The Shirt On His Back

The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly



PROLOGUE March, 1837



The third time that day that Benjamin January walked over to the Bank of Louisiana and found its doors locked, he had to admit the truth.

It wasn't going to reopen.

The money was gone.

Admittedly, there hadn't been much money in the account. Early the previous summer he'd taken most of it and paid off everything he and Rose still owed on the big ramshackle old house on Rue Esplanade, and thank God, he thought, I had the wits to do that . . .

Even then, there'd been rumors that the smaller banks, the wildcat banks, the private banks all over the twenty-six states were closing. Months before the election last Fall the President's refusal to re-charter the Bank of the United States had begun to pull down businesses along with the banks, and at meetings of the Faubourg Treme Free Colored Militia and Burial Society

or less formal get-togethers with his friends after playing all night for the white folks at some Mardi Gras ball - January had frequently asked: what the hell did the Democrats think was going to happen, when they knocked the foundations out from under the only source of stable credit in the country?

Not that it was any of January's business, or that of his friends either. As descendants of Africans, at one remove or another - though January's mother loftily avoided the subject not one of them could vote. And in New Orleans, by virtue of its position as Queen of the Mississippi Valley trade, the illusion of prosperity had hung on longer than elsewhere.

Still, standing in the sharp spring sunlight of Rue Royale before the shut doors of that gray granite building, January felt the waves of rage pass over him like the wind-driven crescents of rain on the green face of a bayou in hurricane season.

Rage at the outgoing President - a fine warrior when the country had needed a warrior and a hopelessly bigoted old blockhead with a planter's contempt for such things as banks.

Rage at the whites who saw only the war hero and not the consequences of letting land-grabbers and shoestring speculators run the country for their own profit.

Rage at the laws of the land, that wouldn't let him - or anyone whose father or grandparents or great-grandparents back to Adam had hailed from Africa - have the slightest voice in the government of the country in which they'd been born, regardless of the fact that he, Benjamin January, was a free man and a property owner . . . Artisans like his brother-in-law Paul Corbier, merchants like Fortune Gerard who sat on community boards, his fellow musicians and the surgeon who'd taught him his trade of medicine, and all those others who made up his life, were free men too, had been born free men and had fought a British invading force in order to stay that way . . .

And rage at himself - the deepest anger of all as he turned his steps back along Rue Royale toward home. For not taking every silver dime out of the bank and putting it . . .

Where?

Ay, there's the rub, reflected January grimly. There were thieves aplenty in New Orleans, and if you were keeping more than a few dollars cached in your attic rafters, or under the floorboards of your bedroom, word of it soon got out. And if you didn't happen to be rich enough that there were servants around your house at all times, that money was eventually going to turn up gone.

He wasn't the only man standing in Rue Royale looking at the closed-up doors of the Bank of Louisiana that spring afternoon. As he turned away, Crowdie Passebon caught his eye - the well-respected perfumer and the center of the libre community in the old French Town. Like most of January's friends and neighbors, Passebon was the descendant of those French and Spanish whites who'd had the decency to free the children their slave women had borne them. January knew Crowdie had a great deal more money than he did in the Bank, but nevertheless the perfumer crossed to him and asked, Are you all right, Ben?'

'I'll be all right.' Many people January knew - including most of his fellow musicians - didn't even have the slim resources of a house.

Petronius Braeden - a German dentist with offices on Rue St Louis - was haranguing a knot of other white men outside the bank doors, cursing the new President: hell, the man has only been in office a week, and see what he done to the country already? We need Old Hickory back . . .

As if it wasn't 'Old Hickory' who'd precipitated the whole mess and left it for his successor to clean up.

January walked on, shaking his head and wondering what the hell he and his beautiful Rose were going to do.

It had been a bad winter. Tightening credit and the plunge in the value of banks' paper money meant that fewer white French Creoles - and far fewer Americans - had given large entertainments, even at Christmas and Twelfth Night. January, whose skill on the piano usually guaranteed him work every night of the week from first frost 'til Easter, had found himself many nights at home. The same spiral of rising prices and fewer loans had prompted many of the well-off white gentlemen who had sent their daughters 'from the shady side of the street' to board and be educated at the school that Rose operated in the big Spanish house, to write Rose letters deeply regretting that Germaine or Sabine or Alice would not be returning to the school this winter, and we wish you all the best of luck . . .

And we're surely going to need it.

Other well-off families - both white and gens de couleur libre - had decided that Mama or Aunt Unmarriageable would be perfectly able to take over teaching the children the mysteries of the piano, rather than hiring Benjamin January to do so at fifty cents a lesson. The last of them had broken this news to January the previous week.

Since early summer, January had been hiding part of what earnings he did make here and there about the house - in the rafters, under the floorboards . . . But summer was the starving- time for musicians, the time when you lived off the proceeds of last year's Mardi Gras. The little money he'd made from lessons, January had fallen into the habit of spending on groceries, so as not to touch the slender reserve in the bank.

