In the weeks that followed, Letice kept looking for a menstrual flow that did not come. And she knew.
Emmaline Molyneaux noticed how tired her daughter was, napping during the day and sleeping all night as well. Emmaline also noticed that Letice had gone off her food. Waiting in a corner of the upstairs hall, Emmaline heard retching and feeble spitting and the running of water in the sink. When Letice came out of the bathroom, Emmaline followed behind.
“Letice.”
Letice fell to her bed and throwing her arm over her eyes moaned something about not wanting any breakfast. Emmaline shut the door, yanked her daughter up off the bed, and slapped her as hard as she could.
“It’s that stable boy, isn’t it?” she demanded to know. “Don’t think I haven’t seen how you two look at each other, how you let him keep his hands around your waist a little too long when he helps you down from your horse. You have the look of a tramp when you’re around him, Letice. And now you’re throwing up. You’re pregnant by Tristan Duvais, aren’t you?” Emmaline snarled and grabbed Letice’s arm, giving her a shake that almost snapped the girl’s neck.
Terrified, Letice kept silent.
“Answer me!”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know yet,” Letice admitted and began to cry.
“And you’re not telling him; in fact, I forbid you to leave this house. Pack a bag. We’re going on a little trip. We leave tomorrow.”
“Where are we going?” Letice asked.
“To a place I know. You’re going to get rid of that stable boy’s leavings,” Emmaline spat.
“No, Mama, no. I love Tristan! We’re going to get married!”
“Married? To the stable boy? Don’t be ridiculous and don’t be stupid. You’re going to get rid of that baby and you’re going to keep your mouth shut about it or your precious Tristan will be accused of stealing. I’m not afraid to press charges and have him put in jail for a good long time.”
“Mama! You wouldn’t do such a thing!”
“Oh, but I would, Letice. You are marrying Remington Arrow in June. Even if this baby was Remington’s, and we both know he’s too much of a gentleman to put you in this predicament, the scandal would be bad enough. You will not ruin this match for me, Letice.”
Emmaline Molyneaux belonged to an unnamed sorority of women whose members knew things—like where to procure an abortion for oneself or a reckless daughter. Emmaline joined her husband at breakfast and announced that she and Letice would be spending some time in New Orleans. The Phelan Beales were in residence at Le Pavillon Hotel, she said, and were looking to purchase property in Pass Christian.
“Letice and I have been invited to join Mrs. Beale for teas, shopping, and luncheons; and we will be going. These are desirable people, Horatio, very desirable people.”
Emmaline liked to cloak her lies in verifiable truths. It amused her.
Mother and daughter left the next morning, and once in New Orleans took a room at Le Pavillon, where Emmaline bribed a waiter into seating them near the Phelan Beales at breakfast the following day. Emmaline ordered eggs, toast, and tea for both of them but forbade Letice to eat. Emmaline knew how to cover her tracks.
After breakfast, she asked the concierge for a jitney, which they took from Poydras Street to Rampart to Canal. They left the cab to walk the streets of the Quarter, following a circuitous route and stopping to browse in the shops. Emmaline wanted it to appear as though they were on a mother-daughter outing, just in case they should run into someone they knew. It seemed to Letice they’d walked for miles before they passed through a wrought-iron gate and into a lush garden, where they followed a stone path until they came to a dark green door.
Emmaline tapped the knocker four times, waited, and tapped it four times more. It was opened by a coffee-colored woman who stepped aside to let them in. A coffee-colored girl no more than a child stood at a table folding bright white cloths. The child looked up but did not stop her folding.
And then from the shadows came Suville Jean-Baptiste.
The Dreams of a Bright and Ambitious Girl
T
O
understand the mind of Suville Jean-Baptiste, it is important to know of her ancestry and of a social system that once flourished in the American South, most openly in the city of New Orleans. This system,
plaçage
it was called, enjoyed society’s unspoken yet unmistakable approval. And so with its nose in the air and a flip of its fan, plaçage shrugged its lovely shoulders and turned its backside toward the law.
