Victoire (12 page)

People looked Victoire up and down. Where did this mulatto woman spring from? Who was she wearing mourning for? What was she after? A whiplash from a
zambo
? There were quite a few among the mourners. But given her determined look, they drew back and let her in.

Dernier had been so disfigured by his burns that out of respect for the family he had immediately been placed in a coffin away from the public gaze. In the only bedroom it was quite a crush. His family, a genuine tribe of picky head country bumpkins from Marie-Galante, was in tears. An aunt firmly held a bottle of volatile alcali under the nose of Dernier’s mother, who was on the verge of fainting. Since he had been a Freemason, members of the Egalitarians’ Masonic Lodge of Freethinkers complete with hats and black suits were swaggering next to the more slovenly looking representatives of the Republican Youth Committee and the Social Studies Club. There were a great many women. Uniformly dressed in garnet-colored dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, they belonged to the association of the True Daughters of Schoelcher. Numerous kids too,
claiming to represent the association the Children of Marianne. Except for the latter, everyone was drinking heavily and the level of rum in the demijohns was getting dangerously low. Those who had had the most to drink were sobbing shamelessly.

At 2 p.m. the din of conch horns could be heard, belonging to the strapping Negroes over six feet tall from the Socialist Federation of the Grands-Fonds, whom everyone feared. They took charge of the coffin, shifting it from one shoulder to the other, then set off for the cemetery, for Dernier had never had time for the church’s holy sacraments. Like all the socialists at that time, he was violently anticlerical and wrote in
Le Peuple
that religion was man’s stupidity.

The funeral cortege was unending. The Workers’ Chorale, who opened the procession chanting socialist hymns, was threading its way between the graves, dug at ground level and marked out by the white rocks of the Bergevin graveyard, while the tail end of the cortege was still trailing along the rue des Abymes. Almost right up until evening, in front of the open grave, following the hymns, came a series of speeches that all expressed the same despair. Ah, the mold was broken. There wouldn’t be men of that caliber anymore.

Victoire listened. She wondered what her life would have been like if Dernier’s passion for the disinherited had materialized into an interest for her own destitution. If this
vayan nèg,
this valiant Negro, who had advocated free schooling for all, had taken her hand to decipher the letters of the alphabet. Does caring for the forest prevent you from looking after each and every one of its trees? What else does love for humanity signify if not love and respect for every human being? That is why deep down in her heart when she thought of Dernier she felt an immense bitterness. She couldn’t help thinking that it was the hand of justice that had lit the fire.

Night had fallen when she arrived back at the rue de Nassau.

It was an evening of
entente cordiale
. Boniface Jr. had joined in Jeanne and Valérie-Anne’s games. The three children were running after one another in the back garden, uttering Siouxlike shouts. Vic
toire drew her daughter against her and to Jeanne’s great surprise kissed her. Such a show of affection was rare. She was tempted to tell her:

“Papa w sòti mò.
”

But had her father in fact just died? For her, hadn’t he died before she was born, nine years earlier, when, without bothering to tell a soul, he had boarded the steamship and put an ocean between himself and two women with whom he had gone through the gestures of lovemaking?

She kept silent. But from that moment on she took Jeanne to the cemetery at Bergevin every All Saints’ Day. The socialists had clubbed together to give Dernier the tomb he deserved: a ponderous monument of cement and freestone. There was always a crowd around it, praying, lighting candles, changing the water in the vases, and replacing the wilted wreaths and bouquets with fresh flowers; a crowd of inconsolable individuals uttering heartrending cries. Jeanne had no idea why she was there. While her mother knelt down on the cold stone and lost herself in prayer (what was she asking God for?), Jeanne told herself stories to kill time. All she had to do was look around her. Trees everywhere. Flamboyants of an indecent red. Casuarinas. Mango trees loaded with fruit that nobody dared fight over with the dead. The number of funeral processions entering the gates impressed her. It was as if the inhabitants of La Pointe were dying like flies. Here a well-dressed, even opulent-looking, light-skinned family was following a small white coffin. A child. Their child? A daughter? A son? Born into happiness and great expectations. A christening awash with
chodo
custard and
gateau fouetté
. Death does not spare the affluent.

A few alleys over, next to a grove of mango trees, a black family in tears was burying Linda, the apple of their eye: 1880–1899. Committed suicide out of love. The man she worshipped had abandoned her. So she gulped down a massive dose of tincture of laudanum. Commit suicide for a man? What stupidity! As for Death, she didn’t need much persuading; she’ll make do with any prey.

When the chicken hawks began to spread their wings in the night air, the tombs would be glowing from the candles lit by an infinity of devoted hands. Her mother stood up, dusted off her knees, and led her by the hand back to the rue de Nassau. This protective gesture no longer made much sense. The daughter had recently grown taller and bigger than her mother.

Jeanne ended up guessing why year after year Victoire took her to this grave, and she understood that Dernier Argilius must be her father. She took no pride in the fact. There is no reason why she should have. She mentioned it to nobody and never sought to make herself known to his family. The fact that he abandoned her mother, that he never for one moment bothered about the fruit of her womb, and let her, Jeanne, grow up in the charitable care of a family of white Creoles seemed to her the perfect illustration of this male tendency to maintain a heroic posture without assuming the real human duties that are often obscure and insignificant.

Dernier Argilius was nothing but a whited sepulcher.

