Feast of All Saints (11 page)

“Oh no, no,
mon fils
. Don’t do that, you mustn’t do that, don’t you ever go into bookstores and ask,” Jean Jacques said. His face had settled into that brooding frown of his that Marcel had known so often in years before. “Some day I’ll give you those to read.” He gestured to the diaries on the shelf. “When I die, I’ll leave those books to you.” He looked at Marcel. “Would you read them if I did that, would they mean something to you?”

When Marcel did not answer, he asked again,

“Mon fils?”

“I don’t want you to die,” Marcel said.

Jean Jacques smiled. But he was already turning to get the shutters, and said again under his breath that it was time for Marcel to go home.

M
ARCEL HAD BEGUN
to change. Cecile saw it, and sighed,
“Eh bien
, he’s thirteen.” He took unexplained walks, and went out of his own accord to the flat of his aunts over the dress shop. And at table on Sundays (they were always at the cottage for supper if Monsieur Philippe was not there) he asked them simple questions about Saint-Domingue, seemed bored by their accounts of all the practical wealth left behind, reminiscences of those lovely courtyards crowded with flowers where you could pick the ripe yellow bananas right from the trees.

“But the revolution, what was it like?” he asked quite suddenly one afternoon.

“I’m sure I have no idea,
mon petit
, since it was mostly in the north and we were all so thankful Josette escaped!” Tante Louisa said haughtily.

And Cecile nervously turned the talk to the subject of Marie’s birthday. That white eyelet lace was too expensive, she said suddenly, she was thinking of something a little more practical, and Marie was growing so fast besides.

Richard, a frequent guest, felt the tension in Cecile at such gatherings. The tall aunts fascinated him with their ripples of laughter, rustling and tinkling with pearls and gold, even the white streaks in their straight dark hair seemed decorative. While Cecile, cutting the cake for dessert, brought down the knife a little too hard making a strangely attractive “chink” against the plate. But never, never did any of them speak of anything that was more than the practical, more than the materially real. “Oh, we had such chandeliers in that house, and champagne each night, and that young French officer, what was his name, Louisa, you remember he brought up the little orchestra. Why, we had music every night, all night. Richard, here have some more cake. Cecile, give that boy another piece of cake, Richard, if you get an inch taller you won’t fit through the door.”

And before he could even answer these quick flashing statements, their eyes were elsewhere, their hands eternally busy. Cecile in particular fussed with the flowers in the center of the table, or examined the immaculate linen napkin in her hands as if for some tiny and all-important flaw. And if the boys, alone after dinner, lapsed into some low-voiced talk of what they had read at school, she was at once uncomfortable, quick to clear the table, as if listening to some abrasive foreign tongue.

Richard had not thought of it before. And it was Marcel’s taut face that made him think of it then, how empty at times all that chatter seemed, and how quickly it left the mind. Richard was only vaguely aware of his own ability to think about abstract things and to talk of them, but the whole tone of the Lermontants’ suppers was different. You could count on it, trivial or not, conversation with the Lermontants revolved around the invisible. And Marcel, who had once sipped his soup quietly waiting to be excused so that he and Richard might slip off alone, now stared fixedly at Rudolphe who waved a folded newspaper over the steaming plates, crying, “Read what they say, read it!” while Grandpère Lermontant tried to quiet him with a quick, “It won’t pass, Rudolphe, I tell you the legislature will never pass it.”

“It’s the country parishes, every time it’s the country parishes: strip the
gens de couleur
of their right to own property!” Rudolphe all but rose straight into the air with rage. “To think that they…”

“It won’t pass,” said the old man.

“But why, what does it mean?” Marcel asked.

“That the country whites are afraid of the free negro,” Grandpère explained patiently. “It’s been the same since 1803, since we became Americans,” he went on with a slight twist to his smile, never missing a bite, reaching now and then for his glass: “They bring one bill after another before the legislature in Baton Rouge to try to take away our rights, limit our rights, what have you. It’s all because some colored barber in their town has a finer horse than they have, or a prettier daughter.”

