CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
T here were children on Belinda’s front porch, children dressed as clowns in simple homemade costumes of purple and gold. At first Phillip thought they were just some of the little girls who frequented her life, until an older woman with tired eyes and badly processed hair joined them.
“Is Belinda home?” Phillip started up the stairs. He had never met any of Belinda’s family, but he thought this might be one of her married sisters.
“No one by that name here.” The woman looked suspicious, but Phillip had gotten suspicious looks since leaving Nicky and Jake’s house that morning. He hadn’t seen another man in town wearing a sport coat. Had he been dressed as Satan himself, no one would have given him a second look.
He had chosen Mardi Gras day to see Belinda again—a decision that had appealed to him, because he still wasn’t sure what he would say to her. Immersed in the noise and confusion of the day, he thought he might be able to feel his way through their reunion. He was a journalist, a man so inti mately familiar with words that he ought to have a thesaurus stored inside him. But he still didn’t know how to tell her what he was feeling. About her. About his life and who he was. About their future—or even if they had one together.
He paused on the top step, because the woman was moving swiftly toward him, as if to head him off.
“Belinda Beauclaire,” he said. “This is her house.”
“Uh-uh. This is my house.” She barred his progress with wide hips.
It had been only weeks since Phillip had seen Belinda and lived right here with her. For a moment, he was as suspicious as the woman’s eyes. “How long have you been here?”
“I don’t see why I got to tell you.”
“Look, a friend of mine, Belinda Beauclaire, lived right here just a few weeks ago. I need to find her.”
“I live here now.”
Frustration filled him. “Did you just move in?”
The woman shrugged.
“Miss Beauclaire done moved away,” one of the little girls said.
The woman waved her hand to shush her. “You better get on,” she told Phillip. “Ain’t none of our concern.”
“Look, I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where she is. I’ve got to find her.”
The woman pursed her lips and folded her arms.
It had never occurred to Phillip that Belinda wouldn’t be right here waiting for him to return. For the first time since he’d seen the children on the porch, he realized that he might not find her at all. He could wait until the holiday was over and go to her school, but what if she’d left town? What if her destination was confidential? Few people here knew him or knew about their relationship. Who would he go to for information?
Belinda had always been there for him.
Now she wasn’t.
His feelings must have shown in his eyes, or maybe the woman had just gotten tired of him standing there. Her sigh was appropriately world-weary. “She be down on Claiborne today.”
“Claiborne?”
“You not from here, are you?”
“My mother is Nicky Valentine. I visit here a lot.” He was ashamed to use Nicky this way, but only a little. If anyone could open doors, it would be Nicky.
“Belinda’s staying with a friend. Don’t know where, exactly. You ask down on Claiborne, you find her soon enough.” She pointed to the left.
“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”
“You wait there.” The woman went inside and returned a few moments later carrying a handful of gaudy glass beads. “Put these on.”
He took them reluctantly.
“Put ’em on,” she ordered. “You Nicky Valentine’s boy, you got to look like you part of things.”
From the moment he went out into the streets that morning, Phillip hadn’t wanted to be part of things. Mardi Gras had always seemed a colossal waste of time to him. He had never been sure that there was anything to celebrate here. Everywhere he looked, he saw walls that all the Joshuas in the world couldn’t tumble. Even the parades were segregated, with Rex and other krewes representing the white elite, and Zulu, a Negro krewe in satirical blackface, slyly spoofing the pomposity of Rex.
He strung the beads around his neck anyway and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. At the car he ditched his sport coat, then locked the doors. Claiborne was a fair hike, but walking seemed easier than driving through the crowds. The trip to Belinda’s—or what had once been Belinda’s—had been just short of suicidal.
Why had she given up her house? By most standards, it wasn’t much, half of a double, with small rooms and no hall. But it was hers, paid for with a job she loved, decorated in colors that would always make him think of her, firmly rooted in a neighborhood where she was loved and respected. There she had taught her heritage classes, watched over the children who played on her street, sat on her porch in the spring when the jasmine was a cascade of fragrant yellow stars.
And why hadn’t she gotten word to him that she had decided to move? Surely, despite the way they had parted, she knew he would be back.
