Ah, there it was, revealed at last, the one thing inside Isadora that made me shudder. It was what you heard all your blessed life from black elders and church women in flowered gowns: Don’t be common. Comb your hair. Be a credit to the Race. Strive, like the Creoles, for respectability. Class. It made my insides clench. Oh, yes, it mattered to me that Isadora cared, but she saw me as clay. Something she could knead beneath her tiny brown fingers into precisely the sort of creature I — after seeing my brother shackled to subservience — was determined not to become: “a gentleman of color.” The phrase made me hawk, then spit in a corner of my mind. It conjured (for me) the image of an Englishman, round of belly, balding, who’d been lightly brushed with brown watercolor or cinnamon.
“No, Isadora.” I shook my head. “I don’t believe I’ll ever get married. There’s too much to do. And see. Life is too short for me to shackle myself to a mortgage and marriage.” I was a breath away from adding, “And a houseful of gimped cats,” but thought it best to bite my tongue.
Her eyes took on a woebegone, persecuted look, a kind of dying-duck expression she had now and then: She stared at me for the longest time, then flashed, “You just won’t act right, will you?” Touching her handkerchief to the doorknob nose, she stood suddenly, her cat leaping from her enskirted knees and bumping blindly into a candlestand. Isadora took three paces toward the door — I thought she was about to throw me out — then turned to pitch her voice back into the room. “Suppose you have to get married, Rutherford Calhoun!” Now her eyes burned. “What about that?”
What Isadora meant by this was a mystery to me. She couldn’t be pregnant. Not her. At least not by me — she twisted my fingers whenever I reached for her knee. Have to marry her? It made no sense that afternoon, but less than a fortnight later her meaning became horribly clear.
Near the waterfront, after a day of dodging my creditors and shooting craps, I turned a corner and found myself facing a Negro named Santos, a kind of walking wrecking crew who pretty much ran things down on the docks for a Creole gangster known by the name of Philippe “Papa” Zeringue. Some masters, as you know, groomed their slaves to be gladiators: the Africans with a reach, or thickness of skull, or smoldering anger that, if not checked, would result in slave rebellion. So it was with Santos. He’d been a dirt-pit wrestler on a Baton Rouge plantation, and made his master, John Ruffner, a fortune in bare-knuckle fights he arranged for him with blacks from other farms. Freed by Ruffner, undefeated, and itching for trouble, he’d next come to New Orleans, and fell, as many did, into the orbit of life upstream. You have seen, perhaps, sketches of Piltdown man? Cover him with coal dust, add deerskin leggings and a cutaway coat tight as wet leather, and you shall have Santos’s younger, undernourished sister.
This upright disaster was in the oval light of a lamppost on Royal Street as I passed. He was gnawing a stolen ham. Behind him two policemen stood, tapping their nightsticks on their palms. “Come along now, Santos,” said one. “Don’t make trouble. That ham’ll cost you a month in the Calabozo.” Santos went right on chewing, his small, quick eyes half-seeled in gastronomic bliss. And then, without warning, both policemen smashed him full on both sides of his temples with their nightsticks. They’d each taken half steps back too, putting their waists and full weight into the swing. One nightstick broke with a sickening crack, the other vibrated in the officer’s hand as if wood had struck wood. As for Santos, he only looked up sleepily. Said, “Now what’d you do that fo’?”
No fools, the policemen flew past me, Santos’s eyes on their flapping waistcoats until his gaze lighted upon me. “Illinois!” he said — or, rather his sweaty voice rumbled and rattled windows along the street. “Ain’t you Rutherford Calhoun from Illinois?”
I shook my head and took a step backward.
“Dammit, you are Calhoun! Don’t lie! Papa been lookin’ fo’ you, boy!”
I touched my chest. “Me?”
“Yes, you, nigguh.” He came forward, seizing my arm. “He wants to talk to you ’bout somethin’ you owe him.” I told him that surely he was mistaken, that indeed I owed several people within a mile circumference of the city — my landlady Mrs. Dupree; Mr. Fenton the moneylender; and the vendors too — but I’d never met Papa. How could I owe him? None of this washed with Santos, a man with whom you didn’t argue, because he looked exactly like what he was: an athlete gone slightly to seed, with maybe thirty pounds of muscle alchemizing to fat on his upper body. He’d be dead by forty from the strain on his heart — the extra bulk had scrunched down his spine, I heard, shortening him by two inches, but no matter. He was bigger than me. Silently he steered me, his right hand on the back of my collar, to a tavern owned by Papa on Chartres Street, a one-story building of English-bond brickwork, with sunken, uneven floors, and windows with old, diamond-paned lattices, pushing me through the door to a table at the rear of the room where Papa sat eating a meal of drop-biscuits and blueberries with — my heart jumped! — Isadora! Of a sudden, I had that special feeling of dread that comes when you enter a café and stumble upon two women you used to sleep with — who you’d have sworn were strangers but were now whispering together. About you by God! She looked up as I scuffed jelly-legged to the table, and her eyes, I tell you, were indecipherable.
“Isadora,” I gulped, “you know these people!”
She gave Papa, in fact, a very knowing smile.
“We just met to discuss a business arrangement that affects you, Rutherford. I’m sure you’ll be interested to hear what Mr. Zeringue and I have decided.” Isadora touched a napkin to her lips, then stood up. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
She seemed to take all the available air in the room with her as she sashayed outside, mysteriously happier than I’d seen her in months. For an instant I could not catch my breath. Papa sat with a napkin tucked into his collar. He was holding a soup spoon dripping with blueberry jelly in his right hand when I extended my hand and introduced myself; this spoon he slapped against my palm and, having nothing else to shake, I shook that. Santos roared.
“Sir, you wanted to see me abo—”
“Don’t say nothin’, Calhoun.”
If there were musical instruments that fit this man’s voice, that would ring from the orchestra, say, if he appeared on stage, they would be the bull fiddle, tuba, and slide trombone (Isadora was all strings, a soft flick of the lyre), a combination so guttural and brutish, full of grunts and deep-throated notes, that I cannot say his voice put me at ease. Nor this room. It had the atmosphere you feel in houses where some great “Murder of the Age” has taken place. My worst fears about him were confirmed. He was, in every sense of the word, the very Ur-type of Gangster. Fiftyish, a brown-skinned black man with gray-webbed hair, he dressed in rich burgundy waistcoats and had a princely, feudal air about him, the smell of a man who loved Gothic subterfuges and schemes, deceits, and Satanic games of power. Yet, despite his wealth, and despite the extravagant riverboat parties I heard he threw — bashes that made Roman bacchanals look like a backwoods flangdang — he was a black lord in ruins, a fallen angel who, like Lucifer, controlled the lower depths of the city — the cathouses, the Negro press, the gambling dens — but held his dark kingdom, and all within it, in the greatest contempt. He was wicked. Wicked and self-serving, I thought, but why did he want to see me?
“I suppose,” said Papa, as if he’d read my mind, “you wanna know why I had Santos bring you heah.”