Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

What started out as tears of pain were now tears of gratitude. Nobody had ever loved her like this before. Nobody. All Rita could do was cry.

The Swamp

Kentucky Williams owns a Bible?” Benjamin January cast a doubtful glance catty-corner across the trampled muck of the Broadhorn Saloon’s yard to the shabby building’s open back door. The Broadhorn was a substantial building for this part of New Orleans, a neighborhood known quite accurately as the Swamp. Constructed of the lumber from dismantled flatboats, it stood a story-and-a-half tall and boasted not only porches but a privy, though the four whores who worked out of it did so in a line of sheds that straggled away into the trees of the true swamp — the ciprière — beyond. Under the brilliant winter sunlight the bullet-pocked planks and unspeakably puddled weeds looked every bit as grimy and rough-hewn as the establishment’s proprietress, who a few moments before had bellowed out the back door for January to come in: She needed his services.

“Last night some suck-arse bastard tried to steal my Bible!” she shouted at January.

“In many ways that’s the most surprising element of last night’s fracas,” remarked January’s friend and fellow musician Hannibal Sefton, fishing in the pocket of his dilapidated frock-coat for a bottle of opium-laced sherry. “It was her uncle’s — another surprise, since I’d always assumed that, like the Athenian hero Erechtheus, she was birthed from the earth itself. It’s in no way a remarkable volume: printed in Philadelphia thirty or forty years ago by a Bible society. The frontier was flooded with them when families started taking up lands in the Mississippi and Alabama territories.”

He had risen from the bottom step of the ladder he was sitting on when January emerged from the trees. January had reason to approach the Broadhorn cautiously: Even at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning there were men drunk enough to take violent exception to a man of January’s color appearing in the vicinity of white men’s chosen watering holes. January stayed away from the Swamp when he could. Only Hannibal’s note had brought him that morning.

“I thought myself something might have been hidden in it,” Hannibal went on, as they crossed the goo of the yard to the saloon’s rear door. “Pages cut out to make a hollow, or something of the kind. I can’t imagine anyone in the Broadhorn ever opened the book. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. For whatever reason, the thief was prepared to do murder to get it.”

January paused on the saloon’s sagging rear porch, trying to see into the impenetrable gloom within. Born a slave, one of the first things he’d learned in early childhood was that there was “buckra territory” — in his case, the front part of his master’s house — where a black child would be thrashed for setting foot. Even after his mulatto mother had been freed and they’d gone to live in New Orleans, he’d still been forbidden to use the front entrance of the house her white protector had given her.

In the Swamp, it was as much as a black man’s life was worth to go into a saloon patronized by the white crews of the flatboats and keelboats that came down the river with their cargoes of furs, pigs, and corn. The black prostitutes would be tolerated in most saloons in that insalubrious district that sprawled from the upper end of Girod Street along the back of the town to the canal and the cemeteries. But the only black who was truly able to come and go freely in the Broadhorn was Delly, a sweet-tempered, simpleminded girl of seventeen whose buck teeth, skewed jaw, and prominent facial moles had relegated her to the role of washing cups and doing as much cleaning up as the Broadhorn ever got.

It was Delly who lay on the narrow bed in Kentucky Williams’s room behind the bar. Williams yelled, “Git the hell in here, Ben, what you doin’, wipin’ your goddamn feet?” and January followed her voice into that tiny cubicle, which appeared to do duty as the Broadhorn’s storeroom as well. Williams sat at the foot of the bed, a big-boned white woman wearing what the black whores called a good-time dress , a faded calico mother-hubbard whose front was splashed and blotted now with crusted brown blood. One sleeve was torn and a makeshift bandage, also spotted from a seeping wound underneath, ringed her right forearm. “Gimme your dope, Hannibal,” she added more quietly, holding out her uninjured hand, and Hannibal passed over his bottle of opium-laced sherry without a word.

The girl Delly lay quietly on the bed, her face wrapped in several bar rags and what looked like somebody else’s torn-up mother-hubbard bound around her chest and shoulder.

“Dumb bitch tried to pull him off me,” growled Williams to January, gently holding the bottle to Delly’s lips. “Can you swallow a little of this, honey? Easy... not too much... that’s my good girl.” She patted Delly’s hand encouragingly. “Didn’t think I could goddamn take care of myself.” She took the cigar out of her mouth for a gulp of the sherry, then passed the bottle back to Hannibal. “How bad’s she hurt, Ben? She be all right?”

Hannibal’s note had said, Bring your kit, so January had brought the battered leather case of probes, forceps, fleams, and scalpels that his mentor in New Orleans had given him back in 1817, when he’d left to study medicine in Paris — little realizing at that time how useless it was for a black man to attempt to practice medicine on whites, even in that land of liberté, egalité, etc. Oddly enough, in the two years since his return to New Orleans in 1833, he’d found himself acquiring a clientele after all: unfortunately, all of it among the poorest class of freed (or runaway) slaves, who couldn’t afford the mainly light-complected physicians patronized by the better-off free colored artisans.

January had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was going to be playing piano for his living the rest of his life.

In addition to the tools of his one-time trade, he’d brought vials of camphor and opium, and bundles of herbs recommended by his voodoo-priestess sister and various “root doctors” — freed and slave — in the countryside. One of these he held out to Hannibal.

“Can you get some boiling water from the Turkey Buzzard, and steep about a quarter of this in it?”

The Turkey Buzzard stood about a hundred feet from the Broadhorn, and combined the usual Swamp amenities of barroom, gambling parlor, and bordello with about a dozen beds for hire in three or four chambers, qualifying it as a hotel. It boasted a kitchen of sorts, and a dining room that served up grits, beans, and whatever mules might have given up the ghost the previous day — occasionally varied if an alligator happened to get too far from the canal at a time when the patrons were sober enough to hit it.

“Did you put anything on this, Mrs. Williams?” January asked, gingerly beginning to unwrap the bandages on Delly’s face.

“Like what?” The proprietress pulled her snarly light-brown hair back into a knot on her nape. “My daddy said duck shit an’ cobwebs was good for cuts, but I was goddamned if I’d go huntin’ for a duck in the middle of the night. ’Sides, that was just for little cuts, not a big hack like he gave her. There’s ducks down at the turnin’ basin by the cemetery, though, if you need—”

“My teachers swore by brandy.” January flinched a little as the bandages stuck, then came away from the split mess of brow and cheek. Though crusted almost shut with blood, Delly’s brown eyes blinked up at him unharmed.

“You mean brandy-brandy?” asked Williams doubtfully. “Or the tonsil varnish me an’ Railspike make out of tobacco juice an’ red pepper?”