Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River Read Online Free PDF Page A

farther than the quarters on his own land,” snapped January. He was getting tired of everyone's opinions on a subject that he himself considered closed.
    “That's exactly where he's looking,” returned Olympe calmly. “And what you think's going to happen to those folks when he dies?”
    The coflle of slaves clustered the railing of the deck of the Bonnets o' Blue, stared back at the swarming levee, the cafes under the sycamore trees around the Place d'Armes, the twin white towers of the cathedral under the sidelong smoke-yellow glare of the autumn sun. Gazing, January knew, for probably the last time. Life expectancy on a cane plantation wasn't long.
    Behind him, Olympe's voice went on. “Not four years ago they hanged Nat Turner and near seventy others in Virginia for rising up and killing whites. Every slave-owner in the country has been seeing rebels under his bed ever since. You think getting sold to pay the inheritance tax is the worst that'll befall a man's slaves, if he dies of poison in his own home?”
    “You want me to save his life?” January remembered the wet thud of the broom handle on his buttocks and thighs, the agony of blows multiplying as the bruises puffed and gorged the flesh with blood. He couldn't even remember what he'd done to trigger the beating, if anything.
    “I'd like you to think about saving the lives of the hundred or so folks who didn't put nightshade into that brandy. However much they might have wanted to.”
    For that moment, January hated her. He hadn't thought about it consciously, but he realized now that in addition to his sense that Simon Fourchet deserved whatever retribution was coming to him from his slaves-whether incited by his neighbors or not-in addition to his fears of something going wrong, he had been looking forward to a pleasant winter of playing music and being paid for it.
    The days of summer heat and summer fever were done. The wealthy of New Orleans the sugar brokers, the steamboat owners, the bankers and landlords and merchant importers, both French and American-were coming back to town to attend the opera and give parties and marry off their daughters and sons to the sons and daughters of their friends. The militia companies and burial societies, those bulwarks of the free colored community, would be organizing subscription balls and fund-raisers even more entertaining than the galas of the whites. January not only earned his bread through Mozart and Rossini, cotillions and schottisches and valses brilliantes. They were the meat and drink of his soul, the fire at which he warmed himself.
    For a year he'd lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.
    After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.
    He looked up now, studying Rose's long delicate profile. The cool mouth that was so sensitive beneath the mask of its primness. The way her smile came and went, as if in girlhood she'd been punished for laughing at the world's absurdity. Slim strong hands, stained with ink-she was currently making her living correcting young boys' Greek examinations for a school on the Rue d'Esplanade-and blistered from the chemical experiments that were her refuge and her joy.
    A winter of friendship.
    
     Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents' worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.
    A winter of rest.
    Sugar-grinding.
    
    
     Roulaison.
     The suffocating heat of the mill-house and the clammy damp of the cabins. The ache of muscles lifting, hauling, dragging armfuls of sharp-leaved cane after not quite enough food and never ever enough rest. The pain that settled into your bones when you couldn't even remember when last you'd slept to your heart's content.
    Fear of being beaten. Fear of being sold.
    Simon Fourchet's flaying voice and the