“Uninspiring,” her teacher had said, handing Rebecca the sheets of music at the end of the lesson. Rebecca hadn’t practiced enough this week, she knew, and her fingers had felt cold and leaden. She’d just plodded through thirty endless minutes of a piano lesson. Rebecca was waiting for her best friend, Ling, at the Fulton Street Fish Market. The city was full of boys with big attitudes and no manners. The first time she saw the boy with blue eyes staring at her, Rebecca didn’t think much of it. Philip Street, fighting over the tiny piece of hidden treasure in the boy’s pocket. They’ll both end up in a small house on St. On the far side of Rampart, they both disappear into Tremé, the old neighborhood built decades earlier for New Orleans’s free people of color. A dark-haired, burly man follows him, taking care to keep up. He crosses the broad, muddy expanse of Rampart Street, dodging carts and carriages, soldiers on horseback, washer-women balancing bundles of laundry on their heads. Perhaps it’s something he’s stolen himself. Perhaps it’s money perhaps it’s something valuable he can sell or trade. With every nervous pat, he gives himself away: They can tell that he’s carrying something precious, something unfamiliar in his pocket. More than one of the city’s legions of pickpockets notice the way he pats his jacket every few steps.

His face is pale and sunken his trousers - ragged at the hems - are flecked with cotton dust. He wends his way through the streets of the Quarter, speaking to nobody. One damp spring day, as a misty evening begins to settle on the city, a teenage boy hurries away from the dock. Some are robbed - or worse - in one of the many dark alleys or hidden courtyards of the old town. Many succumb to yellow fever, the mysterious and feared disease ravaging the city. Many end up starving and poverty-stricken.

New arrivals flock to the city, hoping to make their fortune. When the wind blows, pinches of cotton drift through the air like snow. The river is crowded with steamers, its levee piled high with cotton bales. The docks are still busy, loading and unloading heavy cargoes of cotton, sugar, and coffee every day. New Orleans is dirty and disease-ridden, a place of political and racial violence, looting, and unsolved murders. The Civil War is over, but the spirit of the city has been broken.

Unbroken a ruined novel