Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 1)

Click image to see
all published parts

“Madame,” began Walt, in a voice of deep and assumed majesty, “I require a cup of your coffee, but only if its taste is as rich and pleasing as its aroma.”
    Whitman spoke to a Creole woman in a stall in the marketplace in New Orleans. Her head wrapped in a lime-colored scarf, she squeezed the juice from an orange in her large palm into a pitcher of glass.
    She turned and smiled at him, scrutinizing him behind a hard-to-maintain modesty, but he held up a finger of warning. “Wait!” he cried. “Do not lie to me now, or exaggerate its quality in the least, for I can be violent before I have had my coffee, and I require the absolute best!”
    “Aroma and taste go hand in hand together, sir. My coffee best in this whole world, sir. Come on a ship from the distant mountain right to that harbor right there, all for the morning pleasure of one large handsome man with delicate finger and big head hairy like an old mountain bear.”
    He said, “My Creole belle, you have the loveliest smile, the most endearing voice, and the warmest heart! You have deftly perceived that I am a fool for flattery, especially when it’s of a nature as strange as yours.”
    She smiled even more.

“Swear you shan’t tire of me”

    “I will have a cup, if you please. Let us promise to meet here every day. Swear you shan’t tire of me.”
    She made no such vow, but served the coffee and held out her palm to receive the coin. He placed it there, and let his fingertips trace lightly along the palm and back across her fingertips. Both were electrified.
    “Swear!”
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
    He took a sip, watched her slip the coin into her apron, and nodded smiling at his two companions, Edgar Poe, whom he had hired to write for him for the Crescent, and his girl. So they asked for two cups of coffee, and Malinda got some orange juice, as well.
    He and Edgar and Malinda continued their stroll through the market, delighting in the abundance of exotic fruits, vegetables, flowers, clothes, lamps and hand-crafted items of every color, and of magicians, tricksters, letterwriters: the conglomeration of races none of them had beheld before to such an extent.
    “This is the greatest city in the nation!” Walt declared, and he threw his head back to laugh, but he was arrested by the sight of a nearly naked man on a platform into which he nearly bumped.
    He was stunned speechless, for his upturned eyes caught the gaze of the man’s eyes, which looked downward directly into his own, carrying traces, though but slight, of fierceness and offended dignity. Walt’s eyes descended naturally to the other’s mouth, his neck, his shoulders broad and strong, the well-defined muscles of his chest and belly, which had been oiled, slightly, it dawned on Walt, to make for a more advantageous display. Yes, the hands wore manacles of iron, and the feet stood on a wooden block. Walt began to tremble, and his eyes found the man’s again, which met his and quickly sought the ground, though not before sending through the poet’s veins the second electricity of the morning.

“No! Look! Look,  all you people!”

    In a sudden rage, he wheeled, shouting, “No! Look! Look, all you people! This magnificent man in chains! For sale! Show yourself, wealthy farmer! Scoundrel, with his wallet out, ready to buy! Show yourself, to me!, vile merchant, so deceived as to think this son of a worthy mother yours to offer! Where are you, that I may crush your throat in this hand! Look at yourselves, all, you nonchalant customers, going about your business, pretending to your lulled consciences that such a sideshow as this ungodly trade is not the abomination it is!”
    A crowd had gathered, but they retreated from the madman who turned to face them, and murmured to themselves.
    “Look at the strength, at the glorious strong youth of this man, and at these chains!”
    He rattled the chains at the feet of the man, who refused to look at him, who stood torn between cowering and not cowering.
    “And picture yourselves standing here, stripped of your silks, clean, laundered cotton, linen, without your bonnets or your light shoes new and fine, exposed to the scorch of the sun! Until a reasonable price has been paid. Reasonably low. If it were you standing on this block, fellow citizens, brothers, sisters, children, what price would you name for your own worth?”
    And though he gesticulated wildly now, nearly lost in his passion, he did perceive the approach of police, and darted.
    “When I get through with this town, there will be no slave here!” he shouted, over his shoulder. “It is, after all, 1848!”
    Malinda decided then that she would invite him into her bed.
    Edgar knew his days at the daily paper, brand-new, were numbered.
    The juice lady prayed that man would not return as promised.
    Whitman had moved south to edit the New Orleans Crescent, but the slave trade oppressed him so much he stayed a few months only, February to May. Though he was only 29, the white in his beard made him look much older. He had been born in 1819, ten years after his employee Poe. He lived with his brother Jeff at the Tremont House, near Lafayette Square.
    Absinthe, 140 proof, was served in the coastal town to Whitman, as it had been to Aaron Burr, who dropped in on his way to take over the new Louisiana territory, and Mexico, and as it later would be to Mark Twain, at Aleix’s Coffee House, in the French Quarter, built in 1806 by two brothers from Barcelona, at the corner of Bourbon and Bienville Streets. Walt had his mail delivered to him there.

