Barbara Hambly: 04 Sold Down the River

Behind him, Olympe's voice went on. "Not four years ago they hanged Nat Turner and near seventy others in Virginia for rising up and killing whites. Every slave-owner in the country has been seeing rebels under his bed ever since. You think getting sold to pay the inheritance tax is the worst that'll befall a man's slaves, if he dies of poison in his own home?"

"You want me to save his life?" January remembered the wet thud of the broom handle on his buttocks and thighs, the agony of blows multiplying as the bruises puffed and gorged the flesh with blood. He couldn't even remember what he'd done to trigger the beating, if anything.

"I'd like you to think about saving the lives of the hundred or so folks who didn't put nightshade into that brandy. However much they might have wanted to."

For that moment, January hated her. He hadn't thought about it consciously, but he realized now that in addition to his sense that Simon Fourchet deserved whatever retribution was coming to him from his slaves-whether incited by his neighbors or not-in addition to his fears of something going wrong, he had been looking forward to a pleasant winter of playing music and being paid for it.

The days of summer heat and summer fever were done. The wealthy of New Orleans the sugar brokers, the steamboat owners, the bankers and landlords and merchant importers, both French and American-were coming back to town to attend the opera and give parties and marry off their daughters and sons to the sons and daughters of their friends. The militia companies and burial societies, those bulwarks of the free colored community, would be organizing subscription balls and fund-raisers even more entertaining than the galas of the whites. January not only earned his bread through Mozart and Rossini, cotillions and schottisches and valses brilliantes. They were the meat and drink of his soul, the fire at which he warmed himself.

For a year he'd lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.

After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.

He looked up now, studying Rose's long delicate profile. The cool mouth that was so sensitive beneath the mask of its primness. The way her smile came and went, as if in girlhood she'd been punished for laughing at the world's absurdity. Slim strong hands, stained with ink-she was currently making her living correcting young boys' Greek examinations for a school on the Rue d'Esplanade-and blistered from the chemical experiments that were her refuge and her joy.

A winter of friendship. Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents' worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.

A winter of rest.

Sugar-grinding. Roulaison. The suffocating heat of the mill-house and the clammy damp of the cabins. The ache of muscles lifting, hauling, dragging armfuls of sharp-leaved cane after not quite enough food and never ever enough rest. The pain that settled into your bones when you couldn't even remember when last you'd slept to your heart's content.

Fear of being beaten. Fear of being sold.

Simon Fourchet's flaying voice and the sense that it would make no difference to anyone if he, Benjamin January, lived or died.

"You think I'd be safe there?" He threw the words at his sister like a lump of dirt. "Maybe Fourchet'll make sure I don't get kidnapped and sold, but that's not going to keep the killer from slipping poison into my food if he guesses why I'm there. And it won't keep me from being beat up by men who think I'm carrying tales to the master. Killed, maybe, if there really is rebellion planned."

"Then you'll just have to be careful," said Olympe, "won't you?"

January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January's freedom. Copies were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January's mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Theatre d'Orl?ans and various gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of January's principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet's lawyer.

"Not that it will do the slightest bit of good," said January grimly, "should Fourchet's overseer, or his son, turn out to be a cheat and a slave-thief Altruism is all very well, and I'm really sorry for those folks on Mon Triomphe, but I'd just as soon not try to convince some cracker cotton-farmer in the Missouri Territory to write to the New Orleans City Notary about whether or not I'm a free man."

Lieutenant Shaw, slouched so deeply in a corner of the big stone watchroom of the town prison, the Cabildo, that he appeared to be lying in the chair on his shoulder blades with his boots on his desk, raised mild gray eyes from the documents, and scratched with businesslike thoroughness under his shabby collar. "Prob'ly wouldn't do you much good anyways, if n they're like my uncle Zenas-Zenas and his family went to Missouri to grow cotton." Shaw scratched again, and looped a long strand of his greasy ditchwater hair back around one ear.

"Zenas can plug a squirrel through the eye at two hundred and fifty yards and build a house from the ground up includin' the furniture usin' only an ax, but he can't write for sour owl-shit. You think you'll be in much more danger there than you'd be just walkin' around here?"

Shaw asked the question sincerely, and sincerely, January had to admit that in certain sections of New Orleans-the entrepot and hub of slave-trading for the entire region-he was probably in more peril of kidnapping than he'd be on Mon Triomphe.

"It's easy for you to say. Sir." In his tone he heard his own defeat. The thought of what he was going to do made his stomach clench with dread, but he knew that Rose and Olympe were right.

He understood that he could not feel anger that none would give justice to slaves, if he wasn't willing to work for that justice himself.

"I understand that," said Shaw. "And I hope you understand I'd do it, if n I didn't have certain physical limitations that'd make me middlin' unconvincin' as a cane-hand."

January met his eyes with a bitter retort on his lips, but he knew Shaw. And he saw in the Kentuckian's quiet gaze that yes, this man would go out into the fields to trap the murderer... If he didn't happen to be white. And, as he'd said, a middling unconvincing cane-hand. So he only said, "What? You don't think you could pass?" and Shaw relaxed and returned his unwilling grin. January reached into the pocket of his neat brown corduroy livery for his watch and tightened his lips when it wasn't there. The watch was silver, bought in Paris after he'd given up work as a surgeon and returned to being a musician. As a surgeon he'd never been able to afford such a thing, for even in France no one would choose a black surgeon over a white. At least in France, he reflected dourly, he wouldn't have had to go searching through pawnshops for weeks to recover it, after it had been stolen by the same louts who'd cut his coat to ribbons and torn up his music.

Along with his other few valuables, the watch was safe at Olympe's house now. A slave would not possess such a thing.

"Yore pal Sefton'll be along," said Shaw reassuringly. "What do you know about Fourchet's son?" "Not much." January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. "He's a few years older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine-merchant here in town."

"Juana Villardiga, accordin' to the records." Shaw folded his hands over the papers, rumpling them as if they were yesterday's newspaper instead of the proofs that January would need, should his freedom be in jeopardy. The morning was chill, and through the arched doors at the inner side of the watchroom the Cabildo courtyard was dusky still. Two prisoners swabbed the flagstones under the watchful eye of a blue-uniformed City Guard.