A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [69]
The bells on the cathedral struck six, then seven. At eight—full dark—the cannon in Congo Square boomed out, signaling curfew for those few slaves who remained abroad, though the rain, January guessed, would have broken up the dancing long ago.
He wondered about the woman he’d followed from the square and where she lived, and if he’d have to go through this again next Sunday to locate her.
If he wasn’t on a boat by that time, he thought bitterly, wedging his broad shoulders against the stained plaster of the wall and drawing up his knees. The man next to him grumbled, “Watch your feet, nigger,” and January growled tiredly, “You watch yours.” There were advantages to being six feet three and the size of a barn.
On a boat and on his way back to Paris, where he wouldn’t have to worry about being triced up in that hellish scaffold in the yard and lashed with a whip because some chaca jack-in-office thought he was darker than he should have been. Jesus! he thought, lowering his throbbing head to his wrists. Maybe he couldn’t get work as a surgeon in Paris, and maybe the government taxed everything from toothbrushes to menservants, but at least he wouldn’t have to worry about carrying papers around certifying that he wasn’t somebody’s property trying to commit the crime of stealing himself.
And Ayasha? something whispered in his heart.
Well, not Paris, then. But there were other places in France. Places where every cobblestone and gargoyle and chestnut tree didn’t say her name. Or England. The world was filled with cities.…
He wondered who were the men who’d attacked him.
And why.
He stifled the rising panic, the fear that nobody would come for him, nobody would come to get him out of this, and thought about those men. One at least had been in the square. Probably both. They’d clearly followed him.
Why?
Coarse clothing, but he thought their shoes looked better than those given to slaves for wintertime wear. In the tangle of the fighting he hadn’t had a chance to observe their hands or their clothes, to guess at what they did.
Stay out of barrooms, the official on the docks had said. They’s enough cheats and scum in this city … you’d find yourself pickin’ cotton in Natchez before you kin say Jack Robinson.…
‘Impudent’ means twenty-five lashes, is what it means.
NO. It will not happen.
Why hadn’t Livia come? Or Minou?
The clock on the cathedral chimed eleven.
The sergeant hadn’t sent for them. Was the sergeant being bribed to turn over likely blacks to Carmen and Ricardo or Tallbott, or any of those others who owned the pens and depots and barracoons along Banks’ Arcade and Gravier and Baronne streets?
Sitting here in this stinking darkness, it seemed hideously likely.
January closed his eyes, tried to calm the thumping of his heart. Along the gallery, female voices rose again, arguing bitterly, and a man’s bellowed, “You hoors shut up, y’hear! Man can’t get no sleep!” Other voices joined in, cursing, followed by the sounds of a fight.
I was a fool to return. He wondered why they all didn’t leave, all who were able to—all who were still free. And how long, he wondered, would that freedom last, with the arriving Americans, who saw every dark-skinned human being as something to be appropriated and sold?
It won’t happen to me. I’ll be let out tomorrow. Holy Mary ever-Virgin, send someone to get me out of here.…
Abishag Shaw appeared at the cell door shortly before eight.
January wasn’t sure he had slept at all. The night blurred together into a long darkness of intermittent fear; of deliberately cultivated memories of Paris, of Ayasha and of every piece of music he’d ever played; of the prickle of roach feet, the scratching scamper of rats, and unspeakable smells. In the depths of the night he’d fingered his rosary in his pocket,