He's Mine

Thirty-Four. The Yard on Esplanade

Chapter Thirty-Four

The Yard on Esplanade

The first thing about New Orleans was that he could not understand what anybody was saying.

They walked them up off the levee in a line of thirty-one and the street was full at eleven in the morning — carts, a man with a barrow of oranges in January, women in the road, two men arguing on a corner — and the noise of it went over Nelson like weather.

There was English in it. There was a good deal of something that was not English and that ran fast and came off the tongue at the front of the mouth.

There was something else that he could not have said was a language at all except that two women were plainly using it to have an argument.

He had been in Virginia his whole life and had never once in nineteen years been anywhere that he could not understand.

He walked up that street with his hands loose and turned his head at everything.

—

The pen was four blocks up, where Chartres comes to Esplanade, and it did not look like anything from the street.

That was the part nobody had told him. He had expected — he did not know what.

There was a house with two doors and a board over the front of it with lettering on it that he could not read, and a wall running back from the house down the side of the lot, and the wall was fifteen or sixteen feet high and had bottle glass set in the top of it.

Behind the house was a yard about the size of a house lot and there were, that January, a hundred and four people living in it.

There were sheds down two sides for sleeping under. There was a kitchen at the back and two privies and a stand pipe. There was a brick building three stories high on the far corner with barred windows that they called the jail and that was for anybody who gave trouble or was sick.

The smell of that yard was the thing he could not get used to and did not get used to in three weeks.

It was a hundred people in a space that would take four, and lye, and cooking, and the privies, and something coming off the wet ground underneath all of it, and it was worse in the morning than at night.

—

They were three weeks in that yard and they were worked on the whole time.

That was the difference between Richmond and New Orleans and it took Nelson six days to understand it. In Richmond they had boarded him at thirty cents a day and put him up in a new shirt. Here they prepared him.

They fed them up. Twice a day and enough of it and meat in it, more than Nelson had eaten regularly in nineteen years, and there was a man whose job was to look at the yard in the morning and pick out anybody going thin.

They washed. Every man in that yard was made to wash himself and shave every second day, and the water was in the yard and it was cold and it was done in front of everybody and there was no arguing about it.

They were oiled. That is the word for it. Twice in the three weeks a man went along the line with a pot of something and every man in the yard got his arms and his shoulders and his face done with it, and it made you shine, and Nelson stood in a yard in New Orleans being greased like a harness.

A doctor came twice a week. He came on Tuesdays and Fridays and he went down the yard in about forty minutes and looked at every mouth in it, and twice while Nelson was there he had somebody taken out and put in the brick building on the corner, and one of those two came back.

And they were dressed. On the last week they gave every man in that yard a blue suit — coat and trousers, new, cheap, all of them the same — and the women got calico.

In that season the street outside those pens was lined with people in blue suits and calico dresses standing about in the sun waiting to be looked at, and you could see it four blocks up, and Nelson understood after two days that this was the point of it.

—

They drilled them.

He had not been ready for that at all. There was a man of about forty who belonged to the house and whose work it was, and he took them into the yard in the mornings and taught them how to be sold.

He taught them to stand in a line by height, men on one side and women on the other, tallest at the near end, and to get into that line fast and without being told twice.

He taught them to come forward when called and stop at a particular place on the ground and stand with the arms loose.

He taught them to hold the head up. He was firm about that. He came down the line pushing chins up with two fingers, over and over, all week, and he was not rough about it and he did not stop.

He taught them how to answer. What to say and how long to make it. Yes sir. Nineteen, sir. Tobacco and wheat, sir. Two seasons on a threshing machine, sir. Short, quick, no more than was asked, and look at the man while you say it.

And he taught them to look smart, which was the word he used, and which turned out to mean a particular way of holding the shoulders that Nelson had never in his life held them.

On the fourth morning the man came down the line and stopped in front of Nelson and looked at him for a while, and then he said, “You’ve done a day’s work in your life.”

“Yes sir.”

“It’s the only thing they can see from over there,” the man said, and moved on.

He said it without any bitterness in it whatsoever. He said it the way Reuben would have said a thing about a horse’s feet.

—

In the second week a man came down the yard with a meal sack and gave back out of it what was worth the trouble of giving back.

