Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down the River

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Benjamin January

Book 4



Sold Down the River



Barbara Hambly



For Mom and Dad

Special thanks are owed to Paul Nevski, Bill Coble, Norman and Sand Marmillion, and the rest of

the staff of Le Monde Creole in New Orleans and Laura Plantation in St. John Parish, for

unbelievable help, inspiration, and friendship in putting together this book.

Thanks also to Pamela Arcineaux and the staff of the Historic New Orleans Collection for their

patience, friendship, and help; to Laurie Perry for her comments and help on early black music;

and to Kate Miciak of Bantam Books.

Thank you also to Jill and Charles, to Neil and Deb, to Michael, and, of course, to George.

PARTIAL GLOSSARY

OF CREOLE AND AFRO-CREOLE WORDS

One of the problems with the terminology found in accounts of slavery-in Louisiana in particular-

is that words have often been transcribed phonetically, and spelling differs from account to

account. As usual, my research has spanned so many small sources that the spelling is completely

inconsistent. I apologize for this.

Arpent-192 linear feet. Plantations were usually measured in arpents of river-front, extending

sometimes twenty, sometimes forty arpents back from the river towards the swamps.

Baron Cemetery (also Baron Samedei, or Baron La Croix)-voodoo spirit of the dead.

Batture-the ground between the levee and the actual edge of the water. Frequently heavily

wooded, and piled with snags and debris washed up in high water.

Blankittes (or blanquittes)-disrespectfiil term for whites, used by slaves.

Bousillage-river mud mixed with moss, ground shells, straw, hair, or any other binding substance

to make a hard plaster. Also, the act or process of making walls out of this material.

Bozal (or bosal)-A slave newly arrived from Africa; in other words, a raw savage.

Brigitte of the Dry Arms-voodoo spirit of death, wife of Baron Cemetery.

Callas-fried rice-balls (frequently dusted with powdered sugar).

Cipriere-the swampy cypress forests that lay behind the cleared plantation lands along the river.

Also called simply the swamp by Americans, and the "desert" by French (meaning "a waste

place," not as the word is understood in English).

Congris-mixture of chickpeas and rice, or more broadly (in other parts of the Caribbean), any

kind of beans and rice.

Damballah-Wedo (or Damballa-Wedo) -voodoo snake-spirit of water and wisdom. Gar~onniere-

separate wing of a plantation or town house where the grown sons of the family lived. Sometimes

a separate building.

Griot-African word for the village storyteller, bard, and historian.

Loa-voodoo spirits or "gods." Loa can be great or not-so-great, powerful or minor, dangerous or

benign or even comical, though the line between "good" and "bad" spirits is often less sharp in

the African religions than in Western: spirits can be summoned to help with good causes or bad.

Osnabrig (or osnaberg)-short for Osnaberg cloth, a coarse heavy cotton manufactured in

Osnaberg, Sweden, usually used for slave clothing.

Papa Legba-voodoo spirit of the crossroads, often conflated with St. Peter, the keeper of Heaven's

keys. Guardian of the doorways from this world into the next.

Plaçee-free colored mistress of a wealthy white gentleman. The relationships were usually

monogamous and frequently arranged with a contract on business lines.

Quantiers (also quanteers)-a type of extremely coarse rawhide shoes made for slaves by the

plantation shoemaker.

Rattoon-to grow cane from stalks planted in a previous season and left in the ground (rather than

being dug up and replanted). Rattooned cane tends to come up thinner and is more trouble to

harvest.

Ronlaison-cane-harvest and grinding season.

Tignon-the head-scarves or turbans whose wear was mandated by law for all women of color,

slave or free.

Veve-voodoo signs or diagrams drawn to summon the loa.

ONE

When someone ties you naked to a tree in the yard and beats you unconscious with a broom

handle, you don't soon forget it, or him.

"Ben, you remember Monsieur Fourchet," said his mother.

