The Brightest Day, the Darkest Night, page 12
‘And a strong slave can breed future slaves. Children born to a plantation become its property – like foals and horses,’ Patrick added.
‘It is indeed a peculiar institution …’ Oxy commented. ‘A very peculiar institution.’
‘Yes, but how could the South survive without it?’ Stephen Joyce challenged them. ‘Slavery is like the household itself, central to the stability of the Southern state at large.’
Oxy rose to the bait with Stephen. ‘That is the very reason the North wishes to crush it. For by crushing slavery, it will subjugate the South and remove that which is the bulwark of the South – the household!’
‘But the North itself is wedded to slavery through cotton …’ Patrick interjected, ‘and is why Northern bleating about slavery is so hypocritical.’
‘Will you stand with the South, Stephen, if it comes to that?’ Patrick asked.
‘It is too early to say, Patrick. Word has come that, in the event of war I may be offered a commission in the army of the North.’ He paused, noticing Patrick’s dismay.
‘There is for and against that,’ Stephen continued. ‘Within the bigger frame of Ireland’s struggle with England. The Irish could raise a great army under the mantle of the North but …’ he reflected, ‘… my heart lies with the South – its republican ideals, its badge of honour.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘My darling brothers, Lamarr and Lovelace, are returning from visiting with dear, cheery little cousin Constance.’ Emmeline Labiche announced this with great excitement, waving a rose-hued envelope. It was the summer of 1860. Patrick and Oxy had returned to the Labiche Plantation, this time alone, as Stephen had gone North to ‘enquire of matters.’ He had told them he would not require their company … but ‘that the Labiche ladies might!’
‘How I miss the affection of the brotherly touch, in times when I am dispirited,’ Emmeline added, displaying not the faintest hint of dispiritedness, her dark eyes alight, her delicate complexion betraying an uncharacteristic glow. She was like a painting, Patrick thought. An exquisite and beautiful painting, perfectly captured in every detail. Fragile, preserved, unattainable – except when she smiled. Came alive at some news or excitement. Like now. Or, even sometimes, he noted, when he addressed her.
Cordelia, too, evinced a great anticipation at the coming home of her twin brothers.
‘Oh, Mr Moran and Mr O’Malley, you will simply adore them and they you!’
Patrick and Oxy’s introduction to Lamarr and Lovelace Labiche was in true Southern style. Patrick, fascinated as ever by the splendour of the architecture, had convinced Oxy to accompany him on a further examination of the house.
They both marvelled at the high open doors to the front and back. These formed a central, air corridor perfectly aligned with the centre-point of the giant embrace of the stairs. All rooms of the house were to the left or right of this central corridor.
‘The ceilings are high, the hot air rises, keeping the lower levels cool,’ Patrick remarked.
‘Cooler!’ Oxy corrected.
Like a far-distant drum roll, they heard it first, before feeling the drumming in the ground. Then, whipped up the wild whooping of horsemen charging through the cypresses.
The Labiche boys were home!
Patrick wondered how the riders would halt in time before reaching the house. But it was not the Labiche boys’ intention to halt.
In they thundered, passing within the arch of the white staircases. Oxy, the more quick-witted, realising the riders’ intent, grabbed Patrick by the collar and bundled the two of them to safety in the library, as neck and neck the two black steeds powered their way through the house.
‘They’re back! They’re back!’
Patrick could hear Emmeline’s voice, somehow carrying through the clatter of hooves. He and Oxy, on their feet again, rushed out to see the horsemen storm the garden, one brute’s haunch sending the black-veined Venus to her naked eternity. Then a launch into the air over the boxwood hedge, each rider hanging from the saddle, miraculously snatching a green sprig for a beloved sister. Down the oak avenue, past the slave cabins they raced. Eventually, both riders and horses came to a shuddering halt beyond the finishing line of the last cabin.
‘Lamarr is the victor!’ Emmeline cried out deliriously, running, dress daintily hiked, to welcome her brothers.
‘No, Emmy, it is Lovelace. Now it is six to five in his favour!’ Cordelia called after her, she too in headlong flight.
