"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 2 - Fever Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Benjamin January
Book 2
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Fever Season

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Barbara Hambly

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For Laurie

Special thanks to the Staff of the Historic New Orleans Collection for all their help;
to Kate Miciak for her assistance and advice in redirecting the story;
to O'Neil deNoux; and, of course, to George.
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
As in my previous book of this series, A Free Man of Color, I have employed, as far as possible, the
terminology of the 1830s, which differs considerably from that in use today. In the 1830s, as far as I can
tell, creole was generally taken to mean a native-born white descendant of French or Spanish colonists. If
a person of African parentage was being referred to, he or she was specified as a creole Negro, that is,
born in the Americas and therefore less susceptible to local diseases than Congos-African-born blacks.
There was a vast distinction between black and colored. The latter term had a specific meaning as the
descendant of African and European ancestors. Sang m├кl├й was one of the French terms: "mixed blood."
Any colored person would have been deeply offended to be referred to as "black," since black meant
"slave"; and the free colored had worked long and hard to establish themselves as a third order, a caste
that was neither black nor white. Likewise, they were careful to distinguish between themselves and
slaves of mixed race and between themselves and freedmen, whatever the percentage of African genetics
in their makeup. Given the economics of the time and the society, this was a logical mechanism of
survival. That they did survive and thrive, and establish a culture of amazing richness that was neither
African nor European, is a tribute to the stubborn and wonderful life force of the human spirit.
? One

In fever season, traffic in the streets was thin. Those who could afford to do so had left New Orleans
with the ending of Lent; those who could not had all through the long summer hurried about their business
as if Bronze John, as they called the sickness, were a creditor one could avoid if one kept off the streets.
Midday, the molten September heat raised steam from the water in the French town's cypress-lined
gutters and the rain puddles in the soupy streets. Mephitic light filtered through clouds of steamboat soot
from the levees and gave the town the look of a grimy but inexplicably pastel-walled hell. Only those
whose errands were pressing walked the streets then.
So it took no great cleverness on Benjamin January's part to realize that he was being followed.
Charity Hospital, where he'd spent the night and all the morning among the dying, lay on the uptown side
of Canal Street, the American side. It was against January's nature to spend more time on that side of
town than was absolutely necessary, to say nothing of the fact that Americans seemed to regard all free
persons of color as potential slaves, money on the hoof going to waste that could be going into their
pockets in the big markets along Baronne and Levee Streets. Americans made no distinction, as the
French were careful to do, between African blacks-be they slaves or freedmen-and the free persons of
color whose parents had been both colored and white. Not, January reflected wryly, that it made a great
deal of difference in his case.
But even in fever season, when men and women, black and white and colored, were only hands to hold