Without seeking to excuse him, one question remains, however: Did he know about his daughter? Did Victoire have the courage to confess to him her condition? This presupposes an intimacy that perhaps never existed between them. He took her, withdrew, and went his way. He never asked questions, and not being very talkative, she never confided in him. However, even if he had been aware of her pregnancy, it is unlikely that Jeanne’s destiny would have changed. Up till very recently our men were like sowers, carelessly sowing the first field they came across. Sociology and literature are full of stories illustrating this machismo. “The condition of the Antillean woman” has become an indispensable topic of interviews, dissertations, and theses.

All that is in the process of changing, like Antillean society itself. What will our American students have to write about in the coming years?

N
INE
 

I have described in
Tales from the Heart: True Stories from my Childhood
how nobody in my family told me anything about slavery or the slave trade, those initiatory voyages that founded our Caribbean destiny. I had to negotiate on my own the weight of this terrible past. On the other hand, since individual stories have replaced our collective history, my mother on several occasions alluded to a journey my grandmother (whom she seldom mentioned except for a few clichés) made to Martinique in the year 1901. I keep asking myself why she insisted. What did she want to tell me? Her watered-down version of this modest odyssey took up the home-sweet-home theme, so beloved of the English, illustrating the risks an honest woman ran by leaving the security of her own home; by having adventures with men who respect nothing and nobody; by undergoing physical ordeals and leaving herself vulnerable to suffering, degeneration, and death. When I think about it, I believe it was her way of exorcising a memory whose pain never subsided. In actual fact, as a result of this journey, her mother met a stranger and abandoned Guadeloupe and her daughter for him. It didn’t matter that she recovered her wits and returned home, the intention was there. It was proof that her daughter did not mean everything to her.

The facts I managed to gather corroborate my mother’s fears. This journey and the distress it caused can be considered incendiary and excusable, when all is said and done, in a life that was routine to say the least. Victoire, who at the time was only twenty-eight, that age when body and heart are raging with desire, was tempted to rearrange her lifeline. I can equate her flight with one of those types of marooning of which Victor Schoelcher speaks when the African, tired of the rigors of slavery, dreams of freedom but lacks the determination needed to realize his plans.

Here are the facts.

Those who are called local whites in Guadeloupe and
Békés
in Martinique amount to one and the same creature. Since the sixteenth century identical names can be found on either side of the Caribbean Sea. In 1684, Donatien Walberg, having sliced up a rival with a machete—they were both sharing the same bed of a free colored woman without knowing it—fled Guadeloupe in a fishing boat. Quite by chance, he sailed up a river and settled in Le Francois in the south of Martinique. There he founded a family. One of his descendants, Philimond, a merchant at Saint-Pierre, married Amélie Desgranges in February 1901. Philimond had spent many of his childhood vacations with the branch of his family in Marie-Galante and was especially fond of his cousin Boniface, who, like him, had succeeded in business. He therefore invited Boniface together with his wife to his wedding, specifying that they should bring with them their cook, whose reputation had reached far beyond the shores of the island.

Leaving the household in charge of the servants, Boniface and Anne-Marie, flanked by Victoire, succumbing under the weight of the wicker baskets that supplemented three large trunks, settled into the first-class section of the
Lusitania
for an eight-hour crossing. The steamer had barely left the quai Foulon when Anne-Marie began to feel sick. A little later she began to vomit noisily into brown paper bags. The sight of this woman bent in two, a greenish bile around her lips, was not very inviting, so Boniface went and stretched his legs on the promenade deck.

Ever since Victoire had left Marie-Galante some ten years earlier with her infant in her arms, she had never crossed the high seas. The immensity of the voyage they were about to undertake frightened her. At the slightest noise or rolling movement she imagined the
Lusitania
swallowed up by the waves. More harrowing than this physical fear, though, were the thoughts that the wind on the open sea fanned like glowing embers. Jeanne had just been admitted to the Sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny day school, which had opened its doors right behind the church. This solid edifice built of gray stone still exists. It was not one of those schools founded strictly for the education of white girls. They accepted colored girls as well, most of them mulattoes from well-to-do families. According to some indiscreet revelations, Jeanne apparently was the class punching bag. Using little imagination, the pupils nicknamed her Little Whitey. One of their favorite ways of greeting her every morning was to dance round her, singing a nursery rhyme:

A little Negress who was drinking some milk
Said to herself, oh if only I could dip my head in a bowl of milk
I’d become whiter
Than all the French, my, my, my.

She herself never complained. She merely became increasingly remote, increasingly silent, a foreigner to all those around her. As if she came from elsewhere, as if she possessed her own untranslatable idiom and her own incommunicable ways. Anne-Marie shrugged her shoulders:

“Pooh! It will forge her character. Whoever we are, we all have to get over our childhood.”

Victoire did not contradict her. Yet
a pa vré sa
(that’s not true), she thought, head lowered over her tomato coulis. Her childhood had been her only moment of happiness. She felt terrible for Jeanne and tortured herself, realizing that perhaps she had made a huge mis
take believing she had acted for her daughter’s good. Daughter of a servant to a white Creole family, wasn’t that a scar that would remain with her all life long? She wondered how else she could ensure her education and contribute to the blossoming of her intellectual gifts.

Around eleven, since Anne-Marie’s vomiting had subsided, she went and joined Boniface, who was calmly leaning against the ship’s rail, scanning the immense horizon. His serenity had a calming effect on her. Her fears appeared laughable to him. She convinced herself he was right. As long as he was alive, she possessed the security that Jeanne needed. Security, that’s the main thing.

At times, schools of flying fish sheathed in silver like shining commas leapt out of the water. At a respectful distance a procession of porpoises accompanied them. Apart from that, blue waves rippled as far as the eye could see. Apart from that, there was nothing else. Nothing.