‘Whoever first gains the majority of thirteen is the winner for the season,’ she explained all a-flutter to the guests.
‘It is such an excitement to have such gallant brothers!’
Oxy wondered about the statue – were there to be thirteen such shattered Venuses before the racing season ended?
‘Oh, Father will not be angry when it was so close a race – something equally agreeable will replace it!’ Cordelia explained and dashed on.
As Oxy later remarked to Patrick, of the smithereened Venus, ‘And that was that – just as I was forming an attachment to her!’
The nineteen-year-old Labiche twins Lamarr and Lovelace, dark as their mounts, both sported fledgling moustaches. They were of such a similarity that the only thing distinguishing them seemed to be their names. Apart from the small lick of hair that on one forehead – Lamarr’s – curled eastwards, and on the forehead of Lovelace, curled westwards.
‘Mother, ever-thinking of the good of her family, decided it should be so,’ Emmeline explained.
Now the boys sat with their sisters, complimenting them, professing love, caressing soft, sisterly hands. ‘Like re-united lovers,’ Oxy thought they were. ‘It was beautiful to behold, beautiful! To my dying day, I will never forget that picture of contentment,’ he said later to Patrick.
Whatever the pool of contentment, the two young bucks were not content to remain still in it for long. The next day, the brothers made plans to take Patrick and Oxy to a quadroon ball in the French Quarter of New Orleans, downtown from Canal Street, the city’s dividing line.
The men wore masks, the ladies went without.
‘Keep your masks affixed,’ Lovelace Labiche cautioned. ‘It is then of no concern as to who might recognise you and whom you might recognise in turn.’
Patrick and Oxy were then propelled forward by the brothers. Into a throng of likewise masked gentlemen and the most beautiful creatures of every shade and hue on which eye had ever rested.
Except black.
But all were of black lineage – somewhere along the line. Some, the octoroons, were almost white, the quadroons a quarter less so.
‘One could meet one’s neighbour, an uncle, even one’s own father here … and not recognise him!’ Oxy exclaimed.
‘There are tales – even between brothers and sisters,’ Lamarr let it be known in reply.
‘The game is in the pretence of not knowing,’ Lovelace added.
It was an evening full with music and mystery and conversations spiced with innuendo, as thinly disguised as those engaged in it. Respectable mothers – femmes de couleur libre – of mixed descent, would bring their even more creamily complexioned daughters here. Lamarr Labiche explained it to them. ‘A mulatto is sprung from white and black; griffe is mulatto and black – see her … there … dark chocolate! Over there is a quadroon – milk chocolate – mulatto and white, lighter to the taste.’
Patrick and Oxy were fascinated by the classification of caste, as Lovelace took over the explanations. ‘But the tastiest to the tongue are the octoroons, from a mixture of quadroon and mulatto stock. They are almost as white as we are … apart from their passion,’ he added.
Elegant and refined, the femmes de couleur were prohibited by law from marrying white men, but not from being their mistresses. Marrying free men of colour was also not countenanced. So, rich white Creoles came to the balls to pay court to the exotically-dressed quadroons.
‘The old-style quadroon balls have mostly died out,’ Lamarr confided, ‘but placage still exists. Watch it in action!’ he said to them.
They watched as a Creole gentleman was refused permission by a mother to speak to the most beautiful sight Patrick and Oxy had ever seen. No arrangement of placage would be made here, the suitor deemed unsuitable to provide a small home and other acceptable financial arrangements for the woman’s daughter.
Patrick did not find the place or the evening much to his liking. ‘It is an auction room,’ he said dismissively, ‘a beautifully-costumed auction room!’
Lamarr and Lovelace, on the other hand, relished the high-intrigue atmosphere, cavorting among the femmes de couleur, while seeking to ‘unmask’ what gentlemen suitors they recognised.
And Oxy Moran, from the pinched-in County of Roscommon, met Kizzie Toucoutou from the wide, wide shores of the Pontchartrain.
Kizzie Toucoutou was black, not that her mother Angelique, or indeed Kizzie regarded herself as black. Nor was it considered by either lady an impediment to Kizzie’s advancement in this world. More especially to the advancement of Kizzie’s children … whenever she had them – and she would have them and by a white man too!