Standing in the doorway of her parlor, Benjamin January felt the hair lift on his nape at the sight

of the man beside the window.

In the nightmares, he was taller.

Fourchet turned from the long French door that looked out onto Rue Burgundy, and January saw

that he was, in fact, just slightly under six feet tall: more than three inches shorter than his own

towering height. That he was wide through the chest and shoulders, but without January's

massive strength. In the nightmares his hair was black, not streaky gray and thin, and his face,

although creased with a lifetime's rage and cruelty, didn't have the broken network of lines that

gouged the sunken cheeks, bracketed the harsh mouth, accentuated the sag beneath the chin.

The eyes were the same. Arrogant, dark, and cold. But the man had grown old.

"I remember," he told his mother.

"You've grown." Fourchet took a seat in one of the straw-colored chintz chairs of which January's

mother was so proud.

Between seven and forty-one I'd belong in a raree-show if I hadn't.

January couldn't resist saying, "Monsieur Janvier fed me very well. Sir."

Fourchet hadn't. The slaves on Fourchet's Bellefleur Plantation, where January had been born,

had what were called provision lands, small plots where they could grow corn and yams. On most

plantations these augmented whatever rations of cornmeal and salt pork the planter saw fit to

distribute. On Bellefleur, Fourchet had skimped the women and the children; even out of harvest

time, he had demanded extra work after the conch shell was blown at sunset, so that the provision

grounds were neglected and choked with weeds. January remembered his aunts and uncles were

always being whipped for stealing food.

Fourchet sniffed. "Educated you, too, so your mother tells me."

By the way the man said the words January knew that Fourchet had had his mother, probably

many times in the years before he'd sold her to St.-Denis Janvier. Anger rose in him like vomit,

and like vomit he swallowed it down. He glanced at Livia Levesque, slender and beautiful still at

sixty-four, neat in her fashionable frock of yellow mull-muslin, on her head the tignon that New

Orleans statute required all women of color to wear, striped yellow and white to match, and

trimmed with lace. Her slim strong hands in crocheted house-mitts rested easy around the cup of

pink-and-green German porcelain that held her coffee, and her dark wide beautiful eyes moved

from man to man with an alert calculation that held not the smallest whisper of embarrassment,

self-consciousness, or anger in the presence of her former master.

The situation simply didn't bother her at all. "Monsieur Fourchet has come to ask our help, Ben,"

said his mother. Outside, in the Rue Burgundy, a brewer's dray rattled past, driven far too fast by

a young man standing to the reins like a Roman charioteer; two women walking along the brick

banquette squealed and sprang aside from the water thrown by the wheels. Even so far back from

the levee the hoots of the steamboats could be heard, and the dim stirring of stevedores' shouts

and vendors' cries. After summer's gluey horror, the autumn air was crisp. The city was resuming

its wintertime bustle and prosperity. "Your name was given him by that dirty American

policeman you take up with, but perhaps it's all to the best."

That dirty American policeman was Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guard.

Though as a rule-like most of the citizens of the French town, white and colored alike- January

mistrusted Americans profoundly, particularly those in positions of power, he liked Shaw and

respected him. Still, his mother spoke no more than the truth.

January folded his powerful arms and waited. He had not, he noticed, been invited to sit in the

presence of a white man and his former master. Nor had his mother said, Get yourself some

coffee, Ben.

It was one thing for a white man to share coffee with a velvet-brown mulatto woman. White men

did it all the time, in these small cottages at the rear of the French town. The custom of the

country. For generations French and Spanish Creoles had taken free women of color as their

mistresses, as St.-Denis Janvier had thirty-three years ago freed and then taken her. It was another

thing January could see this in her eyes, hear it in her artfully artless silence-to ask a white

gentleman to sit in the same room drinking coffee with the coal-black son of a mulatto and a

slave.

In the eighteen months since his return from sixteen years in Paris-years in which he had

practiced both surgery and music-January had never been permitted to forget that this house was

his mother's, not his.

