sense that it would make no difference to anyone if he, Benjamin January, lived or died.
“You think I'd be safe there?” He threw the words at his sister like a lump of dirt. “Maybe Fourchet'll make sure I don't get kidnapped and sold, but that's not going to keep the killer from slipping poison into my food if he guesses why I'm there. And it won't keep me from being beat up by men who think I'm carrying tales to the master. Killed, maybe, if there really is rebellion planned.”
“Then you'll just have to be careful,” said Olympe, “won't you?”
January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January's freedom. Copies were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January's mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Theatre d'Orleans and various gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of January's principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet's lawyer.
“Not that it will do the slightest bit of good,” said January grimly, “should Fourchet's overseer, or his son, turn out to be a cheat and a slave-thief. Altruism is all very well, and I'm really sorry for those folks on Mon Triomphe, but I'd just as soon not try to convince some cracker cotton-farmer in the Missouri Territory to write to the New Orleans City Notary about whether or not I'm a free man.”
Lieutenant Shaw, slouched so deeply in a corner of the big stone watchroom of the town prison, the Cabildo, that he appeared to be lying in the chair on his shoulder blades with his boots on his desk, raised mild gray eyes from the documents, and scratched with businesslike thoroughness under his shabby collar. “Prob'ly wouldn't do you much good anyways, if'n they're like my uncle Zenas-Zenas and his family went to Missouri to grow cotton.” Shaw scratched again, and looped a long strand of his greasy ditchwater hair back around one ear.
“Zenas can plug a squirrel through the eye at two hundred and fifty yards and build a house from the ground up includin' the furniture usin' only an ax, but he can't write for sour owl-shit. You think you'll be in much more danger there than you'd be just walkin' around here?”
Shaw asked the question sincerely, and sincerely, January had to admit that in certain sections of New Orleans-the entrepot and hub of slave-trading for the entire region-he was probably in more peril of kidnapping than he'd be on Mon Triomphe.
“It's easy for you to say. Sir.” In his tone he heard his own defeat. The thought of what he was going to do made his stomach clench with dread, but he knew that Rose and Olympe were right. He understood that he could not feel anger that none would give justice to slaves, if he wasn't willing to work for that justice himself.
“I understand that,” said Shaw. “And I hope you understand I'd do it, if'n I didn't have certain physical limitations that'd make me middlin' unconvincin' as a cane-hand.”
January met his eyes with a bitter retort on his lips, but he knew Shaw. And he saw in the Kentuckian's quiet gaze that yes, this man would go out into the fields to trap the murderer . . .
If he didn't happen to be white.
And, as he'd said, a middling unconvincing cane-hand.
So he only said, “What? You don't think you could pass?” and Shaw relaxed and returned his unwilling grin. January reached into the pocket of his neat brown corduroy livery for his watch and tightened his lips when it wasn't there. The watch was silver, bought in Paris after he'd given up work as a surgeon and returned to being a musician. As a surgeon he'd never been able to afford such a thing, for even in France no one would choose a black surgeon over a white.
At least in France, he reflected dourly, he wouldn't have had to go searching through pawnshops for weeks to recover it, after it