"They know I was putting my blood and my sweat into its soil while that lightskirt mother of theirs was promenading the New Orleans docks in quest of a husband, and they know the land is my body and my life. I've done evil in my time, wasted the gifts of God and harmed those it was my duty to protect. But through it all the land was mine. It's the one true good in my life, the only thing I have to show for living: truly my Triumph. They're spiteful as women, the whole family is," he added. "They'd be glad to see me lose it. Glad enough to pay my own field hands to turn against me.

"That's what I want you to find out."

He raised his chin and stared at January, who still stood before him-stood as if this man were still his master. Were still able to beat him, or nail him up in the barrel in the corner of the barn in July heat or February frost. Still able to sell him away, never to see his friends or his family again.

Heat blossomed somewhere behind January's sternum. Ice-heat, tight and furious and dangerously still. He'd set his music satchel on the floor by his feet upon coming in from the backyard-yet one more of those myriad tiny prohibitions imposed upon him in his mother's house. Neither he nor Olympe-his full sister by that slave husband of whom their mother never spoke-had ever been allowed to enter the house through the long French door from the street.

With the coming of the November cool, balls and the opera were beginning again. Likewise, most of January's piano pupils had returned to town, the sons and daughters of the wealthy of New Orleans: Americans, French, free colored. He'd just returned from a house in the suburb of St. Mary's-quite close, in fact, to where Bellefleur's cane-fields had Iain-after talking to a woman about lessons for her son. That angelic sixyear-old had announced, the moment January was on the opposite side of the parlor's sliding doors again, "Mama, he's a nigger!" in tones of incredulous shock.