

Aeneas and the original waiter had been joined by a third man, young and barely five feet tall,

hastily buttoning a white linen jacket and rinsing something off his hands with water dipped from

the rain barrel. With him was a young woman in the first stages of pregnancy, retying the

headscarf that all women of color, slave or free, were by law required to wear. They turned

immediately to lay out the slices of beef and ham, the tarts and cakes and petits fours, on the

yellow-flowered plates. "I'll be back," said January softly. He slipped down the gallery steps and

around the corner of the house into the trees.

Given the trouble his curiosity had caused him in the past, January reflected that he should know

better. In any case, he had a good idea of what he would find in the darkness where the trees got

thick. Though by this time, he told himself, if she'd been there-been part of it-she'd be gone.

And what good would it do me to know? He didn't want to admit it, but the brought back

memories.

Mats of leaves and pale shaggy curtains of moss quickly obscured the bright cool rectangles of

the windows. Light glinted on puddles of standing water, and the ground gave squishily

underfoot. Twenty feet from the house, January scented blood again and the heavy grit of drums

had quenched smoke still hanging in the air. He listened, but all was still.

Even so, he felt their eyes. Not those who'd risked a whipping to sneak out and follow the sound

of the drums. Not those who'd sung the keening, eerie, driving rhythms of those songs in a half-

forgotten tongue. The eyes he felt on his back were the eyes of those they'd come to see, to touch;

to sing to and to give themselves to, flesh and hearts and souls.

January knew them well.

Papa Legba, guardian of all gates and doors, warden of the crossroad.

Beautiful Ezili, in all her many forms. Zombi-Damballah, the Serpent King.

Ogu of the sword and the fire January quickly pushed the thought of that burning-eyed warrior

from his mind.

And the Baron Samedi, the Baron Cemetery, boneyard god grinning white through the darkness. .

. .

A hundred feet from the house, trees had been felled. Here new construction would begin with

the first frost of autumn. Embers still glowed where a pit had been dug, quenched now with dirt.

From his pocket January took a box of lucifers, and scratched one on the paper. It showed him

the rucked earth where the veves had been drawn, the dark spatters of spilt rum and the darker

dribblings of blood. Near the pit a headless black chicken lay, feet still twitching, ringed by

fragmented silver Spanish bits. Two plates also lay on the ground, each likewise surrounded by

silver. One was heaped with rice and chickpeas. The other held a cigar and a glass of rum.

Those whose aid had been sought were known for liking tobacco, rum, and blood.

January lit another match and stepped closer, careful where he put his feet. The plates were white

German porcelain, painted with yellow flowers. Around them, inside the ring of silver, dark

against the paler dust of the ground, a line had been drawn in sprinkled earth.

If it had been salt, January knew, it would have been bad enough. Salt was the mark of curses and

ill. But this wasn't salt.

It was graveyard dust, a cursing to the death.

There was nothing else, no sign to tell him who might have been here, who had done the rite.

She's probably home in bed. Nothing to do with this at all.

January crossed himself and walked swiftly back to the house. Though the drums had ceased, he

seemed to hear them, knocking in the growl of the thunder, in the darkness at his back.

Colonel Pritchard was waiting for him on the gallery. "When I pay four men for five hours I don't

expect to get only four hours and a half." The American studied January with light tan eyes that

seemed too small for his head. As far as January knew, the man had never been a colonel of

anything-there was certainly nothing of the military in his bearing-but he knew better than to omit

the title in speaking to him.

"No, Colonel," he said, in his best London English. "I am most sorry, sir. I heard a noise, as if of

an intruder, around . . ."

"I have servants to deal with noises if that's what you heard." The dust-colored eyes cut to

Hannibal, who smiled sunnily under his graying mustache; Pritchard's mouth writhed with

disgust. "And when I pay for four men for five hours I don't expect to get only three men and a

half. And you a white man, too." He plucked the flask from the pocket of Hannibal's shabby,

long-tailed black coat. Pulling the cork, the Colonel made another face. "Opium! I reckon that's

what happens when you spend your days playing music with Negroes." He hurled the flask away,

and January heard it smash against the brick of the kitchen wall.

"I suppose that means an end to the champagne as well," Hannibal noted philosophically as they

followed the master of the house back up the stairs. He coughed heavily, January reaching out to

catch him by the arm as he half-doubled over with the violence of the spasm. Pritchard glanced

over his shoulder at them from the top of the stairs, impatience and disdain on his heavyfeatured

face. "Just as well. I think we've seen the last of the chamber pot, too."

