She shrugged and pointed at her belly button.
“Let’s say she was ‘the center of the universe,’ and for her it was French or nothing. She would say, Who does O’Reilly think he is, that great Ass of Dublin. I had to hide my laugh behind my hand at her words, for she did not like any show of understanding on our parts.
“After the Creoles were put down, O’Reilly sent many of those black soldiers back to Cuba, but those remaining behind made their presence felt every morning and evening with a drum tattoo and the playing of their fifes and horns. Many times the troops marched down our street, and through the window, a smarter and finer dressage was not to be found. And they went to work supervising gangs of men to shore the levees and build a bridge and to construct the banquettes so folks would have someplace to walk without dragging their hems through the muck and mire. In short, the governor brought a sense of discipline that had been missing to the fair city. It was so good to see law and order imposed upon those who for so long imposed upon us. Even the Master has his Master to obey.”
With a creak and a groan, the old man unhinged his spine and slowly straightened from his crouch to a full standing position. He had been bent over to read the part of the story that began at the hip and ran into the problem of the nether lands, the words disappearing into a thicket covering her pubis. I empathized with the delicacy of his conundrum as he looked my way for moral support or some technical instruction, but all I could do was shrug. The women in the room offered no assistance, nor did they seem particularly aware of the nature of his predicament. Obliviously chatting among themselves in the interlude, Dolly, Jane, and Alice could have been three sisters at a wedding for the fourth, throwing an invisible shield about the bride, subtly resenting the attention paid to her while acknowledging her role as the center of attention. The bride herself, Marie that is, rolled her eyes as she intuited the cause of the old man’s indecision.
“Zut de fl?te! You have been ogling and objectifying me thus far. Be a man and read on.” She reached out and grabbed him by the ears, and then tugged him to his knees. He cried out and accepted his subjugation. Clearing his thoughts with a long sigh, he read on from hips to toes without hesitation.
? ? ?
“The greatest change, however, was to the Code Noir—the legal protocols by which the French kept control of their slaves. O’Reilly, governed by the precepts of the Spanish code—Las Siete Partidas—and by his long experience in Puerto Rico and Cuba, gradually liberalized the rules. As with every other civic law that made our lives better, we only learned of this by word passing mouth to ear, yet in time, four things became clear even to us slaves.
“First, he freed the red man. No Tchacta, Tanikas, or Natches, or any other Indian would be enslaved—”
Dolly clapped once and said, “I like this Irishman more and more.”