If Simon Fourchet was conscious of any of this, he didn't show it. Maybe he accepted it as natural

that a grown man wouldn't be permitted to drink coffee in the house where he lived, should a

white man be seated there.

"There's a secret campaign of deliberate destruction going on at Mon Triomphe," the planter said,

glancing up at January from under the grizzled overhang of his brows. "Spoliation, arson,

wrecking, ruin-and murder. And maybe open revolt."

Mon Triomphe, January recalled, was Fourchet's other plantation. When Fourchet had sold

Bellefleur-years after January, his mother, and his younger sister had been sold and freed-the

planter had gone there permanently. It lay upriver in Ascension Parish, some twenty miles

southeast of Baton Rouge. Twenty miles, that is, if you wanted to hack your way through cypress

swamps and untamed woodland, instead of journeying twice the distance in half the time via

steamboat on the river.

Forty-two years ago-in 1793, the year of January's birth-Fourchet had managed Mon Triomphe

himself and left Bellefleur in the care of his brother-in-law Gervase Duhamel, only returning

there after the grueling hell of the roulaison-the sugar-grinding-was done. Bellefleur had lain

close to the small, walled city of New Orleans, to which Fourchet brought his Spanish wife and

their two children every year for the Carnival season. They lived in the big house at Bellefleur for

the weeks between Twelfth Night and Easter; entertained guests there, something impossible in

the isolated fastnesses of Ascension Parish. St.-Denis Janvier, who had eventually bought

January's mother, had been one of those guests.

In 1798, when January was five, there'd been a slave revolt on Mon Triomphe. It may have been

fueled by rumor, hope, and the example of Christophe's rebellion in the island of Saint-

Domingue, though the aunts and uncles and cousins whose cabins January had played in said that

it started when a drunken Fourchet beat a young girl to death. Fourchet's wife and daughter died

under the machetes of the infuriated slaves. The revolt was crushed, of course, but after that

Fourchet sent his sister and her husband to Mon Triomphe, and ran Bellefleur himself.

"It began with a fire in the sugar-mill." Fourchet's harsh voice summoned January back to the

present, back to the grim-faced man sitting in his mother's yellow chintz chair drinking coffee,

while he himself stood. "We hadn't started harvest yet-you lose half your sugar if you cut too

soon-and the hands were still bringing in wood from the cipriere. My sugar-boss managed to get

the fire put out, but the beams that held the grinders were damaged. They broke two days later,

and that put us back another week. Men found voodoo-marks in the mill, on the sugar carts and

the mule harness. The cart axles were sawn, the harness cut, or rubbed with turpentine and

pepper. The whole of the main work-gang was poisoned one day, purging and puking and

useless."

"And I suppose you put the women out to cut?" said January quietly. "Sir," he added, as he had

been taught-as he nowadays had to force himself to remember to say, after sixteen years in Paris

of saying "sir" to no one who did not merit it.

Fourchet's dark eyes flashed. "What the hell do you think? We had to get the harvest in, damn

you, boy."

"Let M'sieu Fourchet finish his story, Ben," chided his mother, and Fourchet swung around on

her with a flaying glare.

Then after a moment he looked back at January. "Yes," he said. "I put the women's gang to

cutting the cane as well as hauling it, and kept most of the second gang in the mill. They know

what they're doing with the fires. Fool women put 'em out raking the ashes, and smother 'em

putting in wood and every other damn thing. We couldn't lose a day, not with the frost coming.

You know that, or you should."

January knew. Can't-see to can't-see, they'd said in the quarters. The men shivered in the morning

blackness as they started their work, and again as they returned from the fields with the sweat

crusted on their bodies, once it became so dark their own hands and arms and bodies were in peril

from the sharp heavy blades. He remembered loading cane onto the carts by torchlight, and the

constant fear he'd step on a snake in the shadows among the cane-rows, or find one had coiled

itself into the cut cane. Remembered how the babies cried, laid down by their mothers at the edge

of the field, to be suckled when they had a chance. Remembered the men's silence as they

stumbled back with the final loads of the day, and how it felt to know that there would be no rest.