He needed her today in a way that he’d never let himself need anyone. He needed to tell her what he’d learned about his family. She was the only one who would understand his confusion. Belinda would feel what he had felt upon learning the way that his grandfather had died. He could count on that. He could count on her.
A day hadn’t passed since he’d seen her last that he hadn’t wanted to pick up the telephone and tell her that and more. He had spent months away from her in the past, but after their relationship had become established he had believed deep in his heart that he could always come back to New Orleans and take up where they had left off. Now he no longer knew that, and there was a large empty space inside him where that certainty, that foolish, arrogant certainty, had been.
He stopped on a corner to get his bearings. The houses bordering the intersection were Southern-shabby, weathered by tropical sun and overgrown with foliage that appeared to snake and twine around doors and windows as he looked on. There were people everywhere, and a low, constant thrumming that seemed to come directly from the earth under his feet.
Something not quite music, more like a litany, poured from a run-down bar in the middle of the next block, a bar like so many throughout the city. The building was compact and, from all visible evidence, jammed beyond capacity. Sound spilled out of the windows, and on the sidewalk in front of the bar, groups of men took up the cadence.
Phillip wanted to find Belinda; he didn’t want to stop and see what was happening. He had no interest in local celebrations, or in the fights that would most likely ensue from the lethal mixture of alcohol and testosterone. But the sound coming from the bar was so compelling, he found himself standing still to listen.
There were drums beating, drums like those he’d heard in small African villages. Men’s voices chanted words he couldn’t understand, and the sound filled the street. Children strutted to its beat or clanged soda bottles together in support. Mothers with babies in their arms clapped their hands and stomped their feet.
The chanting grew louder, the words still foreign to him, nonsense syllables strung together with an odd, raw intensity. He didn’t know how long the chanting had been going on. It built subtly but steadily, and he suspected it had been building that way for hours. He found himself swaying to the beat; then he found himself moving closer.
He lost track of time as the chanting and the music continued to crescendo. He was caught in something that went beyond a day or even a season. The cadence was as old as Adam’s heartbeat, as sensuous as Eve and as tempting as forbidden fruit. Then the bar door was flung open, and a man in the beaded and feathered costume of an Indian emerged.
The crowd that had gathered outside the bar parted respectfully to give him plenty of room. There was loud appreciation for the exquisite beauty of the costume, which was a brilliant burst of scarlet and turquoise. The man wearing it stood tall and silent; then he started forward, dramatically scanning the area.
“He the spy boy.”
Phillip turned and looked at the young man who had come up to stand beside him. He was a teenager, lithe and athletic, whose only attempt at a costume was a satin bandit’s mask riding high on his forehead. “Spy boy?”
“Yeah. He the spy boy for the Creole Wild West.”
“What’s that?”
“You not from here?”
For the second time that morning, Phillip owned up to it.
“They an Indian tribe. Mardi Gras Indians.”
Phillip remembered having heard something about the Mardi Gras Indians, but he hadn’t understood it, and he hadn’t cared. “What’s that, exactly?”
“Just one of the tribes. We got lots of ’em.”
There was another burst of appreciation, and another man in costume stepped out of the door. His costume was not as elaborate, but he carried a staff, decorated top and bottom with feathers of the same scarlet and turquoise.
“He the flag boy.” The young man danced from side to side with the beat of the chanting, which still echoed from inside the bar. “He carry the flag all day. The spy boy watches to be sure no other tribes around. You keep watching. You learn what’s what.” He went off to join other boys his age on the corner.
The costumes grew steadily more elaborate, until at last, with a huge burst of sound, the last man of fewer than a dozen stepped out. The crowd roared their approval. The costume and matching headdress were spectacular, but the man wearing them was more so. Phillip calculated what the suit and the headdress must weigh, and how much strength the man needed just to walk. But he didn’t walk. He glided. He strutted. He was as regal as any European monarch.
The Indians began to sing as they moved off down the street. The others, not in costume, followed at a respectful distance, but as the Indians sang and chanted, the crowd joined in on the chorus.
The young man who had instructed Phillip passed by to catch up with the foot parade following the Indians. He grinned at Phillip. “You like that suit? That’s the chief. He got a heart of steel.”
“Who makes the costumes?”
