Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  Praise for Barbara Hambly’s

  SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

  “Absolutely fascinating … Hambly is a master of atmosphere. Compelling.”

  —The Purloined Letter

  “Hambly has created a fascinating set of characters, foremost among them her detective, Benjamin January.”

  —News & Record, Greensboro, NC

  “This is a dark, sometimes savage story, powered by disgust for a system so brutal. Hambly’s portrait of January’s lovely courtesan mother’s household is especially chilling.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “Perhaps the best book in the series.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

  “Intense.”

  —Romantic Times

  GRAVEYARD DUST

  “Seductive … Sweeps from lavish balls on elegant river plantations to voodoo rites in Congo Square and savage brawls in mean waterfront dives.… January proves the ideal guide through these treacherous social strata.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A richly detailed murder mystery with a little bit of voodoo mixed in for flavor. Don’t miss this powerful series.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

  “Its emotional authenticity, varied cast and rich historical trappings give the novel power and depth.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  FEVER SEASON

  “A notable writer of mystery fiction … This one grips the reader from start to finish.”

  —The Washington Times

  “From the highborn Creoles in their river mansions to the uncivilized Americans brawling on the levee, Hambly speaks all their languages, knows all their secrets, and brings them all to life.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  A FREE MAN OF COLOR

  “Magically rich and poignant … In scene after scene researched in impressive depth and presented in the cool, clear colors of photography, Hambly creates an exotic but recognizable environment for January’s search for justice.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A darned good murder mystery.”

  —USA Today

  Also by Barbara Hambly

  A Free Man of Color

  Fever Season

  Graveyard Dust

  Die Upon a Kiss

  Wet Grave

  Days of the Dead

  Dead Water

  and

  The Emancipator’s Wife:

  A novel of Mary Todd Lincoln

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

  A Bantam Book

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Hambly

  Diagrams of Mon Triomphe plantation and house by Hadel Studio

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:

  99-054845

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78530-5

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  v3.1

  For Mom and Dad

  Special thanks are owed to Paul Nevski, Bill Coble, Norman and Sand Marmillion, and the rest of the staff of Le Monde Creole in New Orleans and Laura Plantation in St. John Parish, for unbelievable help, inspiration, and friendship in putting together this book. Thanks also to Pamela Arcineaux and the staff of the Historic New Orleans Collection for their patience, friendship, and help; to Laurie Perry for her comments and help on early black music; and to Kate Miciak of Bantam Books.

  Thank you also to Jill and Charles, to Neil and deb, to Michael, and, of course, to George.

  PARTIAL GLOSSARY

  OF CREOLE AND

  AFRO-CREOLE WORDS

  One of the problems with the terminology found in accounts of slavery—in Louisiana in particular—is that words have often been transcribed phonetically, and spelling differs from account to account. As usual, my research has spanned so many small sources that the spelling is completely inconsistent. I apologize for this.

  Arpent—192 linear feet. Plantations were usually measured in arpents of river-front, extending sometimes twenty, sometimes forty arpents back from the river towards the swamps.

  Baron Cemetery (also Baron Samedei, or Baron La Croix)—voodoo spirit of the dead.

  Batture—the ground between the levee and the actual edge of the water. Frequently heavily wooded, and piled with snags and debris washed up in high water.

  Blankittes (or blanquittes)—disrespectful term for whites, used by slaves.

  Bousillage—river mud mixed with moss, ground shells, straw, hair, or any other binding substance to make a hard plaster. Also, the act or process of making walls out of this material.

  Bozal (or bosal)—A slave newly arrived from Africa; in other words, a raw savage.

  Brigitte of the Dry Arms—voodoo spirit of death, wife of Baron Cemetery.

  Callas—fried rice-balls (frequently dusted with powdered sugar).

  Ciprière—the swampy cypress forests that lay behind the cleared plantation lands along the river. Also called simply the swamp by Americans, and the “desert” by French (meaning “a waste place,” not as the word is understood in English).

  Congris—mixture of chickpeas and rice, or more broadly (in other parts of the Caribbean), any kind of beans and rice.

  Damballah-Wedo (or Damballa-Wedo)—voodoo snake-spirit of water and wisdom.

  Garçonnière—separate wing of a plantation or town house where the grown sons of the family lived. Sometimes a separate building.

  Griot—African word for the village storyteller, bard, and historian.

  Loa—voodoo spirits or “gods.” Loa can be great or not-so-great, powerful or minor, dangerous or benign or even comical, though the line between “good” and “bad” spirits is often less sharp in the African religions than in Western: spirits can be summoned to help with good causes or bad.

  Osnabrig (or osnaberg)—short for Osnaberg cloth, a coarse heavy cotton manufactured in Osnaberg, Sweden, usually used for slave clothing.

