A Separate Country (31 page)

“I would like to tell her what I do here, but you’ve sworn me to secrecy,” I said.

“Why don’t you do what you tell her you do? That would solve the problem.”

“I should take marriage advice from a priest?”

He blew air out from his cheeks.

“What you should do is notice what the hell is going on around you. How many sick do we have in the ward?”

“A couple dozen?”

“More. Do you know any of their names? How many coloreds?”

I didn’t like being quizzed, but I answered. He was commanding, compelling. He could have been a general like me, I thought.
He would have never stooped to that
.

“I don’t know any names, I’ll admit. I’d say half colored, half white.”

“All colored. And their names are Antoine, Jeremiah, Lucille, Katharine, David, Nicholas…”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. If you did, you would leave Paschal alone and help us with the sick who actually know pain, who know what is happening to them, and that they are dying. You would help with that. Instead you have made our friend Paschal into a voudou fetish, something to protect you. You are weak.”

I slapped him then and was on my feet. The sun burned the back of my head, and in the bright light I saw the red come up in his cheek. I was once his physical equal, and if I wasn’t anymore I could still make him hurt. He shrugged.

“Slap me, shoot me, stick me with a bayonet, it’s all the same to me.”

And then he walked back into the house, barefoot and bare-chested, leaving me standing under the banana tree.

I didn’t spend all of my time in the attic. I spent some of it at Mr. Rouart’s ice factory, watching the ice form on the pipes and letting the chill restore my calm. I took walks. I usually arrived home very late.

On one of those walks a few days after Father Mike’s lecture, I stumbled across the funeral in Congo Square. I watched women dressed in white smocks and white tignons leading the coffin, and the men in white following behind with the coffin on their shoulders. I heard wailing and shouts and watched mourners prostrate themselves in grief. And at the moment when the coffin was raised up to depart the square for its final journey to the colored section of the cemetery, the wailing became more intense. Men and women strained to place their hands upon the coffin one last time, and when the coffin finally departed and the crowd was left behind, I heard the cries.
Cut the body loose, cut it loose!
I hadn’t noticed the drums, but immediately they began to pound a syncopated rhythm that each of the mourners picked up and set down. They whirled and shook, jumped and laughed, sang and grimaced. One of the mourners, a woman about Anna Marie’s age, twisted her hips and held her hands to the sky, spinning and gyrating, her eyes closed and her mouth half open as if letting a ghost escape through her lips. I was mesmerized. She was so beautiful and so terrible, terrible for having her beauty brought out by death.
Where did she come from? Why is she here?
And then,
Where was she when my boys were dying at my command?

I knew nothing about death, only killing.

I walked back to Rintrah’s house, light-headed and preoccupied. I didn’t go straight up to the attic. I sat in one of the sick rooms, where fourteen people lay on cots in two straight lines. I sat across from an old colored woman, her skin as thin as a moth’s wing. Her nose and mouth and throat were inflamed and swollen, and I thought that if the fever didn’t kill her starvation surely would. Even so, her eyes were clear, and they stared darkly at me. I silently confessed my sins to her. How I had betrayed, how I had brought chaos to a world with no shortage of it. How I had brought unexpected death, tragic death, death without sense. I had struck without warning, and there could be no resistance. I had helped to design these deaths, and I helped to spread them. And when the dead lay on the ground, I had ordered shallow graves and then a march onto the next killing.

The sun filtered through the long curtains of white linen that had been drawn against the heat, and I imagined the woman across from me might be swallowed up and lost in the diffused light and weightless dust. She seemed so insubstantial at that moment. I became agitated. I watched the willows and the tulip magnolias gently shake outside, casting shadows across the window, the room, the woman’s face. I had always thought that willows were beautiful, and they were no less so in that moment, but for the first time I noticed their imperfections, their asymmetries and browning leaves. I blinked and when I looked again I thought I could see every wrinkle in the bark, every vein in every leaf, and the segmented bodies of every insect upon them.