“I like to see the Indians and Negroes”

    “It’s a glory to see our soldiers returning from their victory in the war. I met General Zachary Taylor. I like to see the Indians and Negroes. I have noted that much business takes place in this barroom, and I said as much to the boss when he said my patronage would reflect badly upon himself. ‘To hell with you!’ I told him. ‘That place is the hub of the life of the city,’ I said.”
    Malinda asked for his life story.
    “My mother was Dutch and Welsh. My father was a friend of Tom Paine.”
    They were in the absinthe house after the morning at the market, and had downed, slowly, their second taste, in silence all the while, each wondering what would result, when Edgar exclaimed, “Well, fuck! I don’t ever want to see that mighty miserable Mississippi again!”
    Walt laughed, clapped him on the shoulder. “It was an arduous little trip, yes. It wasn’t that bad. Except for the insects. But you’ll be all right in awhile, and I bet you’ll come to love it. I find—have you?—that most journeys become truly fine only in recollection.”
    “I have, occasionally, found that to be true. But also that sitting home in solitude becomes fine in recollection when one is embroiled in a hideous transit from one excruciating place to another.”
    “But New Orleans is a fine place! Don’t you think?”
    “Oh, yes, it’s fine. It’s like another world. Rather like Europe, but with a great share of Africa thrown in. Or Hades. That’s the whole trouble. Any new place is fine, because it’s a welcome change. But the benevolent feeling wears off so quickly, leaving one to long for the place he couldn’t escape fast enough just the week before.”
    “Jesus God, Edgar! Are you always like this?”
    “Aren’t you?”
    “Yes. No. Sometimes. But you haven’t answered my question.”
    “No. Well. Perhaps I shall come to like it here and relax and embrace all of everything, as you do, but certainly I do not now. What do you know about this place? Are you really optimistic?”
    When Malinda first met Walt, he gave her some poems he’d written, and she told him later, “I love your poems! I read them over and over. ‘I bide my time, waiting to become one of the Supremes.’ You’re so free, so wild! When are you going to publish them? It’s like you’re not even from these times, but you are the times. You talk about sex, and you seem so free of all restraint. You just don’t care!”
    “I don’t care! Hahaha!”
    “It’s marvelous, really. Makes me feel better about myself, freer.”
    “Thanks!”
    “But isn’t it an act?”

“I don’t ever want to go to jail”

    “Sure. I’m too set in my ways. I have my routine, and I like to stick to it. But not always. I surprise myself, sometimes, some of the things I do. And I like that. I like a good adventure. Long as I have some control over it. I’ll even break a few laws, but I don’t ever want to go to jail.”
    “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
    “I get a lot of praise and flattery, young lady. And much more abuse and contempt! But you, your words appeal to me. My vanity is enormous, but your intelligence is extreme, supreme. And I’m not saying that just because you said some kind words about me.”
    “Thank you, Walter!” Then she asked, “You know Abe?”
    “Yes. A great man.”
    Today, though, when she brought up Congressman Lincoln again, he admitted, “I don’t know him, really. We have tipped hats to one another in the crowds on the broad thoroughfares of the Capital.”
    “Why did you lie to me?”
    “I wanted you to like me.”

Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.