Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Little boss, why you want to work so hard? Better to leave something for tomorrow,” Dan and Samuel would say.

But in truth I was incapable of lying idle for even a few moments; the disorder of the place disturbed my peace of mind. Even the respectable Mr. Richardson, who filled out the bills of lading, dealt with steamship pursers, and kept the ledger books, had a maddening tendency to throw all our completed invoices into a barrel that he kept behind a counter without much concern for the possibility that they might be needed again. Several times he set me to work sorting through them. On one occasion, when a cotton planter, up in a place called Attakapas, claimed that he had been shorted of certain items, the finding of the original invoices, made out some months before, took — and wasted — several hours that might have otherwise been constructively spent. (My readers may be wondering why I am mentioning such things; but it is because from such disorder I learned the importance of keeping proper records and inventory, a lesson that would serve me well in my future provisioning of my Africa expeditions.) And there was something else: Aside from my tendency toward work, I wanted to reflect well on my benefactor’s faith in me.

I did not know very much about him at the time: I only learned his name, Mr. Henry Stanley, by asking. But it was from the shipment manager, Mr. Richardson, that I ascertained, through conversations with him, the exact nature of Mr. Stanley’s professional life. The brunt of his business was in trading cotton. He would travel upriver by steamship, bargain with cotton planters on behalf of the New Orleans merchants, and offer the planters grocery goods — the necessities that were sold in the most remote outposts and settlements along the Arkansas and Saline Rivers. Loaded up with consignments of everything from coffee to combs, tooth powder to razors, he set out north and returned with huge shipments of cotton, which, processed through his own cotton press, he then sold to the merchants of New Orleans. And sometimes, his route took him to the West Indies, and principally to Havana, Cuba, where Mr. Stanley’s brother, a certain Captain John, had an office in port, those journeys concentrating on the sugar and tobacco trade and Havana cigars, for which, in New Orleans, Mr. Stanley was a noted supplier.

Apparently Mr. Stanley lived well — in a fine house on St. Charles Avenue, and had a wife and, it was said, a commendable education as befitting a proper southern gentleman. As for his relationship with my employer, as he had frequent dealings with him and other merchants along that street, he paid Mr. Speake a small fee to keep him a desk in the back of the store, which he visited from time to time during his days back in that strange city.

DURING MY FIRST WEEKS THERE I got to know the slaves quite well. I would say I knew them better than I did any of the white clerks, for in the many hours that we spent loading up the drays, or when we would take a break and sit in front of the store just watching the processions of passersby and carriages on the street, they spoke kindly of their own families and seemed, on the whole, aware of the fact that even if they were slaves, their jobs in the store, lasting some six days a week, weren’t so bad when compared to the very hard labors of the plantation workers upriver. No Simon Legree, Mr. Speake paid them some small wage so that they might live in their own little sheds, and he allowed them to hire themselves out to other merchants, on their own time. Materially poor, they seemed to derive their happiness out of small pleasures — at lunch Dan liked to play a harmonica, while Samuel stuck a Jew’s harp in his mouth to twang along with him. They treated even a smallish gift of a handful of candies, which the clerks sometimes gave them, like a treasure. They seemed to know every other slave on the street — their lunch hours passed with a litany of “How’re yuh” and greetings to various friends, and all manner of social exchange, such as invitations to dance parties or birthday celebrations. Most of their friends were slaves, like themselves, but the most important black man on the street was a freed Negro — New Orleans had more freed slaves than any other city in the South — a certain Dr. Brown, a thin, well-dressed man of an erect posture and serious bearing, elegant as any physician, who mainly treated the slaves working in that district, as many a white doctor refused to. He’d come down Tchoupitoulas making his calls, politely tipping his hat whenever Dan and Samuel greeted him; upon occasion he nodded at me in a friendly way.

If they lived in fear of any of the clerks, it was Mr. McKinney, who sometimes stood sternly by watching them work, a switch in his hand, as if he were some kind of slave driver; and they always piped down whenever the burly local constable, Mr. McPhearson, passed by, giving them a contemptuous glance.

I had been sleeping in that back room for several weeks, an infelicitous situation, when one evening, as I was helping sweep out the shop, the slave Dan, perhaps feeling sorry for me, told me that he knew of a refined black woman, a certain Mrs. Williams, who ran a decent and clean boardinghouse with cheap rates on St. Thomas Street. And so he arranged to take me there to find a room. At dusk one evening, as I walked beside them along Tchoupitoulas Street, on my way to Mrs. Williams’s, we fell into conversation.

“Where’s that place you say you come from again, Little Boss?” Dan, the more cheerful of the two, asked me.

“A village in north Wales called Denbigh.”

“What’d he say?”

“In north Wales, over in England!”

“Oh, the queen’s country, is that right?”

“They’ve got castles and dragons over there, I hear,” said Samuel. “Don’t they have castles, Mr. John?”

“Denbigh has a castle,” I said. “Put up by a very evil English king, a fellow named Edward Longshanks.”

They howled at both my Welsh accent and the image of a man with such a name.

“You live around here?” I asked Dan.

“Yes, suh, not too far away, in a little shack, behind a slaughterhouse. It’s not much, but it’s a home; my wife, she works, too, as a laundress; and my children work, too, plucking feathers for a chicken farmer.”

Ever curious about the slave’s life, in my ignorance, I asked: “And how did you end up a slave?”

He laughed. “There was no ‘end up.’ My father was brought here as a slave, through Natchez: and I was born so. It’s all I know, suh.”

“And your father, Samuel?”

“My pappy, he died a long time ago. Up in one of the plantations. Me, I was the lucky one, being traded by a planter to Mr. Speake for some two hundred dollars’ worth of dry goods, when I was a boy.”

“’Tis a sad thing, not having a father.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of a whole lot worse, Little Boss; all kinds of families broken up all the time. Little ones never seeing their folks; husbands took from their wives. At least I got my own family — and Mr. Speake said that maybe one day he give us all our freedoms. When he dies, anyway — and I’m sure he’s in no hurry. Anyway, this is Mrs. Williams’s boardinghouse.”

Then, standing on its porch, he called in: “Mrs. Williams, I’m here with the white fella I told you about.”

ENTERING HER BOARDINGHOUSE, I was much taken by Mrs. Williams’s amicable presence. Maternal in her manner, she was apologetic that I would have to make do with the highest and therefore warmest room in her house, in the attic, as all the other rooms were rented. But at one dollar and fifty cents per week, with meals, I found the accommodations more than adequate. The room was small, with an arched ceiling, and had a shuttered window that opened out over the back garden and some magnolia trees — it pleased me that it faced north, for then I would be able to see the moon and stars rise.