Madame Suzette, Richard’s mother, shook her head, deplored ignorance under her breath, and motioned to the cook for more rice. Marcel read the column in the paper when he could get his hands on it. And Richard mused silently that he had never even heard the word “color” at Cecile’s table. He felt a momentary discomfort to think that he would not mention it in her presence.

“It’s not the old families,” Rudolphe was saying. “I can tell you that. It’s men come here to make money off slaves, that’s the long and short of it. It’s not a system they inherited! They’ve no respect for a way of life, for traditions that go with it. And every free man of color’s a threat to them. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, that this family was the
Famille Lermontant
when half that cracker rabble were packed in the convict ships landing off the coast of Georgia.”

Marcel’s head jerked round toward Rudolphe, and he let the folded newspaper all but slip from his hand.

Rudolphe lifted his glass ever so slightly toward the framed portrait of his Arrière-Grandpère Jean Baptiste, beyond the double doors. “We had our tavern in the Tchoupitoulas Road, and money in the banks when they were splitting kindling for a living and clearing the fields.”

“Let’s go upstairs,” Richard bent to whisper in Marcel’s ear. But Marcel stared off, his face as still as if it were made of wax.

It was days later when wandering into the parlor of the cottage as young men do, absorbed in his thoughts and annoyed by the very sight and sounds of the house, he glanced at the pictures of Tante Josette and Tante Louisa above the buffet and said, “But they are not our real aunts, are they?”

Cecile, positively afraid of him of late, dropped the embroidery she held in her hand.

“They brought me up from a child that high!” she burst out, “gave me my trousseau, how dare you speak of them in that manner!” It was a rare moment. She had never spoken of being indebted to anyone. And once in a while she would remark when having her measurements taken how she hated, herself, to sew. She had done it for twenty-one years in their shop, Marcel knew.

Tante Louisa, two days later, as she passed him a glass of sherry, said, “Of course I’m your aunt, who’s to say I’m not? Who’s been putting such ideas in your head?”

Her black hair was curled fastidiously at the temples, her pale brown face old but still lovely with the faintest blush of rouge. She had sent her last lover off three years ago. An old white widower from Charleston who loved to play with one side of his waxed mustache, had fighting cocks, race horses, and taught Marcel to play faro.

“But there is no blood connection,” Marcel said to her. They were in her rear sitting room, its high windows open to the court so that there rose over the distant noises of the street the constant trickling of the fountain.

“There’s a connection,” she said to him calmly. And rising, she stood behind his chair and slowly massaged his shoulders, his neck, “You’re my little boy,” she said in his ear. “That’s the connection.”

But Tante Colette, always the more practical and the more outspoken said without looking up from her book of accounts, “Now don’t you worry your maman with all that, Marcel. All the questions you’ve been asking about Saint-Domingue, what do you know about Saint-Domingue? Your maman was just a child when she left, but children remember.” Then she removed her gold-rimmed eyeglass and let it fall on its long blue ribbon, looking at him gravely. “Why we hardly had the time to take the clothes on our backs…and the pewter and the silver we left behind…Oh, it makes me ill to this day!”

His lips were moving with her words, he had heard them so many times, but she did not see, and there was nothing of mockery in his eyes.

“But how did you happen, then, to bring my mother?” he asked.

They were stunned.

“Marcel,” Colette began, “do you honestly think we would have left that baby there!”

“Her parents, then, they were your friends?”

They were studying him as if they had not ever really taken stock of him before, and then Louisa bending over the evening paper seemed at once absorbed as though he had never come in.

“Why,
cher
, your mother’s father had the biggest plantation north of Port-au-Prince,” Colette said simply. “He was everybody’s friend, course that man didn’t have the sense he was born with…”

“Marcel, you haven’t touched that glass,” said Louisa, her eyes on the paper, “you’re always asking for a glass of wine like a proper gentleman—”

Marcel sipped it hastily, spilling a drop or two as he set the glass down. “He was white, this man, her father?”

“Cher
, don’t you even know that?” Colette asked. “Of course he was white. And a fine white man at that, though a bit dumb.”