Plaçage had originated in the heart of the Caribbean, in the French colonies of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadalupe; places where there were not enough French women to go around. To compensate for this shortage, French men took enslaved women as their concubines and fathered children on them.
From this system there arose
gens de couleur libres
—free people of color, a phrase possessed of a certain irony, for though they were not slaves, neither were they considered equal to whites. They were a people trapped within a third class, and that third class was associated with slave society despite the fact that free people of color formed a culture in which refinement was paramount and education and wealth were achieved.
Suville was a Creole woman of color, descended from a past full of assorted blood. Her ancestors had been so lovely as to appear angelic, each of them able to cast a spell. Suville’s mother was truly beautiful and moved with grace; she was also extremely intelligent. Her name was Clémence, and she had been mistress to a white Creole doctor since she was eighteen years old. His name was David Gaudet, and he kept her in a house on Dauphine Street, a respectable distance from the Garden District where he lived with his wife and children. Dr. Gaudet fathered Suville in the year 1900 and allowed the child and her mother to use his surname in all things unofficial. He visited Suville and Clémence every Sunday, unless of course it was the day of the week upon which Christmas fell or the birthday of one of his legal family members.
David Gaudet had graduated from the Académie Impériale de Médecine on Rue Bonaparte in Paris, a school that followed an edict stating that among the Académie’s endeavors would be the evaluation of natural medications. David Gaudet had a fascination for the origin, production, and efficacy of medicines found in nature. His was a classical education, and he was a devotee of the ancient Greek, Pedanius Dioscurides, studying Dioscurides’s
De Materia Medica Libri Quinque
every single day. The book listed over five hundred plants possessed of medicinal properties.
From the age of ten, Suville Gaudet accompanied her father to his laboratory, where she sat upon a high stool and beheld bacteria jitter this way and that, and the mating dance of sperm in frenzied search of ovum. She saw all this through the microscope’s unerring, non-judging, magnificent clear glass eye.
“Come along,
mon bébé
,” the doctor would say. “Let us go to the laboratory to see what we see.”
In this manner, Suville received an education worthy of the finest medical school, the small back room of Dr. Gaudet’s clinic becoming a private lecture hall. Suville soaked the information up and reached for more. Her father introduced her to the works of another famous Greek, Pliny the Elder, most especially those to do with the medicinal properties of trees and herbs, Gaudet’s own particular fascination.
Dr. Gaudet marveled at his daughter’s aptitude and trained her to work beside him. Year after year she traced abracadabra to the capillary passageways in the veins of leaves and to tinctures made of roots. Year after year she learned of nature’s own abortifacients and of their leafy and flowered and rooted disguises. She accompanied her father to patients’ homes, and to Charity Hospital in the Faubourg St. Marie, and to Touro Infirmary at Louisiana Avenue and Prytania Street. She was always assumed to be his serving girl, but this cultural error, this mistaken identity, escaped Suville’s notice, driven as she was by the soothing of suffering and bringing cure to the poor and diseased. She was caught up in healing like a Christian caught in the Rapture, so caught up that she did not detect the social code, though it was plainly there.
It became obvious to Gaudet that Suville had a mind better even than his own, and that she had the makings of a truly brilliant physician.
Unfortunately, none of that mattered. Dr. Gaudet could not look at Suville when he said that no university would ever accept her. Rarely did young women become doctors, never mind illegitimate young women of color.
“But, Papa,” she cried, “I would make a fine doctor! You have said it yourself many times!”
“Yes,
ma petite fille
, I said so because it is true.”
“You are well respected, Papa. You can open this door for me.”
“Ah,
mon trésor
, but I cannot.”
“Why not, Papa? You are a powerful man in New Orleans. You sit on the board at the university. They listen to you.”
“But, Suville,” said Dr. Gaudet, “what of my family? It would be a disgrace. Although it puts a deep cut on my heart to hurt you, I cannot do them such harm.”
The betrayal put a deep cut on Suville’s heart too, which she healed with a thick-muscled bloodlust.