Only hours more work unloading the heavy stalks at the mill, feeding the dripping sticky billets

with their razor-sharp ends into the turning iron maw of the grinder. Remembered exhaustion,

and the sickening smell of the cane-juice and the smoke and the burnt-sweet stink of the boiling

sugar.

Cold meals and provision grounds gone to weeds and the cabin filthy, hearth piled high with

ashes and walls surrounded with trash. He and his sister itching with lice and driven nearly frantic

by bedbugs at night because their mother had no time to wage the slave's endless battle against

those pests. His mother falling asleep sitting in the doorway, too tired to undress and go to bed.

"Yes, sir," he told Fourchet. "I know."

"Then you should know how devastating this kind of thing can be at such a time. And it's not the

first time. God knows blacks are always doing one thing and another to get out of work. Breaking

tools, or crippling a mule or a horse. You'd think they'd have the sense to know that a poor

harvest will only hurt them in the end, but of course they don't."

No, thought January, silent. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes when you were that tired and that

angry you didn't think very straight. When he was a child he'd wanted to kill Fourchet, after the

man had flogged Mohammed, the plantation blacksmith's apprentice, nearly to death in one of his

fits of drunken rage. Remembered how the drivers had untied the slim youth's body from the post

and dropped him to the ground in the stableyard, and how the flies had swarmed around the

bloodied meat of his back. Mohammed was a favorite of the children-the hogmeat gang, as they

were called-a storyteller and a singer of songs. January had wanted to kill Fourchet and even at

the time had known that if the big man died, at least a couple of the slaves would end up being

sold to pay debts while the man's son was still a young boy. Maybe all of them.

And he'd known then, for the first time, that taste of helpless fear, the awareness that some things

had to be endured for the sake of the slender and priceless good that endurance bought you.

Being in hell wasn't as bad as it might be, if you could sit with your family in the hot dark of

summer nights, listen to the crickets and the soft sweet wailing of singing along the street of the

quarters, in those short lapis hours between supper and bed.

The thought of losing that-even that-was usually enough to make a man or a woman think twice

about open revolt.

Still he said nothing. But he felt as if the whole core of him had shrunk and cured to a rod of iron,

ungiving and utterly cold.

"Then yesterday morning the servants found Gilles, my butler, dead in the storeroom under the

house." Fourchet's mouth hardened. "Beside him was a bottle of liquor, cognac. My cognac. The

cellaret in the dining room was unlocked, the keys lying beside Gilles's hand."

Bitter hatred froze the old planter's face as he gazed unseeing at the bright slim slat of Rue

Burgundy visible beyond the window louvers, remembering whatever sight it was that he had

been brought down to see.

"Livia will have told you I used to drink," he said. "And that when I drank, it was as if there was

a devil in me."

"My mother never spoke of you, sir," replied January, and the dark eyes slashed in his direction

again, then cut toward the straight cool figure in the yellow muslin, sipping her cafe creme. But

since January hadn't actually said, What makes you think she gave you a moment's thought after

she wiped your spunk off her legs and went about her business? there was nothing with which

Fourchet could take issue.

"Just as well. I'd like to say that all the evil in my life sprang from drink, but I don't think even

that's true." He took a cigar from his pocket, bit off the end with carnivorous-looking teeth. "For

eight months now I have not tasted a drop. Nor will I. But I've spoken of this to no one. Only my

wife knows of my decision to put it out of my life, to make some reparation for the harm I've

caused. Not so very long ago poisoning my liquor would have been the quickest way to get shut

of me." He was silent again, as if he expected praise or admiration for this abstinence-as if every

slave on Bellefleur hadn't known to stay out of the master's way when he'd been at the bottle. As

if even the scullery maid hadn't held him in fear-filled contempt.