“Suits. They make ’em. Every stitch. Every year’s different, too.”
The Indians disappeared around the corner, but the beat continued. Music spilled from windows and in front of houses where impromptu brass bands blew one-of-a-kind refrains. Phillip walked up a street the Indians hadn’t taken, dodging wrestling children and scolding mamas. Crowds overflowed from doorways, and parties flourished on porches and driveways.
The crowd grew larger as he neared Claiborne, and the beat intensified. It was still early, but the heat had intensified, too. He was part of a great surge of people, but he was aware of how alone he really was. All around him people were cele brating together. Masked friends greeted each other in the melee, and grandmothers, aunts and uncles corraled and carried children to share the burden. He was apart from it all, yet he was being swept into the very center of it.
He had come to find Belinda because he thought he wanted solace. Now he realized it was something more he required. He wanted her. The whole woman. The companion. The lover. He wanted to share the strange exuberance of the day, a day that was slowly seeping over him—despite his own melancholy—like a bath of warm honey. He wanted to tuck her securely beside him while they drank in this unique outpouring of culture. The word lonely had never existed in any significant way for him, but it did now.
On Claiborne he was swept along by the crowd as he crossed to the neutral ground, the local term for the wide strip of land between the traffic lanes. It was heavily forested with live oaks, and overnight it had developed into a settlement of blankets and picnic tables. Transistor radios countered the steady rhythm of shouts and laughter, and battered horns and saxophones reinforced the din.
He was beginning to feel like a fool for coming. There were thousands of people crowding the streets, and he could have walked right by Belinda and never seen her. He pushed on anyway, glad he had when another Indian tribe, this time in gold and green, came around a corner. He watched the crowd surge around them.
A small contingent of men dressed as skeletons loped by, shaking bones at passing children. An old woman gathered up a wailing child and turned him so that he couldn’t see, while three small boys, shaking sticks, took off after the skeletons. The children brushed past him, and one stumbled at Phillip’s feet. Phillip lifted him off the ground, and the boy was off like a shot again.
“What’d you do to Percy?”
Phillip turned around to find a little girl glaring at him.
She slapped her hands on her hips. “I said what’d you do?”
The child was familiar, but it took Phillip a moment to place her. “He tripped over my foot. I just helped him up. You’re Amy, aren’t you? I’m Phillip, Belinda’s friend.”
The glare faded slowly.
“Hi, Amy.” He put out his hand.
She took it with poise, then released it.
“Amy, have you seen Miss Belinda? I’m looking for her.”
Amy shrugged. “Ain’t seen her.”
“Oh.”
“She live over there now.” Amy pointed to the block just past the one where they stood.
“Do you know which house?”
She shook back her braids. “’Course I do.”
He tried again. “Will you tell me which one?”
“White one on the corner.”
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll find her there.”
Amy took off after Percy, and Phillip took off after Belinda. He wound his way through family groups and friends. He interrupted a game of catch and skirted a large group of men playing cards. A vendor tried to sell him peanuts while two older boys in raggedy devil costumes jabbed forked spears at him. As he stepped into the road, an old lady in a flour-sack apron offered him the drumstick off a chicken she was expertly carving up.
The music got louder the closer he got to Belinda’s. Someone had hooked up a hi-fi in an upstairs window, and rhythm and blues poured out of large speakers. In front of the house four particularly pretty teenaged girls with arms around each other’s waists were dancing in step, moving back and forth along an invisible line, like Radio City Rockettes.
The house, white stucco and well cared for, sprawled over every allowable inch of space on the lot. He estimated it had six bedrooms, at least, and a porch large enough to sleep a dozen. Right now the porch held a party in progress, but Belinda wasn’t among the partiers.
On the porch he stopped a young woman and shouted Belinda’s name questioningly, but she frowned and shook her head. The second woman he asked cupped her hand behind her ear to hear him better, but he wasn’t sure she ever did. He made his way into the house, where the din was muted, and found two men in their early thirties loading up plates from a dining room table groaning with food. Three women carrying casseroles appeared and disappeared, leaving their bounty behind.
“Get you a plate,” a broad-shouldered man in a madras shirt and Bermuda shorts said.
“I’m just here to find Belinda Beauclaire. Somebody told me she’s living here now?”
