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By Root 532 0

own food and housing and employment, rather than exist in the enclosed compounds behind the white folks’ houses. In a room twenty feet by thirty—blocked off by a wood-and-plaster wall from the attic storeroom of the shop below—ten men slept, as January had guessed, on the bare floor, rolled in blankets with their heads on their spare jackets or shirts. The place stank of unwashed clothes, unbathed flesh, of mice and roaches and of the smoke leaking through the brick of the two chimneys that rose up along the dividing wall. January had to feel his way gingerly down the center of the room so as not to trip over anyone, as he sought the place he’d seen in the little dim moonlight let in when he’d opened the door.

There was a dormer on the other side of the slanted roof—which, like Hannibal’s attic in the Swamp, rose to a point a foot and a half short of his own height—and after a few minutes his eyes adjusted to the still denser dark, so that he could guess at the shapes that lay all around him, breathing deeply, heavily, in the vermin-infested dark.

Still, it was less crowded than the jail cell, quieter and far cleaner. By the last threads of blue moonlight he could see the man nearest him, and beyond him the little bundle of clothing, tin cup and plate, and the tin identification medal that showed him to be a slave working rather than a runaway when he walked about the streets.

He was sleeping under a roof he’d chosen for himself.

January closed his eyes.

His hand slid into his pocket, fingering the battered rosary as he told off prayers of thanks.

The illusion of freedom was tiny, he thought—maybe as tiny as his own illusion of justice—but they made do with it. It was better, to them, than the marginally more comfortable accommodations under a master’s roof. Better than leaving everything he owned, everything he had worked for, everything he had left in the world, for the convenience of whoever had put that scarf around Angelique Crozat’s ivory silk throat.

Save for a few hours snatched along the way, he had been without sleep for two nights and most of a third. Sleeping, he dreamed of the soft wailing voices of the workers in the fields, under the glassy weight of the new sun.

“They say go north, find us new kin,

They say go north, find us new kin,

We try save our folks,

We never come back again.”

But the dream’s light changed, from the early spring sun, harsh on the cane fields, to moonlight heavy as quicksilver, a black ocean strewn with phosphor galaxies, the black shape of a ship riding silent in the dark.

Dark blots on the ivory silk beach, like messy scabs; a tangle of walls and pens, shacks and fences; charred flesh and the smell of human waste and branding fires; the muted whisper of weeping. The glint of eyes that showed twelve young men, watching from the clotted shadows of the mangrove swamp.

“Without my folks, is no land home,

He say without my folks, no land be home,

I’ll die on that beach,

Before I live my life alone.”

“I walk on needles, I walk on pins,” sang a voice back, whirling through dark and time like the smell of a burning house. “I know well the Grand Zombi …”

The throb of drums swept aside the beat of the surf on the shore. Voices cried, “Calinda! Dance the calinda! Badoum, badoum!”

Rain smell, and the throbbing in his hand as if it had been pounded with a hammer. It was only marginally more painful than the rest of his body: legs, arms, back. Downstairs, two people argued in gombo French over the price of a half-pound of sugar.

Leaky gray light showed him the slant of the roof, the bundles of blankets, tin cups, spare shirts that were shoved into corners and around the walls. When he sat up mice went scurrying, but the roaches were less concerned. Possibly, thought January wryly, because some of them were almost as big.

No one was in sight. The dancing in Congo Square generally didn’t start until well after noon. The door onto the stairway stood open, the noise coming through it clearly. He limped over, stooping under the rafters and stepping through, stood on the little