“Oh, my head is aching,” Louisa said. “Go shut those blinds,
cher.”

“But what do you mean a bit dumb?”

“Oh, to stay there at all after that,” Colette said, “after the French army leaving, with the blacks taking over, every white man who had any sense left. But no, that black devil, General Dessalines, that black devil, he told the white planters to stay, said he needed them to go back to their lands, rebuild the plantations, and they believed him, they believed that black devil. Well,
cher
, he hated them, and he hated us too, hated everyone that wasn’t black as he was. He’d been a black man’s slave, that’s what he’d been, before he became the powerful General Dessalines!”

“I just don’t want to talk about these things, my head aches!” Louisa dropped the paper, putting her fingers to her temples. She turned stiffly in her chair to her sister.

“Well, he just wants to know!” Colette said.
“Cher
, don’t you say a word of this to your mother, do you hear me? Why, they massacred every white French man, woman and child in the city of Port-au-Prince! Why, there was this colored officer running through the streets just to kill the children, can you imagine, just to kill those babies! I saw that with my own eyes! And there was that baby, your maman, out there in the street. ’Course she wasn’t white, you could see that, but all around…”

“Oh, stop this now!” Louisa burst out.

“No, no, please.” Marcel turned quickly and placed his hand on hers and pressed her hand against the table. “Go on, Tante Colette, where was my mother?”

“Out there in the street, with people dying right there all around her. Marcel I swear to you, I’ve told you many a foolish tale in my life, but I swear to you, the water running in the gutter down the middle of that street was the color of blood.”

Louisa’s face was very still. She had removed her hand from Marcel’s hand, and she sat looking at her hands which were now clasped in her lap. “Cecile’s my little girl,” she said softly. “My little girl.”

“…and that white man, your maman’s father, they had hung him on a hook right over the door! Right opposite our house this was, Marcel, and there he was, that hook run up through his chin, and blood streaming down the front of his clothes. ’Course he was dead, been dead for hours, I hope to God he was dead before they hung him up there, but there was that baby, your maman, just clinging to that door post and that colored officer up at the top of the street, sticking his bayonet into the bodies of those other babies. They were everywhere, they had dragged those people out of the houses, women, children, they didn’t care…just so they were French and just so they were white.”

“I feel sick in here,” Louisa said softly. She put her hand to her lips. “Those blinds, shut those blinds, Marcel.”

“Never mind about those damned blinds!” Colette said. “Well, there was that baby like I told you,” she went on. “And Josette, she was the one, Marcel, yes, she was the one…”

“Will you stop this for the love of heaven!” Louisa said.

“I will not. I say if he’s old enough to ask the question then he’s old enough to know. Might just stop him from driving his maman out of her mind, all those questions about Saint-Domingue. Look at me, Marcel, don’t you tell your mother, your mother won’t ever talk about those times.”

“What did Tante Josette do?” Marcel asked.

Louisa walked crisply across the polished floor and pulled the blinds shut with a clat. She went to the second window and to the third, as the room was darkening around them.

“Well, she looked out there into that street,” Colette said, “and she saw that baby down there, poor little baby in her bare feet, that man never took any care of that baby at all, just fed her right off his own plate in the tavern, that’s all he ever did, never combed that pretty hair, never washed her face. That baby didn’t even have shoes, I bet that baby had never even worn shoes. Will you stop it, Louisa, I can’t see a thing in here, will you open those blinds!”

“But what happened?” Marcel asked.

“Well, Josette was never scared of the devil in hell. We were terrified, Marcel, ‘Oh, don’t go out there,’ we said to her, ‘they won’t hurt that baby, they’re killing white babies…’ But she took the bolt
down off that door and marched right down those steps. ‘I’m going to get that baby,’ she said, and walked right out there into that street, right up to that dead man hanging on that hook, and she grabbed that baby in her arms. Why, she had to bend down right under that dead man, knocked his body around on that hook to get that baby in her arms. And oh, to hear that child scream! It made no difference that that man was dead, she did not want to leave that man! Oh, to hear that child scream.…”

“Don’t say another word!” Louisa said.