“She is.”
“Do you know where she is right now?”
“She’s off seeing Zulu.” The man seemed absolutely sure. As much as Phillip wanted the information, he would have been happier if the man was a little less sure of himself. And of Belinda.
“Do you have any idea how I might find her?”
“It’s hard to tell where Zulu will be about now. Why don’t you just eat and wait? She’ll come back when she gets tired.”
“I think I’ll go look for her. I’ll come back here later if I don’t find her.”
“Want me to tell her who was here?” The man gave Phillip the once-over with narrowing eyes. He didn’t look as friendly as he had at the beginning of the conversation.
“That’s okay. I’ll be back.”
“Try Jackson Avenue,” the other man said. He waved a bottle of beer in the general direction.
Out on the street again, Phillip wound his way toward Jackson. He was halfway there, skirting a rugged-looking crowd of pirates, when he saw Belinda. She was coming toward him across the street on the neutral ground, dressed in stark white. A tight white skirt cupped her perfect bottom, and a gauzy blouse flowed over the curves of her torso. A white satin mask with two gracefully drooping feathers covered the top half of her face.
“Belinda!” There was nothing much in the way of traffic to dodge. He avoided pedestrians and made his way into the madness again.
She stopped and stood very still.
He lifted her mask and searched her eyes. She had never looked more beautiful or desirable to him. He wanted to kiss her, but one look told him what a bad idea that would be. She was a woman capable of great emotion, a woman who could melt with passion and ignite a man in the process. But the Belinda staring back at him was a woman who had hidden her feelings well.
“I’ve had a hell of a time finding you,” he said.
“No one asked you to look.”
“I wanted to.” A crowd of shoving adolescents knocked him closer to her. He took her arm to steady them both. She didn’t shake him off, but she looked as if she wanted to. “I was just at your new place. Why did you move?”
“I moved in with a friend.”
He pictured the man in the madras shirt and the narrowing eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me where you were?”
“How would I have done that?”
“You could have left a message with Nicky.”
“Could have.” She nodded.
“Why didn’t you?”
She pulled her arm from his grasp and started across the street. He stopped her. “No, you don’t. Don’t go off like that. I want to talk this through, right here and now.”
“You made your wishes known, Phillip. You always do. I didn’t see any reason to leave you messages.” She shook off his hand once more, and this time she made it across.
“Belinda.” He took her arm gently this time. “We need to talk. Will you talk to me?”
“I’ve got nothing to say. I’ve got a new life now, and you’ve got the life you always had. The one you want.”
“What do you mean, a new life?” When she didn’t answer, he made his worst fears a guess. “I met a man at your house who seemed to know you pretty well. Is he part of that new life?”
Before she could answer, a woman came up beside them. “Belinda?”
For a moment, Phillip didn’t recognize her, then he realized it was Debby, the teacher he’d met at Club Valentine on the last night he and Belinda were together. She wore a dress of leopard spots and a black half mask that turned her pert face into something feline and mysterious.
“What are you doing here, Phillip?” she asked.
“Just looking for Belinda.” He dropped Belinda’s arm. “And I guess I found what I was looking for.”
“How’d you find her? She just moved in with us.”
“Us?”
“Us. Vicki and me and my family.”
“Vicki?”
“My baby. You haven’t seen her yet? My brother’s bringing her up to see Zulu. Jackson’s on a float, but the parade’s late. I’m going to see if I can find them.” With a wave, she crossed the street and headed in the direction of her house.
“It’s Debby you moved in with?”
Belinda didn’t confirm or deny it.
Phillip had a list of questions a mile long, and he knew she wasn’t going to answer them. He had hurt her, and she wasn’t going to let herself be hurt again. He didn’t understand why or how, not exactly, but she had left him as surely as she had left the house she loved.
“Belinda.” He touched her cheek. Her expression didn’t change. He dropped his hand. “Let’s go see Zulu. Maybe we can talk along the way.”
“I’m going home.”
“May I walk with you?”
She started toward the house, and he fell in step beside her. He had just blocks to tell her what he was feeling, and he couldn’t find the first word. In the midst of the biggest party he’d ever witnessed, he was dead sober, and mute besides.
He cast around for something to say. “I didn’t know Debby had a daughter. How old is she?”