‘Bleaching the line, Kizzie, my dear!’ her mother never stopped reminding her. ‘Bleaching the line. That is why the good Lord put us here. Eventually, your children, perhaps, but certainly your children’s children, will be so well bleached, they will be indistinguishable, as long as the rules are followed,’ her mother warned.
Kizzie nodded. She understood the rules. She must never marry beneath her: black; mulatto; or quadroon. By doing so, she would be bleaching their line. She must have children but only by a white man … as her mother had. One who could provide for Kizzie and her children – a house in New Orleans and a regular income. Most of all her consort must be of unquestionable racial stock who, through breeding and circumstance, could bestow on her children that certain ‘Southern White’ attitude – as well as its pigmentation. And Kizzie Toucoutou with her fiercely dark eyes carried that attitude so well. From the tilt of her aristocratic forehead, through the flowing lines of her body, to the way she held forward her delicate instep when addressing you. But Kizzie could never marry her white man. He would be already married – and even if not, here in New Orleans it just could not be.
‘It is pure economics,’ Angelique Toucoutou explained to her daughter. ‘Your beauty, your body, your intellect …’ she paused, ‘but not your soul … for the white man’s seed … his capital … and our future.’
None of this Kizzie found alarming, or demeaning. It was a proud and strong tradition. She was only a conduit, bridging one generation to the next. The white man unwittingly relinquishing more than she ever would – the future of his race, and children.
As her mother often said to her, ‘Look at you, my darling Kizzie – tall, beautiful, graced with such finery of character – you could have been a plantation mistress at any of the houses along the River Road!’
Now tonight, Kizzie was slightly bored with it all, this being on show to men who made no secret that they were inspecting little more than property. Those already with mistresses, their arrogant faces behind those hideous masks, letting it be known they weren’t desperate for new flesh … only if something exceptional was on offer. And Kizzie was exceptional, she knew that, but Mère Toucoutou would raise her fan, and whisper to her daughter, ‘Not him!’ or ‘Too old’ and sometimes ‘Without means’, even ‘Gouted from liquor’. The men always knew. There would be no overt signal from Mère Toucoutou. Then, slightly flushed, the suitors would once more circle the ornate hall, downwardly adjusting their horizons to the lower pecking order in which they now found themselves.
‘Those Labiche boys …’ her mother said. ‘Just look at them!’ Kizzie discreetly cast her eyes to where the Labiche boys were ‘cavorting’ as her mother disparagingly put it. There they were, the ‘terrible twins’, back in New Orleans, fresh from some new escapade or other. Together, they had previously approached her, unintroduced. Then, ignoring her mother, had boldly asked if she was ‘taken’. She, in turn had ignored their insulting behaviour, looked beyond them, while her mother despatched them with a flick of her fan. With them she noticed the two other young men. Strangers. One dark-haired and not a Southerner but at home with the likes of the Labiches; the other, slender, less dark-haired and holding a certain grace. She wondered what he was doing in the company of the other three. As if prompted by her thought, the slender one looked up and smiled at her before she could avert her eyes.
Later, again she looked. He seemed apart from the other three – not frequently engaging in their animated talk. Once again he surprised her. She looked down, but momentarily looked up before slightly turning her body away from him. She knew he would approach her whenever the opportunity presented and her mother be otherwise distracted in conversation.
Kizzie Toucoutou then, ever so delicately, took the slightest of half-steps away from the space which her mother now occupied.
TWENTY-NINE
‘Goin’ fishin’ for alligators …’ Lamarr announced, ‘for our city friends.’
‘We’ll bring Beauty,’ Lovelace added.
The Labiche twins had exhorted Patrick and Oxy to return with them after the visit to the French Quarter, citing that ‘our sisters will cease to love us!’ if they returned alone, now that they had lost the company of Mr Joyce who had returned separately to New Orleans. Patrick was the more easily persuaded of the two. Oxy less so.
