"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

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.
Pla├зee-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.
Ronlaison-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.
Veve-voodoo signs or diagrams drawn to summon the loa.
я┐╝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,