  Papa Legba—voodoo spirit of the crossroads, often conflated with St. Peter, the keeper of Heaven’s keys. Guardian of the doorways from this world into the next.

  Plaçée—free colored mistress of a wealthy white gentleman. The relationships were usually monogamous and frequently arranged with a contract on business lines.

  Quantiers (also quanteers)—a type of extremely coarse rawhide shoes made for slaves by the plantation shoemaker.

  Rattoon—to grow cane from stalks planted in a previous season and left in the ground (rather than being dug up and replanted). Rattooned cane tends to come up thinner and is more trouble to harvest.

  Roulaison—cane-harvest and grinding season.

  Tignon—the head-scarves or turbans whose wear was mandated by law for all women of color, slave or free.

  Vévé—voodoo signs or diagrams drawn to summon the loa.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Partial Glossary of Creole and Afro-Creole Words

  Map
>
  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

  About the Author

  ONE

  When someone ties you naked to a tree in the yard and beats you unconscious with a broom handle, you don’t soon forget it, or him.

  “Ben, you remember Monsieur Fourchet,” said his mother.

  Standing in the doorway of her parlor, Benjamin January felt the hair lift on his nape at the sight of the man beside the window.

  In the nightmares, he was taller.

  Fourchet turned from the long French door that looked out onto Rue Burgundy, and January saw that he was, in fact, just slightly under six feet tall: more than three inches shorter than his own towering height. That he was wide through the chest and shoulders, but without January’s massive strength. In the nightmares his hair was black, not streaky gray and thin, and his face, although creased with a lifetime’s rage and cruelty, didn’t have the broken network of lines that gouged the sunken cheeks, bracketed the harsh mouth, accentuated the sag beneath the chin.

  The eyes were the same. Arrogant, dark, and cold.

  But the man had grown old.

  “I remember,” he told his mother.

  “You’ve grown.” Fourchet took a seat in one of the straw-colored chintz chairs of which January’s mother was so proud.

  Between seven and forty-one I’d belong in a raree-show if I hadn’t. January couldn’t resist saying, “Monsieur Janvier fed me very well. Sir.”

  Fourchet hadn’t. The slaves on Fourchet’s Bellefleur Plantation, where January had been born, had what were called provision lands, small plots where they could grow corn and yams. On most plantations these augmented whatever rations of cornmeal and salt pork the planter saw fit to distribute. On Bellefleur, Fourchet had skimped the women and the children; even out of harvest time, he had demanded extra work after the conch shell was blown at sunset, so that the provision grounds were neglected and choked with weeds. January remembered his aunts and uncles were always being whipped for stealing food.

  Fourchet sniffed. “Educated you, too, so your mother tells me.”

  By the way the man said the words January knew that Fourchet had had his mother, probably many times in the years before he’d sold her to St.-Denis Janvier. Anger rose in him like vomit, and like vomit he swallowed it down. He glanced at Livia Levesque, slender and beautiful still at sixty-four, neat in her fashionable frock of yellow mull-muslin, on her head the tignon that New Orleans statute required all women of color to wear, striped yellow and white to match, and trimmed with lace. Her slim strong hands in crocheted house-mitts rested easy around the cup of pink-and-green German porcelain that held her coffee, and her dark wide beautiful eyes moved from man to man with an alert calculation that held not the smallest whisper of embarrassment, self-consciousness, or anger in the presence of her former master.

  The situation simply didn’t bother her at all.

  “Monsieur Fourchet has come to ask our help, Ben,” said his mother. Outside, in the Rue Burgundy, a brewer’s dray rattled past, driven far too fast by a young man standing to the reins like a Roman charioteer; two women walking along the brick banquette squealed and sprang aside from the water thrown by the wheels. Even so far back from the levee the hoots of the steamboats could be heard, and the dim stirring of stevedores’ shouts and vendors’ cries. After summer’s gluey horror, the autumn air was crisp. The city was resuming its wintertime bustle and prosperity. “Your name was given him by that dirty American policeman you take up with, but perhaps it’s all to the best.”

  That dirty American policeman was Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guard. Though as a rule—like most of the citizens of the French town, white and colored alike—January mistrusted Americans profoundly, particularly those in positions of power, he liked Shaw and respected him. Still, his mother spoke no more than the truth.

  January folded his powerful arms and waited. He had not, he noticed, been invited to sit in the presence of a white man and his former master. Nor had his mother said, Get yourself some coffee, Ben.

  It was one thing for a white man to share coffee with a velvet-brown mulatto woman. White men did it all the time, in these small cottages at the rear of the French town. The custom of the country. For generations French and Spanish Creoles had taken free women of color as their mistresses, as St.-Denis Janvier had thirty-three years ago freed and then taken her. It was another thing—January could see this in her eyes, hear it in her artfully artless silence—to ask a white gentleman to sit in the same room drinking coffee with the coal-black son of a mulatto and a slave.

