Drinking Gourd: A Benjamin January Historical Mystery
In Louisiana in 1839, free black man Benjamin January, who had been trained as a surgeon in France, is relegated to earning his living as a piano player. However, he is also clandestinely involved in the Underground Railroad. He receives a secret message to hurry to the cotton plantation town of Vicksburg to treat a wounded ‘conductor’, so he and his white friend, Hannibal, take a boat up the Mississippi. As is necessary in the antebellum era, Benjamin assumes the disguise of Hannibal’s slave. In Vicksburg, Benjamin treats the gunshot victim, who is hiding in the house of Drummond, a white preacher and abolitionist, along with other runaways. Cain, a founding member of the Railroad, is also there to help runaways follow the Drinking Gourd, the Big Dipper, to freedom. However, Cain publicly assaults Drummond, and later, he is arrested after Drummond is found dead. Now Benjamin has to use his investigative skills to solve the murder without exposing the runaways, himself, or the Underground Railroad.
This is the thirteenth novel in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January mystery series, and she continues to entertain and inform us about pre-Civil War life and norms in and around New Orleans. The slaves’ and Southerners’ dialogue and the evocative descriptions transport us to life in the Mississippi swamplands. Nevertheless, this is a story of misery and hardships faced by the underprivileged, particularly black women, and the advantages taken by those who felt it was their God-given right to subjugate them. These aspects of the novel were noted by Ms. Hambly herself, in a Facebook post (March 21, 2016): “It was a very dark story, but I couldn’t see how to do a book about the Underground Railroad as a light story – the best I could do was to put in a light sub-plot” [the Drummond murder]. Highly recommended.
