Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery Page 8

He glanced at the stack of census-index books and piles of white microfilm boxes this woman had sequestered in a corner of her micro-film compartment.

  “I beg your pardon, lady,” Nick began, bluffing, “but no one’s been on this reader for twenty minutes. I’ve been watching it from the stacks, over there.” He pointed across the dimly lit room to a door leading to the bookshelves. In fact, he’d just noticed the empty reader and had hurried over to take possession.

  “Sir, I have a bladder condition, if you must know,” she said, her voice louder than library etiquette allowed. “But I’ve been in the ladies’ room only eight and a half minutes. I time myself.” She took out a small spiral notebook from a blouse pocket. There were her bathroom visits, neatly chronicled for posterity. She pointed triumphantly to a sign on the wall: READERS UNUSED FOR 10 MINUTES ARE CONSIDERED OPEN.

  “Kindly remove your film,” she continued. “I have this one reserved until 5pm. I’m working on a very special project.”

  There were twelve machines in the room, but seven were out of commission; three crank models and one other motorized one were in use by grad students or low-ranking professors—he could tell by the cowlicks and inside-out shirts—oblivious in their research.

  Nick glanced at the reservation sheet on the partition. “Muriel” had obviously been waiting at the front door when the library opened at eight, in her baggy hiking pants, marathon runners, and pom-pommed pink ankle socks. Her name was indeed first on the list, but two other names below hers were scratched out; in the same ink a line detoured around those expunged persons, to continue Muriel’s unjust possession of the projector.

  Nick apologized with convincing deference.

  “I’ll just take down this microfilm and get my things together—if you don’t mind.” He turned his back to Muriel.

  She smelled victory in the air and imperiously held up her chin as she waited, checking her watch every fifteen seconds or so as Nick busied himself with his task. Her pride made her cocky. Mistake.

  It was a simple, speedy matter for Nick to jam an inconspicuous paper clip into the spool-and-lens assembly at the base of the unit. He’d been bullied once too often by Muriels of the genealogical world. Payback time.

  Moving out of the way with exaggerated graciousness, he relinquished the now useless machine to Muriel.

  The library was at the moment operating under an austerity budget. Eight months before, a political scandal with Freret at the heart of it had infuriated the state’s citizenry. As usual in Louisiana, when the shoe fell, the politicians instinctively scattered like guilty roaches. Freret took the rap as the symbol of sinful, profligate New Orleans, which much of the rest of the state despises as the homely child resents a gorgeous sibling.

  Scholarships for the steep tuition at the prestigious school had been thrown like Mardi Gras doubloons to children of the well connected, in the time-honored, plutocratic Louisiana way—secretly. And not merely for a year or two; but since 1876. For over a century, no newspaper or other media organ had dared break the silence (possibly because many media-owning families had benefited, too). Louisianans are wary of pointing their crooked fingers at each other.

  But a Republican cattle and natural-gas centimillionaire and philanthropist from north Louisiana became incensed that his pet state senate candidate had lost the election through gerrymandering machinations of the traditionally Democratic legislature (however, when a strong GOP governor reigned, bayou donkeys embraced their inner elephant). Purely out of spite this man bought a rural weekly newspaper and spilled the beans in a hyperventilating month-long series that gained the notice of the national media, always ready to run any story portraying Louisiana as backward and bizarre.

  Now there were rumors that further tax breaks were quietly being offered to Freret’s for-profit, joint-venture biotech and computer-sciences divisions as a sop for the punitive cuts in state grants that the embarrassed legislators had inflicted on the private institution from which so many of their children had graduated, tuition paid and grades inflated. And for all the heat the university president personally had to take, the bond commission stealthily approved a tax-free issue for the renovation of a St. Charles Avenue mansion as his new official residence. The good times would roll on as discreetly as before, and everybody would soon be happy again.

