The Spirit Photographer by Jon Michael Varese

Author:Jon Michael Varese [VARESE, JON MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC014000, FIC019000, FIC024000, FIC012000
ISBN: 9781468315882
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE BOAT SAILED, and on the final day of its journey, the landscape changed once again. The dense forests that lined the river, and the surviving cotton fields that competed with them, gave way to acres of sugarcane in that last coiled stretch after Baton Rouge. The cypress trees still towered from their strongholds in the water, but the cane fields dominated the flat open spaces that lay beyond the river’s edges. The sugarcane swayed, its sharp tips pricking the sky. An endless green ocean bound the river’s muddy waters.

This was the land that Joseph had left behind—the plants and soil that he still smelled in his dreams. The last time he had seen these fields he had been traveling with the man who had saved him. Together they had stood on the deck of a steamship, watching the land go by. The sun had been setting on that day, too … setting over the sugarcane fields and tree-lined edges of the horizon.

The boat rammed into the levee at New Orleans a bit farther upriver than the central landing at Jackson Square. Here, as in St. Louis, the packed earth sloped down toward the water, and small cities of cotton bales awaited departure, by river or by land. The levee was a fury of activity—mules, horses, carriages, and working men all moving in opposite directions. From a distance the cathedral’s steeple seemed to be glowering down at all the commotion, but its opinion—and certainly its dignity—was overshadowed by the countless feathered smoke stacks of the steamboats.

Even as the light was fading, the commerce of the levee showed little signs of slowing. And this was fortunate for Joseph and Moody, who reunited and then blended into the crowd. They made their way through the mules and the cotton bales to Levee Street, the thoroughfare that rimmed the old French Quarter. Crossing over it, they entered into a city ablaze with life … a place of so much color that no picture could ever have captured it.

Joseph had returned, and the smell was much the same—hot brick and dry dust and pipe smoke and horse urine. But the balconies and concealed gardens of those houses closest to the river released the aromas of their tropical inhabitants, in defiance of the city’s ranker smells. There was the fragrance of sweet olive, the scent of oleander and jasmine, the damp smell of banana trees, their six-foot leaves drooping toward the ground. Oranges protruded from decorative iron railings, and white roses climbed upon trellises and verandas. Where the old Spanish buildings had left room for larger things to grow, moss-draped oaks shaded the courtyards and the streets.

Because a number of steamboats had released passengers at once, the crowds piling into the streets of New Orleans were unusually dense. In that crowd, Joseph noticed, every class and color of person was represented—white planters, black workers, white workers, and well-dressed freedmen. Creole mistresses, Creole servants, and mulattoes, old and young. The shop windows displayed signs in French and English.

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