Feast of All Saints (82 page)

“But how do we live in the shadow?” he rose and put the ledger in front of her.

“Marcel, each year it becomes harder for us, each year there are laws passed that seek to restrict us, each year as the abolition forces in the North increase in scope and volume, we are pushed and threatened on all sides. I suppose one would have had to see Saint-Domingue to know that these United States are a world apart, but there are hundreds of small planters and farmers through these backwoods who never saw it and never knew it, and they live in terror of just that sort of uprising. No, if you want my opinion, it will never happen here. Something different has happened here.” She rose, shutting the ledger, and put the candle again in his hands. “Take this with you, if you like, I’ve been able to see in the dark all my life.”

“But what’s happened, how is it different?” he asked. Of course he had read of atrocities committed in the name of routine discipline on Saint-Domingue plantations of which Louisiana planters would not dream. But he wanted to hear from her. All this knowledge lay about him, all around him, he was blinded by it, and drained and somewhat lost.

She moved into the main hall and toward the delicate curved stairway that led to her attic room.

“Saint-Domingue was settled by unscrupulous men who worked the land only long enough to leave it in the hands of their overseers and live in luxury abroad,” she said. “And it was paradise that land. You can’t imagine it, the fruit there to be picked from the trees, the air forever mild, that clean wind from the sea. Fortunes were made too fast; men worked their slaves to death planning with pen and paper the profits of such a system when they could always buy more. This is a different country, it’s gone a different way. People live on the land that they own, slaves have been bred for generation upon generation, domesticated and not by blatant atrocity, but by some system far more subtle and efficient, something akin to the cotton gin and the refining mill in its precision and its relentlessness. No, it could not happen here, because we’ve beaten them, cowed them, and ground them utterly
and completely into the dust.”

Marcel blew out the candle as he stepped onto the porch.

The night was black over the rural country, and alive with an
endless sweep of tiny brilliant stars. Beyond the row of crepe myrtles behind the kitchen, he saw a flicker of light in the village of slave cabins he knew to be there. The barest snatch of laughter drifted to him on the night air, and it seemed he heard some faint mournful singing but he could not be sure. He had been at
Sans Souci
a month by this time, and never had he gone near that long row of bungalows, though sometimes from the window of his room in the morning he had looked out on the hundred distant tiny figures making their way through the low fields. The names he’d read from the plantation ledger came back to him, Sanitte, Lestan, Auguste, Mariette, Anton…and he let out a moan to himself in the shadows of the porch looking still at the distant light which suddenly dimmed beyond the branches of the trees and appeared to die out. What was it like there, was there a dreary submission, a sullen misery, such as he had so often seen in Lisette’s face as she stood above the kitchen fire in summer, or was there some measure of peace in the hopelessness? He found himself frantic suddenly, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, unable to continue with these thoughts.

Of course he knew the household servants, saw them daily, pretty Toinette who brought his breakfast tray with its small bouquet of roses, and little Narci who groomed his mare. And Celeste who stood at old Gregoire’s arm nightly to hand out the steaming plates as he served the supper just behind Tante Josette’s chair. But they were the scrubbed and comely aristocracy of this little slave nation. What of Sanitte, Lestan, Auguste, Mariette, Anton…backs all but broken by those pounds of cotton, eyes inevitably squinting over a field which had become the wretched measure of the world?

It’s an accident any of us being here or anywhere…it’s all an accident and we don’t care to realize that because it confuses us, overwhelms us
,
we couldn’t live our lives day to day if we did not tell ourselves lies about cause and effect
. An accident then, his consciousness emerging here among this rich and proper colored elite of New Orleans, an accident, an accident, his mind played with the cadence of the words like a drum. And what if…what if his consciousness had emerged out there? He could not move toward those cabins, not tonight in this enfolding darkness, nor on any night. He could not run the risk of discovering there a system so thorough that it might have crushed him had it ever gotten him in its maw. And this was a small plantation, a human plantation, a vital community in comparison to those vast industrial enterprises that lined the banks of the Mississippi where anonymous slaves were driven like mules. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, hunched as if the air were cool, and turning his back to the village that had vanished with its single light into the dark he made his way around the broad gallery until he settled in a chair at
the front of the house. There he could sit back, hands clasped behind his neck, and peer again at the limitless stars.

