XLVII

Lis Cherie was dreaming about the Tiger again, who danced on its hind legs about a great bonfire. He was surrounded by a thousand faces black like hers, who swayed with the guttural rhythm of the drums. He held before him a white serpent while the mambos threw goofer dust into the fire, which flared into a cyclone of sparks that spun up into the strange constellations. That's when she was awoken be her father, who looked very urgent and serious.

Lis Cherie. get your things, Bebe! We have got to go!

His tongue was French. His skin black as coal. Lis Cherie only knew her father's name as Francois. She did as she was told and took only her doll, whose limbs were porcelain but bound by twine. She was united with her beloved mother in a heartfelt reunion. Outside you could see plantations burning up the River Road towards La Place, casting a red glare across the low cloud deck. Francois and the other slaves were assembled on the porch of their master's home, which was Destrehan Plantation. This was on the Cotes de Allemands upriver from New Orleans. The year was 1811.

What they saw from the porch was a great assemblage of slaves bearing torches and cane knives and pitchforks. Many were women and children. There were perhaps two hundred of them. Standing for them was a tall man powerfully built. His French was like Lis Cherie's father, that of the colony of Saint-Domingue, which was now Haiti. This was Charles Deslondes, who lead this slave revolt.

Where are your masters, Francois?

Lis Cherie saw in her father great apprehension, and herself sensed great and unusual events were in progress. She was but eight years old. The twenty-something slaves on the porch looked to Francois, who replied that Jean Noel Destrehan and his family were in New Orleans. The white overseers had fled, along with half the slaves. They are streaming down the River Road towards New Orleans.

Why have not you fled yourself, Francois?

You know why, Charles. Because if it can be done over the water, then it can be done here. Do you think this is the moment?

Francois referred to the Saint-Domingue revolt of 1791. Tens of thousands of blacks and whites were slaughtered in the bloodiest slave revolt in the New World. It had been instigated by the voodoo priest Dutty Boukman and the bewitched mambo Cicile Fatiman. And that was not all. Saint-Domingue entered into a decade and more of terror and invasion during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Both Charles and Francois had been young men during those dark times, and they related their experiences together as friends, for Charles Deslondes was a frequent visitor to Destrehan with his master. They both dreamed of freedom, which had been fleeting and furtive prospect as Saint-Domingue was rocked by revolution. Both Charles and Francois had come to New Orleans when their masters finally fled the turmoil of Saint-Domingue. They remained in bondage while they learned only by mythic rumors that Saint-Domingue had become a republic of former slaves called Haiti.

Do you think this is the moment, Charles Deslondes said, repeating the question to himself. He turned to look at the throng of erstwhile slaves behind him. There was no turning back, he thought to himself. He saw the women and the children. He held back a tear, then turned back to Francois.

Freedom is worth more than just living, he said. We breathe in this moment of freedom now, Francois. Breathe it with us.

Francois looked at his wife Marielle, and his daughter Lis Cherie, and then to the other slaves of Destrehan who had stayed behind. He already knew the plan. He just did not realize it would happen so soon. The plan was collect an army as large as 3,000 slaves, which all the conspirators thought possible. Slaves were essentially worked to death in the cane fields. The alternative of freedom and a state of desperation was expected to swell the revolt's numbers as it had in Haiti. But the breathe of freedom? That alone was enough for Francois to make the decision to join the revolt. He stepped down off the porch and was embraced by Charles Deslondes. And with his wife and little Lis Cherie, they stepped out into the dark unknown on a desperate run towards freedom.

XVIII

For someone who had been such a vocal proponent of secession, Drake Shoney went to extraordinary lengths to avoid actually fighting for it. When the first conscription act was passed, he placed an entreaty in the paper to hire a substitute. He could scarcely afford one. Thankfully, Linus Poteat was broke after the debacle of the Gar and Drake hired him at a discount in forbearance of his gambling debts. Later, when the hiring of substitutes was abolished, the Confederate government left an exemption from conscription for any white male who owned twenty or more slaves. So Drake went even further into debt and purchased two slaves bringing his total to twenty.

