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

drunk. He'd escaped with his life, and without serious injury, only by refusing to resist, putting
his arms over his head and telling himself over and over that to put up a fight would escalate the
situation to a killing rather than just "roughing up a nigger." It hadn't been easy.
The custom of the country, he'd told himself later. And he had known, returning from France in
the wake of his wife's death from the cholera two years ago, that in the land of his birth he could
be beaten up by any white man, that he had no right to resist. It was the price he'd paid, to return
to the only home he had.
But the incident had cost him the clothes he wore, clothes a musician needed if he expected to be
hired to play at the balls of the wealthy: long-tailed black wool coat, gray trousers, cream-colored
silk waistcoat, linen shirt. And it had cost him all the music in his satchel-torn up, pissed on,
dunked in the overflowing gutters of Rue Bienville--difficult and costly to replace. The season of
entertainments was just beginning, after the summer's brutal heat. He could not afford delay in
repurchasing the tools and apparel of his trade.
But he knew, even as he'd asked her for the money, that his mother would not let him forget.
And it was in her eyes now: that avid glitter. Envy, too, that he'd been offered the money, and the
task, instead of she.
"I'm sorry, Monsieur Fourchet," he said again, and marveled to hear his own calm voice. "It isn't
a matter of money. I-"
"Don't be a fool!" Fourchet's voice cracked into a full-out shout, as January remembered it. The
child in him flinched at the recollection of the man's capricious rages, the sudden transitions from
reasonableness to violent fury. "Too proud to get your black hands dirty? Think you're too good
these days to live with the niggers you were born among?"
"I think-" began January, and Fourchet raged. "Don't you back-talk me, you black whelp, I don't
give a tinker's reverence what you think!" He flung the cigar to the spotless cypresswood floor. "I
could get a dozen like you just walking down Baronne Street who'd leap on a dollar to suck my
arse, let alone do as I'm asking you to do!"
"Then I suggest you betake yourself to Baronne Street, sir," said January quietly. "I'm sorry to
have wasted your time."
"I'll make you goddam sorry. . . !" Fourchet thundered, but January simply raised his new beaver
hat to the man, bowed deeply, picked up his music satchel, and walked through the rear parlor
and out the back door. He could hear the man's enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard
and mounted the stairs to his room in the gar├зonniere, and only when he had shut the door behind
him did he start to shake.
He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself-forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago.
Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum
of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn't hurt him
much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves
off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.
He found himself listening, heart racing, to the old man's shouted obscenities as he pulled off the
coat and shirt his mother had lent him the money to buy, the armor of respectability that, more
even than the papers in his pocket, said: This is a free man.
To Fourchet, January realized, he would never be free.
Only jumped-up.
To the Americans who saw him walking well-dressed about the streets, the Americans whose
growing numbers were slowly swamping the older population of Creole French and Spanish, it
was the same.
He fought down the impulse to change clothes fast and run. With his habitual neatness he made
himself fold the coat and trousers into the armoire, and set the shoes neatly under the bed.
Clothed in rougher trousers, a calico shirt, and the short corduroy jacket he'd bought while a
student in Paris, he descended the stairs and deposited the white shirt in the tiny laundry room