Dead and Buried
Page 29
‘It doesn’t sound as if she has,’ said January. ‘That must have been a hideous shock for Droudge, to have you turn up on his doorstep like that.’
‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Hannibal softly. ‘Because it meant, you see, that neither Gerry nor Uncle Diogenes had any legal control of the Foxford estate at all. That it was legally mine – still is, as a matter of fact. A terrifying thought.’
January bowed elaborately to him, and Hannibal hit him with the pillow.
‘I told him I’d just returned to New Orleans from Mexico, so he didn’t think I had the slightest interest in whether the Deschamps family was ruined or not. His one thought was to get me out of the way before I showed myself to Uncle Diogenes and demanded an accounting of where all that money’s been bleeding away to. Cousin Stubbs was right, by the way – he always did skim, and he had ways of making money out of the tenants that my father never knew about. I think the fact that Droudge used a knife during a quarrel was only happenstance. That arsenic was in his strongbox for a reason.’
January nodded, understanding. ‘And, as you pointed out to Shaw, all the evidence concerning motive was thousands of miles away.’
‘More than that, there was no one – except Patrick, probably – who would even think to look for it. And me, of course.’ The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘Will Philippa like Miss Isobel, do you think? Will she make a good mistress for Foxford Priory?’
‘She was raised on a plantation,’ said January, ‘so she’ll know what’s entailed in running a property that size. And I should imagine that with Droudge gone – and control of the property legally in Foxford’s hands – things will be easier there.’
‘Not to speak of all Aunt Elodie’s shekels. I always knew Philippa would be a better custodian of Foxford Priory than an opium-swilling fiddle player; I’m glad Gerry seems to have inherited that. Sometimes—’ He broke off again and sat for a time gazing through the open doorway, out over the flat green monotony of the Swamp and the glitter of standing water, toward the low roofs of the town.
‘He had a great deal more feeling than most people guessed,’ he had said of himself, about the Foxford acres: the green and misty Irish meadows that he would never see again. In Paris, though January had sworn when he left Louisiana in 1817 that he never would come back, he had often dreamed of New Orleans, and the dreams had never been of white men with ropes, or of Presidential Elections in which he was allowed no say.
White egrets in gray river mist. The burnt-sugar smell of December fog. African drumbeats and the roar of cicadas, and men and women dancing in Congo Square.
Friends gathered together, in his mother’s pink house on Rue Burgundy, with the French doors thrown open to the street in cooling twilight.
Like poor Martin Quennell, he’d been willing to walk away from it all, in order to live as a free man.
And fate had led him back.
January put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘Wash your hair. There’s a rehearsal for the opera tonight, and Davis is saving a place for you. Anyway, it’s time you met the young ladies you’ll be tutoring in history and Greek this winter. Will you stay to dinner? Rose has been asking after you.’
Hannibal sighed and got to his feet, pale in his ragged nightshirt like a corpse climbing forth from a dishonored grave. ‘Facilis descensus Averno,’ he said, unconsciously providing the rest of the passage of Virgil that Uncle Diogenes had spoken, to reflect upon the path into Hell – and out of it again. ‘Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus . . .’
‘Hoc opus,’ agreed January. ‘To return to the light and air, that is indeed the work. And after the rehearsal, if Rose’s young ladies can spare us, we’ll go to a grocery I know somewhere upriver of Canal Street. There’s music there I think you need to hear.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is not the purpose of this novel to explore the origins and ramifications – political, social, and psychological – of race-based chattel slavery in the United States, nor the entangled and tragic system of prejudice and laws that made up the ‘one-drop rule’. Suffice it to say that as late as 1985, a Louisiana woman was denied a passport application because she had checked ‘white’ on the form – having been raised to believe herself of 100% Caucasian extraction – when her birth certificate listed one of her parents as ‘black’, which in Louisiana at that time could mean having as little as 1/64th African ancestry. Blue-eyed blondes with characteristically African features are a commonplace in many areas of Louisiana and elsewhere in the South, and given the severe social limitations placed on blacks up through most of the Twentieth Century, it is hardly surprising that many light-complected African Americans chose to leave their communities, go North or West, and ‘pass’ if they could.
Common also in the records of the South are cases of children, adopted by white parents, who were later ‘outed’ as being of such distant and negligible African descent as to be completely indistinguishable from their adoptive families – and who lost jobs, families, and in many instances, civil rights thereby.
Similar cases existed prior to the Civil War, and the social consequences, at that time, were horrific – not the least of which being that if one of the unfortunate passe blanc’s parents could be proved to be a slave, he or she would lose not only social position, but liberty as well. (Three of Thomas Jefferson’s reputed children by the slave Sally Hemings – herself a fair-complected ‘quadroon’ – were said to have slipped invisibly into white society: something that was easier in the 1790s than in the 1830s.)
Moreover, to literally add insult to injury, most of the gens du couleur libre – the free colored of New Orleans – appear to have identified with, and sided with, the whites who had money and power, and to have distanced themselves as far as possible from the darker-skinned blacks, slave or free, who came into New Orleans with the Americans in the 1820s and ’30s. This tendency did not end with the Civil War, though the genres of music purely native to America – ragtime and jazz – are a combination of the greater Classical training of ‘downtown’ black musicians with the stronger African musical traditions that had not been erased from the less-snobbish ‘uptown’ players.
In all these matters and all others, I have tried, as always, firstly to entertain.
* Fever Season
Table of Contents
Cover
The Benjamin January Series from Barbara Hambly
Dead and Buried
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Author’s Note
Footnotes
Fn1
Table of Contents
Cover
The Benjamin January Series from Barbara Hambly
Dead and Buried
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Author’s Note
Footnotes
Fn1