Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 27

"He ran away from Triomphe, and three days later they found his body in the cipriere. He'd been bit by a snake, and he died there underneath a sweet-gum tree, about a hundred feet from where Disappearing Willie had his house. By what we could tell, he'd made no effort to cut the wound, or suck the poison clean. He was just tired, and had lived enough, and so he fell asleep."

January closed his eyes, the tears still running down his face. "There's no call to weep," said Mohammed gently again. His hard hand rubbed January's arm as if to remind him of his own bone and flesh. "It was a long time ago-nearly twenty-five years. He died a proud man, and a happy one."

"He died a slave."

"He died knowing his son was a free man, and a man who could make music that the angels in Heaven would sneak away from their work to listen to. He died in the wilderness, where it was quiet and green. We all sang a ring-shout for him, and laid him to rest, there on Triomphe, for his dust to mingle with the dust of his friends. How many other men die that happy?"

January nodded, and drew in his breath, remembering the burying-ground near the levee.

Recalling those anonymous marker-boards, and the still silence where hundreds lay unmarked, reabsorbed into the womb of the earth. His father was buried, he realized, with Reuben and with Gilles, with those others who were little more than names-LIVINNIA and POSEY. He could say now to Olympe's children, This was your grandfather, a good and wonderful man. Maybe one day say it to a child of his own. He had seen his father's grave, and that gave him peace.

"How did you know it was me?" he asked Mohammed. "I couldn't have been eight years old when I left Bellefleur. You couldn't have known me."

Mohammed almost laughed. "Ben," he said, "you're the mirror of him, his living double. I knew your name was Ben. And like you he was a music-maker, with his hands and his voice and his heart."

"Thank you," said January softly. "I didn't know all that. And I'm glad now that I can tell my sister and her children."

"That's good," said the smith, nodding. "He'd want his grandchildren to know his name."

January stepped into the dense lapis midnight of the streets, and though he'd spent the evening playing Bellini's bright flamboyant airs-and those airs still resonated golden within him-as he walked he raised his voice in a wailing field-holler with all the joy in his heart. And as he pa.s.sed each dark alleyway, each slaveyard or carriageway, voices answered him, as they would have out in the cane-fields, lifting in harmony, catching and twirling his notes like a dancer. The reverberance of sorrow and joy echoed around him, and followed him all the way home.

?WORK SONGS.

AND.

SPIRITUALS.

All accounts of travel through the Deep South in the 1830s make mention that the slaves sang as they worked in the cane-fields. When it came to researching this book, the question of what exactly they sang proved to be a difficult one.

Until almost the eve of the Civil War, most rural plantation slaves were only nominally Christian, if that. House-servants were probably given some instruction in Christianity, depending on the master. Many urban slaves attended Christian worship, though in New Orleans particularly, the legally mandated Catholicism was frequently blended with voodoo. In the countryside, most small slaveowners-not of the planter cla.s.s-who owned one, two, or possibly half a dozen slaves who divided their duties between farm work and the house, might convert, or instruct, their bondsmen.

But the majority of rural slaves-and a goodly number of urban ones-did not become Christians in any real sense of the word until the Evangelical movement of the 1840s. Up to the 1830s many whites refused to tolerate black congregations, arguing that any gathering of blacks would provide a seedbed of rebellion and pointing out that the two great leaders of early nineteenth- century rebellions, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, were both preachers.

Spirituals-the quintessential form (with blues) of black music in America-did not exist until the late 1840s or 1850s.

So what did they sing?

I've done the best I can in a.s.sembling what phonetic fragments of presumably African songs survive in the works of such writers as George Washington Cable, and the old Creole songs that were popular then. There are contemporary or near-contemporary (1840s and 1850s) accounts of both ring-shouts and the field hollers, and the similarity of these hollers to descriptions of street- vendors' cries is striking.

Descriptions agree that the songs were extremely odd and frequently unpleasant to Western ears: words like wailing, monotonous, and caterwauling are used, and frequent reference is made to the call-and-response form that was later absorbed into spirituals. Accounts agree on the very African emphasis on rhythm-in fact on many plantations possession of a drum was a whipping offense.

What is clear is that music played a critical part in the lives of the displaced Africans; that it was a vital link to the world from which they, or their parents or grandparents, had been ripped. When plantation blacks did come to Christianity, either through campmeetings in the 1840s or through the often-secret efforts of preachers from urban black congregations, they naturally adapted Protestant hymns to African needs and African modes of song, giving rise to spirituals in the same way that European cotillions and Irish clog dancing morphed into characteristic black dance.

Field Work Songs hollers blended imperceptibly into the blues, the casual weaving of songs from and into everyday activities. "Playing the dozens," the game of insults and counter-insults, is attested to in slave-related literature well back into the eighteenth century.

?MASTERS AND SLAVES.

What struck me most clearly, in reading first-person accounts of slavery, is the enormous variety of personal experiences in what was by definition a hideously dysfunctional relationship. Some masters were very nice to their slaves. Some slaves were maliciously rebellious and manipulative.

Some masters nailed their slaves up in barrels and rolled them down hills. Some masters sold families as units and others didn't think twice about splitting them up. Some slaves poisoned their masters, sabotaged farm equipment (though the word "sabotage" didn't exist until the early twentieth century), deliberately injured work animals or their masters' children.

In some ways, Gone With the Wind is as accurate as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Men and women, both white and black, reacted to these conditions with the entire conceivable (and in some cases inconceivable) spectrum of emotions and behaviors: loyalty, resentment, kindness, patronization, uncaring.

The critical thing about all these accounts is, that if you were a slave, you could just as easily get one sort of master, and treatment, as you could another. What happened to you was entirely arbitrary.

There was nothing you could do about it. And there was no redress.

One of the most amazing things I've encountered in my research on slavery was that any slave, male or female, was able to remain reasonably cheerful, survive emotionally, raise children, sing songs of any sort, and get on with their lives under the conditions described. I am recurrently and repeatedly astonished at the adaptability and strength of the human spirit.

Naturally, in writing a murder mystery involving slavery, I've written about a harsh master who treated his family as poorly as he treated his slaves. If he was a nice person I wouldn't be telling this story. He had plenty of spiritual brothers out there, and plenty of fellow-slaveowners who would have been horrified by his behavior-although quite possibly they wouldn't have considered it their business to do anything about it.

In writing any work of fiction about a condition like slavery (or n.a.z.ism, or child abuse, or the enslavement of women) one runs the risk of trivializing horrors by weaving them into the background, by making them part of the scenery-part of the game. I've done my best to portray conditions and att.i.tudes as they were, insofar as I have found them in my studies of the period. If I have offended those whose families actually endured the conditions I've described, or belittled their experience and suffering, I apologize, for the offense was unintentional. I'm not seeking to make anyone into a saint, or anyone into a monster-only to tell a story as it might have taken place, and to stay as close to the truth-and to human nature-as I can.

BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer.