CHAPTER 19
Her jail cell stank of urine. Cockroaches skittered across the stone floor. The room was too dark for her to see them unless they wandered into the small pool of light that spilled through the barred window of her cell door. Or that was cast by the moonlight through another barred opening high up in the wall. But she could hear them, the cockroaches, a constant patter of frenzied legs and dragging exoskeletons.
She wrapped her arms around herself and wished she’d had the presence of mind to bring a shawl. Then again, she’d not left Mrs. Neale’s—however many hours ago that was—expecting to pass the night in jail.
Perhaps she ought to have listened to the man when he told her to leave the stockyard. She’d believed him when he said he’d fetch the police, but at the time, that hadn’t seemed important. A few more minutes, that’s all she needed to fully remember. A chance to stand in the far corner and see the entire space laid out before her—the door that led to the traders’ office through which she’d first entered the yard after being sold by her master; the wooden cistern tucked around the corner where they drew water to drink and bathe; the outbuilding where they changed each morning from their rags into suits and calico dresses for show, where the traders polished their faces with oil and slicked their hair with tallow, where she first saw the tangle of scars on Jonesy’s back, a briar patch of raised flesh, when he pulled off his shirt to change; the heavy oak door at the back, still rigged with iron locks, leading out to the alley. She’d exited only once through that door, she and Jonesy and four or five others of the season’s dregs, coffled together, bound for whatever new hell awaited them.
Beyond that door, Effie remembered little. A few flashes of sound, of sight, of smell, but nothing concrete. Nothing from which she could glean where they’d gone or the name of their new master. Maybe if the man at the stockyard hadn’t accosted her before getting the police, grabbing her from behind and binding her with rope as if she were some wayward sow, maybe then she would have remembered more. She leaned back against the cold plaster wall of the cell. The crude stool beneath her creaked and wobbled.
No, likely not. She’d remembered all she could from the place. Her life before, her life after had been locked out as surely as she’d been locked in. What, then, did she have to show for the day? Two dollars gone to some Voodoo queen. The memory of this Jonesy—a man not her kin. Charges of vagrancy and trespassing, which might well cost her her livelihood once Mr. Whitmark found out. And a desire to scrub her skin raw. Not from the mud and pig shit clinging to her boots and skirts and stockings, but from those hands. All those men’s hands.
What she wouldn’t give for a bar of soap and pitcher of water! Hot, cold, it didn’t matter. If only she could likewise scrub her mind. She was done with this. Looking for her past. She’d tell Adeline straightaway. No more of these little excursions. Damn her anyway for meddling. Adeline just wanted to assuage her guilt—she who had a mother and a brother and had never been a slave.
Footfalls sounded in the hallway. Likely the police had rounded up another ruffian from the streets. A prostitute from down by the levee. A drunk passed out in the rail yard. But as the click-clack grew louder, she realized it came from only a single set of feet. A set of feet that stopped right before her door.
Effie sat forward and straightened. Dawn was hours off yet, the sliver of sky visible through her window lit only by the moon and stars. So whoever it was, they had not come to usher her before a judge for her arraignment, nor to toss another ne’er-do-well into her cell.
She readied her voice to scream. Surely those in the surrounding cells would hear. The other officers in the guardroom. But what could her fellow prisoners do if the man at the door attacked her? And the officers? Likely they’d grown deaf to such screams.
A key rattled in the lock. Strange how this was now familiar—the tiny, foul-smelling room, the barred windows, the click of rusty pins and springs, the foreboding. The door swung outward. The man before her, a tall, square-shouldered mulatto, said nothing but motioned for her to exit. Effie hesitated, but as he stepped back and glanced over his shoulder, his face caught the lamplight. She recognized him not only as the guard who’d taken down her name and led her to her cell earlier that evening, but from somewhere else as well.
He closed the cell door quietly behind her and, after another furtive look toward the guardroom, nodded down the hall in the opposite direction. They passed several cells before the hallway curved into darkness. The man grabbed a lamp off the wall and stepped around her, illuminating another short stretch of hallway, three descending steps, and a heavy wooden door. Effie’s hands went cold. Her feet shuffled her around the bend. She hesitated again at the top of the stairs, but he waved her down, a look of urgency in his eyes, and handed her the oil lamp.
