A Separate Country (21 page)

Now where are my visitors? They’ve spread out, they’ve found new things to do. They watch the Opera, they plot the overthrow of governments. To their left and to their right as they look out from their carriages, behold the men maddened by war, mere animals now, shambling along. The old warriors flinch at the sound of the horses, rend their garments, soil themselves. In the market, which has spread up and down the river, widows and their children sit quietly in doorways clutching the last portraits of their men. These men wear woolens and campaign hats and their eyes look utterly white. The pistols they carry, or the bugles or the battle flags, it all looks much to bulk for them.

The
américains
thump and dig their way through the city. They do not call on me either. They spend their days raising buildings and cutting roads, perfuming their bosoms, shooting pistols in the sky. Their houses have sharp corners and picture windows so that anyone might see them eating, arguing, sleeping, making money, bathing in coin.

Had it only been a matter of money, I would still have visitors. The ladies would have brought us things, they would have taken pity on us. We would have been poor, embarrassed, but not alone. John’s failures in cotton factoring were not so unusual. Among Creoles, a head unsuited for business was, in some circles, a matter of pride. In the Creole world, there were other things to preoccupy a fine and subtle mind, things that were born and died in a brief season like flowers, love, the taste of a good liquor, the Christ of Lent.

But such things did not occupy the mind of your father. The General wanted only to plead his case before the court of the Confederate mind, to convince those who cared that he had not been incompetent, that he had not sacrificed thousands on the field of Franklin for naught. He muttered about it in his sleep, and he throttled the sheets as if they were the throats of his critics. His businesses failed, whatever he says, because he didn’t care as much about them as he did the opinions of men in distant cities, most of whom (I imagine) gave him no thought at all. John thought he was constantly recognized on the street. If we rode through town in our open trap, he would pull his hat down tight and tuck that beard into his shirt. He’d ask me if I’d seen that man staring, the one with the ruined and burnt face, and I’d say no, he hadn’t been staring because his eyes were dead.
We must find a closed cab,
he’d say, ignoring me.
I do not like being gawked at.

Your father hid. He hid in his office, grousing about money, scratching at his war memoir. He hid out in the ice factory down on the wharf. He haunted dark men’s clubs, and the corners of hotel lobbies beneath dimmed lamps. He hid in his room, asleep beneath the woolen sheets or pacing—
step, click, step, click
—long into the night rehearsing for debates he would never engage.
Our flank
WAS
guarded at Spring Hill! That was
HUMAN
error….
He came to me always deep in the night. The wraiths subsided only then, and he could concentrate on me and on him, on our bodies, on our sharp angles and sweet tingling, on the warm and furious thing of us! If your father had been home more, if he had not secreted himself away until the middle of the night, I might have had fewer of you children. But those were the moments allotted to me, and I craved them whatever pain and exhaustion they might bring later.

Now we are alone together nearly every moment, except when one of you children crashes into the room chasing a wayward grasshopper, or when we all walk along the levee and spot the lights of the riverboats twinkling away up the river toward cities I’ve never seen. It’s an awfully unsettling idea: that there are people who will live and die without ever being aware of you. John would have said this was his greatest wish, but in fact it was quite the opposite. He had known fame and he had known infamy, and he had lost the power to reject either, especially for perfect anonymity

I, however, have become glad of anonymity, if only because it protects me from the chaos, silliness, and violence of my city. Even my old friends talk of nothing but whiteness, of the indignity of deferring to Yankee governors and the humiliation of
our men
. Our
white
men. We have governments and shadow governments now, each claiming sovereignty and willing to enforce it by club and pistol. They brawl on Canal Street, gouging eyes, burning posters, and overturning horse carts for barricades. The
gens de couleur,
the octoroons and quadroons, always the picture of mystery, elegance, and desire, are now merely nigger mammies. All negroes are now possessed of pop eyes, swollen lips, and bent spines, if the newspapers and their artists are to be believed. Occasionally they must be purged, the negroes, and so they are rousted, trussed up, beaten, toyed with, burnt, or worse. And afterward, when the muttering hobos are picking over the remains of the negro cottages and plucking out pairs of pants, some bright cuff links, a ladle—my people scurry back to their parlors and recite the litany of purity, of whiteness:
Father and Grandfather and Great-grandfather never dallied with the coloreds, Mother is pedigreed back to Charles Martel himself
,
and we have maintained this purity at great sacrifice for the good of our race, we have no coloreds in the henhouse, Amen.
I say bah. I know no such purity. I see the negro in every face, every big dark eye and thick black head of hair, and in every long and graceful hand picking out études on the piano.

