Feast of All Saints (83 page)

But after Mass as he walked with Tante Josette along the banks of the Cane River, and she told him the history of this family, his thoughts were much changed on this question of name. All of these Metoyers who filled this country known as Isle Brevelle, sprawling over many houses and prosperous plantations, were descended from one freed slave, Marie Therese CoinCoin who had built a small fortune on land granted her in the days of the Spanish and bought the freedom of her children one by one. Even Grandpère Augustin, her eldest, who had built the church of St. Augustine, had not been born free. And had been the grandson of the African-born slaves who had been the parents of Marie Therese, calling her CoinCoin which was, in fact, an African name.
These people had not inherited their world, they had created it!
Just as Richard Lermontant’s ancestors had created theirs. They had made a life for themselves as gracious and prosperous as that of the white colonists who’d once held them in chains.

But that mellow and beautiful day might have passed into Marcel’s varied collection of tender impressions of the Cane River along with many others had it not been for another small detail which made its imprint on his mind.

In the late afternoon, he had gone out alone on the back gallery of the big house at Yucca and looked over the land. There were the usual plantation buildings, sights, sounds. But as his eyes swept the familiar landscape, he saw a structure directly behind the main house—that is, right in front of him—that was quite different from the other outbuildings he had seen. Because, though it had an immense sloping roof like many a slave cabin or bungalow, no columns supported this roof and it rose very high, much higher than any he had observed, above the doors below. A short walk about the place revealed it to be even more amazing, for beneath this great roof another complete story to the little house was hidden, its windows peeping out into the shade. Rude beams projecting from the walls held the roof in place. Marcel did not know what to make of it, and riding home that night with
Tante Josette was disappointed to hear that she did not know the purpose of the structure or why or how it had been made.

It lingered in his mind. It was reminiscent of buildings he had seen in some old book, engravings that he could not quite resurrect from memory, and sometime during the night he realized he had seen this same form in pictures of the wilds of Africa in the accounts of British travelers that Anna Bella so loved to read. Africa. The house had seemed like something built for such a climate—how that immense mushroom roof would have cooled the rooms within!—and there had been no evidence of metal in the construction anywhere, except perhaps the hinges on the blue painted doors. What slave had built that structure, what slave had remembered such a house in Africa which might even have been his home? This perplexed Marcel, for one transcendent feature of this house had added to its singular impression: it was very beautiful. It seemed finer than those other cabins whose roofs were supported by posts from the ground.

And as he thought of it, Jean Jacques’ words of years ago came back to him, Jean Jacques’ long description of the fine quality of that African sculpture made in the cabins of his old home in Saint-Domingue. Suddenly Marcel was burning to return to Yucca, to ask anyone and everyone about that curious little house. And he felt, as he fell asleep, more acutely than ever the loss of Jean Jacques. He wanted to show this house to Jean Jacques, to take him under that soaring roof, he wanted to talk to Jean Jacques about how this house had been built. Oh, how Rudolphe and Richard had teased him that summer when Marcel had been so obsessed with the craft of a simple chair, a table, the way that a staircase climbed the wall. But the miracle had never dimmed, not with Jean Jacques’ death, or with the development of Marcel’s mind. And it seemed to him the greatest of cruelties now that he hadn’t even the talent to sketch the African house from memory, and dared not return to Yucca to draw a picture of it for fear that others might see. And then his mind roamed freely in half sleep with a delightful possibility, that of capturing one of the country Daguerreotypists to make a picture of the house for him when the light was just right. What a treasure that would be among his collection of plates that glinted on the bedroom wall at home.

