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

thick in these narrow streets of the old French town, drowning the sounds of the ballroom itself. In the
growing upriver suburbs, in their tall brick American houses on the new streets along the tracks of the
horse-drawn streetcars, Protestants would be shaking their heads about the goings-on. Though perhaps,
reflected January, a number of those Protestant wives wondered—or tried not to wonder—where their
husbands were tonight.

Last summer everyone in the ballroom—everyone in the streets—everyone in the city—had been through
the horrors of a double epidemic: yellow fever and Asiatic cholera, worse than any that had gone before.
They had survived it, mostly by clearing out of town if they could afford to, taking refuge in the lakeside
hotels of Mande-ville and Milneburgh or on plantations. Typical of the Creoles, they celebrated the
victory rather than mourned the loss. But there was no guarantee that in five months it wouldn't return.

He remembered Ayasha and crossed himself again. There was no guarantee about anything.

"They simply do not understand." Froissart's voice brought him back to the present. The man was now
well worked into his theme. January kept an expression of fascinated interest in his face, but barely heard
him. It was only a few hundred feet to the Cabildo, and ordinarily a woman—even a beautiful one—was
quite safe walking about the streets alone, provided she kept out of certain well-defined districts: the
waterfront or the bars along Rue du Levee; the Swamp or the Irish Channel.

But Carnival was different.

"Americans have no finesse, no sense of how things are done!" Froissart's gesture to heaven was worthy
of Macbeth perishing in the final act.

"They sure don't, sir." If he's buying, I'll sell it to him.

"The Americans, they don't know how to behave! They don't know how to take mistresses. They think
it's all a matter of money. For them, money is everything! Look at the houses they build, out along the
Carrolton Road, in the LaFayette suburb and Saint Mary! I recall a time—not ten years ago it
was!—that the whole of the city of Jefferson was the Avart and Delaplace plantations, and a half-dozen
others, the best sugar land on the river. And what do they do now? They build a streetcar line, they tear
up the fields, and the next thing you know, you have these dreadful American houses with their picket
fences! Exactly that which that canaille Granger proposes to do along Bayou Saint John! Him, fight a
duel? Pffui!"

He flung out his hands in indignation—evidently challenges to duels, like trouncings with canes or fistfights
in the court downstairs, did not come under the same category as murder.

"Why, in my office this evening, the way he and those sordid friends of his behaved! A disgrace! They
are not gentlemen! They have no concept! They cannot tell Rossini from 'Turkey in the Straw'!"

"You're right about that, sir," agreed January gravely. As he spoke he felt a deep annoyance at himself, to
be playing along as he had played along during his childhood and adolescence, falling back into the old
double role of manipulating a white man's illusions about what a man of color was and thought. Still, the
role was there, script and inflections and bits of business, a weapon or tool with whose use he was
familiar, though he felt dirtied by its touch. "In Paris, the Americans were the same way. Every ball I'd
play at, you could tell right where the Americans were sitting."

"And that is why we cannot summon the police tonight," concluded Froissart, turning regretfully back to