I Am Madame X (8 page)

Directly below me was a skylight. If Farnsworth dropped me, I would fall twenty feet through the glass and into the room below it. My head felt like it would burst from the pressure, and cold terror snaked through my limbs, branching into every vein. I prayed to God to let me live.

“I’ll teach you, Avegno, to put on airs. You think you’re so smart. Americans! I spit on you!”

Suddenly I felt warm arms around my legs, as Farnsworth’s grip on my ankles released. “We’ve got her! Bring her in!” cried one of the girls. Supple arms embraced me, and sweet voices rose excitedly as my classmates pulled me to safety. “Are you all right, Virginie?” several girls asked at once.

“I think so.” My head was throbbing, and my limbs felt shaky.

Lying in front of me, with her huge flabby arms by her side and her right cheek squashed into the filthy floor—the floor she had forced so many of us to kiss—was Farnsworth. Suzanne, a tall, large-boned fourteen-year-old, had wrestled the hateful woman to the floor and was now sitting astride her fleshy back.

A minute later, Mother Superior stormed into the room, followed by a group of nuns. “All right, girls, we’ll take her,” Mother Superior said. Fury flashed across her face. The four nuns were as tall and strong as men, with big square hands and broad shoulders under their purple habits. They lifted Farnsworth off the floor and, grasping the groaning woman under her arms, led her away.

We never saw Farnsworth again. The next day, Madame Smithy, the piano teacher, took over our class. She was as indifferent to history and arithmetic as she was to scales and chords. During most of her class, we read silently at our desks. Meanwhile, Madame Smithy—her no-color hair hastily arranged on her head like a pile of sticks, an expression of dazed dottiness on her face—stared out the window, watching her cats as they ran and played on the tangle of gabled rooftops.

On my last day at the convent, Sister Emily-Jean gave me a rosary and a small statue of the Virgin. “Good-bye, dear. I promise I’ll write to you, and you do the same,” she said to me in the visitors’ hall when Mama came to pick me up. A porter carried my wicker trunk across the ancient cobblestones of the courtyard, through the low vine-covered archway, and out to the street, where he helped Mama lift it into a cab.

At eight the following morning, I walked up the gangway of the
Trésor,
followed by Mama, Rochilieu, and Valentine. It was an ancient, hideous ship, but its name seemed a good omen. Madame Slidell and her daughters had come to the wharf to see us off. From the deck of the ship, I searched for their pretty faces in the crowd below. Before I could spot them, however, the old ship lurched from the harbor and rolled out into the gray sea.

We landed in New Orleans ten days later. I was asleep in our tiny cabin when the ship swung into its stall. The clanking engines snapped me awake. Mama, Valentine, Rochilieu, and I, our faces puffy with sleep, ambled up the gangway and down the wharf under a blanched sky. Rochilieu was staying on in the city for a few days, and we said good-bye to him on the wharf. He had tears in his eyes as he kissed us good-bye. Though I’m sure she didn’t care if she ever saw him again, Mama urged the old soldier to visit us at Parlange, and he promised he would.

Mama, Valentine, and I boarded a steamer for the Waterloo landing on the Mississippi River, ten miles from Parlange. A gentle drizzle began to fall, and Mama and Valentine retired to our cabin. I stayed on deck, leaning against the railing and letting the soft wind lift my hair off my shoulders as the rain sprayed my face. The steamboat glided past the parishes of Saint James, Ascension, Iberville, West Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge, and Pointe Coupée. Through the trees lining the shore, I glimpsed the burned-out shells of the once-grand plantation manors, and the fenceless fields where a few cows still grazed.

At five in the afternoon, the rain stopped and the steamer slipped into the Waterloo landing under a clearing sky. The wharf was lined with crumbling, empty warehouses. At a nearby shack serving as the sheriff’s station and livery, Mama hired a wagon.

I climbed in back. Mama sat up front next to the driver and held Valentine on her lap. An hour went by, and the wagon swung around a wide bend, then creaked to a halt. Before us was Parlange. As Mama rummaged through her purse for a few coins to pay the driver, I scrambled to the ground.