Home. An ugly reality awakened him. Monsieur Philippe had returned to the cottage, and Marcel, when in the name of God would he see his room again? And why in the name of God hadn’t he bought the magic box, the Daguerre camera, during that millennium when he had been a rich young man, his father filling his pockets with ten-dollar bills? He could have had it, that wonderful instrument to fix all that he could never draw, precisely as the eye saw it, as the eye chose to place it in the frame. But that was gone, wasn’t it, the young gentleman
who was forever hanging over Duval’s shoulder with ten dollars for a whole plate whenever he chose. Sheer exhaustion called him back to the African house, and the gentle drifting into sleep commenced again. He found himself in Christophe’s classroom, in the midst of one of those familiar lectures in which Christophe was striving to make the point anew: the world is filled with varying standards of beauty and civilization so that the edicts of one small time and place must never be accepted as supreme. Ah, he must ask about the African house, he must discover…

But there was much to be done the next day.

He was determined that his little charges would be able to read their French well for their grandmother before he was called back to New Orleans, and he had promised to help Marguerite copy out some poetry from a borrowed book. He liked Marguerite but was a little afraid of her, of that luscious and familial affection which she so easily displayed. So he forgot about the African house, and did not think of it until years after, knowing no more then of its origins than he did now.

Christmas had been heaven at
Sans Souci
. Days before, the slaves had made the effigy of a cow, marked with all the cuts of beef, and when this was mounted on a pole, shot at the animal to win the cuts as presents for their Christmas table, all this in a ceremony known as the
papagai
. The plantation rang with music within the great house and without, and all the family round came together for dancing, and on the solemn night itself they made the long carriage ride to the church of St. Augustine for Midnight Mass.

Marguerite had made a long knitted scarf for Marcel, and sometime in the hours after midnight on New Year’s Day, when he was sick of the sweet punch and had gone to the pantry himself to see if there wasn’t just one more bottle of vintage claret, Marguerite had pressed close to him, offering her tender child mouth for him to kiss. She was soft as a baby, and he felt shame afterwards, and resolved not to be alone with her again before he left.

So one week after New Years, when he was still carrying Christophe’s letter of two days before, and reading it over and over, and feeling impotent that he could not be with Cecile and Marie in New Orleans, he was quite surprised to find his aunt one morning at her desk with a grave expression, saying to him, “Sit down, Marcel, I want to talk to you about your cousin, Marguerite.”

She had a letter in her hands. At first he thought perhaps it was something more from Christophe. But after folding it neatly, she laid it aside and told him to close the parlor doors.

“Tante, I meant no disrespect for her,” Marcel said. After all, this was just an innocent kiss. But what if her aunts had seen them, this penniless ne’er-do-well from New Orleans with their precious and pretty little girl.

His aunt’s face was particularly tired this morning, and she flexed her fingers stiffly before turning in her chair so that she could see him.

“I have some news for you from home, but with your permission, let me put that aside,” she said. “And I promise to be brief. You’ve made an excellent impression here, Marcel, you are much liked and much admired, and I think you know you could make a tolerable living as a schoolteacher in these parts.”

He couldn’t conceal the expression on his face. This wasn’t the life he wanted, he had taught the children because their parents had wanted it, and it was all he had to offer.

“But there are other avenues open to you, and I should like to get directly to the point. Marguerite’s father owns two plantations upriver, some 150 acres of cultivated land. The man is willing to settle one-fourth of that land on you, and to build a house upon it for you, should you enter into marriage with Marguerite.”

“Marriage? With Marguerite!” Marcel was stunned. “But does he know my circumstances, that I could bring nothing to this marriage?”

“Marcel, you bring a gentleman’s education and breeding, and a gentleman’s honor. That would be quite enough.”

She waited, then went on.

“Marcel, don’t you see, ours is a small community, and we have intermarried over and over, and perhaps too much. My son married his second cousin, my grandsons were second and third cousins to their wives, and so it will probably go with their children as well…” But when she said this last about the grandchildren, a distress distracted her so that she made a little gesture of opening her eyes wide as if to clear them. “But let me make it simple. There are not many eligible men here for Marguerite to marry, and all of us would look with favor on this match. You need not give your answer now, Marcel. There’s no doubt in my mind that you could manage a plantation, that you could learn the cultivation of cotton, the management of the slaves. You’d be under more of a watchful eye than you’d want, besides.” She sighed as though reciting all this more from duty than anything else. “You’d have your own home. You would be the master on your own land.”

