Feast of All Saints (81 page)

“An hour passed, perhaps more. Yet the woman would not give up. She threw stones, brickbats. And at last she attempted to wrench the door from its hinges with a wedge. My nerves were on the breaking point, and unable to bear it a moment longer, I threw open the shutters and looked down at her in the street.

“But understand Marcel before you judge: the smell of fire eternally in the air, the stench of rotting flesh. That woman in her bare feet, her breast naked, that Frenchman’s body bloated, festering on the hook. And the little ebony child, your mother, the flawless and beautiful little face with eyes closed against my bosom, hair in ringlets, skin like silk.

“I screamed at that woman, ‘Your child’s not here. Go away from
here, your child’s dead! They took her body away last night, they put her on the common pyre.’ ”

Tante Josette stopped. She was staring forward, and Marcel, speechless, watched her remote but agitated face.

She sighed. “I will never forget the sound of that woman’s howl. I will never forget that face with the hands pressed on both sides of it, that round hole of a mouth.

“ ‘Cecee, Cecee, Cecee!’ she bellowed before she went down on her knees. And two days later when I said that name, ‘Cecee’ to your mother in the hold of the ship that was taking us to New Orleans, she smiled for the first time.”

Marcel had brought his hand up to shield his eyes and he said nothing, nor did he move.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked softly. “Your mother is more mine than any child I ever bore, and you belong to me, too. It was evil what I did, willful, wrong. You do not know the hours I have spent begging forgiveness for it, begging God to give me some sign that I was right; But God has been easy with me, easy with us all. And in telling the truth to you now, I should rather lose your love, Marcel, than have you come to believe that you are not my own.”

Once alone in the spacious room of the
garçonnière
behind the house, Marcel cried like a child against his knotted fists while beyond the open windows the vast plantation with its spreading fields of cotton came awake.

It was a week before he could write of this to Christophe and how stiff and stilted the words seemed. Tante Josette’s feeling eluded him, the voice so enriched with grief and remorse had not been his to convey.

Christophe’s reply was prompt, however, and brief:

But it was neither Cecile nor Josette who concerned him during those first few nights when darkness came so totally to the country, it was the black woman beating on the door in Port-au-Prince. The family portrait was now complete: the white Frenchman dangling eternally on his hook, and the African with her bare breast howling as she dropped to her knees. How wish Josette had not done it? How reach back across four decades to touch that black hand? And finally sitting bolt upright in the dark one night he had wandered down to the main house just before dawn to find Tante Josette reading by the light of a lamp. She reached out for him when he came in. It was so easy to cry
against her, to encircle her small waist and press his forehead to her withering breast. “You are my own,” she said again softly. And this time, he answered, “Yes.”

It seemed those early weeks at
Sans Souci
passed in confusion. He had been burnt by these early revelations, and the recent past in New Orleans was never far from his mind. And all he wanted finally was to speak with Tante Josette while instead he went through the elaborate motions of a visiting nephew in the midst of a large family as if he were an actor playing the part.

But in the next few months Marcel was to spend long mornings in Tante Josette’s company during which she revealed to him her entire world. She had gone to Paris when she was very young with a white lover who had her educated by tutors in their Paris flat. She remembered another age of three-cornered hats and knee breeches and the turmoil of Paris under the Directory still vibrating with the horrors of the guillotine.

And unlike her sisters, and the pretty women who surrounded her all her life, she was an obsessive reader of papers and books. Her corner of the parlor at
Sans Souci
revealed a library behind locked cabinet doors, and it was from these carefully concealed shelves that she commenced Marcel’s education on the history of his people and the island of Haiti or Saint-Domingue.

And baroque and filled with blood these books were. They were, some of them, violently opposed to the revolution, and painted the rising slaves as monsters, cruel beyond civilized reason, while others made heroes of these same men, detailing the life and speeches of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the little black general who had commanded the first great organized uprising, and his successors, Dessalines, who had given the island the name of Haiti, and its first emperor, the magnetic and enigmatic Henri Christophe.

