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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 89: Brown 313
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 112
Derek started to enjoy the weather. He bought Vashti and himself light jackets as windbreakers, and played music nearly every day as the new year marched through January. Frost was a daily occurrence, but he never saw snow, and found himself occasionally missing it. The air continued humid, but he had adjusted to that.
He had begun to understand the Cajun accent and had long adjusted to the full Southern drawl. That had taken him about a month to get completely used to. He improved the French that he had learned as a spy, because Pierre occasionally without thinking dropped into French, or even Castellan Spanish, which Derek did not speak. Pierre had explained that he had spent two summers in Spain and learned their language, which was different from Mexican Spanish. Lei He was smoothing out his English, and Derek tried to learn a bit of Cantonese, which was surprisingly different from the Mandarin he had studied to the point where Lei could not understand his Mandarin despite having grown up speaking Cantonese at home.
The rabbits around the shack and its adjoining swamplands had learned to fear him, and the hawks and pelicans accepted him as one of their own when he was in sprite form. The seagulls and he were in an ongoing war because when he fished in his middle size (it was light enough to go into the swamp yet strong enough to fish), they tried to snatch his fish away from him. Attempts to appeal to their better natures had resulted in replies that amounted to ‘too slow, too bad, sucker’. Unlike the hawks, they did not reverence the King, nor, like the crows, did they serve the Crooked Man. Instead, they served themselves first and foremost, then served the other gulls. Now he just threw pebbles at them if they came near, which only meant they redoubled their efforts to sneak up on him. This led to him practicing his 360 degree clairvoyance which turned the relaxing occasion of fishing into a training session on situational awareness against crafty determined adversaries who would mock him mercilessly if they succeeded. He threatened that if they stole his supper they would be the replacement, but as he had heard that seagull was a particularly greasy unpalatable bird, he never made good on the threat.
Finishing up, he went back toward the shack, leaping over the local alligator who pretended to snap at him. The beast was loyal to the King, it had said, but when it saw food it forgot sometimes. Passing out of the swamp, he saw a happy but apprehensive Vashti. Carrying his string of three fish, he walked up to her, and shifted into Derek.
“What is it, honey?”
“A prince from Arabia has come. He needs a translator. The merchants offered to hire me to sit at the negotiation table, and to walk with the merchants and the prince as he looks into warehouses. A dollar an hour.”
“How long each day?”
“Two to three hours.” She looked apprehensive. “It will cut into our practice time.”
“You’re pretty good already. I think it would be okay if you took the afternoon practice session off for this job. How long is it?”
“At most two weeks, maybe only three days.”
He nodded, and kissed her. She took the fish to the kitchen to prepare for Sunday lunch.
That night, they went to a Crawfish Boil. Quartered corn on the cob, crawfish, shrimp, andouille sausage, sliced red potatoes, small onions, and lots of creole seasoning on everything were offered in great heaping piles on the outdoor picnic tables in the cool evening air. Hundreds of people attended, ate, kibitzed with the cooks who were surrounded by clouds of steam from the boiling pots over the fires, socialized, ate, danced, ate more, and listened to the music. Derek was glad his band got to play relatively early so that he and the others could join in the feast. Afterwards, he took Vashti out and attempted clumsily to dance around a great circle with dozens of other couples under the fading sun to the tunes of My Sunny Southern Home and My Wild Irish Rose and other waltzes. Pierre joined them with a delighted girl when the next dance was a two step with a Sousa march. Fiddles provided the main accompaniment to the dance, and all races joined in the fun. They ate some more, danced some more, and even got to do some impromptu music with a few other players off to the side, and quietly enough as not to disturb the babbling crowd, even though with his teeth filled with corn bits his playing was not at his best.
Sitting down at a wooden picnic table as the party was winding up, he saw Pierre and Maurice and Lei laughing as they walked up to him. The trio sat down across from him, and each had a small pie in hand--chess, pecan, and cherry respectively.
“They’s be givin’ out pie. Iffen you want some, you betta move.” Maurice said.
Derek shook his head, and patted his overstuffed stomach.
“I have to remember not to fall back into my old habits, which is easy here. I’ll do some extra flying tomorrow to burn off the fat.”
Equably Maurice nodded, and began attacking his pecan pie. Derek paused. He still remembered being chided for ‘being Yankee’, and he certainly did not want to come across that way. On the other hand, his heart urged him to speak.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if it could be this way all the time?” The three other men looked at him curiously. “I mean, everyone friendly. No race, no class, everyone friends and--let the good times roll.”
“Ah’s seez whats you mean,” Maurice said sagely. “It be a good party.”
To their surprise, Lei spoke.
“Yes, is a good party,” he then bent back to his cherry pie.
“Change of things,” Maurice said. “I gotz an invite to join the Golden Hiawatha.” The other two congratulated him, but this left Derek in the dark. Further explanations revealed that there were ‘krewes’ that ran the floats in the Mardi Gras parades, hosted exclusive balls, and raised money for charity. These were white only. So the Blacks had responded by creating about fifty ‘tribes’. They would make fun of the krewes, and hold their own parades. They were inspired by the local Indians who had helped escaped slaves, so they had names like Flaming Arrows and such. The tribesmen would all dress up in very fancy hand-painted costumes, parade, dance, and compete ‘to see which Chief was the prettiest’ while also making fun of the krewes.
