Fever Season

THE CRITICS LOVE BARBARA HAMBLY’S

Fever Season

A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year

More Praise for FEVER SEASON

Praise for Barbara Hambly’s

A Free Man of Color

Special thanks to the staff of
the Historic New Orleans Collection
for all their help; to Kate Miciak for her
assistance and advice in redirecting
the story; to O’Neil deNoux;
and, of course, to George.

As in my previous book of this series,
A Free Man of Color
, I have employed, as far as possible, the terminology of the 1830s, which differs considerably from that in use today. In the 1830s, as far as I can tell,
creole
was generally taken to mean a native-born white descendant of French or Spanish colonists. If a person of African parentage was being referred to, he or she was specified as a
creole Negro
, that is, born in the Americas and therefore less susceptible to local diseases than
Congos
—African-born blacks.

There was a vast distinction between
black
and
colored
. The latter term had a specific meaning as the descendant of African and European ancestors.
Sang mêlé
was one of the French terms: “mixed blood.” Any colored person would have been deeply offended to be referred to as “black,” since
black
meant “slave”; and the free colored had worked long and hard to establish themselves as a third order, a caste that was neither black nor white. Likewise, they were careful to distinguish between themselves and slaves of mixed race and between themselves and freedmen, whatever the percentage of African genetics in their makeup. Given the economics of the time and the society, this was a logical mechanism of survival. That they did survive and thrive, and establish a culture of amazing richness that was neither African nor European, is a tribute to the stubborn and wonderful life force of the human spirit.

In fever season, traffic in the streets was thin. Those who could afford to do so had left New Orleans with the ending of Lent; those who could not had all through the long summer hurried about their business as if Bronze John, as they called the sickness, were a creditor one could avoid if one kept off the streets.

Midday, the molten September heat raised steam from the water in the French town’s cypress-lined gutters and the rain puddles in the soupy streets. Mephitic light filtered through clouds of steamboat soot from the levees and gave the town the look of a grimy but inexplicably pastel-walled hell. Only those whose errands were pressing walked the streets then.

So it took no great cleverness on Benjamin January’s part to realize that he was being followed.

Charity Hospital, where he’d spent the night and all the morning among the dying, lay on the uptown side of Canal Street, the American side. It was against January’s nature to spend more time on that side of town than was absolutely necessary, to say nothing of the fact that Americans seemed to regard all free persons of color as potential slaves, money on the hoof going to waste that could be going into their pockets in the big markets along Baronne
and Levee Streets. Americans made no distinction, as the French were careful to do, between African blacks—be they slaves or freedmen—and the free persons of color whose parents had been both colored and white. Not, January reflected wryly, that it made a great deal of difference in his case.

But even in fever season, when men and women, black and white and colored, were only hands to hold off Bronze John from one another—to carry water and vinegar and saline draughts, to fan away the humming swarms of mosquitoes and flies—he felt uneasy uptown.

Maybe that was why he realized so quickly that someone was dogging his steps.

His head ached from twenty-four hours without sleep. His senses felt dulled, as if someone had carefully stuffed his skull with dirty lint soaked in the stinking fluids of the dying; his very bones weighed him down. His last patient that day had been a nine-year-old girl who’d walked the twelve streets to the hospital from the levee where she’d been selling oranges. Her mama, she said in English, before delirium claimed her, would whale her for not staying on to finish the day. The child had died before she could tell anyone who her mama was or where that lady could be found.

As of that morning, no newspaper in the town had yet admitted that there was an epidemic at all.

The fever had first come to New Orleans in January’s sixteenth year. In those days you never heard English spoken at all, though the city already belonged to the United States. He’d been studying medicine then with Dr. Gomez and had followed his teacher on his rounds of the hospitals; it seemed to him now, twenty-four years later, that the ache of grief and pity never grew less. Nor did his fear of the fever itself.

He wasn’t sure exactly what it was that made him realize he was being stalked.