  Except Muriel. She lambasted an already stressed-out young woman from the library staff, who scribbled “Out of Order” on a yellow sheet of paper, placed it on the reader, and beat a hasty retreat. Muriel, gathering her things and threatening legal measures to an audience that couldn’t care less, left in a huff. Five minutes later, Nick returned to the abandoned machine. He removed the “Out of Order” sign, repaired his sabotage, and got to work.

  Nick and Tommy Shawe had agreed on a three-pronged strategy. He would prepare a short tribal history; update and verify the pedigrees of the six core families back to the time of French rule; and formulate guidelines for future admission based on a study of other tribes’ practices. This basic work would help the tribe in establishing its enrollment office, the in-house genealogical department that, in most tribes, reviews the claims of applicants for tribal membership.

  Of course, many of the applicants would want as their genealogist someone familiar with the case, someone who could work on a friendly basis with the tribe—namely, Nick. He hoped he’d finally found his own oil well that would pump cash for years to come. Few people got rich in genealogy. Nick wouldn’t mind being one of them.

  This morning he planned to travel back centuries to colonial Louisiana. He looked around to make sure no library worker lurked about, and poured a steaming cup of black coffee-and-chicory from his Thermos. The scruffy graduate students and junior professors sighed at the delicious aroma. One or two whimpered.

  Nick was well versed in the standard works of Louisiana history. He had riffled through two of his favorites, Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire de La Louisiane and Giraud’s A History of French Louisiana, which were in his own library at his office—he’d bought them for a dollar each at a garage sale some years before. He had also browsed through archaeological and ethnographic periodicals for more recent investigatory leads.

  The earliest description of the Katogoula that he’d found was in a 1771 narrative by the French explorer Jean-Bernard Bossu. He also had reviewed the accounts of Thomas Hutchins, William Bartram, Baudry de Lozieres, and other explorers and soldiers of various nationalities, who, in official reports and memoirs, told of later contacts with the tribe. These men wrote that the Katogoula were part of the Sangfleuve Confederation, dominated by the Chitiko and the Tiloasha, powerful tribes which had been in existence centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.

  French-Canadian missionary priests who visited the Katogoula gave up trying to learn the tribe’s original language, though it was apparently Muskogean in character, superficially akin to Choctaw. U.S. Indian Agent John Sibley, President Jefferson’s friend and appointee, reported in 1808 that he made himself intelligible using Mobilian Jargon, a composite language based on Choctaw, Chickasaw, and loan words from the European tongues. With the Katogoula, as with many other tribes forced to deal with the colonial powers, Mobilian Jargon—more precisely, Mobilian K, an evolving variant—became the accepted language around the middle of the eighteenth century, during the last years of the French regime.

  Leaning back with his head wedged in his palms, Nick squandered a few minutes staring at the wall, pondering the ancient helix of chance and determination weaving through the new and strong friendship that had formed between Tommy and his Katogoula tribe, and Chief Claude and the Chitiko-Tiloasha . . .

  At length he sat up, shook his head, and flexed his shoulders. Another bout of aimless philosophizing wasn’t getting him anywhere. He forced his attention back to the slanted viewing surface of the microfilm reader.

  The Internet was certainly a boon to the modern genealogist; yet, Nick took perverse pleasure in the fact that all the servers in the world could
n’t hold the century upon century of genealogical material contained in courthouses, places of worship, governmental agencies, libraries, attics, basements. . . . The day might come when the world’s genealogical source material would be captured in bytes, but it wasn’t here now. Real genealogy still required the researcher to physically venture into the field for patient spade and brush work, just as any good archaeologist would think it necessary to crawl around on hands and knees in an excavation. In both disciplines, part of the art was knowing where to dig and what to seek.

  Hichborn Library, despite the cutbacks, was an excellent facility, as long as you knew your way around the hundreds of microfilm drawers, and the special manuscript collections that weren’t listed in the library catalog—and Nick did know his way around. It was still a great place to research French colonial archives, and no slouch either when it came to the vast assemblage of Spanish colonial records collectively known as the Archivo General de Indias, the lion’s share of which was housed in Seville, Spain. Of especial interest to Nick was one of the Archivo subdivisions holding a wealth of Louisiana materials: the Papeles Procedentes de Cuba. Louisiana as a Spanish colony fell within the administrative sphere of the viceroyalty of Cuba, and that’s where great quantities of Louisiana records of the time were sent and stored, before most of the surviving records were ultimately transferred to Spain.