This threw Derek back to where he had started from. But this was not Maurice’s concern.
“They asked me to join because of the Band. But if I join, it takes a lot of time and effort. I don’t know if I can do both.” Derek’s heart sank. “But, if it comes to that, I will stick with the band.” Derek’s heart rebounded.
“About those Krewes,” Pierre said, “well, I was with one, and frankly, it was a bit dreary to me. I had to give it up to do the band. Standing around at parties raising money is fine and worthy work, but it never sparked my fire. Being in this band does. I can do something important, something that’s mine, not like my cousins who love to do their business, but which seems dull as dirt to me.”
“Which Krewe?” Lei asked.
Pierre looked uncomfortable, but then quietly said, “Um, Rex’s.” The other two whooped with knowing laughter, and both of them were saying versions of “I knew it.” It turned out Rex’s Krewe was the first, the greatest, the royalty of krewes, and Pierre had turned them down for being boring. He had worked with them for a few years, but like other things he had tried, nothing had caught on that hard, so he had been playing a role, trying not to disappoint, and living the life of the hobbyist who did not know what to do with his life.
“Now that has changed,” Pierre said, and Derek could see in his eyes a new fire, and a companionship that a purposeless young man had gained.
“Wouldn’t it be better if there was unity between Black and White, without this divide in Krewes and Tribes?” Derek pushed.
“I’se don’t know. I’se mean, the Tribes are something we do,” Maurice said.
“I don’t exactly disagree, Derek,” Pierre said musingly. “I think my cousins would agree too. I suspect that the Mardi Gras parades will get integrated.”
“I mean, the Krewes,” Derek said. He was surprised to realize that the Mardi Gras official parades were not integrated. What that meant for where the tribes performed he was not sure.
“Mon ami, patience, Derek, patience. I like your passion, but this is New Orleans. God made us to be happy, and enjoy life. Wars are things for other people,” Pierre said with a slightly cynical smile. Le bons tempes roullez really was the town, Derek reflected. For him, the cry of Justice was strong and clear, but as he looked around, seeing Blacks and Whites and Chinese and Creoles and others dancing on the same dance floor together, and even some dancing as couples together, he wondered if he was sacrificing a pretty today for a beautiful tomorrow that might never come.
“I think racial unity is needed to defeat the Devil.” The others quieted. Finally Lei He spoke.
“If so, we die. Not going to happen between now and fight.” He did not seem overly upset by this. Derek noted that Lei He took things phlegmatically. He did not want to die, but there was little he could do about it. He asked him about this.
“I will not flee my fate as a coward,” Lei said stoically. Derek realized he did have a problem. If he was hoping for some grand moment of integration with all barriers between Krewes and Tribes to be his moment, then that likely was not going to happen--unless God performed a miracle. But even he could see that massively changing social structures in less than a month was not going to happen. What that meant he was not sure, but it bore thought.
“Think and pray on this,” he said, and all of them nodded solemnly.
He turned to Lei He to ask another question when Maurice spoke.
“Someone is trying to break down the barriers, and get some unity.” Puzzled, Derek looked to where Maurice was looking. One of the men to whom Vashti had been talking had his arm around her waist, and was trying to lead her out onto the dance area. Derek was not sure how he got up, and how he got across the grass, but he was just there in time to see Vashti kick the man in the knee, and dump him in the grass. Two other men who were with the first rounded on Vashti, possibly about to punch her, but Derek got there first.
Do not kill them, he reminded himself. There were no blue guy medics to patch them together here. He went for a flying kick on the first, knocking him down to the grass, and a right hook right on the schnozz for the second. The second stumped backward, holding his bleeding nose, and the one on the ground jerked out a knife. Before Derek could say something, a southern drawl of an older man carried from a nearby group.
“That would be a fatal mistake, son. You were already rude, which we can chalk up to too much drink, but that boy who just kicked you would cut you to bits. We’d just end up feedin’ you to the gators.” Derek looked over to the nearby group of middle aged men, and he saw a booted man with pistol on his hip, who flashed him a silver badge. Texas Ranger, Derek was pretty sure. In any case, the man had cold eyes, even if a kind voice, and Derek had no doubt that the man had killed before. That meant he knew that he and Derek were members of an exclusive club of deathdealers. Derek just looked at all of them, and the older men were ‘get along now, go home, sleep it off’ to the three offenders against common social barriers. It occurred to Derek that what with few cars around, it was safe to send a drunk home by himself.
The three got moving, with one shouting back ‘apologies’, and left the party. Derek nodded his thanks to the Ranger, and hugged Vashti who was crying a bit. After that, he decided just to go home himself, and to his surprise and gratitude, the other three members of the Band walked them to their front door.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #510: Versers Debate. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
