"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man of Color" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

craftsmen of the city, the colored businessmen who owned their own shops, were being met by the newly
arrived Americans flooding into the city and taking up plantations along the river and the bayous. They
were being called "nigger" by illiterate Kentuckians and Hoosier riverboat men who wouldn't have been
permitted through those artists' and craftsmen's and businessmen's front doors.

These days, the colored had stronger reasons than ever to proclaim themselves different—entirely
different —from the black.

Maybe he could have practiced medicine in New Orleans, he thought, if he were as light as Monsieur
Gomez, as light as the one or two other colored physicians in practice there—even as light as his own
mother.

She was a mulatto. He, with three African grandparents, was black.

"I'll make them change their minds," he said.

That was before the war.

Despite Napoleon's betrayal, St.Denis Janvier, like most Creoles, regarded himself as French. When
January spoke to him about going to study in Europe, it was assumed by both that he would study in
France. But by the time he was old enough to undertake the journey, fighting had broken out afresh
between England and France, and between England and the United States. There was little enough
fighting on land in Louisiana, except toward the end during Pakenham's disastrous attempt at invasion,
but it wasn't a safe time to be on the sea. Thus January was twenty-four, and a veteran of battle,
battlefield surgery, and a major epidemic, before he set sail for Paris, to study both medicine and music,
subjects that in some fashion he could not explain seemed at times to be almost the same in his heart.

He had found Monsieur Gomez to be mosdy right. He studied and passed his examinations and was
taken on as an assistant surgeon in one of the city's big charity hospitals, but no one even considered the
possibility of his entering private practice. In any case it was out of the question, for St.Denis Janvier died
of yellow fever in 1822, shortly after his adopted son was admitted to the Paris College of Surgeons. He
left him a little, but not enough to purchase a practice or to start one on his own.

He had still been working at the Hotel Dieu two years later, when a black-haired, hook-nosed,
eighteen-year-old Moroccan seamstress had brought in a fifteen-year-old prostitute who sometimes did
piecework for her, the girl hemorrhaging from self-induced abortion.

The girl had died. Ayasha had left, but later, coming away from the hospital, January had found her crying
in a doorway and had walked her home.

He was not making enough as a doctor to marry, and by then he knew that he never would.

But Paris was a city of music, and music was not something that whites appeared to believe required a
white father's blood.
Angelique Crozat had been bundled together in the bottom of the armoire in the retiring parlor, beneath a
loose tangle of cloaks and opera capes.

"I looked to see if she might have stowed her wings in here." Minou was still a little pale, her voice
struggling against breathlessness as she glanced from her tall brother back to the silvery form stretched on
its scattered bed of velvet and satin, the face a deformed and discolored pearl in the particolored delta of