Special thanks are due to Pamela Arceneaux and all the staf F of the Historic New Orleans Collection; to Andy and Sue Galliano: to Jessica Harris; to Mary-Lynne and Lou Costa; to all the folks at Le Monde Creole and at Lucullus; Kate Miciak and Kathleen Baldonado of Bantam Books; and to all my friends for their patience with me.
The only time Benjamin January ever actually exchanged words with Hesione LeGros was when they were both hiding behind a piano in a New Orleans hotel hoping they wouldn’t be massacred by pirates.
It wasn’t a long conversation.
She said, “I’m gonna shoot that fuckin’ man of mine for this.”
And January-who had just turned nineteen and was hoping to make twenty-replied, “What makes you think any of us will live to see you do that?”
As it happened, someone else shot her man a number of years later in the Yucatan, but at the time January hoped that the dark-eyed little African Venus beside him would have that honor, and fairly soon. The man certainly deserved it.
The whole debacle began, tamely enough, with the arrival in New Orleans of Major-General Jean Robert Marie Humbert, formerly of the Grand Army of Napoleon. Humbert, in that year of 1812, was avoiding Napoleon’s various domains because of opinions he’d rashly expressed after the Little Emperor had relieved him of command. Some said this was because Humbert’s army had ignominiously failed to re-conquer the island of Saint-Domingue from rebelling slaves. But January’s mother-a clearinghouse for gossip concerning both the white and the free colored communities in New Orleans-was of the opinion that Humbert’s affair with Napoleon’s sister had something to do with it.