“Hold this,” he whispered, and flipped through several keys bound together on an iron ring. Despite her stranglehold on the handle, the lamp quivered, the yellow flame hissing and sputtering. He looked up from the keys and laid his hand over hers around the handle. “I’m Hiram. I’ve seen you at the club meetings. I’ve called someone to take you home.”
He let go of her hand and returned to sorting through the keys. Effie replayed what he’d said through her mind. Yes, that was where she recognized him from. He sat a few rows from the front. Always made a point of talking to Samson and Tom afterward, and kissing Mrs. Carrière on the cheek before he left.
He fitted the key into the lock. When it wouldn’t turn, he tried another.
“But the charges . . .”
“I didn’t record your name, Miss Jones. You were never here.”
“I broke the law.” The whine of unoiled hinges sounded over her words. If he’d heard what she’d said, he made no show of it. A rush of cool air entered through the open door. Beyond it lay a dark side street, the sound of crickets, the smell of damp stone and day-old vegetable scraps. Freedom. She thought to repeat herself. She had in fact been trespassing, but it seemed a small turn of justice that after so many closed and locked doors, here, at last, was one open.
“Thank you, Mr. . . .”
“Elliott. Hiram Elliott.” He took the lamp from her and smiled.
Footsteps hurried down the street toward them. Effie shrank from the threshold, but Mr. Elliott stepped out unconcerned and greeted the newcomer. “Samson.” The sound of clapping hands. “She’s right here.”
For a moment, returning to her bleak, stinky cell seemed preferable to meeting Samson like this. Filth soddened her dress. Dust had dried with her sweat, making sandpaper of her skin. She hadn’t the energy to laugh, smile, nod, to use any of Adeline’s little tricks. And that woman from the saloon. The remembrance still made her sick.
Effie’s arms fell limp to her sides. Only a perfect fool would think of such things at a time like this. But after all that had happened today—or yesterday—whatever day it was, dabbling in Voodoo gris-gris, breaking into a private yard, inviting arrest, she could hardly claim to be anything but a perfect fool.
Had Samson not taken her elbow and shepherded her into the street, she might have lingered forever there in the doorway. He brushed a strand of hair from her face and held firm to her arm. “Miss Jones, are you all right?”
She managed a nod.
“A bit shaken, I think,” Mr. Elliott said.
Samson thanked him and bid him good night, then hurried her down the street. They didn’t speak until several blocks later when they’d reached the levee. Strange how quiet it was now, how still. A line of steamboats slumbered along the dock. Farther downriver the masts of fishing smacks and schooners bobbed and swayed against the black horizon. Her lungs welcomed the crisp air, expanding fully against her ribs for the first time in hours. It smelled of earth and river weeds here, of the tar-coated canvas draping the sugar barrels stacked about the dock.
The waxing moon hung pregnant above them, its light glinting off the water. Hadn’t it just risen when she clambered into the police cart? “What time is it?”
Samson patted his waistcoat pocket. “I hadn’t the presence of mind to bring my watch. A few hours before dawn, I’d venture.”
She noticed the stubble on his cheeks, the white crust at the corner of his eyes, the mismatch of his coat and trousers. “They woke you, then?”
“I’d only just gone to bed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sleep’s not so important.”
“On the contrary, necropsy done on the brains of mice after extended—” She stopped when she saw his smile. He was joking of course. Hadn’t wanted her to feel bad about the trouble she’d caused tonight. How different he seemed now than he had only a few short nights ago at the saloon. How attentive and caring. Just as he had the afternoon of Mardi Gras, the night of the ward meeting when they were alone in the alley. Her brain, perhaps suffering the same affliction as those mice, struggled to reconcile his behavior. Her heart, however, readily dismissed the contradiction, surrendering to his kindness without struggle at all.
“Miss Jones—”
“Effie.”
“Effie.” He stopped walking and faced her. “Sergeant Elliott’s man said you’d been arrested for trespassing and vagrancy. You needn’t tell me what happened, but is everything all right?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t tame her thoughts into words. Her newly unlocked memories remained raw and jumbled. Something else silenced her as well. Not some high-order reasoning, but a base and visceral feeling she couldn’t quite name. Her eyes retreated to the river. The moon’s pale reflection undulated like a ghost upon its surface.