The alley of oaks stood as it had for a century, massive, imperturbable, indifferent to fortune or war. I ran as fast as I could toward the house. Julie was reading in a wicker chair on the gallery. When she saw me, she grabbed two thin canes resting on either side of her chair and stood up. Slowly, awkwardly, she moved toward me. “Mimi, oh, Mimi!” she cried. I flung my arms around her neck. When we had last seen each other, I had barely reached Julie’s chest; now I was as tall as she was. “Look at you,” she said, tears spilling out of her eyes. “You’ve turned into a long, thin baguette!” Her face had grown leaner, and her body more womanly. A few threads of gray had sprouted in her black hair.

Mama and Valentine made their way up the alley and now stood on the front lawn. Grandmère, her skirts pinned up to her knees, clomped through the garden gate in heavy cowhide boots. The three ran toward each other, embraced, and then, with Valentine in Grandmère’s arms, mounted the steps, laughing.

“Who is this lovely young lady?” said Grandmère, lowering Valentine to the gallery floor and rushing to hug me tightly. She had the fresh, lemony smell of cut grass, and I could feel her bony shoulders through her much-washed broadcloth dress.

We went into the parlor, where Alzea was placing a tray with a coffee service on the table. She wore a white kerchief around her neck, and her head was wrapped in a red calico tignon. “Thank God, you is all safe and sound!” she said, enfolding me in her black satin arms.

The parlor was astonishingly bare. Gone were the Aubusson carpet, the horsehair sofa, and the mahogany secretary. A ghostly-white rectangle marked the outline of the huge gilt mirror that had once hung above the mantel. All that remained of the room’s former luxury were a few brocaded fauteuils, a marble-topped table, the piano, and, hanging in the four corners of the room, oval portraits of Grandmère, Grandpère de Ternant, Mama, and Julie, painted in Paris by the society artist Claude-Marie Dubufe.

“Where is the furniture?” Mama asked, flopping onto the round piano seat. She played a few tinny cords—the piano was badly out of tune—and dropped her hands in her lap.

“I sold it, along with most of our land,” Grandmère said, her mouth tight. Sadness seeped from her eyes.

To pay her taxes and debts, Grandmère had had to spend all her cash and sell most of her land, about eight thousand of Parlange’s ten thousand acres. Still, Grandmère was better off than most of her neighbors. The Yankees had destroyed many of the plantations and farms on False River. They stole livestock, furniture, clothes, food, and supplies, and dismantled barns and fences. They burned many sugar mills and houses to the ground.

One day in 1864, General Nathaniel Banks and several dozen Federal soldiers rode up on horseback to the front lawn. Banks gave Grandmère a choice: sign the Federal oath of allegiance or watch Parlange burn. She signed.

She gave General Banks her bedroom, and his troops set up tents in the fields. Every night, Grandmère served Banks and his officers dinner in the dining room, on her best china. General Banks was kind, and he doted on Charles. He spent hours in the evening talking to the boy about meteorology and was impressed by Charles’s knowledge. Playing hostess to the Federals had not been as horrifying as it could have been, Grandmère said. But soon after they left, she discovered that the silver she had hidden in the garden was missing. The imbecile servant girl who’d been hired to help Alzea with the cooking had pointed the valuables out to the soldiers.

“You can’t imagine the struggle we’ve had,” said Grandmère.

At that moment, the tall pocket doors parted and Charles stepped into the room. He had come directly from the fields and was dressed in dirty cotton pants and a frayed blue-checked shirt. At sixteen, he was tall and muscular. The pampered softness was gone from his face, revealing a lean jaw and high cheekbones. But for his eyes, I would not have known him; those sensitive blue pools, fringed with long black lashes, were unchanged.

“Charles!” I cried, running to him and kissing him on both cheeks.

“Oh, it’s so good to see you,” he said. Charles hugged Mama and scooped up Valentine in his arms.

“Charles will tell you how it’s been here,” said Grandmère.

“Now, Mama, that can wait until tomorrow. Let these Paris belles enjoy their first night home.” He sat in a wooden chair next to Grandmère and held Valentine on his knee.

“I’m afraid we need them in the sugarhouse this evening. I’ve got four workers down sick,” said Grandmère.

It was September, a full month before roulaissant, the grinding season. But the unusually rainy fall had caused outbreaks of root rot and mosaic that killed a third of the crop. Grandmère was determined to get the rest of the cane cut, hauled to the mill, and ground into sugar before another blight struck. She and Charles had been working side by side in the fields from dawn to dusk and all night every third night in the sugarhouse.

“It’s come to this, then. We’re to work like darkies,” Mama hissed.