  Unfortunately, the Hichborn lacked an important part of the Papeles: the Legajos de Luisiana, “bundles” of documents that were themselves a newly rediscovered portion of the famous Fondos de las Floridas, which contained material relating to East and West Spanish Florida. The Legajos de Luisiana included documentary details even more useful to researchers interested in the colonial history of the area that became central Louisiana.

  The Fondos and the smaller Legajos were left in Havana after most other colonial records had been removed to Spain in the late 19th century as the former superpower gradually lost its New World foothold. In the 1990s the Historic New Orleans Collection created an academic sensation by gaining permission from Cuba and the U.S. government to microfilm the Fondos on-site at the National Archives of Cuba, where conservational conditions had always been wanting. THNOC pulled off another major coup more recently by returning to Havana, during a time of renewed diplomatic tension, and capturing on microfilm nearly 20,000 pages of the deteriorating Legajos de Luisiana.

  Since the Legajos microfilm set, much less a digital version of it, had not been released for sale and was expected to be very expensive when it finally was completed, scholars from all over the world were swarming to the Collection’s beautiful complex of landmark buildings in the French Quarter for a crack at this trove of historical information. Nick had lately treated his friend from THNOC, vivacious Veronique, to quite a few expensive, cholesterol-laden dinners, during which he subtly mentioned how grateful he would be if she could use her influence to move him up the waiting list of researchers. Chills ran up and down his spine as he thought about getting his hot hands on THNOC’s Legajos.

  Was genealogy replacing sex as his primary source of excitement? he asked himself . . . C’est la vie!

  Today Nick was exploring the Papeles and the Fondos, having first consulted several guides and articles that directed him to productive fishing grounds amid this ocean of information. For hours he slogged through hundreds of microfilmed pages of beautiful script, vowing to himself to brush up on his Spanish and French during his next slack period—the Papeles and Fondos contained records in both languages, a fact highlighting the peculiar political reality of the colony: the French would be French, no matter whose flag flew over them.

  Each page lay projected before him like an insubstantial slice of a core sample drilled down into history itself.

  He discovered several references to a devastating intertribal war that nearly wiped out the Katogoula and probably destroyed their ally, the smaller Yaknelousa tribe. The enemy tribe, the Quinahoa, was utterly extinguished, according to the colonial officials who were trying to understand the convoluted power politics of dozens and dozens of tribes. Precisely when this war had been fought—if it had been fought at all outside the mists of legend—Nick was unable to discover.

  He did find evidence that the Katogoula were well established in Louisiana when the infamous Removals began in earnest, in the 1820s. Ironically, these times of trouble were relatively good for the Katogoula, and the tribe’s numbers increased.

  The territory of the Katogoula was one of the last stops on the mournful trip to the government-selected reservations. Fleeing individuals and family groups of many Southeastern tribes peeled off and sought shelter in the wild backwoods of central Louisiana, avoiding the forced marches to Oklahoma and other frontier lands. Many walked back from Indian Territory, finding life unbearable there, separated from the familiar sky, sun, animals, forest, and waters of their traditional way of life in the Southeast.

  When Nick surfaced again, he realized it was late afternoon. He returned his films and books to the appropriate carts, and took the stairs to the third floor—Literature and Languages, faculty carrels, and Hawty Latimer.

  CHAPTER 9

  “How can you read this chicken scratch?” Hawty Latimer asked, the expression on her brown face somewhere between teasing and contempt. “If you’d gone to grade school where I did, up in north Louisiana, they’d have broken you of this left-handed writing. One run-in with the principal’s wooden ruler—that would have been that.”