Night after night, Marcel (forbidden to show these books in the house) fell asleep with these histories open beside him on the pillow and the chronicle of horrors bled into his dreams. And it was during this time that he first read of the brigands, those runaway slaves who had lived for so many generations in the mountains of the old French colony of Saint-Domingue that the Crown had finally recognized their independence, a status which in the days of the black revolution they had been loath to lose. They fought for the king at one point, the rebels at another, and sometimes it seemed only for themselves.

Juliet’s father, the “Old Haitian,” had been of this breed. And only now did Marcel come to understand, as Tante Josette answered his eager questions, all that had long puzzled him in Juliet herself. Had she been reared in those mountains, with a brigand band? Was it not natural then for her to wring the chickens’ necks so easily, to pull the
yams from the backyard, to carry her market basket with such perfect grace on her head? What kind of life had she lived there, what violence had seared her mind leaving her, as Christophe had often said, a mere shell? One thing was certain in Tante Josette’s mind, that Juliet had believed her father murdered by one of the ever-changing factions in power when she had found her way to the Louisiana shore. And the name Mercier was that of the first white man who had put her up as his mistress in the house in the Rue Dauphine.

“A cunning woman, that,” Tante Josette said. “She’d let them drag her by her hair across the floor if they liked, but she hid the money they gave her, and never let them lay hands on her son. I rather think the old man gave her a mortal fright when he appeared in New Orleans, and God only knows from whom he got the wealth he brought with him, and where he had been. The portrait painter, Belvedere, came up this way just after he had done the old man’s portrait in that house in 1829, and what tales he told. Sometimes I think a traveling artist shouldn’t talk anymore than a doctor should or anyone who comes to render a service in the privacy of a home.”

“But tell me!” Marcel said with a characteristic impatience which, more than once, had made his aunt laugh.

“The old man drove off Juliet’s lovers, he paid her debts, bought the house, and all of this in gold. But he beat that poor exuberant Christophe, and the pretty mother would burst into tears when he was shaking the boy and beat on the old man with her fists. There was a power to that man, think of all he survived. And a power to her, too, I should think. She was scrubbing floors when she first came, and God knows what else until she took a good look in the mirror and then around herself at what was to be had. Tell me, Marcel, does that power persist in your teacher, today?”

Marcel’s short bitter laugh gave her the answer. How could one compare these generations? It dazzled the mind. “Christophe’s a European,” he said more to himself than to her. “Somewhere in the oldest capitals of the world, he contracted a fatal case of ennui.”

“What does it all come to?” she sighed. And then after considering it for more than a moment she surprised Marcel. “And Juliet, my dear nephew?” she shot him a subtle smile. “Ah, but you’re a gentleman and a gentleman shouldn’t be tempted to tell tales.”

Marcel made his face a mask.

“I don’t know what you mean, Tante.”

“Well, my dear nephew,” she drawled slowly, “if I had seen those brilliant blue eyes of yours in my prime, I might have bent the rules and folded back the coverlet myself.”

Marcel merely smiled and with a light graceful shrug shook his head.

But as Marcel read on, it was not the personal history of those around him that kept him enthralled. It was the unfolding tale of the revolution itself. Jean Jacques had been right when he had told Marcel it was the
gens de couleur
that lent the powder keg of the colony its spark. It amazed Marcel to discover the height to which his people had risen, the wealth, the number of plantations, how in such impressive numbers they were educated and burning finally for their full rights. Then came the French Revolution,
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
. How grand it must have seemed. Who could have guessed in 1791 that the island would reek with blood and fire for decades afterwards, its fantastical wealth consumed and scattered, its luxurious capitals burnt over and over to the ground?

