Deadly Pedigree

14



Pacing around downstairs, in what once was Balzar’s Tonsorial Emporium, Nick eagerly plowed into the diary. He couldn’t resist.

It was a meticulously kept, almost-daily journal of Ivanhoe’s life and dreams. A priceless find for a historian, and no mean discovery, either, when viewed from a strictly monetary angle, Nick thought. These things today could fetch four, maybe five figures at auction. He’d never been much a drinker of the collectivist Kool-Aid so often ladled out in academe; profit was just fine and dandy with him. But he suspected that in the case of this little prize, Armiger would never let him reach the auction room.

Ivanhoe’s handwriting was self-assured, his spelling reasonably good, his attitude proud. From the very first words, Nick sensed that he was a man with a clear-eyed view of what was right, a man who had always striven to keep his conscience clean. He instantly envied and respected Ivanhoe.

Nick began to carefully turn the pages, pausing at entries that grabbed him. He knew the journal would require months, years of close study; even the first few passages gave him tantalizing hints of what lay deeper within.



From The Diary of Ivanhoe Balzar:

Mulatto Barber of Natchitoches

We buried my beloved Mother in Natchez, her Bible on her chest, this day of our Lord April 14th 1869. She told me before she died,–Son, you are as good as your brother Jacob, and don’t let him take nothing away from you, because your Father, may he rest in Peace, wanted it that way. The law of the land is on your side, now–she said. She been keeping my Father’s letter, ever since he passed, near ten years ago. Just before she passed to her Reward, she gave me the letter, and I have hid it so that Mister Jacob can’t find it, and I won’t show it, no! not for my own life. Some day Providence will make all things right. And til that glorious time I am going to make this rekord so my Children and their Children after them will know Hard Work, Clean Living, and Faith in the Almitey is worth more than the riches of this sinful world, that only causes hatefulnis, pain, and sorow, the which you can see in the way Mister Jacob and his half-sister treat all us others. Remember, my Children, when you are born, to trust in the Good Book, and in your Grandmother’s Eternal Love.