The woman in the bed moved. Drops of perspiration ran down her temples. She reached up and, with some effort, pulled a long brown braid from behind her neck and stretched it out upon the pillow next to her, letting the air cool the back of her neck. I watched her lie back and die.

The next day I didn’t go up into the attic. The man on the bed in the attic was not the man who had been killed, he was not Paschal, but some other man made of the same flesh but residing in another world. My business, my
penance
, was to be had in this world. My business, as it had always been, would be to fight.

Anna Marie Hood

A
fter my argument with John, I decided the next day to take my father’s carriage back into town, since we had no horse ourselves and no working carriage. I wanted to wander far, and so I called for my father’s driver, George. I was five months along with the baby, I could still get out when I wanted, and I wanted to ride hard, to slip through the air and the miasma and the muck and not be touched by any of it, I wanted to see all that I had missed and was missing. For the first time in that city I felt an outsider.

Paschal’s mother was a nun. A red-faced, silent nun. She had perhaps even raised him without his knowing. She had cut her wrists. Every day he had lived as an orphan with his own mother nearby. I could not possibly understand what that had meant, I knew that much. It was a tale bigger than anything Paschal himself had ever spun about himself, and far more true.

We careened down Esplanade and over Rampart until we came to the big trees at Royal. George cut the reins hard and we swung to the right, slowing to squeeze down the narrow street. Women in coarse brown frocks hurried down the street with loads of vegetables in grass baskets strapped to their backs, intent on the market. Had I eaten their vegetables? Would they have recognized me as anything but someone who ate vegetables? It would have never crossed their minds to ask such questions, I knew. Negro men swept the gutters and the sidewalks, and negro women in purple, yellow, red, and blue tignons shook rugs and sheets out windows, as if hailing a parade. Negro men in heavy boots and thick trousers scaled roofs to repair slate. I didn’t know where the slate came from, nor did I know how it stayed there laid upon the steep roofs, and why the roofs did not slough it off at once. Negro women hurried lazy white children along the sidewalks, steering them around harm and toward the errand of the day. Negro men drove the horses that carried the people who watched. Like me. Negroes everywhere.

Toward Dumaine we rolled. I looked back at the scene on the street. I watched as the wheels of our carriage spit mud and water and all manner of corruption up into the air and onto the fresh sidewalks.

I stared intently at the back of George’s head, which did not move while we rode. I knew this was a matter of pride for him. His body absorbed every jolt and dip, every violent wrenching of the carriage by the treacherous street, and still his head never wobbled. I tried to think of the last time I had seen his children, and I couldn’t remember it. Where was his wife? I had never met her. Did he have one? Was she alive? I didn’t know. There had been no wedding invitation, at least not one for me. What color were George’s eyes? Brown, certainly, but what shade? I knew the back of his head better than I knew his face. The back of his head was broad, and curved gently down to his thick neck. There were often bumps beneath his skin where he had shaved his neck. There was one dark mole on the left, and another that occasionally disappeared on the right only to reappear months later. His hair curled tight against his skull, and gray hairs had begun to make their way up and through the black. The gray hairs were lazier, less tightly wound, wilder. I saw where someone had snipped the stray hairs back to a manageable length. George had been with my father for thirty years, and like my father, he was vain.

The carriage twisted sharply to the right and onto the sidewalk, scattering a pile of trash and a box of oranges. I flew against George’s broad back and he held me back with his left arm while gaining control of the horse with his right. A boy had dashed out in front of our carriage, and we had almost run him right over. He carried some shoes around his neck tied together by their laces. He stood in the middle of the street, his boots in a puddle, entirely undisturbed, as if he had expected our carriage to come along and run up on him. The shoes swung against his chest, and for a moment I thought they would drag him down. His skinny white legs looked too thin to hold him up, especially with the shoes knocking about and swinging. There was no fright in his eyes, and what’s more, he stared straight at me, unblinking and unflinching, as if trying to see something about me. As if he knew me, and I him. He was not afraid of me. I saw this, and then I guess George saw it too.

