No Good Deed 59

My new friend and I decided on a drink to celebrate our respective returns. We did not call into every bar and saloon on Canal Street, for some were not open so early in the morning, but we enjoyed the comforts of more than half. Gottschalk's predilection for spontaneous attempts at notes not quite in his range served as sufficient motive to effect our removal from one or two of the more comfortable establishments. We had sampled both the spirit of the grain and the juice of the hops; therefore, the composer was quite discommoded by the time Canal Street ran out at North Rampart Street around noon. For myself, I felt a little crapulous, but more than capable of remaining upright without assistance. My offer to escort Gottschalk to his place of residence was rebuffed.

'S'alrigh',' he slurred. 'M'fine, m'friend. Le's go Congo Square.'

Enquiring as to where that place might be resulted in his throwing an arm to full stretch with finger extended, which same caused his person to fall prone, leading me to believe that either our prospective destination lay in a puddle, or that he was too drunk to go anywhere unaided. I sat him up, by chance causing his posterior to alight in the aforementioned puddle. This seemed to sharpen his faculties somewhat.

'Congo Square. Come, it will be a marvellous spectacle.'

My doubts about the matter were entirely disproven on arrival at the square. It was a Sunday. There must have been 500 people in the square, all Negroes. A market lined the outer edges of the square, although many of the customers and stall-holders must surely have been slaves, the hand made artefacts and materials were bright in colour and both numerous and varied. Even so there was an expectant air in the square: as if the purpose of coming were anything but the market. Gottschalk seemed animated by this same feeling and certainly less drunk than he had been only minutes earlier.

'What? What is it?' I said, some of the restrained excitement had infected even me.

'Wait,' he replied. 'You'll see!'

The composer's eyes glittered and he shuffled from foot to foot as if dancing to a rhythm only he could hear. The women were, without exception, dressed in fine fashions or extremely colourful imitations thereof. The men, however, wore swatches of bright material as sashes, necklaces of shells and beads, but nothing else. Suddenly, there was a beating of drums, as if Gottschalk had anticipated or provoked it with his own dancing. The sun burst the overcast sky at the very moment the music began. I saw violins, triangles and flutes alongside marimbas, gourds, two stringed banjo-like instruments, quill-pipes and, of course, the insistent drums.

The composer-musician cut a strange figure capering on the periphery of the Negro throng. However, we were not the only spectators, across the square I could see groups of white folk pointing and clapping. Gottschalk spoke,

'Hausa, see. Look at the colours on the men.'

Quite what this meant, I had no clue. This group of dancers and musicians - they might have numbered as many as forty – danced for a quarter hour by my reckoning. Then they gave ground in the centre of the square to another group of similar size. Gottschalk whispered,

'Mandinka.'

Whether he spoke only to himself, or wished to communicate something to me, I could not say.

I took my pleasure in watching the evident joy which the women took in their dancing alongside, in front of, behind and almost touching the men. It was indeed a most stirring sight, and the more so for the lack of entertainment I had endured on the Enterprise. My companion watched the two hours of dancing with an expression of blissful rapture on his face which I could not entirely assign to the alcohol we had earlier consumed.

'Bamboula, Mr Northrup. Bamboula! If not my finest hour, then surely theirs.'

With that he waved an expansive arm towards the Negroes, who were packing up the stalls and retreating once more to 'the back of town', as Gottschalk had referred to the Negro district, long before mentioning Congo Square.