As they set out on their fishing expedition Patrick could well understand why almost half of all the wetlands in the United States were in Louisiana. It was the Mississippi. The river, majestic, meandering and muddy, half a mile wide, two hundred feet deep, everywhere enriched the soil and soul of Louisiana. It also brought the paddle-steamers to gawp at the undisguised splendour of the giant plantation houses – not to the displeasure of those who lived in them – whose back doors faced to the river.
‘Big Muddy there, all two thousand, three hundred miles of it from Minnesota to the Gulf, drains the land from two Provinces in Canada and thirty-one of the dis-united States,’ Lamarr explained.
‘Dumps all that down here in Louisiana.’
‘Yes – and we’re tired of being the piss-pot of America!’ Lovelace added, vehemently.
Behind each other the two pirogues moved silently through the swamp. In the lead, Lamarr, Patrick and the alligator bait. Behind them Lovelace, Oxy and the Catahoula.
‘What is the difference between a swamp and a bayou?’ Oxy, off on another tack, and as curious as ever, asked.
‘A swampland is the best kind of land you can get. Food and lumber – two things a man can’t do without,’ Lamarr answered. ‘A bayou is a shallow channel. Runs through a swamp – like a slow-moving road.’
‘All of New Orleans was a swamp when the Labiches first came,’ Lovelace interjected. ‘But “muck is money,” Grandfather Labiche would always say … and he was right. There are more millionaires from Natchez to New Orleans than in New York, New England and New Mexico all strung together.’ A fact, stated with such conviction, that neither Patrick nor even Oxy, felt qualified to disagree with.
Ahead, beneath a drooping blackwood a great blue heron, fresh from a watery dive, fanned out its wings to catch what drying breeze there was. Blue catfish, some three feet in length, contemptuously slunk beyond the arc of the pirogue’s pole. Then other colours; the red flash of mullet jumping; a tall great egret, still and white and waiting its long-beaked chance; the poked-out petals of the milky-toned bull-tongue. Everywhere were the swampy greens of Louisiana. The trees with their moss-green veils, and the sliced swamp, water parting before them, wrinkling back on itself like a sash of green slime.
They poled silently on in the twin pirogues, dugouts split from the same cypress tree. From time to time the Labiche boys told them of ‘watermouths’ and ‘cottonmouths’ and ‘diamondbacks’, chuckling to each other at the nervousness their conversation of snakes struck into their ‘citified’ guests. Then, some fifty feet ahead, something disturbed the surface. Lamarr motioned them towards a sheltering cypress.
‘This will do,’ he said.
Over a sturdy branch Lamarr cast the noose of a large rope. He then looped the other end through the noose and pulled it firm, securing the rope around the branch. To the free end of the rope, he attached what looked to Patrick like a small anchor.
‘The fishing rod,’ Lovelace explained.
On this anchor-like hook Lamarr impaled a slab of raw meat which now hung about six feet above the water.
‘We only want the big “uns” … boots for Lamarr and me and pretty purses for our pretty sisters,’ Lovelace explained.
They withdrew and waited.
Eventually, Patrick saw what looked like a broad-snouted pirogue weave its way towards the bait. He thought the bait set too high – the height of a man – but said nothing. Only watched.
The alligator approached in a circular swirling movement, gathering momentum, then propelling itself out of the water. It could not reach the bait. Again and again it tried – only once nipping the bloodied tail-end of the meat. It was big, but not big enough for Lamarr.
‘Wait!’ was all he said.
They came, drawn by blood, piroguing silently through the muddy water. Others ventured the six-foot jump and failed, then circled and tried again. It was then that Patrick understood the skill of the hunters. They wanted no small fry. They were after the best the swamp could offer.
‘Don’t they know they’re the lucky ones?’ Oxy whispered, as the smaller-fry alligators fruitlessly persevered. ‘Why don’t they go home?’ Then, what they had all been waiting for arrived. More a paddleboat than a pirogue. So large that Patrick wondered aloud ‘What if it thinks we, not that, are the real bait?’
‘Gators are not aggressive unless attacked or nesting,’ Lovelace answered, in a manner indicating the question should not have been asked in the first place.