George had righted the carriage and stopped the horses along the curb, and was now descending the step to the ground with his switch in hand.

“You know better’n dat, boy. You make way for ladies. And what that look on your face? Don’t you sass.”

But this was a white boy, a defiant boy, yes, but a white boy. I was angry about the way he looked at me, but I also didn’t want George in trouble.

“I don’t think that’s proper, George,” I called.

He turned back to me, his hand now on the collar of the boy, switch in hand. Why the boy hadn’t run, I didn’t know then. A small crowd of negroes and Italians gathered to watch.

“Oh, it all right, Miss Anna. I know his papa, he got that colored cobbler shop up on Burgundy. This here is Homer.”

He was colored. My God, I should have guessed. I had been chasing colored ghosts for days, and yet couldn’t see in front of me.
So white, his arms are burned red from the sun
. While he awaited his licking from George, as if he’d been waiting for it since birth, he kept looking me in the eye. This, perhaps more than anything at all, infuriated George. George did not look strange white people in the eye.

I felt a knot tie itself up in my stomach, and pressure like hands pushing in on my temples. Something broke, and I could not allow George to beat this little colored boy, even though I’d watched him clear the way for me and mete out punishment to the insufficiently deferent since I was a little girl being taken to church. That day I couldn’t allow it.
And
, I thought,
I can never allow it again.
Everything had changed in a day and a night, and I was new.

“George, wait.”

George stopped dragging the boy to the sidewalk, where he could properly switch him, and looked at me. We had stopped traffic on Royal, and the cart drivers behind us were shouting. The crowd on the sidewalks got bigger. I stepped down from the carriage as quickly as I could, picked up my skirts, and walked straight to the boy.

“George, enough. Let him be.”

Now
I
had made George angry. Enforcing the rules gave George great pleasure, I suppose in knowing that there
were
rules and that he had mastered them. He was a man eager to discipline those weaker than himself. I had interrupted one of his pleasures.

“But Miss Anna, he a disrespectful little nigger boy, and he insulted you now.”

“I want you to leave him alone.”

“His papa would want me to switch him, ma’am. Just so you knows. Somebody else gone do lot worse someday, he don’t learn.”

“And I want you to get back on that carriage, please.”

There
were
rules, and because George was so absorbed by them, he could do almost nothing but obey. Almost nothing.

As he let the boy go, he cuffed him across the back of his head, as if to say they weren’t finished with each other, and when he turned back toward the trap I slapped George hard and loud against his face. I slapped him again when he looked at me in surprise and hurt, and I slapped him again when he didn’t move fast enough toward the carriage for my liking. When he got back up top, his hurt had become a crooked, knowing smile at nothing in particular.

Before the boy ran, he whispered, “I will find you, don’t worry.” And then he ran while I stood there slapping my negro driver in the street like any other proper and imperious white lady might have done. I slapped him like I’d slap a dog that had messed the floor, or a recalcitrant horse that would not get into its stall. George took it, and now he smiled a little bent smile. He held out his hand to assist me.

It was horrifying, so
I
ran, too.

I flashed by open windows filled with gawkers, drawn to the spectacle of a frightened, proper white Creole woman in hard shoes click-clacking down the banquette without concern for propriety or the filth of the street.
I will find you, don’t worry
. I turned this corner and that one until I began to pass the small yellow and green cottages of the quadroons.
They
knew better than to stare, and
their
pity I didn’t resent. To them it would have appeared I’d lost my mind, but they also would have considered insanity a privilege of my station. I was as clear and certain of myself as I had ever been, however. I came to the corner of Conti and Royal and let a scream loose—a deep, raspy scream at the heavens—which caused the old apothecary on the corner to hobble out of his shop waving his hands as if to ward off the demons so obviously besieging me. I relieved him of his worry with a bow and a smile, and finally I felt in control of myself. I straightened my soiled frock and replaced the veil that had flown backward from my face and hung like an empty net over my shoulder and began to walk back down Royal to Dumaine.