Only a trace of light gleamed on the distant rippling waters of the river. The trees were monsters against the sky. His mind went swift and free of all distractions to his home, and shot through the small community of the French Quarter like a ghost on tiptoe, surveying all those respectable friends of his, the Lermontants, the Rogets, the Dumanoirs. Christophe in love with his books and his students, Marie dreaming of marriage beneath a flowered tester, and weightless and immediately he returned to this silent rambling house and the generations of this family of the Rivière aux Cannes who had let a layer of dust accumulate on those secret Saint-Domingue histories, perhaps never dreaming that they were there. How could these be a part of armies clashing on the Plaine du Nord, or wild-eyed horsemen, torch in the wind, thundering through a burning town? My people, my people, my people, he heard the words pass his lips in the dark, tears flowing silently down his face. I wish, I wish, I wish I knew, I wish I knew what I am.

He had fallen asleep in the chair. The sky was gray over the river when he opened his eyes, and behind him the front doors opened, the porch reverberating with heavy steps. His cousins, Gaston and Pierre, were in their riding boots, their great shining guns over their shoulders. “Come on, Marcel,” commenced the usual refrain with the warm clasp of a hand, “we’ve got a mare back there, Marcel, so old and so sleepy you could ride her with your hands behind your back, Narci, get that mare!” Little Narci had just brought their horses around, sleek chestnut geldings, and as they pranced and stomped on the shell path they looked like the most dangerous animals Marcel had yet seen. But some old restraint that had sustained him up until now in this new world was suddenly lost. He gave in.

And by Christmastime he had given himself up entirely, without vanity and with wariness, to the life of a country planter of these parts.

It was hunting twice a week, the exciting crack of the gun, and a peculiar flutter inside him when he saw the duck fall from the sky. Its heart still beat when he took it from the dog’s awesome jaw, and broke the life out of it with his own hand. And fishing now and then with high-booted treks into the swamps to draw up the crawfish on long lines. And a delicious relaxation would come over him in the evenings, the long table aglow with candles where seldom less than fourteen sat down to supper, the conversation easy and languorous like the motion of the overhead punka, that great rectangular wooden fan suspended from the ceiling which moved back and forth, back and forth to the jerks of a drowsy slave child at the distant end of its long rope.

Here in these enormous rooms Marcel saw for the first time the proper setting for the immense furniture that had crowded the Ste. Marie cottage all of his life, it was for this space that the great four posters had been built, here the giant sideboard appeared graceful and adequate, and the towering armoires and cabinets in perfect scale. One could grow too accustomed to it, the breeze through the French doors, the last heat of the Indian summer rising toward the high ceiling, and the mingled voices of those pretty cousins, Clementine, Louise, Marguerite, who had taken to driving over more and more often from their father’s plantation since Marcel had arrived.

Marguerite’s voice was pretty. She played the spinet well as he turned the pages for her, mesmerized by the speed of her tiny fingers, and when she occasionally looked up into his eyes, he felt a peculiar weakness all over, something diffuse and romantic and very unlike the passion he missed so painfully with Juliet. Her eyes were black, slanted, her hair a collection of perfect finger curls around the ears, the skin
teint sauvage
, or reddish like that of an Indian, and her full mouth just touched with the color of rose. Once they went to the
pigeonnier
together, and as they gathered the furry baby birds, he was quite horrified to discover they were taking them to the kitchen for the evening meal. She laughed at him, and kissed his cheek.

