Part 27 (1/2)

”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 wors.h.i.+p, 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.