Esmerelda had her hands full as the overseer of Gloaming Birch. Drake seemed to have very little interest in the running of his plantation. He left almost all day-to-day management to her. She did well enough. She learned her trade at Davis Bend under the legendary Ben Montgomery, the slave who managed the Hurricane plantation and its five-thousand acres. Each year she sold the cotton harvest, she brought in tidy profits for her master. So she was frustrated that Gloaming Birch still did not prosper, but it was only a point of personal pride. Drake was actually a generous if flippant master. He was munificent everywhere with his finances. Whatever she needed to improve the living conditions of the estate's slaves, he showed a dismissive largesse. It was not out of benignity, for Esmerelda had long come to the realization that Drake Shoney was just an a**hole.

Fine! Fine! Elzey. You're just about getting on my goddam nerves now. Go and get you and your darky friends instruments then. I don't give a damn. Besides, I'm tired of hearing y'all beating those gourds and s**t in my backyard. You sound like a bunch of mooks out there. And when you get back from town bring me some tobacco. Oh, and if they got some orange juice I need some for my cocktails. And you can use the change to buy you and your darky pals some gum. Just get yer s**t done before you go. Now go on. Get out of here. And don't let me forget to sign your negro papers before you go! 

So she bought instruments and the slaves of Gloaming Birch learned to pick tunes and sing ditties and put their slave spirituals on the strings. With so many slaves working so few acres they had plenty of time on their hands. On cool autumn evenings, they'd play music around the fire like Jimmy Get Your Hoe Cake Done and Rose of Alabama.  Drake was often surrounded by a milieu of bogtrotters, mudsills and low downers he held in his social thrall. They'd sit on Drake's porch and listen to the music and get roaring drunk into the night playing cards and talking about hunting.

Meanwhile Gloaming Birch was in dire financial straits. Drake searched the papers for a Southern victory that would remove the yolk of his Northern creditors. When the Yankees occupied Athens in the Spring of '62, he never went into town.  He grew reclusive and spent more time hunting and fishing and neglecting the estate.  When the Greeks started selling cotton up North during the occupation, he told Esmerelda to change the crop over to corn. He understood he could make more in Confederate dollars selling corn, but did not understand that inflation rendered higher revenues in that currency meaningless.  

None of this concerned Esmerelda. With the war she knew slavery was on its way out.  She could have fled Drake long ago, but she stayed with him.  Besides, the corn he now grew made it even easier to smuggle fugitive slaves through his fields.  She had been running them under Drake's nose for years.  

Jean Noel Destrehan, Creole Grandee and U.S. Senator of Louisiana

 

German Coast Slave Uprising of 1811

 

Destrehan Plantation, Site of the 1811 German Coast Slave Uprising

 

X

She remembered everyone called her Lis Cherie. That was long ago in a time of distant memory. She never actually learned her real name. She was only six, and she walked the halls of the mansion dressed like a porcelain doll. Her daily task was to carry a small velvet pillow upon which she delivered cakes and spoons and coffee for the madames. The plantation she and her parents lived on, Destrehan, was said to be as large as a palace and worked by a thousand slaves. The gardens around it were the envy of the Cotes des Allemands, which was up the River Road from New Orleans. They were said to rival the beauty of the Tuileries itself.

 
Her masters may have been conscientious about her Catholic learning, but at night in the fields she reveled in the ring shouts and the bonfires of her brothers and sisters. She was born in Saint Domingue during its revolution when her family fled unspeakable horrors she was too young recall. Their creole master resettled in Louisiana. For Lis Cherie, New Orleans was the stuff of dreams. Never had she seen so many people before in her life, and everyone and everything moving so fast. Her first memories was of the city. She and her parents were auctioned off to Jean Noel Destrehan to pay their master's debts. Standing on a platform in her little blue dress, she was sold for 200 francs under the rotunda of the Passage de la Bourse, on the Rue de Iberville. She thought she was being sold to a king. Instead she was sold to monsters.

 
Formerly planting indigo, Destrehan was replanted with sugar cane following the revolt in Saint Domingue, whose upheaval increased prices. The cane was far more intensive in labor and processing, and slaves were literally being worked to death in the mills during the season. Destrehan's managers whipped recalcitrant slaves and hung them from gibbets. Recalling how a former bondsman had become the Empereur Noir of Haiti, the slaves of the Cotes des Allemands thought they could make a claim for freedom themselves. So they revolted in the largest slave uprising in American history.

