cultural heritage paralleled that of New Orleans itself. This was undoubtedly why she liked it here.
When walking down a New Orleans street, she was rarely the only person of uncertain racial heritage within eyeshot. There weren’t all that many places in America outside the biggest metropolises where that was true. She’d seen so many people here who looked like her that she was tempted to fake being a native, until she realized how quickly her lack of the distinctive local accent would expose that lie. New Orleans natives sounded like they were born in Brooklyn then transplanted to—where? France? Mars?—before settling down here in the Crescent City.
It didn’t matter. She loved the cadence of their speech, and she loved the town.
The prospect of spending four days walking around the French Quarter—the storied Vieux Carré —with Joe had made the last ten days of this job’s unrelenting physical labor worth every minute. She wished that she could have hired Joe as her assistant, and not just because she liked the way he smelled. He would have been a lot of help to her, but he had his own education to pursue. It wouldn’t be right to slow him down.
Fortunately, Nina had proven herself in the role of Faye’s assistant. Faye was glad to have her on the team.
Like Faye, Nina was a returning student with more experience in archaeology than her college transcript suggested. Faye had earned her decidedly non-academic experience by digging up the artifacts her ancestors left behind on the land she’d inherited—Joyeuse Island. Before entering graduate school, Nina had earned hers in the usual way, by volunteering for any dig that would take a willing worker who was only available on weekends.
Nina was a New Orleans native, so all her volunteer work had been done nearby, and some of it had been done right here at the Chalmette battlefield. If Faye’d been asked to design the perfect assistant, Nina would have been pretty close to her ideal. Well, except for Joe. Joe was the ideal assistant, particularly when you factored in the fringe benefits that a man of his singular beauty could provide.
At the moment, though, she and Joe were both hardworking students without much time for romance, not unless you counted the sheer romance of archaeology. And there was more than a bit of romance to the work she had come to Chalmette to do, even though the stimulus for it was predictably prosaic: somebody wanted to build something.
When Katrina blasted through south Louisiana, she took the battlefield park’s visitor’s center with her. The park service wanted to rebuild it in another spot and, frankly, you couldn’t put a shovel in the ground anywhere in the area without the risk of obliterating history.
A review of the possible sites for the new visitor’s center had determined that the least objectionable place for the new building was near the buried remnants of the Rodriguez plantation house. In laymen’s terms, something historical would be disturbed wherever they built the thing, but the powers-that-be had judged that there was a fighting chance of avoiding utter catastrophe in this spot.
The Rodriguez house had taken cannonfire during Andrew Jackson’s battle, but survived. Just to make things interesting, there had been another plantation house known as the Beluche house nearby—right under the park’s public restrooms, in fact—that had stood even before the Rodriguez house.
Faye and her crew would be doing an archaeological survey, working in advance of the construction team to make sure that nothing old and irreplaceable was destroyed. If things went really well, Faye hoped to locate outbuildings that had stood behind each house. And if God was really good to her, she’d be able to discern which outbuilding went with which house.
She was toying with the notion of a dissertation exploring the ways masters and slaves used space. European settlers tended toward orderly arrangements of outbuildings,
When walking down a New Orleans street, she was rarely the only person of uncertain racial heritage within eyeshot. There weren’t all that many places in America outside the biggest metropolises where that was true. She’d seen so many people here who looked like her that she was tempted to fake being a native, until she realized how quickly her lack of the distinctive local accent would expose that lie. New Orleans natives sounded like they were born in Brooklyn then transplanted to—where? France? Mars?—before settling down here in the Crescent City.
It didn’t matter. She loved the cadence of their speech, and she loved the town.
The prospect of spending four days walking around the French Quarter—the storied Vieux Carré —with Joe had made the last ten days of this job’s unrelenting physical labor worth every minute. She wished that she could have hired Joe as her assistant, and not just because she liked the way he smelled. He would have been a lot of help to her, but he had his own education to pursue. It wouldn’t be right to slow him down.
Fortunately, Nina had proven herself in the role of Faye’s assistant. Faye was glad to have her on the team.
Like Faye, Nina was a returning student with more experience in archaeology than her college transcript suggested. Faye had earned her decidedly non-academic experience by digging up the artifacts her ancestors left behind on the land she’d inherited—Joyeuse Island. Before entering graduate school, Nina had earned hers in the usual way, by volunteering for any dig that would take a willing worker who was only available on weekends.
Nina was a New Orleans native, so all her volunteer work had been done nearby, and some of it had been done right here at the Chalmette battlefield. If Faye’d been asked to design the perfect assistant, Nina would have been pretty close to her ideal. Well, except for Joe. Joe was the ideal assistant, particularly when you factored in the fringe benefits that a man of his singular beauty could provide.
At the moment, though, she and Joe were both hardworking students without much time for romance, not unless you counted the sheer romance of archaeology. And there was more than a bit of romance to the work she had come to Chalmette to do, even though the stimulus for it was predictably prosaic: somebody wanted to build something.
When Katrina blasted through south Louisiana, she took the battlefield park’s visitor’s center with her. The park service wanted to rebuild it in another spot and, frankly, you couldn’t put a shovel in the ground anywhere in the area without the risk of obliterating history.
A review of the possible sites for the new visitor’s center had determined that the least objectionable place for the new building was near the buried remnants of the Rodriguez plantation house. In laymen’s terms, something historical would be disturbed wherever they built the thing, but the powers-that-be had judged that there was a fighting chance of avoiding utter catastrophe in this spot.
The Rodriguez house had taken cannonfire during Andrew Jackson’s battle, but survived. Just to make things interesting, there had been another plantation house known as the Beluche house nearby—right under the park’s public restrooms, in fact—that had stood even before the Rodriguez house.
Faye and her crew would be doing an archaeological survey, working in advance of the construction team to make sure that nothing old and irreplaceable was destroyed. If things went really well, Faye hoped to locate outbuildings that had stood behind each house. And if God was really good to her, she’d be able to discern which outbuilding went with which house.
She was toying with the notion of a dissertation exploring the ways masters and slaves used space. European settlers tended toward orderly arrangements of outbuildings,
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