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recognized Artemus Tourneval, a well-off free contractor of color, and noted another immaculate gentleman picking his way among the tables who, though nearly as light as some of the Neapolitans and Sicilians in the opera chorus, definitely had African ancestors as well as white.
    Neither Tourneval nor this other man—probably a planter come to town from the Cane River country— made any move to sit down. Nor would they have been served if they had, even if only with each other. When they spoke to the white men—as they did, dickering and figuring and speculating about interest and credit—both remained on their feet, while the white men sat, and neither looked the white men in the eye.
    January wondered dourly if they were addressed as
vous
or
tu.
    The only other men in the room of African descent were the waiters, and an occasional porter from the yard beyond. Neither Tourneval nor the colored planter gave them a glance.
    When one aspires to mastery, one does not acknowledge cousinship with slaves.
    Tu,
thought January.
Beyond a doubt.
    In the big back room the auction hadn’t yet begun. Kegs, bales, boxes, were stacked around the whitewashed plaster walls, and on out into the sunlit yard. Nails, tools, seed, foreclosed from failed businesses. Small boxes on the long sawbuck tables contained the deeds to city lots, houses, shares in cotton-presses or sugar-mills or boats. In the yard, mules and horses, ranging from sleek bloodstock to spent ewe-necked nags—foreclosures, probates, the breakdowns of men who’d miscalculated their incomes or debts.
    Slaves.
    “Open your mouth, Deacon, let him see your teeth.” Jed Burton—January recognized him as one of the St. Mary Opera Society—waved his merchandise forward. A man in cheap homespun turned the slave in question half-around, to get better light in his mouth while he peered and thrust his fingers inside.
    Dressed up in their best, the men in jackets of blue corduroy or wool, even those who were obviously fieldhands. The women wore dresses of bright cotton calico, chintz, or sometimes even silk, their hair wrapped in the colorful tignons that the law required all women of color to wear. All smiling, cheerful-looking. Nobody wants a sullen slave, and a “likely” attitude might be the difference between working as a yardman in the city and being sent upriver to cut cane. In a corner a man with leg-shackles on his feet and an “R” burned into his cheek clasped a woman’s hands. Small children clung to their mothers. Older children—ten and up—looked like they wished they could. But they hovered close, and gazed up at the white men with a look in their eyes no child should even know exists. January knew exactly the dread they felt, the dread of that first night in a strange house with no one they knew around.
    Just because the law said
Ten years old
didn’t mean that private sales weren’t worked all the time for children of six and seven and eight. Besides, the law also said
Where possible.
    He looked around again for Shaw. This time saw him: the Kentuckian was within a thumb’s-breadth of January’s formidable height and they were generally the two tallest men in any gathering. Hands in pockets, his battered orphan of a hat shoved onto the back of his head, Shaw looked like any small-time teamster or cracker farmer out after a bargain. The yard was full of such, prying open the mouths of mules or field-hands, peeking into casks of tar or nails, testing an ax-head or saw-blade from job-lots with the edges of horny thumbs. A yard to January’s left a man said, “Shuck down, honey” in drawling flatboat English to a stout young female slave; she unbuttoned her blue-flowered frock and let it drop around her feet, so that the man could knead her belly and pinch her breasts. Her children looked on.
    “Maestro.” Shaw slouched up to January and spit under the hooves of a mule held by a coffee-house servant. “I was just fixin’ to call. You all