Half a thousand slaves marched by torchlight. They carried cane knives and bail hooks and sang Catholic psalms, and they prayed to Jesus and Blanc Dani and marched down the River Road towards an anxious metropolis. They looted and burned plantations, but they did not engage in the killing of whites, which mars the Haitian bid for freedom to this day. They were led by that black Spartacus, the mulatto Charles Deslondes, and beside him marched Lis Cherie's mother and father. Her mother walked in hand with her. For three days their hearts were filled with jubilee. It was a remembrance that she would never forget in all her years.

 
But along the River Road near Destrehan they encountered an army of white militia armed with pikes and muskets. Facing each other as though for battle, the mambos blessed the throng of brothers and sisters with holy water and cast spells of protection in the old tongues. Then, in an overwinter field of cane, they were run down and butchered. Her mother was hit on the first volley. A shot pierced her heart and she fell holding Lis Cherie's little hand. Her father, the last she ever saw of him, sent her away from the bedlam with other children into the swamps. When her father was captured along with Charles Deslondes, Jean Noel Destrehan had their hands cut off before they were hung. Then he had them beheaded, impaling their heads on pikes along the levee.

Lis Cherie lived several years in a maroon camp called Mackandal deep in the Bonnet Carre where a hundred fugitive slaves eked out a living from the swamps. She became the ward of an old mambo called the Queen of Wands, who was a witch of the bayous born and enslaved from over-the-water. She worshipped old gods and possessed herself with the loa. With this mysterious woman she was apprenticed in minkisi, rootwork and the auguries. It was a halcyon passing of time for her as she grew into something of a powerful and respected mambo herself. Tragedy, however, would not wait long to encounter Lis Cherie again.

 
One night during a gibbous moon, when the maroons were dancing the ring, a bateaux of armed slavers attacked the camp. Gunfire erupted, several maroons were killed and Lis Cherie was ensnared in a net and clasped in chains. Twice now her world had been torn asunder. She was then sold upriver in Vicksburg to the planter Joseph Davis, who planted over five-thousand acres at Davis Bend, Mississippi at the place called Hurricane. She had been given a new name, Esmerelda. She never heard the name Lis Cherie uttered again for all her days.

VIII

Esmerelda Laquina Barrilleaux was sold upriver in the Memphis slave market to a one Drake Shoney of Limestone County, Ala. for $1,200 and a chestnut gelding to boot. The advertising bill said she was a marabou, which sounded creole and exotic, but only meant she had some white blood in her. That was nothing unusual even in those days. What interested Drake, however, was her experience in the creole-style of labor management. He interviewed her and purchased her and, curiously, rode with her in the same train carriage back to Limestone County.

 
Drake Shoney planted 150 acres at Gloaming Birch with eighteen slaves. He wasn't a Greek. His family was of the smaller yeomanry of the north County and the bottomlands. They had come from a Whig tradition and were strident against secession, all except Drake. He had hoped to ghost his Northern creditors by voting for it. He was mortgaged to the hilt. In a fit of resignation, he had to admit he had no idea what he was doing. He was just a sportsman, a playboy. The plantation he inherited from his mother was more than he could handle. He had learned he could save money by buying a creole overseer rather than hiring a white one, hence the black woman who sat uncomfortably beside him. It began to draw the ire of other white passengers.

 
A sheepish conductor approached. Sir, you can't have your negro in this carriage. Oh, he replied? But she's got a lot of white in her! Don't you Elzey (Elzey?). Here I got her receipt. Can’t you see she’s high yeller? Drake showed the conducter, pointing to where it was scrawled she was a “marabou.” See, he snapped smugly? She's creole, as if to impress. At any rate, the conductor let them be so as not to be rude to the gentleman. Drake Shoney never minded the glare of vitriol from the others. He went on reading his papers, tipping a flask dramatically and often until he had passed out. Elzey, uncertain of her future, rubbed the stones which lined her grigri bag and prayed to Blanc Dani.