November 3rd 1870. Jacob, my half-brother, came in to my shop this afternoon. It was not a plezant meeting, though I cannot say that such meetings ever been so, and espeshly since dear Mother died and I bought my place with the money she left me. Jacob–I don’t call him Mister anymore, or even Captain, like some folks do, because he carry himself so high. I don’t like to give him the plezure of such titles. Sometime I call him Brother, and that makes him madder than a rattler. Jacob, he marches on in and everything just stops. Mister Fabergas from the hat store was in my chair and he just gets up real quick and pays and leaves, and don’t even wait for his change. James was doing Mister Flaneur’s fine English boots and he just slip out the back door. There were some other men sitting inside and outside, smoking cigars and spitting and jawing about this and that, like they always do, and they all tucked tail and left the two of us alone. Everybody knows Jacob carries a sord in his cane, and a gold and pearl litel pistol, because he has used it twice since the War. Once on Blane Paternoster when he blamed Jacob for losing that fite outside of town with the Yanks back in ’64 (shot him through the throat and he died in a most awful way, I seen it). And once on my half-brother Jeremiah, when Jacob said–Your mother, Mulatta Belle, wasn’t nothing but a common whore and a nigger!–and Jeremiah lit into him like a hericane. But I was not around for that one, or I might have stopped them. Poor Brother Jeremiah. He is alive, but he don’t know his name. Lost an eye, too. After all he been through, to come to this! Jeremiah is the son of my Mother and a slave called Putnam on my Father Hyam Balazar’s plantation, Mitzvah. After my Father died and before the War, Jacob sold Jeremiah to a planter in Missippi! The hardhearted scowndrel! Selling my half-brother to spite me! Father wanted Jeremiah to be free, and said so in his own will and testament. Such paper don’t mean nothing to Jacob. He tore that will in peeces, rite there at my Father’s deathbed! My Mother never spoke a kind word to Jacob after he did that and sold Jeremiah. Father took care of all of us while he lived. He made sure we got some learning. Me espeshly, cause he liked me and let me read many a time in the library out at Mitzvah. He taught me to speak French. He even had a fine portrait of the two of us painted, and it used to hang in the library where he taught me. But Jacob he slashed it up with his sord. Just like he do to anything he don’t like. He kill it. So, Father promised Dear Mother on his deathbed that my Mother’s children would be free and get our Portion after he died, no matter what happened in the war he could see coming. I was there, I remember. He talked to her in French, that nobody else in the family but her and me, a little bit, could understand. Course, lots of folks around here talk French, still, and Spanish, too. He told her, I think,–My dear, I have loved you more than the two white wives who gave me Jacob and Euphrozine.–And then he said some words in a langage I could not understand. I guess he was raving by that time, for he was very old. But Mother said he was praying. Then Jacob, he said–Bout damn time the old Jew died.–Well, I don’t know what he meant by that, cept he always hated Father, because Father was a good Christian man and never missed a Sunday, at one church or another. Father was a man of Honour and Compassion and Charity and Christian Love. Jacob and Euphrozine call theirselves Christian. Make me want to laugh out loud! But Jacob didn’t know rite off about those three letters Father gave to Mother. One for me, one for Jeremiah, and one for my other half-brother Chapman Winn. He was born a free man, like me. Chapman is the son of a white gambler and my Mother, and almost white himself. They say his father had Choctaw in him. Around here, we all mixed up like Missippi mud. I hope the Good Lord keep it strate! Father left me 1000 acres of good land, Jeremiah got his freedom & 500, and Chapman got 250. Jacob has never rested since my Father died. He got poor Jeremiah’s, and he paid a little for Chapman’s. Chapman just want money to gamble. He is no good, like his father before him. That one don’t care about what’s rite. Don’t like me, neither. Now, my Father loved my Mother very much, seeing as how he gave the three of us what he did. Jacob near lost his mind when he heard. He do what he like around here. But my birthrite is safe and I don’t care how long it takes, I will have Justice! I will set the story strate without help from nobody, and my children will know the truth about who they are. Now, Jacob says–Got a mitey nice place here, Ivanhoe.–He takes his cane and swings it down my counter. Broke eleven dollars worth of tonics and French colone. Bent my best two dollar German razor. I just about jumped on him, but he looks so pitiful and thin, with that hole in his chest you can hear like boiling gumbo. I think he was drunk, like usual, because they say he spits blood and drinks whiskey all nite and never eats and never sleeps. He wanted a fite, I reckon, cause he has his hand inside his coat just itching to pull out that mean litel gun. Lucky there was some men looking in the window from across the street. Jacob may be crazy, but he ain’t dumb. He says–Lots of folks don’t appreciate you putting on airs, Ivanhoe. Figure you must have stolen that money you got all of a sudden. Lots of powerful people, who can take action when it is necessary. They don’t like you setting yourself up white, they don’t like you calling yourself by my Father’s name, or almost, they don’t like you thretning to go to those traitor tirants in the Yankee Legislachure in New Orleans.–Times have changed–I say–You can’t do like you did before. The War is over, Brother.–He come rite up close to me. His breath put me in mind of those breezes we used to smell coming from the east after Vicksburg, carrying the odor of dead men. He says–Give me that letter nigger because you sure won’t live to benefit from it.–I just stare, don’t move a musel. He wanted to shoot me rite then and there, but something stayed his hand thank the Good Lord. I suspect I’ll be having trouble from the Thanes of the Gardenia soon. They a bunch of white nightriders who look to Jacob for their money. They do their drilling out on Mitzvah, I hear.



December 10th, 1870. Today I bought 30 acres from the old Chirke place. Chirke, he think he was being foxie telling me how good the land is, when I know it is full of rocks and mostly scrub and bog. Five dollars an acre, too much by half, but I have a desire to be a farmer one of these days, and have something my children can feel beneeth their feet. My children’s Portion is safe, but it don’t put food on the table yet. I hear that Mrs. Devlin died, on account of a bad midwife. They say the collera is breaking out again in the south, round New Orleans. Loaned Newman Judd eight dollars for three months at four percent, for him to buy some milk cows. I get as much milk as I need, too. Business is good, and I mite hire another barber. Know of a young colored boy working at the Stable, of good carriage and manners, if I can get him for the rite wage. Guess if he can groom a horse, he can a man, just as easy. They say Jacob getting more crazy every day. He chase the sheriff off the place with a shotgun, who just come to see how he was, like he chase Mr. Roberts off last spring when he come to do the census taking. Jacob think everybody out to cheet him, so he cheet everybody else first.