Shame. That was the feeling.
Not because her hair and clothes were a mess. Not because she stank of pig excrement. Not because she’d been arrested and jailed.
She’d been a slave, subject to all its indignities. Her past was no longer an abstraction but a reality she could taste and smell and remember.
Samson coaxed her to walking again. “I was arrested once. No twice, I think. Just after the War. The usual charges. Vagrancy, impudence, swearing. They’d have arrested a black man just for breathin’ if they could in those days.”
Effie knew about the Black Codes, how hard the Southern Democrats had tried to clip the wings of Emancipation. It wasn’t a fair comparison. “I deserved to be arrested. I was trespassing.”
“Whoever you were trespassing on could have just asked you to leave.”
“He did. Several times. I ignored him.”
Samson laughed—a rich sound she drank through her ears like pure honey. “Now see, that don’t surprise me one bit.”
“You were a soldier during the War, weren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Seventy-fifth U.S. Colored Infantry.”
“And before that?” Effie knew the answer. She’d gleaned it from his speeches. From the stories other people told of him. She could hear it in his voice too, those country words and phrases and pronunciations that broke through his polished vernacular when he was particularly impassioned. From their first encounter in Tivoli Circle, she’d known it. But she wanted to hear him say it.
He steered her among towering piles of baled cotton awaiting passage on tomorrow’s ships and sat down on one of the shorter stacks. Effie sat beside him, her feet swinging just above the ground.
“I was a slave. A field hand. Up north a ways.” He pulled a wisp of cotton from a tear in the burlap and worked it between his fingers until it became a knotted ball. “I picked more of this shit than God had tears.” He threw the pea-sized ball onto the ground. “Sometimes I think I can still feel the fibers in my nose, my ears, wet and stringy on my tongue like they used to would get during pickin’ time.”
Effie had the urge to reach out and touch him. His forearm, perhaps. His hands, now clasped and lolling between his knees. His rounded shoulders. Not in a romantic way, but as a tether of sorts. An anchor.
A breeze rolled across the river, sending a tremor across the water’s surface and scattering the reflected moonlight. The canvases stretched atop the nearby sugar barrels flapped and rippled.
“The stockyard I was arrested at had been a slave pen.” Her words came without conscious thought to voice them. She glanced askew at Samson. His heavily lashed eyes regarded her intently, his expression one of earnest curiosity. Had she really thought he’d look down on her for a past over which she had no control? For a past they shared? Still, she looked away before continuing. “I didn’t remember until yesterday, but I’d been there as a girl. I mean, I was sold there.”
Another sideways glance. He sat as before, his entire attention upon her, and it was impossible not to give over to it. She told him everything then. A rush of words flying from her mouth like expelled poison. She told him how she’d emerged from the swamps into the Union camp without memory of whence she’d come. She told him of Captain Kinyon and her time in Indiana. She told him of her work as an embalmer and even at this, he didn’t flinch.
Never had she given such a complete and uncensored accounting of her life. The telling undressed her. Or so it felt. A shoe, a glove, a hat at first. Mundane stories of life in the camp or the journey North after the War. Then came the buttons trailing down her blouse, the ties of her skirt, her stockings. Here her voice wavered. Were it not for his steady gaze she’d have abandoned the telling. The why of her leaving Indiana, only that she withheld. And when she’d circled back to the present, to the Voodoo queen and the stockyard and awful memories it triggered, she could almost feel the river’s cool breeze trailing over her naked body.
In turn, Samson told her more of his days on the cotton plantation. He too was an orphan, his mother dying of childbed fever only days after his birth. His father sold off a few months later to pay his master’s gambling debts. The other women in the slave quarters took turns caring for him, though. He learned early he had a gift for storytelling, and became a vagabond of sorts, roaming among the slave cabins, spinning a yarn for any who asked in exchange for a turnip from their garden or a leg of rabbit from their stew.
He shrugged out of his jacket and leaned back against the surrounding bales of cotton as he spoke, his hands laced beneath his head, eyes turned heavenward. Effie eased back too, painting his words into a moving picture in her mind. He was easy to imagine thus—dapper, even as a boy; precocious; seducing those around him with his wit and melodious voice.