This is how my city lives, now. In it, your father and I grew lonelier together. Your father had no interest in continuing the war, and so he turned down the men who came to him to take a position on the negroes and on the Republicans. He turned down the men who asked him to lead them in rousting these invaders. After this, they had no use for him. As for me, I had married the crippled and eccentric and traitorous General, and so I could be safely ignored as well.

And so there we were, orbiting each other, muttering curses at our enemies, hardly ever looking up.

A year ago, your father and I went back to the ballroom where we’d met, for a gathering of swells and toffs and Creoles and mistresses, the usual thing.

“We are going because we have not been invited to a party in quite a many months, and here we are with an invitation,” John said. “So, we go.”

“It helps that it is my cousin’s party.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Here, darling, you might think that your father was being purposely dense, but it’s not true: he really had no idea. Society was not one of his interests, and consequently not something he’d even begun to master.

“You yourself have noticed that we rarely are invited to the parties, and yet you haven’t asked yourself why?”

“No. I assumed there were fewer parties.”

“Remember what city you live in, John.”

“Yes, true.”

“I nearly made a career of going to parties when I was young.”

“Yes, I’d heard that.”

“Fiend!” I punched him on his good shoulder and my fist bounced back.

We were sitting in our parlor, which was still stocked with liquor. I poured him a brandy and took a dram myself.

“I am saying, John, that we are not being invited, and this particular invitation comes to us only because my cousin doesn’t dare to snub me.”

John sipped noisily at his brandy, a bad habit.

“We are being snubbed?”

“Yes.”

“Because?”

“Have you been to any White League meetings?”

“No.”

“Have you written to the newspapers denouncing the Federals? The Freedmen’s Bureau?”

“No. But you know that I couldn’t.”

“Have you burned down a negro house? Lynched a half-breed?”

“No.”

“And you’re a former Confederate general?”

“I see.”

He knew all this of course, that he had failed miserably as a former leader of the late Confederacy. He had not met expectations, and when the notables of our humid, cramped little city wanted a Confederate general—or several—to lead their resistance to Federal rule and the rise of the negro, he had not volunteered. They are people with long memories.

John poured the rest of his brandy out the window onto a pink hydrangea. Another bad habit.

“You’re going to kill that plant.”

“Mmmmm.” He was thinking. “Why would your cousin not dare to snub us?”

“Personal reasons. Family history.”

Which meant, in the ancient code of the Creoles, that I knew she had once taken a colored lover, and that now in her first year of marriage it was imperative that no one else find out. I must be kept happy, and she knew it.

But just to make sure she knew it, I invited her lover to the party myself. I thought it a clever idea at the time, though I hadn’t spoken to Paschal in years.

Does it shock you, Lydia, that I can speak of lovers? I had my own, darling. It’s true, I won’t deny it now that I’m gone and I don’t have to see your face. Don’t be shocked. Perhaps you aren’t shocked. Perhaps you’ve had your own lovers and know the sweet promise and tender violence of an affair. What do you love? I ask not for my own benefit, of course, since I am now moldering in my tomb and unable to hear you. Don’t begrudge me my morbid humor. It’s all that keeps me from crying out for you. I couldn’t go on without death’s wit. Death was something that was always present then, it lingered behind all of us like a shadow waiting to subsume the body. So many people died, it’s easier for me to name the ones who lived.

