Canaan's Tongue by John Wray Page A

air was quiet. The land was stupid—there were no noises in it, God said. There were no corn-fields, God said. There were no rice-fields, God said. There were no niggers.
    There were no
Asas,
God said, to own them.
    There were no women, God said. There were no horse-flies, God said. There was a quiet all around. There were no steam-boats, God said. There were no skiffs. There were no fathers, God said. There was this quiet, Asa. It was very black.
    There were no armies, God said. There were no sparrows, God said. There were no serpents, God said. There were no catfishes in the river. The river was there, but it flowed quiet. The comings and goings were not in it. The air was stupid, God said. There were no sounds in it. It was a dead air, God said. And it was very sweet.
    Sweet, I said. Yes! It was very sweet!
    Then came the Asas, God said.

The Whist Room.
    I GOT MY ANSWER THAT NIGHT, says Clementine. But not the way Virgil thought I would.
    I’d expected a right crowd, what with all the to-do, but the whist room when I came in with my tray of chitterlings and beer held only seven men. I put the tray down on the felt-covered table and sat on a fainting-couch by the door. I recognized Virgil and the rough-neck Stuts Kennedy, who’d come to see me once. The rest were strangers to that house.
    The R—— was speechifying—:
    “A simple proposal, gentlemen, though you may find it hard to picture. It might be best, in beginning, to summarize the commerce in slaves and bondsmen as it functions this day and hour.”
    “We know that well enough,” Kennedy said into his scruff.
    “I wonder if you do, Mr. Kennedy,” the R—— said. He was the same bundle of piss as always, the same little peacock, but no-one else seemed to see it—; and suddenly I found that I couldn’t see it, either. He leaned back in his high-chair, gave an elegant sigh, and set his hands on the table. He might have been Napoleon on campaign.
    “The states along the Mason-Dixon,” he said at last, “have a marked glut in man-power—; the lower South, contrary-wise, suffers a desperate lack. For this reason, the slave trade, almost without exception, runs north to south. Although there’s a demand upriver, the few-odd head required are not worth the dealers’ trouble and often as not go unsupplied. In times of need, such slaves are acquired after much trouble and expense downriver in Natchez—; or, even more commonly, here in New Orleans.” He smiled. “This, of course, is why our city has grown so fat.”
    He turned as he said this to a pallid-faced man whose eyes were as quick as Virgil’s were quiet. “Not from your sugar plantations, Asa. Though not for want of every good intention.”
    “My father poured his blood into this ground,” the man replied. His eyes went from face to face as though he expected to be laughed at. He hushed a moment, hiding under his ruffed black hair, then sputtered out—: “We are all of us Asas tonight, dear sirs! Every one of us in these chambers—”
    “To the slaves
themselves,
however,” the R—— interrupted, “nothing could be more dreadful than this fate of being barge-hauled down the river. The death rate on sugar and rice land is exceeding high, and this knowledge has managed to trickle north, with the consequence that most niggers would rather die the same place they were born.”
    Kennedy snorted. The R—— waited patiently for him to hush.
    “And among those that
do
get shipped, there are more than a few who’d give their last breath for a chance to reverse the above-mentioned flow of trade.”
    Nobody gave a peep. The R—— settled back in his chair, fussing with his glove-tips. Finally a well-preserved specimen to the R——’s left sat forward. His hair was coiffed and silverish and he looked more like a country squire than anyone I’d seen outside of a penny-theater. I’d expected him to weigh in with quite a speech, from the look of him, but once all heads were turned he