They remained in the ballroom, under the Colonel's sour eye, until two in the morning. Despite

the open windows, the room only grew hotter, and the pain in January's back and shoulders

increased until he thought he would prefer to die. Your back carries the music, he was always

telling his pupils. Strong back, light hands. It surprised him that he was able to play at all.

At around eleven, after a particularly gay mazurka, Aeneas came to the dais with a tray of

lemonade. "What's that?" Pritchard loomed at once from among the potted palms. "Who told you

to give these men anything?"

"Mrs. Pritchard did, sir." The cook's English wasn't good, but he took great care with it, as if he

feared the consequences of the smallest mistake.

"Mrs. Pritchard-" The Colonel turned to his wife, who, probably anticipating the objection, had

positioned herself not far away. "I thought I made it abundantly clear that I'm paying these men in

coin, after they have satisfactorily completed their duties, and not by permitting them to make

themselves free with my substance."

"It's such a very hot night, Colonel," she said soothingly. Her English was just as awkward-and

just as wary-as the cook's. "And, you understand, it is what is done. . . ."

"It is not `done' in this house. . . ."

During their low-voiced altercation Aeneas stepped back beside the piano where January sat and

whispered, "There's a boy back in the kitchen asking after you, Michie January. Says he's got to

see you. Says he's your nephew."

"Gabriel?" January looked up, trying to cover the fact that his arms were too weak from the strain

of playing to reach for the lemonade. It was far later than his sister Olympe would ever have

permitted any child of hers to be on the streets.

Panic touched him at the recollection of the drums, the blood. . . .

"That's what he says his name is, yes, sir. He says he has a message for you, but he wouldn't tell

me what." January glanced at his employer. Pritchard was already looking over at him, clearly

expecting the next dance to start up. "I don't think I'm going to be able to get over there until the

end of this."

Equally impossible, of course, that the Colonel would consent to write out permission for any of

his servants to escort the boy home.

"He's no trouble," Aeneas assured January. "I'll tell him he has to wait. He's already asked if he

can help with the tarts and the negus."

That certainly sounded like Gabriel. But as he maneuvered his arms back to where the edge of the

piano would take the weight of them and struck up the country dance "Mutual Promises," January

felt his heart chill with dread. Something had happened.

He felt sick inside.

Let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholera, he had said to the drums that had mocked him for

the hard-won security of his freedom, for the complex beauties of the music that was his life.

January could still remember the first time he'd met St.-Denis Janvier, the sugar broker who had

purchased his mother, himself, and his sister Olympe. Could still see in his mind the man's close-

fitting coat of bottle-green satin and the fancy-knit patterns of his stockings, the eight gold fobs

and seals that hung on his watch chain. Could still feel the rush of relief that went through him

when that paunchy little man had told him, I have purchased your beautiful mother in order to set

her free, and you, too, and your sister. Relief unspeakable.

I'll be safe now.

No more nightmares about his mother going away, as others on the plantation had gone so

abruptly away. No more fear that someone would one day say to him, You are going to go live

someplace else now-someplace where he knew no one.

All his life, it seemed to him, he had wanted a home, wanted a place where he knew he was safe.

He'd been eight. It had taken him a little time to learn to be a free man, to learn the ins and outs of

a different station, what was and was not permitted. To learn to speak proper French and not say

tote for "carry," or aw when he meant "bien stir. " But throughout the boyhood spent in the

garçonnière behind the house on Rue Burgundy that St.-Denis Janvier gave his new mistress,

throughout the years of schooling in one of the small private academies that catered to the

children of white men and their colored plaçées, January had never lost that sense of being, in his

heart of hearts, on firm footing. At least the worst wasn't going to happen. At least he wasn't

going to be taken away from those he loved.

From "Mutual Promises" they whirled into "A Trip to Paris." The ladies laughed and skipped in

their bellshaped skirts, their enormous lace-draped sleeves that stood out ten inches from their

arms; gentlemen flirted decorously as they held out white-gloved hands to white-gloved hands.

Mr. Greenaway of the pomaded curls hovered protectively around the wealthy Widow Redfern,

fetching her crepes and tarts and lemonade and presumably soothing her not-very-evident grief

while she talked business with Granville the banker. Granville himself showed surprising

lightness of step in dancing with his drab little pear-shaped wife and with every pretty maid and

matron on the American side of the room. From the sideline, Mrs. Pritchard watched with

resigned envy.

The American ladies all seemed plainer than their French counterparts, duller, an effect January

knew wasn't entirely owing to having less sense of dress. No American lady would be seen in

public, even at a ball, in the rice powder and rouge that no Creole lady would be seen without. It

seemed to him, too, that they laughed less.

He supposed if he were a woman married to an American he wouldn't laugh much, either.

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