Paschal, as you now know, was once one of my oldest friends. He was also once, and briefly and in the distant past, my nervous little cousin’s lover. His mother was a quadroon, rumor was. He had thin, knobby, twiggy fingers that stretched far across the piano keyboard and ran promiscuously and lightly over the keys. Among other things, he was a piano teacher, and I have no doubt that during her lessons my cousin had wondered very often about such fingers, each one an independent creature ruling over the white and the black with force and delicacy in turn. She found out in time, though she would tell me nothing.

Are you shocked that one of our family could love a negro? I don’t know that there was much love, merely fondness, but I would understand if you were surprised. You shouldn’t be, really. He was an educated man, after a fashion, and if you didn’t know he’d been an orphan raised by nuns, you’d have assumed he was the son of the finest sons, a gentleman. And surely he was brother to white men unknown, cousin to others, their equal in all but blood, but even blood was less of a barrier to friendship than we might imagine now, now that the lines have been so clearly and cruelly drawn. He had been a friend to some of the men who killed him. My darling, he was their friend
to the moment he died,
I have no doubt. But most damnably, he had been
my
friend. His name was Paschal.

The city had changed. Just a few years after the war and we had all begun to behave like the
américain
, greedy and jealous and so awfully righteous. Paschal had once been trusted with the fairest of Creole blossoms, a misplaced trust in the matter of my cousin, I will admit that, but now he was permitted to teach piano only to his own kind. But we were his kind! Coarse, ignorant, money-mad men were newly admitted to our society because they were white and because they owned the city, but the delicate and talented
gens de couleur libre
who lacked only our
purity
(or what purity we had been able to secretly distill from the dark waters of our ancestries) were banished like common servants, or worse. They looked like us, and that could not be excused anymore. Kin denied kin. It sickened me, but of course I went along. I liked my pretty things, my pretty life. Acquiescence was the price of eternal membership in a society that would swaddle me and give me warmth for as long as I lived. That was very silly of me. I should have known there was no constancy in the new city, no loyalties that could not be forgotten or traded. You know this now, child. You need only look around you, you need only look at us here in our house, alone with the dusty and tarnished things. Where are those lovely and chivalrous creatures of my childhood now? They are not here in our house, not here where there is no money or prestige. No one comes to teach my children to play music, no one seeks our company, no one helps fill the pantry. I have no doubt that, were he still alive, Paschal would have come to continue your lessons, Lydia.
He
would have come. What a bitter thing to know.

This was the real truth of that awful, momentous night: my own ignorance cost a man his life. I had thought that the old rules could still apply if I only wished for them, and that a man like our piano teacher could still, if only for a little while, be allowed the gift of a beautiful night.
I
had invited him, and
I
had convinced him all would be all right.
Your friends will be there, they will remember you,
I said.
My cousin will be there.
For this foolishness my cousin would not forgive me for many years. After all, I think, she still had loved him.

Paschal died that night. I had invited him there, and there he died. He was beaten and dragged off by men who knew him and had always known he was colored, only that night being colored was a death warrant. I watched them do it and I said nothing. It was so very stupid. He danced with a woman, a white woman, and her drunk brother took up her honor, such as it was, and set in motion events that quickly leaped out of his control and into the hands of another, crueler and more blood-drunk man by the name of Sebastien Lemerle. I cross myself when I write his name, may his evil spirit be banished from me. I can’t write anymore, thinking about it has nearly convinced me to tear this entire letter up, since it’s clear it can only become the chronicle of my sin and loathing. Remember this only: Paschal Girard, the beautiful orphan, disappeared from the earth while I watched.

Shame and loathing and guilt.
Guilt
is not a sufficient word for what I felt, but it will have to do. I had killed a man even if I did not tie the rope. It was because I was stupid and insisted that the world ran according to my rules and my wishes. Who had ever told me otherwise? I could do nothing but flee the scene of my crime, our crime. What pact had that little killer, that Sebastien Lemerle, made with Lucifer? That is not fair to him. What pact had
all
of us made, and for what purpose? So that we might be preserved in amber, never changing? So that we might twirl eternally in our dancing shoes across an endless floor, past dark faces holding out full trays in bony hands?