He had a paper and he read numbers off it and not names. A tin cup. A razor with the scale gone off one side. A comb. A whetstone. Two knives.

“Forty-one.”

Nelson had been forty-one since Richmond. He came forward and put his hand out.

The man laid the bone handle in it without looking up. Somebody had oiled it, which nobody had done to it in November, and there was a spot of rust come up in the pivot that had not been there either.

“That’s the whole of it against that number.”

“There was paper,” Nelson said. “Wrote-on paper. Four passes and some pages of writing.”

The man turned the list over and looked at the back of it, which had nothing on it.

“There’s nothing else for that name,” he said, and went on down the yard.

Nelson stood where he was and shut the blade and opened it again with his thumbnail, and it worked the way it had always worked.

—

Later that same week Reddick came into the yard and had four of them out and Nelson was one, and he took them into the house.

The front room was the show room and Nelson had not been in it.

It had a boarded floor that had been finished, and painted walls, and a fireplace with a fire in it, and four chairs, and doors on three sides, and it was the first room he had stood in since Louisa County that had been made for people to be comfortable in.

Reddick had a man with him with a book.

“Take your coat off. And the shirt.”

He took them off.

“Turn round.”

He turned round, and Reddick came over and put his hand on Nelson’s back, on the two that had healed wide, and pressed along them with his thumb, and said something to the man with the book that Nelson did not hear.

Then he came round the front.

“Now,” he said. “When a man asks you about that, this is what you say. You say you were took sick in the summer and there was a hand on the place that stole from the smokehouse, and you were took up for it along with two others, and it was found out after that it was not you. Say that. Say it like that.”

Nelson stood in that room with his shirt in his hand.

“It weren’t a stealing,” he said.

“I know what it was,” said Reddick. “I’ve known what it was since Norfolk and it don’t signify one damn thing to me.

What signifies is that a man that buys you in this city can come back on me inside of a twelvemonth and get his money if he can show there was a vice in you when he bought you, and a back like that is a vice in this state, and I have had it done to me twice.

” He put his hands in his pockets. “So you were took up for a stealing you didn’t do.

That is a thing that happens to a good hand on a bad place and there ain’t a planter on this river that don’t know it. Say it back.”

Nelson said it back.

“Again.”

He said it again.

“That’ll do,” Reddick said, and went out, and the man with the book went after him, and Nelson stood in the show room and put his shirt on.

—

He was sold on the twenty-seventh of January, in that room, to a man called Bergeron who was buying for a sugar place on the Bayou Lafourche and who bought four of them in about twenty minutes.

Bergeron was fifty and quiet and did not oil his words any more than Reddick had oiled them. He asked Nelson three things. He asked what he had worked at. He asked whether he had ever been on a place that made sugar, and Nelson said no. And he asked about the back.

Nelson said his piece.

Bergeron listened to the whole of it with his head a little on one side, and at the end of it he said, “Mm,” and turned to Reddick and began talking about the other three.

Nelson had no way of knowing whether the man had believed one word of it.

The figure was fifteen hundred and fifty dollars.

He heard it said twice in that room and he stood there and did the sum, because he had been doing sums in his head since a wall in Louisa County when he was thirteen years old.

Pendleton had bought him off Corbin Ashmore in November for something Nelson had never been told. Reddick had bought him in Richmond for fourteen hundred. Bergeron had just bought him for fifteen fifty.

Three men had owned him in eleven weeks. The one price he knew had gone up a hundred and fifty dollars, and he had walked the whole distance himself.

—

They took them up the river on the twenty-ninth on a steamboat, on the deck, among the cargo, with a man and a boy watching the four of them and about sixty other people going up on the same passage for seven different places.

It took a day and a half. There was a great deal of water and a great deal of flat ground behind the levees on both sides, and towns, and sugar houses standing up out of the cane grounds with their chimneys going, one after another, all the way up.

Nelson stood at the rail with his blue coat on and looked at them.

He had the thimble in his mouth. He had nearly lost it in the second week, when they made the whole yard wash and he had put it inside his shoe and then not been able to find the shoe for about five minutes, and he had stood in a yard in New Orleans in the middle of a hundred and four people with his heart going like a bird in a sack.

They put them off at a landing below Thibodaux at about four in the afternoon and there was a cart.

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