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Review by Leah Odze Epstein
New Orleans is the sensual backdrop for Barbara Hambly's richly textured historical mystery, "A Free Man of Color." It's 1833, in the "season of Mardi Gras, when the . . . muddy streets of the old French town had been rioting since five o'clock with revelers -- white, black, and colored, slave and free, French and American -- bedizened in every variation of evening costume or fancy dress."
All the finest Creole families have turned out for the subscription ball in the Theatre d'Orleans. While the wives stand around politely listening to second-rate musicians play, their husbands wait until the "earliest possible moment" to slip away. A mere hundred yards down a discreet corridor, their mixed-race mistresses await them at the Blue Ribbon Ball, where "being thrown up against the wall and kissed by a white man was presumably the point of the evening" and where Benjamin January, the "free man of color" at the center of Hambly's novel, plays the piano, transporting them into a dream world.
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In old New Orleans, a mistress is murdered. |
What begins as a typically kind gesture on January's part turns into a nightmare when Angelique Crozat is found strangled to death. The last non-white person to see her alive, January soon finds himself the central suspect for a crime he didn't commit against a woman he barely knew.
His quiet existence shattered, January sets out on a frantic search to find the murderer, one that takes him from the plantations of corrupt Creole society to the quaint townhouses where the mistresses live, the nouveau mansions of the much-despised Americans and into the underworld of voodoo and violence.
In "A Free Man of Color," Hambly, who holds a master's in medieval history and has written everything from fantasy and historical fiction to vampire tales and science fiction, weds her vivid imagination with her gift for accurate and telling period detail. The result is a jewel-like novel that glitters with multiple facets.
By showing us the world through Benjamin January's eyes, Hambly creates a unique perspective of a society in which "a tremendous amount of energy went into making distinctions that seem absurdly petty today" and "an intricate hierarchy of terminology existed to categorize those of mixed race." And so we come to the painful realization, alongside Benjamin January, that his status as a "free man of color" is as flimsy as the crumpled freedom papers he keeps in his pocket and which his pursuers are trying to steal.
In portraying this society in which an innocent person of color would be hanged before a guilty white person was even tried, Hambly has upped the mystery's ante: At stake for January is not only his life, but the freedom and dignity he values even more.
Leah Odze Epstein lives and writes and New York City.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.