Barbara Hambly: 01 A Free Man of Color

"It might," said Madame Trepagier, more softly still. "And one day it may come to that. But with all its faults -with my family and the Americans coming in and... and all else-New Orleans is my home."

She lowered the veil to cover her face once more. Their dark forms moved off down the banquette. In the Place des Armes a cannon fired, signaling the curfew for all slaves to be indoors-all men of color, if they had not good proof of their business abroad. The hoot of a steamboat whistle answered it, bound upstream to the American towns that swarmed with the riffraff of Kaintucks and rivermen, or downstream to the coastwise trade with the slave states to the east. In either direction, and not very far off, lay the lands where it mattered even less than here that a man was legally free, if he showed the smallest trace of African descent; where a man could lose all his rights and his liberty-and that of his children-in the time it took a white man to tear up a piece of paper.

January turned back to the lighted parlor. Livia had gone into the rear of the house. Dominique had resumed her seat and picked up her sewing again, an intricately smocked and embroidered christening gown for the child that now made a soft round of her belly under her loose-fitting short gown. Her face was beautiful in the glow of the lamps; she was one of those women whose beauty increased with pregnancy.

Having in the past several weeks made better acquaintance with his Corbier nieces and nephews, January found himself looking forward to having another.

And that, he thought, was home.

Not Africa, nor Paris, but here, this place where he'd grown up. Sitting at the piano again he let his hands wander, sketching a tune he'd heard in the fields of Bayou Chien Mort, an echo of older tunes, and Hannibal's violin trailed and threaded around it like a skein of gold.

Dominique looked up, smiled, and said, "That's pretty, Ben. What is it?"

He only shook his head. In his mother's household, he thought, it wouldn't be considered at all respectable.

Then from the other room he heard Livia's deep smoky voice half-hum, half-whisper half-remembered words she had put behind her and tried to eradicate from the lives of her daughters and her son.

"An-a-quf, an'o'bia, Bia 'tail-la, Qut-re-qut, Nal-le oua, Au-Monde, Au-tap-o-tt, Aupe-to-ti, Au-que'-re'-que', Bo.

"Misery led this black to the woods, Tell my master I died in the woods."

But if he spoke to her, he thought, she would deny it, of course.

All my thanks and humble gratitude go to Octavia Butler for her time and consideration in reading the original of this manuscript and for her invaluable comments; to George Alec Effinger for his support and advice about local New Orleans customs; and to Leslie Johnston and the rest of the research staff at the Historic New Orleans Collection for all their help.

A native of southern California, Barbara Hambly attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history in 1975- She has worked as both a teacher and as a technical editor, and holds a black belt in Shotokan karate. A Free Man of Color is the first of a series of novels about Benjamin January and New Orleans in the 1830s. She has just completed the second Benjamin January novel, Fever Season, and is currently researching the third, Graveyard Dust.

Ms. Hambly lives half-time in New Orleans and half-time in Los Angeles with two Pekinese, a cat, and another writer.