It wasn’t until the War he’d learned to read and write. Said he wasn’t all that good at it even now. Not like Tom. Certainly, not like her.
Effie turned onto her side, reclined as she was against the soft bales, and propped her head up with her hand. Only a narrow expanse of cool night air separated them. “There are far fewer orators than there are ready pens to transcribe their words.”
“That’s kind of you to say, considering you were teaching others to read and write by War’s end.”
“I’m not being kind. I’m being truthful.”
He smiled at her. “That’s what I like about you, Effie. I reckon it impossible for you not to say the truth.”
She lay back and stared up at the sky. The moon had dipped toward the horizon, but the dawn had not yet broken at the opposite edge of the sky. The air was still now, heavy with that river smell, and for the first time that night, Effie felt its chill. “I was wrong to look into the past.”
“How can you say that?”
“I’m no closer today to finding my kin than I was yesterday. Yet now I have all these, these . . . disquieting memories dulling my attention.”
Samson rolled toward her onto his side. “That’s not true at all. There are records of those sales. Who bought you. Who sold you to those traders in the first place. It was law to record such things.”
“Really?” In her excitement, she flopped to her side to face him, shrinking the space between them to but a hair’s breadth. For a moment her brain idled and muscles froze. The surrounding cotton bales concealed them from any who might pass. Not that she’d seen or heard anyone since their arrival. She wiggled back a few inches. They were still far too close for any claims of propriety, but at least he needn’t vie with her greedy lungs for air.
He brought a hand to her face, tucking a frazzled strand of hair behind her ear. But then his fingers lingered, dragging lazily over the curve of her jaw and down her neck. “Really. Tom could help you. He’s good with records and bookkeeping, and all those kinds of things.”
Her lips parted, but she couldn’t speak and settled for a nod. His fingers flirted with the collar of her shirt, tracing the edge of the fabric, then dipping beneath.
“You could even look into what happened to your friend Jonesy.”
The name jolted her from her pleasant stupor. Jonesy.
“None of the buyers wanted him,” she said and then, after a moment, “Me either.” She explained the lash marks on his back and how, despite Jonesy’s size and strength, as soon as a prospective buyer saw them, he’d back away, mumble something about vice of character, say he wasn’t interested in no bad Negroes. Effie they’d called queer, touched, dull.
He rolled away from her and she feared what she’d said—that she too had been unwanted—was too much.
But he didn’t sit up or make to leave. Instead, his hands worked the buttons of his waistcoat, tugged his shirttails free of his trousers, and then pulled both up and over his head. “They’d have called me a bad Negro too, then.”
Several thin scars streaked across his back. Not like the gnarled mess that had marked Jonesy’s, but painful to behold nonetheless. She reached out, this time without hesitation, and traced the dark raised lines with her fingertips. Water rimmed her eyes. Her hand shook with hatred for the vile scourge who’d inflicted these lashes. She reached the small of his back, where the scars tapered into smooth, warm skin and started over again at the top, as if her fingers could somehow erase what had been done to him.
She sniffed to staunch her running nose and he turned back to her, cradling her face in his palms. “It’s behind us now. It doesn’t define us the way it still defines them.”
His voice trembled with that same passion she’d fallen in love with back in Tivoli Circle, and when his lips found hers she let them guide her through a kiss. And then another. Harder than the first, flattening their mouths together and open, his tongue flicking inside her. For once, her rational self disengaged, and she was all emotion and sensation. His fingers loosening the top buttons of her shirt. His hand working beneath her chemise and corset to find her breasts.
She felt his other hand grasping at her skirts, pulling them upward. Over her calves, her knees, her thighs. Her senses surfaced a moment, just to glance between the bales and be sure they were alone. Then she surrendered fully, throwing her head back, inviting his lips upon her neck. He worked his hips between her legs. The sketches of human anatomy she’d studied flitted at the edge of her consciousness. How clinical they’d seemed. How void of any—
A sharp pain rent her from her musing. She winced and tried to reposition herself beneath his weight. Samson slowed a moment but did not withdraw. He kissed her again and breathed her name. The pain dulled, and she returned his embrace.