She displayed no enthusiasm whatsoever and Marcel was perplexed. Surely she wasn’t trying to convince him.

“Do
you
approve?” he asked.

Again she appeared distressed, distracted.

“Is it what you want, Marcel?” she asked.

“Tante, I can’t stay here. I don’t need to think it over. Oh, it’s tempting, it’s beautiful.” He was feeling that peace again that he’d felt so strongly in the church of St. Augustine, that sense of community where one would never encounter a white face without the community’s strength to bolster him, the community’s warmth.

“I have to go home,” Marcel said. “I have to go back to New Orleans to whatever future I can make there. I don’t know what I will do or how I will do it, but it’s the city to which I belong, with all its strife and its challenges.”

And all its vicious injustice, too.

“When I came here, I brought with me a little book,” he went on. “I believe I showed it to you, it was the first issue of a literary journal, published by men of color entirely. Christophe’s sent me several numbers of it since.”

“Marcel,” she sighed. “Poetry doesn’t mean anything in this world, it never has meant anything and it never will. If men of color in New Orleans write poetry it’s because they can do precious little else! Don’t give me that wounded look, that proud expression. It’s true and you know it. What future has a man of color in New Orleans?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “And this little quarterly, it may have no significance as you’ve said, but I respect it. I respect it! And all my life I’ve been searching for something to respect. All my life I’ve been trying to understand what really matters, and I tell you, this book,
L’Album littéraire
, matters. And there are other things that matter…Christophe’s school, the business that Rudolphe Lermontant has built…I don’t want to enumerate these things, I don’t want to be placed in a position of having to defend them. This country’s beautiful, Tante, and I should like nothing better than to let it enfold me and protect me so that I could pretend all the world was people of color, but I can’t do it. I can’t cut myself off from what I perceive to be the real world. So I have to go home.”

She appeared thoughtful and then she said,

“I have been alive too long.”

“Don’t say that, Tante!” he said. He did not remember it now, but these were the words Jean Jacques had used the night before he died.

“Why not?” she said. She began to murmur as if he weren’t there…“Picture the Plaine du Nord where I was born, that splendid island, and La Belle France when I first went there, and this rude country when Monsieur Villier first brought me to this stretch of swamp and told me he’d make it our home. I don’t believe in anything.

“I tell you after what I have seen in my life of Saint-Domingue and this place, I don’t know what a man of color can do anywhere in the world. I don’t know. We are a doomed people, Marcel. Whether you stay here or go to New Orleans it makes no difference finally. Oh,
I don’t tell my grandchildren these things. I tell them the world is a good place, that in their time they will enjoy a greater measure of equality with the whites than we do now. But this is a lie. There’s no equality. And there never will be. Our only hope is to hold onto our land here, to buy and to cultivate more land so that we can keep our community as a world apart. Because the white Anglo-Saxon heart is so hardened against us that there’s no hope for our descendants as the Anglo-Saxon takes over, as he supplants the French and the Spanish families around us who understood us and respected us. No, there is only one hope and that is for our descendants to pass when they can into the white race. And with each one who passes, we are diminished, our world and our class dies. That’s what we are, Marcel, a dying people, if we are a people at all, flowers of the French and the Spanish and the African, and the Americans have put their boot in our face.”

“Tante, stop this! What about the here and now?”

“Here and now, here and now? Each year it grows worse, the prejudice, the laws that restrict us. We live in a fool’s paradise here, shut off from the world on our plantations, but the world is right there, outside. You don’t know the reverses we suffered, all of us, in the depression of ’37, and you do not know the constant struggle with the land itself. You don’t know the mortgages that underlie some of the prosperity you see. This ‘here and now’ is fragile, indeed, for us and when it crumbles, what awaits us but the American Southland which is encroaching on all of us more day after day.