In the God-damned locked-doors Lucifer-strike-you-all- with-lightning Bank of Louisiana, thank you very much.

Rose was sitting on the front gallery when he climbed the steps. She'd been quiet since the first time he'd walked to the bank that morning, for the week's grocery money. Sunday would be Palm Sunday, and once Easter was done, the planters who came into town for the winter, and the wealthier American businessmen, would begin leaving New Orleans. Subscription balls ordinarily continued up until April or May, but John Davis, who owned the Orleans Ballroom, had told January that this year he was closing down early. With the Bank of Louisiana out of business, January guessed that the American Opera House - where he was supposed to play next week - would follow suit.

Rose met his eyes, reading in them what he'd found - yet again that day - on Rue Royale.

In her quiet, well-bred voice, she said, 'Well, damn,' put her spectacles back on and held up the letter that had been lying in her lap. 'Would you like the good news first, or the bad news?'

'I'd like this first.' January took the letter from her hand, dropped it to the rough-made little table at her side, stood her on her feet and kissed her: slender, gawky, with a sprinkle of freckles over the bridge of her nose and the gray-hazel eyes so often found among the free colored. Though she stood as tall as many men, against his six-foot-three bulk she felt delicate, like a sapling birch. 'You're here sitting on the gallery of our house. No bad news can erase that; no good news can better it.'

She sighed and put her head briefly against his shoulder. He felt her bones relax into his arms.

'I take it that letter is from Jules Gardinier informing us that he's taking Cosette out of the school and sending her to live with her grandmother?'

She leaned back, looked up into his face in mock wonderment: 'You must have second sight! And here Cosette was the only one of our pupils left to us—'

'And her father owns stock in the Bank of Louisiana.' January grinned crookedly. 'Which is going to be converted into a livery stable as soon as they can get up enough money to buy hay. What's the good news?'

Rose was silent for a moment, as if thinking how to phrase an awkward question. Then she propped her spectacles more firmly on to the bridge of her nose, took a deep breath, looked up into his face again and said, 'We have two dollars and fifty cents in the house. And we're going to have a child.'



An hour later, with the street gone quiet in the dinner hour, they were still on the gallery talking. The two dollars and fifty cents was in hard coin, not the now-worthless notes from the Bank of Louisiana - or the various other banks in the town - in which January had been paid over the winter: 'They'll make good kindling,' said Rose in a comforting tone.

'That's not funny.'

'Nothing is,' replied Rose. 'Not today. Benjamin, I've spoken to your sister Olympe. If this—' She hesitated, then went on with some difficulty. 'If this isn't a good time for us to have a child—'

January cut her off firmly. 'It is.' Olympe was a voodooienne, versed in the termination of unaffordable pregnancies among the poorer blacks of the town. He added, 'My mother won't let her grandchild starve.'

Rose mimed exaggerated surprise. 'Whatever gives you that idea?'

'Hmmn.' Since January and Rose had refused his mother's advice about investing their little money in slaves - you can feed them dirt cheap and make a dollar a day renting them out to the logging companies - that astute businesswoman had repeatedly asserted that it was none of her business if her son and his wife starved together. January was fairly certain that this stricture would be expanded to include Baby Rose. Besides, the last he'd heard, his mother's money had been in the Bank of Louisiana, too.

'Something will turn up,' said Rose.

'Hmmn.'

He closed his eyes, wondering, as he had wondered all the way home, what the hell they were going to do. Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . Please have something turn up.

When he opened his eyes, Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards was standing on the gallery.

'Lieutenant.' January got quickly to his feet, held out his hand, even as Shaw removed his greasy old excuse for a hat and bowed to Rose:

'M'am.'

As Shaw turned toward him, January thought that the man did not look well. It occurred to him to wonder if Shaw, too, had been among the unfortunates who'd discovered that morning that they'd lost everything they owned. Framed in his long, thin, light-brown hair, the Kentuckian's face had a strained tiredness to it, beyond what keeping the peace in New Orleans through Mardi Gras usually did to him. There was a slump to the raw-boned shoulders under the scarecrow coat and a distant look in his gray eyes, a reflection of bitterest pain. January had seen his friend take physical punishment that would have killed another man, but this was different, and he was moved to ask - as Crowdie Passebon had earlier asked him - 'Are you all right?' He remembered to add, 'Sir,' even though his mother wouldn't have permitted Shaw into her house.

Shaw nodded - as if he weren't quite sure of the affirmative - and said, 'Maestro, I have a proposition for you.'

'I'll take it.'

The long mouth dipped a little at one corner: 'Don't you want to hear what it is?'

'Doesn't matter,' said January. 'If it's money, I'm your man.'