Dead water - Barbara Hambly [17]
By the glare of armloads of wood burning aloft in iron cressets, January watched stevedores heave the last of the luggage on board, and stack cords of logs for the ever-hungry furnaces. Soot from the tall chimney stacks gushed into the sullen sky above the levee. Now and then showers of sparks would whirl upward, only the height of the stacks preventing them from igniting the boats themselves. On the deck of the Silver Moon a nervous little gentleman with a pot belly and octagonal spectacles fussily marshalled the deck-hands—the owner, January guessed. Beside him, a tall, slim young man in a steward's white coat read from a notebook and called out to the porters: “Leave that trunk on the deck, Mr. Purlie gettin' off at Donaldsonville. Those go in the hold, Colonel Davis goin' on with us to Memphis this time. . . .”
January shifted Hannibal's valise, and his own small satchel, in his hand.
“All the way through to Memphis,” requested Hannibal of the clerk at the steamboat office window. The man took the Bank of Louisiana notes without question. January had to admit he'd been holding his breath.
“Hell, don't you piss around sellin' your niggers here and there along the river,” boomed a voice near-by. “Niggers are sky-high in St. Louis, fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred for prime bucks. . . .”
January turned and saw the speaker, bow-legged and broad-shouldered, his shortness making him look like an animate barrel, with tobacco-stains in his yellow mustache and a mouth like the hack of an ax. He jabbed a finger at another man, then gestured back to the line behind him: five men, four women, linked together by hanks of chain.
Scared, some of them, looking around in the sickly yellow of the smoke-fouled dawn. In Virginia and Kentucky, January knew, sluggards and troublemakers were threatened by their masters with being “sold down the river” to the cane plantations—and, he reflected, remembering his own childhood, they were right to fear. Three of the men clutched little bundles of clothing done up in bandannas, all they'd been able to carry from Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, still seasick from the voyage and aching with grief for friends and family they'd never see again. One woman clutched a small child to her side. Another, a girl with the fair-skinned quadroon beauty prized by so many white men, stared at the slave-dealer with naked hatred in her eyes.
“They got more and more land goin' for cotton up there, and they'll pay damn near anythin' for hands to work it. You can't go wrong with St. Louis, or my name ain't Ned Gleet!”
January turned away, sick with the sickness of helplessness, rage, and disgust, and looked around for Rose. He glimpsed her between the brick arches of the market buildings that stretched along the levee downstream of the Place des Armes, nearly out of sight in the shadows. She was dressed like the market-women who were just beginning to make their appearance, with their baskets of roses and oranges: a short red skirt and a petticoat of blue-and-orange calico, a white blouse and a short red corduroy jacket, a gay bandanna hiding her hair. With her spectacles she looked like an intellectual gypsy. With a glance back at Hannibal, who was still chatting with the clerk, January crossed to her,