“If we don’t, we won’t survive,” said Grandmère. She took a lump of sugar from the china bowl, dipped it in her coffee with a spoon, and fed it to Valentine.

At dusk, Mama, Valentine, Julie, Grandmère, Charles, and I gathered on the front lawn, surrounded by the steady buzz of crickets. “Help Julie and your mother with their skirts,” Grandmère ordered. She handed me a small box of straight pins. I pinned up Julie’s pink gingham hem to reveal a pair of white lisle stockings sagging on her twig legs. Then I held out the box to Mama. She shook her head from side to side. “I’m not exposing my legs to the workers,” she said.

“Virginie, please. Soap is a dollar and a half a pound,” Grandmère pleaded.

“I won’t do it.”

A moment later, a cane wagon driven by an old black man rumbled down the road and parked under a magnolia at the side of the house. Starting with Valentine, Charles lifted each of us into the back and then hopped on next to the driver. We rode out to the fields, past a recently planted grove of fig trees and the small row of shacks that had once been slave quarters. A gaggle of barefoot black children played on a rickety porch.

“When I grow up, I’m going to build nice houses for poor people and a school for their children,” Valentine announced. “And I’m going to buy them lots of shoes!”

“You’re very kind,
chérie,
” said Julie. She nuzzled Valentine against her chest and composed an English verse to delight her: “Soon we’ll be sugary lasses covered in molasses, as brown as berries and twice as merry!”

The two-story clapboard sugarhouse stood at the end of a desolate open field. Silver moonlight clung to the backs of four men who were unloading cane from a wagon and feeding it through a large chute at the side of the building.

Inside, in the largest room, giant rollers crushed the green stalks, releasing the sweet cane juice into barrels. In the room behind it, a dark line of men and women stood over a series of roiling kettles.

“Mimi, you go over there,” said Grandmère, pointing to the middle of the line.

“Howdy, young missus,” said an old black man. He wiped his wooden paddle on his apron and handed the paddle to me. “Now I’m gonna get me some sleep,” he said.

I took the old man’s place across from a skinny mulatto woman who stared impassively at me through the cane steam. Julie, Mama, and Valentine, perched atop a tall stool, replaced three workers at the kettle next to mine. Through the open doorway, I could see Grandmère standing at the crusher, clearing off debris and readying the rollers for a fresh batch of stalks.

Charles took his post at the last, smallest kettle. It was his job to judge when the reduced cane juice was ready to crystallize into sugar. Valentine and I loved to eat this grainy syrup on batter cakes and bread, and Charles planned to save a bit for us and carry it home tonight in a tin cup he tied to his belt.

Sweet, solid Charles. He had become indispensable to Parlange. His knowledge of weather patterns enabled him to anticipate droughts and freezing weather, and the long hours he spent poring over books on botany and farming helped him improve irrigation techniques.

Most important, however, he understood the new order. Grandmère still treated the workers like slaves. She forbade them to leave the plantation without her permission, and though she provided them with housing, clothing, and food, she had stopped paying them a year earlier, when her income had dwindled to nothing after the disastrous 1864 crop. The laborers complained to Charles, who devised a plan to pay them at the end of the year, after the cane had been harvested and sold. He let the workers vote on whether they wanted cash or a share of the crop. They voted unanimously to take the money.

“How y’all doing?” Charles said. Two hours had gone by, and he had interrupted his work to check on us.

“Just fine and dandy,” said Julie as she rotated her paddle through the bubbling liquid.

Mama’s face was white and glazed with sweat. She nodded to the back wall, where a group of Negro workers, former slaves, stood gaping at us, incredulous to see white females working in the sugarhouse. “Look at them, hanging back, not lifting a finger to help,” she grumbled. “They’ve given us more trouble than their heads are worth!”

“Now, Virginie,” said Charles. “We’re all living here together. We must try to get along.”

“The girls and I won’t be here much longer. As soon as Anatole’s father’s money is found, we’re going back to Paris.”

“Oh, please,” groaned Julie. “No one but you thinks that money is going to turn up.”

I hoped Julie was right. Now that we were home, I wanted to stay at Parlange.

At midnight, Grandmère announced it was time to quit. We piled into the cane wagon. Mama carried Valentine, who had fallen asleep on the floor of the sugarhouse two hours earlier. We drove home in the cool, still air as the old Negro driver and Julie sang the Confederate tune “Dye My Petticoats.”