It was not all leisure, this life. Everyone worked, in fact, the women constantly with the needle and cutting patterns on the dining table in the afternoon. Tante Josette supervised all the operations of the enterprise, there were the pickings through late December, repairs to a dozen outbuildings, the slaughter of the pigs when winter had at last set in. Gaston and Pierre often fell asleep in their parlor chairs, their rough hands folded on their chest, while Emile burnt the oil late over the books. Marcel wrote letters for anyone and everyone amid the sprawling family that seemed at times to encompass every plantation in the surrounding parts, and one afternoon, coming in with Gaston from the hunt at Marguerite’s home upriver, found himself very much pressured to take up the education of the little ones of the family in earnest. A tutor was living with Tante Elizabeth but he had his hands full. There were Marguerite’s little brothers, and Tante Josette’s great-grandchildren, a brood of twelve whose names Marcel still confused. So the mornings soon turned to some elementary lessons, until impatient and anxious, Marcel went out to nap in his room.

A painter came in early December as so many had come before, offering to do a pair of portraits for a very small sum and room and board. He was a man of color from New Orleans whom Marcel had never had occasion to meet, and soon the rich smell of his linseed oil filled the lower rooms of the
garçonnière
and Marcel watched in fascination as the man dipped his brush into the palette of brilliant colors and brought the face of Cousine Elisa to life right before his eyes. He
made her mouth too small, less African, and thereby sacrificed something of the sharp beauty of her face.

But it was the traveling Daguerreotypists who fascinated Marcel even more. He missed the picture salons of New Orleans as much as he missed anything at home, thought constantly of the illustrious Jules Lion, or old Picard and his brilliant assistant, Duval, wondering if the latter had ever managed the capital for a studio of his own. He longed for those expensive sittings, the chatter, the magic, and wondered would he ever be able to afford them again. But here in the country a man came through with his own cart on which the words were painted, Daguerreotypist Salon, and took pictures of all the family which were to be put up on the walls. Another brought his equipment into Marguerite’s home finding a well-lighted room and fixing a blanket for the backdrop to produce an excellent portrait of the three sisters, Marguerite, Louise, and Clementine. But much of this work was woefully inferior to the artistry in New Orleans, and the one great advantage was that when lodged in the house, as they often were, these men talked freely of their adventures, of the pictures they had taken among the Indians out West, or of natural wonders, even the great Niagara Falls. Marcel sent a tolerable “specimen” to Christophe, an oval of himself in riding boots with his gun, describing a wagon salon in detail with notes on his analysis of the man’s technique.

Meanwhile Marcel was meeting more and more of the colored planters. His hunting excursion took him into new houses and new families as various men joined the party, and one morning he was surprised to discover that they were riding north to hunt with two white planters of the
Cote Joyeuse
. All was amicable and familiar. And later the entire party took supper at the house of a man of color, the white men and colored men at the table together, after which several hands of cards were played. No false formality intruded, there were old jokes familiar to all and tales of other hunts, talk of the crop this year, the lack of rain in the last summer and fall, and how they were all paying for it now. And Marcel studied all this, not quick to trust, and certain that in spite of this camaraderie strict lines here were still drawn.

But it was only one Sunday when Marcel and Tante Josette drove north into Isle Brevelle that Marcel was to grasp the actual size of the colored community all around. They had come to visit the Metoyer family whose plantations were quite famous in these parts. All through this country were colored Metoyers, in fact, and the Catholic church of St. Augustine on the Yucca plantation had been built by that family. And here it was that Tante Josette took Marcel with her to Mass. Only colored faces made up the congregation with the black slaves out under the spreading eaves adding their beautiful African timbre to the singing, and the only white face was that of the priest.

A curious peace came over Marcel in this church. His thoughts were not of God, in fact, he was barely conscious of the ceremony, kneeling, rising, murmuring only to please his aunt. But he realized that for months now he had lived almost exclusively among people of color so that the sight of the white Daguerreotypist or the hunters of the
Cote Joyeuse
had actually presented him with a gentle shock. Even in New Orleans where his people were everywhere in the narrow streets, some eighteen thousand in number, he had never felt this pleasant anonymity, this lovely concord. But what would his pretty
cousines
think, he wondered, as he watched them return one by one from the Communion rail, their heads bowed, their hands folded, but what would they think if they knew he hadn’t a penny to his name? Name. Do I even have a name?