As a young boy January had gone, although his teachers at the Acad?mie St. Louis told him this was not a thing young gerrs de cauleur libre did, and his mother vowed she'd wear him out with a broom if she ever heard of him acting like a slave brat... But he'd been a slave brat only a few years before. And he missed the music and the dancing and the dark lusciousness of forbidden excitement that fired the air at the dances. Later, old P?re Antoine had told him that what went on in the brickyard was the worship of devils. Though January never quite believed that, he came to understand that he could not be a child of God and a friend of the loa as well. Olympe had taunted him with cowardice-Olympe who was then slipping out of the house regularly to dance with the voodoos and to learn from a woman named Marie Saloppe the secrets of herbcraft and poisons and the names of the African gods. From the first his sister had turned from her mother, and all her mother's efforts to make her a proper fille de couleur. You think about how you're doing Ben and me a favor, every time you open your legs to that white man? he remembered Olympe saying to their mother, bitter and mocking and wild-Olympe had spent a great deal of her girlhood locked in her bedroom. But she would always slip out at night. One night she had simply not come back.

Their mother had made no effort to inquire about where she might have gone. But three or four nights after that, when lying in the dark of the gar?onni?re January had heard the thick swift heartbeat of the drums, he had put on his clothes and made his way to Rue Dumaine, knowing that if she was in the city at all, that was where she would be.

The drumbeats drew him on.