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By Root 568 0

and the gliding, silent smokestacks of the riverboats beyond. Past the oaks stood new American-style houses, built of wood or imported New England brick, brave with scrollwork and bright with new paint, gardens spread about them like the multicolored petticoats of market women sitting on the grass. After the enclosing walls and crowding balconies of the French town, the American town seemed both airy and a little raw, its unfinished streets petering out into rows of oaks and sycamores or ending in the raw mounds of the cane fields, bare looking or just beginning to bristle with the first stubble of second or third crops. A black man was scything the grass in one yard behind a white-painted picket fence; a woman with a servant’s plain dark dress and an Irishwoman’s fair complexion walked a baby in a wicker perambulator down the footpath by the roadside, trailed by a small boy in a sailor suit and a smaller girl in frilly white with a doll.

The houses glittered with windows, the farthest dwellings imaginable from the sordid cabins of the Irish Channel just upriver from the French town, or the filth of the Girod Street Swamp. Not that his mother—or any of the old French planters—would admit that there was any difference in the quality of the inhabitants. “They are Americans,” Livia—or Xavier Peralta, for that matter—would say, with the tone Bouille had used of his opponent Granger, with the look in her eyes like the eyes behind those velvet masks regarding Shaw from the doorway of the Orleans ballroom last night.

He suspected that because they could afford such houses—because they owned so many steamship companies and banks, so much of the money that kept the old French planters going from sugar crop to sugar crop—only made the situation worse.

“Ma! The nigger music teacher’s here!”

The small boy’s bell-clear voice carried even through the shut back door of the house, and January felt his jaw muscles clench even as he schooled his face to a pleasant smile when the housemaid, wiping flour-covered hands on her apron, opened the kitchen door. The knowledge that the girls’ white drawing master also had to come to the back door was of little comfort.

Franklin Culver was vice-president of a small bank on the American side of Canal Street. He owned four slaves: the housemaid Ruth, the yardman Jim, and two other men whose services he rented out to a lumberyard. January suspected that if any of the three daughters of the household knew that his given name was Benjamin, they’d call him by it instead of Mr. January. He could see that the matter still profoundly puzzled Charis, the youngest. “But slaves don’t have last names,” she’d argued during the first lesson.

“Well, they do, Miss Charis,” pointed out January. “But anyway, I’m not a slave.”

Upon a later occasion she’d remarked that slaves didn’t speak French—French evidently being something small girls learned with great labor and frustration from their governesses—so he could tell she was still unclear about the entire concept of a black man being free. He suspected that her father shared this deficiency. He didn’t even try to explain that he wasn’t black, but colored, a different matter entirely.

Still, the girls were very polite, unspoiled and charming, clearly kept up with their daily practicing, and four-fifty a week was four-fifty a week. Three dollars of that went to Livia, and two or three from what he earned teaching small classes in her parlor on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. They didn’t have the passion, or the gift for music, that Madeleine Dubonnet had had, nor the secret bond of shared devotion, but he’d instructed far worse.

He occasionally asked himself what he was saving for, squirreling away small sums of money in his account at the Banque de Louisiane. A house of his own?

In New Orleans? Paris had been bad enough, knowing that he was a fully qualified surgeon who would never have his own practice—or never a paying one—sheerly because of the color of his skin. Even as a musician his size and color had made him something of a curiosity, but at