"Well, it's clear to me what's going on this time." The planter shook his head. "I don't think it's

revolt-they're taking too goddam long over it. No-someone's set out to destroy my land. To

destroy me." His hands balled into fists upon his knees, his face like a storm-scarred stone.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Percy Shelley had written of an ancient colossus,

battered and alone. A shattered visage . . . whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold

command. . . .

Fourchet held the cigar to his lips and glanced at January, not even expectantly, but impatiently.

A slave, January realized, would spring at once to the spiritlamp beneath the coffee and kindle a

spill for him.

So, of course, would a gentleman host who didn't want to relegate the task to the only lady in the

room. January fetched the spill, his anger smoldering in him like the ember at the spill's tip. The

comparison with Shelley's poem was too grand, he thought. Yet the words would not leave his

mind.

"It might just be my neighbors, the Daubray brothers, are behind this, or paying one of my blacks

to do it." The dark glance flickered sideways to January again through the curl of the smoke. "I've

been in lawsuit against them for near a year now, and the case is coming to court as soon as the

harvest's in. I wouldn't put it past them to burn my mill." For a moment the old black glint of

unreasoning hate showed through his brooding self-control.

"Sneaking bastards. They know what my land means to me." He puffed his cigar like a caged

dragon blowing smoke. "They know I was putting my blood and my sweat into its soil while that

lightskirt mother of theirs was promenading the New Orleans docks in quest of a husband, and

they know the land is my body and my life. I've done evil in my time, wasted the gifts of God and

harmed those it was my duty to protect. But through it all the land was mine. It's the one true

good in my life, the only thing I have to show for living: truly my Triumph. They're spiteful as

women, the whole family is," he added. "They'd be glad to see me lose it. Glad enough to pay my

own field hands to turn against me.

"That's what I want you to find out."

He raised his chin and stared at January, who still stood before him-stood as if this man were still

his master. Were still able to beat him, or nail him up in the barrel in the corner of the barn in

July heat or February frost. Still able to sell him away, never to see his friends or his family

again.

Heat blossomed somewhere behind January's sternum. Ice-heat, tight and furious and

dangerously still. He'd set his music satchel on the floor by his feet upon coming in from the

backyard-yet one more of those myriad tiny prohibitions imposed upon him in his mother's

house. Neither he nor Olympe-his full sister by that slave husband of whom their mother never

spoke-had ever been allowed to enter the house through the long French door from the street.

With the coming of the November cool, balls and the opera were beginning again. Likewise,

most of January's piano pupils had returned to town, the sons and daughters of the wealthy of

New Orleans: Americans, French, free colored. He'd just returned from a house in the suburb of

St. Mary's-quite close, in fact, to where Bellefleur's cane-fields had lain-after talking to a woman

about lessons for her son. That angelic sixyear-old had announced, the moment January was on

the opposite side of the parlor's sliding doors again, "Mama, he's a nigger!" in tones of

incredulous shock.

Did he think I was going to play a tom-tom instead of a piano?

Now he moved his satchel carefully up onto one of the spare, graceful cypress tables that adorned

the parlor, and folded his hands. In the impeccable Parisian French that he knew was several

degrees more correct than Fourchet's Creole sloppiness, he said, "In other words, sir, what you

want is a spy."

"Of course I want a spy!" Fourchet's eyes slitted and he looked like a rogue horse about to bite.

His harsh voice had the note of one who wondered how January could be so dense. "No question

it's the blacks. I just need to know which ones, and if the Daubrays or someone else are behind it.

This Shaw fellow I spoke with yesterday said you'd be the man."

"I'm afraid the lieutenant mistook me, sir." January fought to keep his voice from shaking. "I'm a

surgeon by training, and a musician. I've looked into things when friends of mine needed help.

But I'm not a spy."

