Passover in New Orleans

I went to a hypnotist's show once, here in New York. It was years and years ago, around 1870 or so. My wife was always very superstitious, and she was the one who wanted to see the show. But I was the one who ended up on stage. The hypnotist told me and the other volunteers to close our eyes, and I felt myself swaying back and forth as he lulled us into a trance. Then he told us all that we were musicians in a conceit hall, about to play the opening notes of a symphony. I later found out that I was the only volunteer to take up the violin. When I had finished the first movement, the hypnotist dismissed the others and continued with me. By the end of the evening, I had played a dozen other instruments, traded neckties with a man in the front row, barked like a dog and kissed a woman who wasn't my wife. In the final act, I climbed up to one of the box seats just beside the stage, where I fired an imaginary pistol and assassinated an imaginary president. The audience adored it.

It is an odd thing, hypnotism: a pure replacement of human will. It sounds horrible, debased, that anyone would demean himself enough to voluntarily succumb to the desires of others. But the truth is that it is a relief. To play whatever they tell you to play, and hear everyone applaud. From the moment I undertook my first mission, when I was seventeen years old, I sustained myself on such applause. And it wasn't until decades later that I understood my mistake. I thought they were applauding me, but they were actually applauding the hypnotist. And I was merely the hypnotist's slave.

That first mission was elegant. The officers removed me from the company, provided me with a real Rebel uniform (borrowed from a particularly punctilious enemy corpse who had had the gentility to bleed almost exclusively on to his hat) and then drilled me for weeks on how I would be carried by gunboat to some Mississippi island, where I would then have to insert myself into one of several barrels to be passed along to smugglers, who would then transport the goods the remaining hundred miles to New Orleans, where I would pose as a refugee from a decimated Rebel company, looking for the only kin I had left in the entire South. Once I reached my mother's cousin's house, I would have to convince her and her family that I had joined a Rebel unit and betrayed the Union out of loyalty to my parents, whose whole business was run on cotton, and in particular to my mother, whose beloved cousins had been suffering in New Orleans—and of course my mother hadn't been able to tell them about me, because of the censoring of the mail and the blockades; in fact, no one in the family knew where I was, and now that my regiment had been destroyed, I had nowhere left to go, and had been given furlough by the command to spend an evening with family before reporting back to the nearest headquarters to be reassigned.

The goal, it was decided, was to get me to New Orleans in time for Passover—which coincided nicely with the navy's plan to capture New Orleans. This part of the plan, I'm proud to say, was my own idea. (The officers had suggested Easter, but I explained to them the limitations of that possibility.) It happens to be true—I freely informed my superiors—that every Hebrew in the world is obliged to celebrate the Passover holiday at a table with other Hebrews, and there's even a part of the Passover service right at the beginning of the meal where the head of the household has to open the door and invite all who are hungry to come and eat. The officers were quite thrilled to hear about that one. Hebrew hospitality would save the Union yet. And an uninvited guest was exactly what I would be in the home of Henry Hyams: cotton and dry-goods merchant, husband of my mother's cousin, member of the Louisiana State Legislature, relation and confidant of Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State of the Confederate States of America—and, of course, a repulsive traitor to these great United States. I hadn't seen him since I was nine years old, but I remembered him as a kind man, one who brought me toys and saltwater taffies from places where he had travelled, always attaching a story to each gift about what a rare treasure it was, or how the candy shop by the seaside had been about to close when he convinced the candyman to sell him the very last box of taffies. When I was a little boy, he used to lift me up high in the air when he walked through our family's door, until I was looking down at his sideburned face, laughing loudly at my new view of the world, where the adults were far below me and I had triumphed over them, all by his raising me into the sky.

My mission was to kill him.