Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River - Plot & Excerpts
Quashie still lay unconscious, though Jeanette had gone. Waking on his corn-shuck pallet, January listened for a time to the young man's breathing, and by the grimy light of a half-burned kitchen candle checked the dressing he'd put on the bloody welts. Then he went to work in the mill, hauling wood and stoking the fires in the vast roaring brick furnace under the kettles. There was no singing in the mill. During the day the brick walls picked up the endless creaks of the iron grinders, the groan of the timbers that supported and turned them, and the wet sticky crunching of the cane as it was devoured. Even in the dead-night hours, when the grinders were still, the fires beneath the kettles roared with the thick greedy panting of a vast beast, and the smoke gripped and grated at the throat. The heat was dizzying; more than once January saw Simon Fourchet stop in his cursing, his pacing, his watchful gauging of the boiling juice, and lean against one of the rough wooden pillars that held up the high roof, pressing his hand to his side.
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