Suville severed herself from her father and kept to her room, coming out only to get food from the kitchen or to use the toilet. She did not play the piano or dine with her mother or go to the shops or spend afternoons among friends. Rather, she stayed in her room and read those texts precious to the man who had destroyed her dream. She reread Dioscorides’s
De Materia Medica Libri Quinque
and made note of the ingredients in “abortion wine”—hellebor, squirting cucumber, and scammony. She read from Pliny the Elder and learned of the killing powers of common rue. She read of the deadliness of birthwort and pepper and myrrh. Then she took all that knowledge and opened her own clinic in which she performed abortions, free for her own people and at an exorbitant price for whites. Suville changed her surname from Gaudet to Jean-Baptiste in imitation of the saint who had baptized souls to new life.
She performed abortions in a sanitary environment and made a handsome living at it. Her surgical skills were undeniably precise, and her small hands were deft and delicate as she scraped the wages of womanliness out of fruitful wombs and fed them to her bitterness, one baby at a time.
Suville stood tall and dignified and looked straight into the face of Emmaline Molyneaux, savoring for a moment the power she held over this white woman of position and means.
“Follow me,” she said, leading the mother and daughter into a small room that held a bed draped in very white sheets and a small table that was draped in its own white cloth. Upon the table there rested a tray, and upon the tray there rested what looked at first glance like a piece of shiny cutlery. That is not what it was at all. It was a curette, a small thing described in the field of medicine as a spoon-shaped instrument for cleansing a surface. That is the definition Suville offered to her clients if they asked; personally, she thought of it as a blade and loved how nicely it fit in her hand. Whenever she held it or even just caught a glimpse of it from the corner of her eye, Suville always thought the same thing: how feminine, how powerful, how elegant and deadly.
E
MMALINE
Molyneaux was surprised at the abortionist’s elegance. She was not, however, surprised by the woman’s barely concealed hatred. It crossed Emmaline’s mind that the woman could harm Letice. But what did it matter? Letice had brought this on herself; she would have to live with the consequences. Emmaline withdrew an envelope from her handbag and laid it on a small black-lacquered table. “Would you like to count it?” she asked.
“That is not necessary. You may go now, Madame,” Suville told her. “Leave your daughter here. Come back at nine tomorrow morning. Don’t worry. She will be safe. I need to watch her to make sure that no products of conception remained inside. They could poison her blood.”
Suville did not need to offer such aftercare. Accountability was an option for her, not a requirement; if a well-to-do white girl died from an abortion, no accusations were made.
Letice began to entreat her mother with gasping, half-choked words:
“Mama, no! Don’t leave me here! Please, Mama! I love Tristan; I want this baby, Mama!” Letice was screaming by then. “Please, Mama! I’m begging you!”
“Go, Madame. I will take care of her.” Though Suville’s voice was soft, the command was clear.
When Emmaline had gone, Suville put her hands on Letice’s shoulders and said, “Calm down, girl. I won’t hurt you like some might do. Or would you rather die?”
“I want my baby,” Letice whimpered.
“Your mama won’t let you have this baby. If I don’t take it out, she’ll find someone who will, maybe someone who would not be so careful. There are those who might ruin your pretty body. What would you do then, eh? There’s plenty of white girls die from dull knives and dirty water. I’ll take this baby out cleanly. Do you understand?”
Letice could not stop crying.
“Calypso,” Suville called out. “Bring the tea.”
The woman who had answered the door to this place entered the room bearing a tea tray with a steaming pot and a white china cup. The woman’s back was as straight as a rod and her face was as unreadable as a Mardi Gras
déguisement
. She had been trained by Suville Jean-Baptiste in diction and procedure and, in the few months she had worked for the abortionist, had put her training into practice at least twice a day, sometimes more, and had served the tea every time. What no one, not even Suville, knew was that Calypso had not been sane for years.
“Help her undress,” said Suville, and Calypso did as commanded.
“May I have your hat, miss?” Calypso asked. And then, “Your gloves, miss? Your coat, miss? Your shoes, if you please?” as if this was nothing more than a visit to the dressmaker.