“Three.”
“Is Jackson the father?”
“Plans to be.”
“He’s a good man.” He reached down and took her hand. She didn’t resist, but her hand was limp and unwelcoming. “You loved your house and your privacy, Belinda. I can’t imagine you living in that house with all those people. They’re not your family.”
“They’re good people.”
“I’m sure they are. I just want to understand what’s happening here.”
“Why does it matter?”
He stopped and pulled her to a halt beside him. “It matters because you matter to me.”
She studied his face. Clearly she didn’t think his answer was enough. “I wanted to save money.”
“If things were that tight you should have let me know.”
“Why?” She started back down the sidewalk.
He tried to understand her responses. She wasn’t hostile or disinterested, although with a different inflection, most of her answers might have sounded that way. Instead, she seemed merely intent on getting through this conversation, focused so completely on what she was saying that there was no room for emotion in her voice.
They came to a corner, and he heard a familiar chanting. “Come on this way.” He pulled her off Claiborne and toward the sound.
“I have to get back.”
“Come with me, Belinda. I’ve already seen two of the tribes this morning, and I’d like to see this one.”
“What would you know about the Indians?”
“I don’t know about them. I’ve just seen them for the first time today.”
“Why are you interested?”
He detected skepticism. “I don’t know.” He honestly didn’t. He was a journalist, not a sociologist, and he knew there wasn’t a tremendous market for articles on the cultural life of black people.
“Do you think it’s silly?”
“Silly? No.” He pulled her along. The chanting was getting louder. “I think it’s incredible. I don’t understand it. Why do they dress that way?”
“They’ve been doing it for a long time. This is our Mardi Gras you’re seeing. Not the white Mardi Gras everyone knows about. Indians and black people have a lot in common. The Indians hid slaves after they escaped, hid them in the swamps and protected them, because they knew what it was like to be hunted. Some people think that’s how the Mardi Gras tribes began, as a mark of respect. But it doesn’t even matter. Because this is us. This is who we are. This is that culture you don’t understand and don’t want to be a part of.”
“You’re angry at me.”
“No.”
“That night at the club, when I said this wasn’t my home, I wasn’t saying that I didn’t want you.”
She faced him and pulled her hand from his. Her eyes were unwavering. “You don’t want me, Phillip. You want what you thought we had. You want me to be there waiting when you need a place to come back to for a while.”
“I have to travel. I have to be where the news is. In fact, I’ve got to leave for Alabama the day after tomorrow, so I wanted to settle things with you before I left.”
“This isn’t about your job, and you know it.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about being part of something. And you don’t know how to do that. Maybe you never will.”
“I thought you and I were part of something together.” But even as he said the words, he realized it was the first time he’d ever said any like them.
She shook her head. “You stand off by yourself, and you watch. That’s what you’ll do in Alabama, too, whatever happens there. First time something starts to tug at you, you get on a bus or a plane. You do that too many times, you stop feeling anything. I think maybe that’s already happened.”
As he was searching for the right response, she carefully skirted him and disappeared into the crowd that was surging forward to see the Indian tribe just turning the corner. He tried to follow, but he was cut off immediately.
Against his will, he was carried along by the enthusiastic crowd. The beat, the steady insistent beat that had drummed all morning, seemed to swell in intensity. Now it was a primal roar, the throbbing of hundreds of hearts and voices. He was immersed in it, and he couldn’t fight his way out to find Belinda again, no matter how hard he tried. He could feel the heat and soft give of flesh, smell sweat and beer and woodsy perfume. He was carried forward, stumbling once, then righting himself easily, because there was no room to fall.
The crowd was chanting words he didn’t understand. The sound rumbled in his chest until he wanted to chant with them, chant past the strange lump in his throat, chant his own pain. But he couldn’t follow the voices of those around him. He was still a stranger here, and his pain was his own. The words, the ritual celebration, were theirs.
The crowd began to fan out and thin as they neared the Indians. People were moving to the sides in respect. He was thrown against a small female body clutching a little girl in her arms. He grabbed them both to stop them from pitching forward, and realized it was Debby.
“Hey, are you all right?”
She laughed. “Sure.”
