A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [23]
“What is it?”
“I …” Minou swallowed hard. “You’d better come.”
“What happened?” He hadn’t known his sister long, but he knew that under the empty-headed frivolity lay considerable strength of mind. It was the first time he’d ever seen her unnerved.
“In the parlor,” she said. “Ben, I think she’s dead.”
FOUR
From the time he was fourteen years old, January had wanted to study medicine.
St.-Denis Janvier had sent him to one of the very fine schools available to the children of the colored bourgeoisie—where he had been looked upon askance, as he had in his music lessons, for his gangly size and African blackness far more than for his mother’s plaçage—which boasted a science master who had trained in Montpellier before returning to his native New Orleans to teach.
Monsieur Gomez had been a believer in empiricism rather than in theory and had trained him as a surgeon rather than a physician. For this direction January was infinitely and forever grateful, despite his mother’s sneer and frown: “A surgeon, p’tit? A puller of teeth, when you could have an office and a practice of wealthy men?”
But his reading of the medical journals, the endless quibblings about bodily humors and the merits of heroic medicine—his experience with the men who prescribed bleeding for every ill and didn’t consider a patient sufficiently treated until he’d been dosed with salts of mercury until his gums bled—convinced him early on that he could never have adopted a livelihood based so firmly on ignorance, half truths, and arrogant lies.
Instead he had dissected rabbits and possums netted in the bayous and cattle from the slaughterhouses; had roved at will through Monsieur Gomez’s meager library and had followed the man on his rounds at the Charity Hospital, learning to set bones, birth babies, and repair fistulas regardless of which bodily humor was in ascendance at the time. He had been more than a student to Gomez, as Madeleine Dubonnet had been more than a student to him; rather, he had been, as she had been, a secret partner in a mystery, a junior co-devotee of the same intricate gnosis.
He had fought alongside Gomez in Jackson’s army when the British invaded and afterward had tended the wounded with him. When yellow fever had swept the city for the first time in the summer before his departure for France, he’d worked at his mentor’s side in the plague hospitals.
But from the start, Gomez had told him to be a musician.
“That Austrian drill sergeant is the best friend you have, p’tit.” Gomez’s Spanish-dark eyes were sad. “You have talent. If you were a white man, or even as bright-skinned as I, you could be a truly fine doctor. But even in Europe, where they don’t look at a black man and say, ‘He’s a slave,’ they’ll still look at you and say, ‘He’s an African.’ ”
January had sat for a long time, looking down at the backs of his huge ebony hands. Very quietly, he said, “I’m not.”
“No,” agreed Gomez. “Were you an African—living in Africa, I mean, in the tribes—I daresay you’d have found your way to the healing trade. They’re not all savages there, whatever the Americans may say. You have the healer’s hands and the memory for herbs and substances; you have the lightness of touch that makes a good surgeon, and the speed and courage that are the only salvation of a man under the knife. And you have a surgeon’s caring. You’d have been exceptional, either in the one world or the other. But you’re not an African either.”
January was silent. He’d already encountered too many of his mother’s friends—too many of his classmates’ parents—who gave him that look. Who