CHAPTER 3
Gray clouds muted the afternoon sun. Winter’s chill hung in the air. Talk about town was of tomorrow’s Twelfth Night parade and ball. Effie had made the mistake of asking Meg about this peculiar celebration and suffered a quarter hour’s explanation that meandered from the feast of the Epiphany to something about a golden bean and the beginning of Carnival. Had she not cut Meg off mid-sentence and walked away, Effie suspected she’d still be trapped in the parlor listening to an endless history of every krewe in the city.
Now, she hurried toward the business district. She’d not had a day off in well over a week, and her list of errands was tiresomely long. While others had filled the Christmas and New Year’s holidays with social calls and parties, Effie had traipsed from one end of the city to the other with her cooling table and embalming tools.
Death knows no respite, Captain Kinyon had said to her some years back in Indiana, and she found the same to be true here in the South. Lockjaw, consumption, childbed fever, grippe—so many cases they blurred together in her mind. More lasting were the sideways stares and all-too-audible whispers: Negress assistant, darkie, wench. Not that she hadn’t heard those words in Indiana; not that she wasn’t—what had Mr. Whitmark called her?—an odd fish there too. Another reason she preferred the dead: their silence.
Still, she was grateful for the uptick in business. She crossed the street and cut through Tivoli Circle. Despite the gray day and cold breeze off the river, the circle teemed with people. Effie navigated around them—the Italians tossing their weighted balls across the lawn, the toothless Creole woman peddling toadflax and pansies, the children trundling their hoops—and decided it best to avoid the circle in the future. Near the St. Charles Avenue exit the movement of the crowd slowed and eddied. Effie shimmied and shouldered through until a voice, low and resonate, snagged in her ear. She stopped. The voice rose above the din of the crowd like music, and though she couldn’t make out the exact words, the timbre and cadence seemed to vibrate inside her, stirring some memory just beyond her reach. She pushed in toward the sound.
“Republican rubbish,” an older white man said, shoving past her toward St. Charles. Two women, shielding their fair skin with parasols despite the sunless day, looked toward the center of the crowd with puckered expressions and shuffled away. Everyone else, however, stood transfixed. Most of those gathered were Negroes, and of those, most were men. They nodded their heads and murmured the occasional “yes, sir” and “don’t the good Lord know it.” Over their slouch hats and derbies, Effie caught glimpses of the speaker—a black man in his shirtsleeves and a brocade vest, standing on a low platform. She caught snatches of his words now too: progress, equality, opportunity.
Effie squeezed in closer until she could fully hear.
“Our brothers in Mississippi have already lost those rights promised them in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to our great Constitution, rights we paid for with our blood. Blood drawn first with the lash and then the sword, as our Great Emancipator said.”
His voice crescendoed and tapered like a well-written score, each word perfectly articulated, each pause allowing the weight of what he’d said to settle.
Effie had never cared overmuch for politics. Moving to New Orleans had not changed that. Her clients whispered and stared. Men who doffed their hats for white women brushed past her without thought on the streets. The steamboat she’d arrived on permitted coloreds to dine only after all the white folk had been served. Effie noticed these slights, recognized the injustice, but then, as she’d always done, tucked such notions away and focused on her work. Embalming took patience and care and attention to detail that left little room for thoughts as frivolous as politics.
Now, however, she stood inexplicably mired. The liveliness in the man’s voice, his conviction, his passion made her lean in and nod along with the others. A young boy came up beside her and thrust a handbill into her palm. He smiled, revealing a checkerboard of missing teeth, and moved on to the next bystander. Effie looked down at the flyer.
Ward Two Republicans Club
Weekly Meetings Tuesdays 7 p.m.,
1010 Constance Street
All Welcome
“Wait,” she called after the boy. “I don’t want this.” But he continued through the crowd, hoisting his flyer into unexpecting hands, and didn’t look back.
The man’s voice reclaimed her attention. He was speaking now of public accommodations, the right of any man to a seat at the theater, or racetrack, or restaurant, or—should he be thirsty and wish to imbibe—a stool at the saloon. The crowd chuckled.
“Hear, hear,” someone hollered. Another rapped his cane atop the walkway.
Effie caught herself smiling and quickly righted her expression. What was she doing here? Already she’d tarried too long. The shops would be closing soon, and she mightn’t have the chance to come back for days. She’d whittled her soap down to a sliver and used the last of her shoe polish yesterday. She needed tooth powder, new stockings, a length of twine to—
The gentleman in front of her stepped aside to say something to his companion, and for the first time, the orator stood before Effie in clear view.
Years of embalming had well acquainted her with variations of the human form—fat, thin, aged, youthful, muscled, wasted, crooked, straight. But she’d never seen a more perfect example, living or dead, than this man. His confident air suggested a man in his forties, but his dark, luminous skin—free as yet of lines or furrows—hinted at one much younger. Thirty perhaps, or younger still. He moved with graceful purpose as he spoke, turning to address each segment of the crowd, raising an arm, brandishing a loosely closed fist. His words no longer registered. It was the gentle slope of his wide-set shoulders that claimed her attention now, the outline of his deltoid and bicep muscles beneath his cotton shirt.
The bells of St. Patrick’s tolled the hour, startling Effie back to her senses. The sun, no more than a smudge of white behind the clouds, lolled closer to the far horizon. The Italian men had finished their game and quit the circle. The bustling crowd had thinned from the banquettes.