Why did the whites come back and back? Why did any of them ever remain? It was the wealth that must have seduced them throughout the struggle, the old tales of fortunes made overnight, the
petite bourgeoisie
from Paris become millionaires with a single harvest of coffee, tobacco, cane. Napoleon’s finest men had pitted all their strength and reserves to subdue the island and lost it forever in 1804, the richest colony of the French Crown.

And who could deny the measure of greatness that the rebel slaves had produced? Toussaint himself a loyal servant to the age of forty-one; had the man ever dreamed of such a destiny? That he would take the reins of the rebel forces and bring them from savage pitched battle to a disciplined and often invincible army of soldiers willing with a fanatic’s courage to fight to the death? The French had gotten him finally, lured him with lies. And Marcel felt anguish to read of Toussaint’s death in some cold damp dungeon on French soil.

But what of the others, Dessalines, whom Marcel’s aunts had once called “the black devil,” the man who massacred the trusting whites who stayed to rebuild the Republic of Haiti? Who could deny that man’s courage, quite larger than life, and the hold he had once maintained on his fighting men?

And the emperor, Henri Christophe. Born a servant, and destined to build at the northern tip of the island a mighty fortress where he was to reign in a fairy-tale kingdom ever ready for a French invasion which never came again?

But it was Marcel’s own people who continued to touch him with a particular emotion. He understood their dilemma and how so often they were exploited and distrusted by both sides. They fought for the French for so long, and then against them, and for and against the blacks. It seemed no concept of brotherhood, born of necessity, had ever truly united the black men and the men of color until they realized that it was only their combined effort which could forever drive the European from Haitian soil. And even then the island was split in
half, because as black Henri Christophe reigned in the north, so the man of color, Pétion, had ruled the south.

It seemed at times Marcel would never grasp the whole. He drew maps, made little charts of battles and events and read over and over the gruesome travelers’ accounts. But what came clear to him again and again was that in Haiti his people had had a power and a history like nothing he had ever known in his native Louisiana in his own time. They had borne arms for their rights, and even today on that island in the Caribbean they lived along with the blacks in the Republic of Haiti as fully enfranchised men.

But how to separate a noble history from this world of horrors he did not precisely know. Haiti was drenched with all manner of human blood. Marcel shuddered to read of the slaves tortured, burnt, brutalized under the French; and the passion to which those slaves had been driven once they had rebelled.

But what had it finally to do with him? An earlier century with its near incomprehensible barbarity, a world of
gens de couleur
that dwarfed and sterilized his own?

One night late in October when he wandered into the front parlor to put a pair of volumes back into Tante Josette’s shelf, he found her writing still in the plantation ledger by the light of a candle, her left hand rubbing at her reddened eyes.

“Read this to me, Marcel,” she said sitting up very straight and pressing the heels of her palms against the side of her head. “Take the candle over there.”

As soon as he was seated on the couch, he saw that it was a list of names made that day, and it was the numerical figure in the farthest column opposite each name that Tante Josette wished to hear. He had read perhaps half of it before he realized these were the names of her slaves, and the figures were the weight of the cotton which each man or woman had picked that day. A curious revulsion came over him. In his mind, he had been fighting pitched battles in the Haitian hills, but he realized that those battles too had filled him with revulsion and he felt an oppression that seemed almost as endless as life itself.

“Is it good, Tante?” he asked.

She nodded, and the sigh that came out of her narrow heaving chest and her attitude as she sat back in the chair with her palms pressed to her forehead struck him as rather masculine and interesting.

“We lost so much in the depression of ’37,” she said. “It has to be a good crop. And it is a good crop. Well be picking until January at least.”

“Could it happen here, Tante? Could it happen as it did in Saint-Domingue?”

She sat still for a moment as if experiencing a concentration and allowing the new subject its just due.

“Never,” she said. “Though how to convince the white population of these southern states, I do not know. We live in the shadow of those times every day. Give me the ledger,
mon cher
, you ought to go to bed.”