“Let me take her. She’ll be safer.” He reached for the child, and she went to him willingly. She was tiny, a beautiful little girl with a head of soft dark curls and pale brown skin. She clutched a rag doll in her arms. “Is this Vicki?”
Debby said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the chanting. She nodded.
They moved toward the edge of the crowd. The Indians, this time costumed in orange and blue, were surrounded, and only flashes of them were discernible. As Phillip and Debby moved away from the center of the action, the noise lessened.
Phillip lowered his head. He felt required to say something to the child. “I like your doll.”
She held it up for him to examine. The doll was handmade. Dark-skinned, like the child holding it. Someone had wanted her to have a toy that resembled her, instead of the white baby dolls that were the only commercial ones available.
They were far enough away from the heart of the noise that Phillip could be sure Vicki heard him. “What do you call her?”
“B’linda.”
“Did Belinda give you this?” It would be just like Belinda to be sure that Vicki had a doll she could identify with.
She nodded, and her curls bounced against her cheeks.
He smiled. “She’s beautiful, and so are you.”
“I gotta learn to hold a baby.”
“Do you?”
“B’linda’s going to have a baby.”
For a moment he didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”
“B’linda’s got a baby inside her. I gotta learn to hold a baby so I can help when her baby’s borned.”
Debby snaked her way to their side and held up her arms for her daughter. Phillip held Vicki tightly against him. He couldn’t seem to relinquish her. He didn’t know what Debby saw in his face, but her arms dropped to her sides. She pushed her mask back and waited warily for him to speak.
“Why did Belinda move in with you?” he asked.
“That’s for her to tell you.”
“Vicki says she’s pregnant.”
Debby held out her arms again, and this time he swung the little girl into them. Debby tried to move past him, but he put his hand on her shoulder. “Debby, please.”
She lifted her chin. “There’s nobody more careful than Belinda.”
He knew how true that was. They had never made love without birth control. “I know that accidents happen.”
She looked relieved, as if she had been afraid he would think Belinda had gotten pregnant on purpose. “You want to talk about this, you talk to her.”
But he and Belinda had already talked about it, only Phillip hadn’t known it at the time. They had talked casually about children, about making a home together, about commitment and responsibility. She had carefully, subtly, led him into those conversations and listened to his answers. And then she had gone away.
Because none of his answers had been the right ones.
Debby disappeared with Vicki, and the chanting swelled again. The Indians would move on, but they would leave honor and a fierce, stunning pride in their wake. The lump in Phillip’s throat threatened his breath.
From the moment he left Nicky’s house, he had been a bystander, an observer. He had thought himself above the ragtag mobs in the street, but now he saw the celebration for what it was. Nothing had kept these people, his people, down. Not slavery, not Jim Crow, not the prejudices that would probably rule the city for decades to come. These descendants of the slaves who had defiantly danced in Congo Square, who had developed their own patois, their own religion, their own traditions, had turned their backs on the Mardi Gras that the world knew and made their own. It was a life-affirming celebration, rich in satire, spirit and courage.
He thought of Aurore Gerritsen, who had lost her daughter because of her own prejudice and fears. He thought of Rafe Cantrelle, the man he supposedly resembled, who had nearly lost his daughter because he had been too afraid to love her.
He had not been raised at the knees of his grandparents. They had not been childhood heroes or role models. He had never known them, but still they had bequeathed him a legacy of uncertainty. Like them, he was afraid to love, to hold Belinda safely beside him and make a home despite the mess the world was in. He had never found a place where a black man could truly live free, and so he had never lived anywhere. He had existed on the sidelines, moving, noting, reporting, then moving again. Like his grandparents, he had never taken the largest risks or reaped the largest gains.
Like his grandparents, he had been afraid.
But there was more to Aurore’s story than cowardice, revenge and betrayal. Now, at the end of her life, she was struggling to set things right, no matter how agonizing that was. And Rafe had died fighting for his daughter, for Nicky’s future and, at the very end, for her life.
His grandparents had bequeathed him uncertainty, but they had bequeathed him more, as well. For the first time, Phillip realized what their story meant, and why Aurore’s revelations had been so painful to hear—and so powerful.
Aurore and Rafe had been doomed by their love.
But they had bequeathed their grandson a second chance.