What foolery to linger as she’d done, listening to this political babble when more pressing needs abounded. At this hour, she had little hope of finishing her errands before the shops closed. If she left now, she might at least make it to the apothecary and hosier.
Then the speaker turned and looked in Effie’s direction. His heavily lashed eyes locked with hers. She forgot the soap and stockings and shoe polish. She forgot even to breathe. His earnest gaze penetrated her, singling her out as if she were the most enthralling person in the crowd. As if she were the only person in the crowd. His dark irises, the same glowing brown as his skin, held her there, affixed to the stone walkway as surely as iron nails.
“And you, miss? I see you are not blind to the ills of this fair city that so sorely try our souls. What issue would you bring forward for consideration?”
Effie glanced around her. Surely his question was meant for someone else. But no other women stood within a dozen paces of her. “Umm . . . er . . . the overcrowding of the cemeteries.”
Several in the crowd snickered, but the man silenced them with a wave of his hand. “No, the lady’s right.” He paused, and for the first time during his stumping seemed to grope for something to say. “We’ve not done enough at the statehouse to address the unsanitary conditions of the city, it’s true. And plots in the new cemetery in Metairie are a mighty high cost, such that the workingman is all but excluded. Yet another way they try to push the Negro and the immigrant out . . .”
He spoke on about injustices done the poor, the colored, the infirm. True enough, but not what Effie had meant. She really ought to attend to her errands, but she couldn’t leave such a misunderstanding uncorrected.
“All must rise,” he said now. “All must fight to ensure our collective advancement, to ensure that the rights granted us, not by man but by God Almighty, are realized by all.”
Effie waited for him to pause long enough that she might interject and explain herself. But his words continued unbroken, and his gaze slipped away. Likely he didn’t understand the gravity of the issue, for he said nothing more about the cemeteries. Effie tried to squeeze forward, to sidestep and shimmy through the horde. She made little progress. She stood on her tiptoes and waved her hand until those behind her complained they couldn’t see.
If she could just correct the man on her point of overcrowding, then she could be gone and to her errands. But his stubborn eyes avoided her, sweeping the crowd, resting here and there, glancing in her general direction without settling upon her as they had before.
Sometime later—Effie couldn’t tell if it had been ten minutes or fifty—applause sounded. The man stepped down from the banana box he’d used as a platform during his speech. Dozens of men circled around him, vying for a chance to shake his hand and offer their praise. Effie pressed in too, unladylike as it was, but found herself waiting just the same.
Slowly, the crowd dispersed. In its place, crept the cold. A few men yet tarried around the speaker, jabbering on about this or that. The young boy she’d seen earlier skipped about the circle, picking up abandoned handbills from the ground. He whistled as he went, the thin, shrill sound almost painful after listening to the man’s richly toned voice. Her feet ached from standing so long on the hard stone, and her stomach grumbled for supper. She craned her neck to see St. Patrick’s clock tower above the bald treetops. Already she regretted the afternoon’s dalliance and knew she’d rue it even more tomorrow when she ran out of soap.
When she faced forward again, the man was standing right in front of her.
“You stumped me a moment,” he said. The timbre of his voice was just as distracting up close, making molasses of her wits. Rosemary and perspiration wafted from his skin. “I thought for sure you’d say something about schooling or the recent spike in the cost of flour.”
“You mistook my point,” she managed at last.
“Oh?”
“What are we to do in an epidemic when we haven’t enough plots and gravediggers? When yellow fever struck in fifty-three they resorted to dumping bodies in ditches only to have them wash up later when it rained.”
He cocked his head and cleared this throat. “I . . . hadn’t thought of that. A good point.”
Effie bristled. He was just placating her now. “When you ask a woman her opinion, you shouldn’t assume she’ll make some dithering comment about domestic affairs.”
“Indeed not, I see.”
“And to your point about the unsanitary conditions of the city—”
He held up his hand and gave a tired smile. His teeth were large and white, nearly straight save for a narrow gap between his top incisors. “Come to our meeting and we can discuss the issue further then.”
“What meeting?”
He nodded to the forgotten flyer in her hand.
“Oh . . . no. I’m not politically inclined.”
“You seem rather so to me. And we could always use a spirited young woman like you.”
“Why should I concern myself with politics? My vote doesn’t count.”
The man smiled again, one side of his lips pulling slightly higher than the other. “The enfranchisement of our race goes far beyond the ballot box. Consider the integration of schools, or right to purchase a first-class rail ticket.”
“I could hardly afford a first-class ticket,” she said. His easy answers combined with the distracting line of his mouth irked her further.
“That’s another issue we fight for, fair wages.”
Effie shook her head, as much to clear her addled mind as to dissent.
“Think on it,” he said, nodding again to the flyer. And before she could say she most certainly would not think on it, he bowed and turned back toward his worn banana box.
A new group circled around him. The boy with his flyers. A stately woman perhaps twice Effie’s age. A crutch-wielding man whose lower leg was missing. The orator’s posture relaxed and he flashed them a smile more brilliant than any he’d shared with the audience. The woman offered him her hankie. He blotted his sweat-dappled forehead. The crippled man bent down with surprising agility and picked up the banana box. The young boy said something and they all laughed. Then the irksome man crouched down for the boy to clamber onto his shoulders.
Effie watched them leave, not turning from where she stood until the fading light and growing distance conspired to conceal them.