– whoever that was – would be at one of the warehouses that lined the river below Peters Street. The code was a simple one, but the neighborhood, upstream of Canal Street in the American sector, was one to which he didn’t go any more than he had to. He could think of few buildings in that neighborhood that weren’t warehouses – except for an occasional saleroom where slaves were put on display. Upriver from the market, each cotton factor and sugar exporter had his own warehouses, sometimes his own wharves. In flush times bales or barrels would be brought in on steamboats, the cotton stacked so high on the decks as to completely cover the barn-like superstructure. Even in hard times like these, cotton was big business . . . And that business demanded slaves. And when a white cotton-farmer paid eleven hundred dollars for a slave, he wasn’t going to listen to that slave’s protests that he was really a free musician from New Orleans who’d been captured and drugged while walking around the streets of the American quarter like an idiot one night.