  After a few more silent moments, she tossed back the pages of cramped, chaotic scribbling Nick had produced. He suspected she would make a good principal herself—and wouldn’t spare the ruler. She was a formidable young woman, in both mind and body, with more drive and joy for living than anyone—in or out of a wheelchair—Nick had ever known.

  “But you can’t fault the content, right?” Nick asked hopefully. “Even if the form isn’t up to your lofty standards of penmanship.”

  Sarcasm was their normal mode of communication. That Nick employed Hawty in his genealogical firm wasn’t immediately obvious; a person could be pardoned for thinking their relationship was the other way around.

  It was past six o’clock now, and they sat in Hawty’s carrel on the third floor of the library. The carrel was a drab seven-by-five-foot study area, painstakingly constructed, Nick often thought, to exclude any naturally occurring material. A silvery plastic grid suspended over the carrel’s walls filtered fluorescent light from a higher coffered acoustic ceiling that extended over all of the carrels. It was too cold and too dry in here; too bright, yet not bright enough; and there was the restive silence of unseen people straining to overhear conversations or muttered secrets. Still, a carrel was a nice perk for grad students and for professors too busy to return to their offices. If you were the kind of person who could lose yourself in your work, then the facsimile of privacy would become real. Hawty had added a few comforting touches: a lamp here, a family photograph there, the odd sentimental tchochke.

  Her volcano-orange wheelchair mocked the sterility of the enclosure. This wasn’t her usual chair, which she referred to as her “chariot.” Normally she rode a motorized, gizmo-crammed computer-lab-on-wheels that made Nick wonder how he’d missed the leap from present-time to science fiction.

  “Oh, I suppose 1771 isn’t bad. For a start,” Hawty said.

  Nick had found references to the Katogoula that far back and was proud of having done so.

  “Just so happens I ran across this thesis.” She held up a slim pamphlet. “Nineteen forty-three. A girl in one of Herbert Bolton’s classes, out in your neck of the woods—Berkeley. She did some really outstanding work on Louisiana Indians.”

  “Bolton, Bolton. Sounds vaguely familiar. Refresh my memory.” He knew she loved to do that.

  “Herbert Bolton was a big-time historian a UC Berkeley between the world wars who broke ground with studies of the colonial Spanish and the Indian tribes in Louisiana and Texas.”

  Hawty handed him the thesi
s and continued. “This student quotes from an unpublished journal of 1768. She says she studied it in the possession of descendants of the writer, in southwest Texas. The journal’s author was a clerk of Athanase de Mézières. Mézières, as I’m sure you know—and if you don’t I’m going to tell you anyway—was a Frenchman, son-in-law of St. Denis, although only briefly because the great man’s daughter died in childbirth, and later, during the Spanish period, commandant of Fort St. Jean Baptiste—”

  “Natchitoches.”

  Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis was a daring French-Canadian officer, explorer, and diplomat originally in Sieur de Bienville’s command, now remembered in Louisiana primarily as the founder of the picturesque city of Natchitoches, in 1714.

  “You got it,” Hawty confirmed. “Mézières, in his spare time, mediated for the Spanish between feuding Texas tribes—”

  “Oh, come on, Hawty,” Nick said, interrupting her. “Sounds to me like a transparent imitation of another well-known journal. I bet she’d read about Jean Penicaut, St. Denis’s carpenter—”

  “I know, I know. St. Denis’s carpenter, who later wrote about the expeditions to Louisiana’s Red River area and into Spanish territory. I get where you’re coming from,” Hawty said. “But I think our clerk’s journal is real and gives us a reliable earlier Katogoula sighting than you found.”

  Nick had begun shaking his head even before she finished. They were in the habit of defending mutually exclusive positions, eventually moving to some midpoint of compromise or proving the other wrong, in Socratic style.

  “She decided to create her own source,” he said. “Happens all the time. Look at the New York Times and the Jayson Blair scandal a few years back. Academia, and especially genealogy, aren’t any different. Deadlines, ideology, fear of failure—writers of all types sometimes feel pressured to take ethical shortcuts.”

  “Don’t be dissing my newspaper,” Hawty warned.