Free Crescent City by Belva Plain

cheerfully, “so let’s get on with the present. What was I telling you? Oh, I was saying I do a great many other things beside merchandising, you know. It’s not enough to work for money. Once you’ve got it, you have to make it work for you! So you see, I’ve been branching out. I transact business all over the country. I hold a good many mortgages and I’m a broker for planters who need advances on their crops. It seems they always do need them, too. Well, they live high .… David, would you like to try a
cala?
They’re a kind of rice pancake, awfully good.”
    In front of the cathedral a Negro woman in a starched white apron was cooking over a small fire. Ferdinand hailed her. “How are you, Sally? This is my son. I want to buy him a
cala,
but he’s not hungry. She makes the best in the city,” he said as they walked on. “Used to belong to a friend of mine, but she bought her freedom. You can always tell a free woman ofcolor by the
tignon,
the handkerchief knotted on top of her head. Some of them are marvelous cooks. At night they come out with hot sweet-potato cakes. You’ll have to try one.”
    And suddenly, as they rounded a corner, they came upon a bustle of life; never had David seen so much color in motion or such a crowd converging on one place. All his senses tingled. Voices swirled, flower-fragrance merged with river smells, and his eyes were dazzled by the burning light. He stood, astonished.
    Ferdinand was delighted with this effect upon David.
    “Surprised?” He laughed. “Yes, it’s quite a sight, the French Market.”
    Nestled below the levee, the stalls were strung out in a long Une. Freshly watered vegetables were arranged like bouquets. In the fish stalls, on beds of ice, the fresh catch glistened silver, black, and mottled gray. Live crabs, green as new grass, crawled alongside lobsters. An aged Indian woman squatted behind a pile of leather goods. Ladies, protected by parasols and followed by maids, moved from stall to stall, or took their beignets and coffee at small tables under a shady roof.
    Silent and marveling, David walked up and down, in and out, seeing and remembering as though he were a painter marking a preliminary sketch in his head.
    “Like a
café noir?”
urged Ferdinand. “No? I suppose you’ve seen enough for today, then?”
    They went out beyond the stalls. At the far end a dentist’s chair, surrounded by a band of loud musicians, stood on a platform. A small crowd lingered there, watching a hapless man having his teeth pulled while the band’s noise covered his cries.
    “The fellow pulling teeth has a brother at the Medical College. Fills the chair of Materia Medica. I knowhim pretty well. I know plenty of others, too. In any case, you’d have no trouble being admitted. I’ll take you soon to visit, but there’s really no hurry. You have a few years’ work ahead of you first. The Americans—you know, I must give them credit—have really been agitating for education. I hear they’re bringing in a man who worked with somebody called Horace Mann up in Massachusetts—that’s way north of New York—setting up free schools. They say we’re going to have free schooling here in a few years. Well, it’ll be a good thing; Lord knows, I never had much schooling in Europe and I’ve felt the lack of it ever since. The lack of it makes a man feel a little shy at times, although I hate to admit it. Yet I’ve certainly done well enough without it, haven’t I?” He laughed. “But I want you to have all you can get, David. Fortunately, you won’t need free public schooling. People in our class here have private tutors or send their sons to private schools.”
    David recalled the previous night’s talk with Pelagie. “What about Miriam?” he asked.
    “Oh, there are plenty of little schools around here for girls, run by gentlewomen usually, women of good family, very refined, who need the money. I don’t know how much the girls learn, but they learn enough,