Nick couldn’t tear himself away, though he was aware he didn’t have time just now to be enjoying Ivanhoe’s account of his family’s bloody drama.

Skimming, he saw that it wasn’t long after this 1870 entry that Ivanhoe married; then, the first child, Erasmus, arrived. Ivanhoe wrote lovingly of his land and his hopes for his children. Eventually he moved his family out to the old Chirke place. This, Nick guessed, was where the Balzars lived today. Clearly, he’d bought the building in which Nick now sat, and the Chirke place, with money Mulatta Belle, his mother, had left him. He had gotten nothing from Hyam–except a father’s love.

The evidence was there in the diary: Jacob had stolen Ivanhoe’s rightful legacy. He obviously suborned the three witnesses to swear to a bogus nuncupative will. Ivanhoe, in the room as his father lay dying, saw Jacob rip apart the legitimate written will, the will that really expressed Hyam’s intentions, the will that dealt generously with Ivanhoe and the sons of Mulatta Belle’s other unions.

Had Jacob acted alone? As yet, Nick knew nothing of the personality of Euphrozine Balazar.

Ivanhoe was about thirty when he started his journal; he reserved a few pages at the back for some vital statistics on family births and deaths, which Nick knew would be invaluable later in his investigations. It seemed to Nick that Ivanhoe had an intuitive understanding of the meaning of genealogy that most people lack in these times. Ivanhoe was facing the stark possibility of the destruction of his past, having already seen the hijacking of his present. He realized that knowledge of his ancestry, and especially the transmission of that knowledge, was of life-and-death importance to the generations that would follow him.

How many impossible gaps had Jacob Balazar created? His father’s dalliance with Mullata Belle was a humiliation for him. Thus the real will had to go. What else had he eliminated? Was this why there were no further courthouse records showing Hyam’s estate moving through the probate process? Jacob was a powerful man, who brooked no opposition.

And what of the letters to Ivanhoe, Jeremiah, and Chapman? As mini-wills, they posed a threat; they could cost Jacob a lot of land–and more, in the case of Ivanhoe. If, with his letter, Ivanhoe could prove he was Hyam’s son, could he have taken Jacob to court to claim some portion of Hyam’s estate? Maybe a thousand acres wasn’t all Ivanhoe would have been due if the issue had been adjudicated properly. Jacob might have faced coughing up more than his ravaged lungs.

Nick surmised that the letters to Mulatta Belle’s three sons were identical, each setting out Hyam’s bequests to the three of them, as insurance. That would explain why Jacob would want them all, why he would kill for those letters, and why Mulatta Belle was so careful with them.

For Jacob, it was a question of twisted honor, not merely land: he could not live with Ivanhoe as his acknowledged brother.

The letters were probably long gone now; but in this diary, written by his own hand, Ivanhoe had made his own immortality, attained his own silent victory.

Nick noticed a change in the style and content of the diary. Ivanhoe started with the noble intention of presenting his side of the story, of instructing his children; but as the years passed, his affairs become more complicated, and he seemed to reach a level of relative affluence and considerable respect in the community. His attention shifted to his business and civic affairs. Town gossip, only momentous family news, and balance-sheet concerns persist, without much of the humanizing spirit of the first entries, until an abrupt cutoff in 1881.

Isn’t that the way of the world? Nick thought, taking a last look at the room that had once housed Ivanhoe’s shop. We start with the grand visions of overconfident youth, with a simplistic lust for radical accomplishments, and soon we lapse into a belittling obsession with minutiae, like an old man on a park bench picking lint from his sweater.



Ivanhoe wrote his diary to preserve the truth; now it was Nick’s task to continue its destruction. He didn’t like the role he was playing. Ivanhoe’s testament should not remain silent forever. He should edit and annotate the volume, get it published. It would become an instant classic of the field, stocked in libraries around the U.S. and the world, translated into a dozen languages.

Nick would be famous. Posthumously.

He walked to his car, hearing Ivanhoe’s voice as if he’d spent an hour with the barber. Nick understood that Ivanhoe had intended his diary to shake the rotten fruit from his family tree, no matter how long it took.

A dangerous place for a genealogist to be sitting, under that tree, more than a hundred years later, Nick was thinking as he tried to get his car’s engine to turn over.





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