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

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 cipriere. 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 back 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.
Cold meals and provision grounds gone to weeds and the cabin filthy, hearth piled high with
ashes and walls surrounded with trash. He and his sister itching with lice and driven nearly frantic
by bedbugs at night because their mother had no time to wage the slave's endless battle against
those pests. His mother falling asleep sitting in the doorway, too tired to undress and go to bed.
"Yes, sir," he told Fourchet. "I know."
"Then you should know how devastating this kind of thing can be at such a time. And it's not the
first time. God knows blacks are always doing one thing and another to get out of work. Breaking
tools, or crippling a mule or a horse. You'd think they'd have the sense to know that a poor
harvest will only hurt them in the end, but of course they don't."
No, thought January, silent. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes when you were that tired and that
angry you didn't think very straight. When he was a child he'd wanted to kill Fourchet, after the
man had flogged Mohammed, the plantation blacksmith's apprentice, nearly to death in one of his
fits of drunken rage. Remembered how the drivers had untied the slim youth's body from the post
and dropped him to the ground in the stableyard, and how the flies had swarmed around the
bloodied meat of his back. Mohammed was a favorite of the children-the hogmeat gang, as they