"I'll pay you," said Fourchet. "Five hundred dollars. You can't tell me you'd make as much

between now and the end of the harvest, playing at balls." He nodded toward the piano in the

front parlor, where January gave lessons three mornings a week to a tiny coterie of free colored

children, the sons and daughters of white men by their plaçees.

"I told Monsieur Fourchet that you certainly needed the money," put in Livia.

January opened his mouth, then closed it, fighting not to snap, You mean YOU want-not NEED-

the money. But his mother didn't even avert her gaze from his, evidently seeing nothing amiss in

charging her son five Spanish dollars a month for the privilege of sleeping in the room he'd

occupied as a child, nor in reminding him of the hundred dollars he owed her.

That debt had come about three weeks ago, when January had gone to play at a ball and,

returning late, had encountered a gang of rowdies, Kentucky river-ruffians of the sort that came

down on the keelboats. Coarse, dirty, largely uneducated, they were habitually heavily armed and

drunk. He'd escaped with his life, and without serious injury, only by refusing to resist, putting

his arms over his head and telling himself over and over that to put up a fight would escalate the

situation to a killing rather than just "roughing up a nigger." It hadn't been easy.

The custom of the country, he'd told himself later. And he had known, returning from France in

the wake of his wife's death from the cholera two years ago, that in the land of his birth he could

be beaten up by any white man, that he had no right to resist. It was the price he'd paid, to return

to the only home he had.

But the incident had cost him the clothes he wore, clothes a musician needed if he expected to be

hired to play at the balls of the wealthy: long-tailed black wool coat, gray trousers, cream-colored

silk waistcoat, linen shirt. And it had cost him all the music in his satchel-torn up, pissed on,

dunked in the overflowing gutters of Rue Bienville--difficult and costly to replace. The season of

entertainments was just beginning, after the summer's brutal heat. He could not afford delay in

repurchasing the tools and apparel of his trade.

But he knew, even as he'd asked her for the money, that his mother would not let him forget.

And it was in her eyes now: that avid glitter. Envy, too, that he'd been offered the money, and the

task, instead of she.

"I'm sorry, Monsieur Fourchet," he said again, and marveled to hear his own calm voice. "It isn't

a matter of money. I-"

"Don't be a fool!" Fourchet's voice cracked into a full-out shout, as January remembered it. The

child in him flinched at the recollection of the man's capricious rages, the sudden transitions from

reasonableness to violent fury. "Too proud to get your black hands dirty? Think you're too good

these days to live with the niggers you were born among?"

"I think-" began January, and Fourchet raged. "Don't you back-talk me, you black whelp, I don't

give a tinker's reverence what you think!" He flung the cigar to the spotless cypresswood floor. "I

could get a dozen like you just walking down Baronne Street who'd leap on a dollar to suck my

arse, let alone do as I'm asking you to do!"

"Then I suggest you betake yourself to Baronne Street, sir," said January quietly. "I'm sorry to

have wasted your time."

"I'll make you goddam sorry. . . !" Fourchet thundered, but January simply raised his new beaver

hat to the man, bowed deeply, picked up his music satchel, and walked through the rear parlor

and out the back door. He could hear the man's enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard

and mounted the stairs to his room in the garçonniere, and only when he had shut the door behind

him did he start to shake.

He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself-forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago.

Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum

of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn't hurt him

much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves

off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.

He found himself listening, heart racing, to the old man's shouted obscenities as he pulled off the

coat and shirt his mother had lent him the money to buy, the armor of respectability that, more

even than the papers in his pocket, said: This is a free man.

To Fourchet, January realized, he would never be free.

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BenjaminJanuaryBook4SoldDowntheRiverBarbaraHamblyForMomandDadSpecialthanksareowedtoPaulNevski,BillCoble,NormanandSandMarmillion,andtherestofthestaffofLeMondeCreoleinNewOrleansandLauraPlantationinSt.JohnParish,forunbelievablehelp,inspiration,andfriendshipinputtingtogetherthisbook.ThanksalsotoPamel...

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