  In the eighteen months since his return from sixteen years in Paris—years in which he had practiced both surgery and music—January had never been permitted to forget that this house was his mother’s, not his.

  If Simon Fourchet was conscious of any of this, he didn’t show it. Maybe he accepted it as natural that a grown man wouldn’t be permitted to drink coffee in the house where he lived, should a white man be seated there.

  “There’s a secret campaign of deliberate destruction going on at Mon Triomphe,” the planter said, glancing up at January from under the grizzled overhang of his brows. “Spoliation, arson, wrecking, ruin—and murder. And maybe open revolt.”

  Mon Triomphe, January recalled, was Fourchet’s other plantation. When Fourchet had sold Bellefleur—years after January, his mother, and his younger sister had been sold and freed—the planter had gone there permanently. It lay upriver in Ascension Parish, some twenty miles southeast of Baton Rouge. Twenty miles, that is, if you wanted to hack your way through cypress swamps and untamed woodland, instead of journeying twice the distance in half the time via steamboat on the river.

  Forty-two years ago—in 1793, the year of January’s birth—Fourchet had managed Mon Triomphe himself and left Bellefleur in the care of his brother-in-law Gervase Duhamel, only returning there after the grueling hell of the roulaison—the sugar-grinding—was done. Bellefleur had lain close to the small, walled city of New Orleans, to which Fourchet brought his Spanish wife and their two children every year for the Carnival season. They lived in the big house at Bellefleur for the weeks between Twelfth Night and Easter; entertained guests there, something impossible in the isolated fastnesses of Ascension Parish. St.-Denis Janvier, who had eventually bought January’s mother, had been one of those guests.

  In 1798, when January was five, there’d been a slave revolt on Mon Triomphe. It may have been fueled by rumor, hope, and the example of Christophe’s rebellion in the island of Saint-Domingue, though the aunts and uncles and cousins whose cabins January had played in said that it started when a drunken Fourchet beat a young girl to death. Fourchet’s wife and daughter died under the machetes of the infuriated slaves. The revolt was crushed, of course, but after that Fourchet sent his sister and her husband to Mon Triomphe, and ran Bellefleur himself.

  “It began with a fire in the sugar-mill.” Fourchet’s harsh voice summoned January back to the present, back to the grim-faced man sitting in his mother’s yellow chintz chair drinking coffee, while he himself stood. “We hadn’t started harvest yet—you lose half your sugar if you cut too soon—and the hands were still bringing in wood from the ciprière. My sugar-boss managed to get the fire put out, but the beams that held the grinders were damaged. They broke two days later, and that put us bac
k another week. Men found voodoo-marks in the mill, on the sugar carts and the mule harness. The cart axles were sawn, the harness cut, or rubbed with turpentine and pepper. The whole of the main work-gang was poisoned one day, purging and puking and useless.”

  “And I suppose you put the women out to cut?” said January quietly. “Sir,” he added, as he had been taught—as he nowadays had to force himself to remember to say, after sixteen years in Paris of saying “sir” to no one who did not merit it.

  Fourchet’s dark eyes flashed. “What the hell do you think? We had to get the harvest in, damn you, boy.”

  “Let M’sieu Fourchet finish his story, Ben,” chided his mother, and Fourchet swung around on her with a flaying glare.

  Then after a moment he looked back at January. “Yes,” he said. “I put the women’s gang to cutting the cane as well as hauling it, and kept most of the second gang in the mill. They know what they’re doing with the fires. Fool women put ’em out raking the ashes, and smother ’em putting in wood and every other damn thing. We couldn’t lose a day, not with the frost coming. You know that, or you should.”

  January knew. Can’t-see to can’t-see, they’d said in the quarters. The men shivered in the morning blackness as they started their work, and again as they returned from the fields with the sweat crusted on their bodies, once it became so dark their own hands and arms and bodies were in peril from the sharp heavy blades. He remembered loading cane onto the carts by torchlight, and the constant fear he’d step on a snake in the shadows among the cane-rows, or find one had coiled itself into the cut cane. Remembered how the babies cried, laid down by their mothers at the edge of the field, to be suckled when they had a chance. Remembered the men’s silence as they stumbled back with the final loads of the day, and how it felt to know that there would be no rest. Only hours more work unloading the heavy stalks at the mill, feeding the dripping sticky billets with their razor-sharp ends into the turning iron maw of the grinder. Remembered exhaustion, and the sickening smell of the cane-juice and the smoke and the burnt-sweet stink of the boiling sugar.