Feast of All Saints Page 8

  Of course they spoke of Saint-Domingue, Tante Colette and Tante Louisa, but Cecile had been too young to remember anything and never said a word. They spoke of the rich plantations on the Plaine Du Nord and their house in Port-au-Prince where they had entertained the French officers in their regal uniforms, drinking champagne with the generals, and gossiping about the wild orgies of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline, who had dined and danced through the entire war. All the names of Saint-Domingue thrilled Marcel along with these images of balls until dawn, and ships with billowing sails striking out across the blue Caribbean for the port of New Orleans. And then there had been the buccaneers. “Tell me about the buccaneers,” he had said once when nestled among their immense skirts in the cottage parlor. They had laughed wildly, but Anna Bella had read him an English story about buccaneers.

  “Oh, yes, Monsieur,” Marcel said, speaking lightly and quickly of French officers, champagne, and how the black slaves had risen and burnt it all and finally the French officers had left with the army, and his aunts had left, too. He meant to sound knowledgeable, but even as he spoke he sensed that all he knew was flimsy, simple phrases often repeated and never explained. He was ashamed suddenly of how foolish he had sounded.

  Jean Jacques’ face had changed. He stood very still over the workbench looking at Marcel. “French officers,” he said under his breath. “French officers, and parties till dawn.” He shook his head. “These are some historians your good aunts, but please understand I mean no disrespect.” He turned back to the chair he had been fixing, and going down on one knee as if in genuflection, he pressed the damask where he had been tacking it down. The box of brass tacks lay beside him, and in his hand he held a small hammer.

  “They had a great plantation on the Plaine du Nord,” Marcel went on. “Tante Josette lived there, but the others, Tante Louisa and Tante Colette, they lived in the city of Port-au-Prince. Of course, they lost everything. Everything was lost.”

  “Eh bien, everything was lost,” Jean Jacques sighed. “I could tell you a lot about French officers, I could tell you a slightly different story, of the French officers who killed my master at Grand Rivière, and broke his commander on the wheel.”

  This was said simply and for a moment Marcel was not certain that he had heard. Then it was as if every sound from the street had died. He strained forward, and then a shock went through him and he felt himself shudder. He had heard it all right, Jean Jacques had said the words, “my master.” Jean Jacques had been a slave! Never in all his life had Marcel heard anyone refer to a time when he or she had been a slave. Of course there were mulatto slaves and quadroon slaves and slaves as light as Marcel, as well as there were black slaves, but these were not gens de couleur, Creole gens de couleur who had been free for generations, free always, free so far back that no one could remember—or hadn’t they???

  “Do those good ladies ever talk about that, the battle at Grand Rivière?” Jean Jacques asked gently. There was no judgment in his voice, merely in the choice of his words. He lifted a tack from the box, fitted it between two fingers of his left hand which held the cloth in its place. “Do they ever speak of the mulatto, Ogé, and how he led the men of color in battle at Grand Rivière and how the French captured him and broke him on the wheel?”

  It seemed the shame Marcel was feeling was palpable and hot. It burned his cheeks. The palms of his hands were damp with it. What does it matter that Jean Jacques was a slave, what does it matter, he was struggling with it, hearing quite distinctly his mother’s tone at table, so sans façon, “I don’t want you with that old man.” He loathed himself at this moment. He would die before he let Jean Jacques know what he was feeling. He cast back though the confusion of his mind for the words Jean Jacques had only just spoken and said quickly, nervously, “No, Monsieur, they never spoke of Ogé.” He was afraid of the tremor in his voice.

  “No, I don’t suppose they would,” Jean Jacques said. “But it seems they might have. That a young man should know something of those times, of those men of color that died.”

  Only now was the meaning of the words penetrating to Marcel.

  “What does it mean, Monsieur, broken on the wheel?” Men of color fighting a battle with white men, he could not envision this. He knew nothing of it.

  Jean Jacques stopped. He held the hammer poised above the brass crown of the tack, and in a low voice said,

  “ ‘…while alive to have his arms, legs, thighs, and spine broken; and afterward to be placed on a wheel, his face toward Heaven and there to stay as long as it would please God to preserve his life.’ ” He paused. Without looking up, he went on. “I was in Cap François then, but I didn’t go to the Place d’Armes. There were too many white people in the Place d’Armes to see it happen. Planters drove in from the countryside to see it happen. I went later, after they’d hanged the other men of color they’d captured with him. But they didn’t capture my master. My master died on the battlefield, and no one got to hang him, nor break him on a wheel.”

  Marcel was stunned. His eyes were riveted to Jean Jacques.

  “But how did this happen?” Marcel whispered. “Colored men fighting white men?”

  Jean Jacques glanced at him, and slowly a smile broke over his wrinkled features. “Some historians those good aunts of yours, mon fils,” he said gently as before. “It was colored men fighting white men who commenced the revolution in Saint-Domingue before the slaves rose. You see, it really began in France. It began with Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, those magic words. And this man, Ogé, quite an educated man, had been in Paris and wined and dined by those men who were the friends of the blacks in the colonies and believed in their protection and their rights.” Jean Jacques suddenly put the tack and the little hammer down. He closed the top of the box of tacks, and then rising slowly as if his knees ached, he turned the chair toward him and rested back on it, his hands on his thighs. He sighed heavily with a movement of his shoulders.

  “Well, it must have made a lot of sense in Paris, that Ogé should dome home to Saint-Domingue and demand the rights of his people, the gens de couleur. Mind you, nobody had said too much yet about freedom for the slaves. But I don’t have to tell you, mon fils, young as you are, that there was no way the white planters of Saint-Domingue were going to give the gens de couleur the same rights as they had themselves. So Ogé gathered a fighting force at Grand Rivière, and my master was there. Oh, I’d begged him not to go. I’d begged him not to be so foolish! And he wasn’t my master then anymore, I was free, and he respected me, he really did.” He looked at Marcel, his eyes moved slowly over Marcel’s face. “But he went on, and with that small force met the French and the French defeated them like that.

  “But by the time it was all over, by the time your good aunts had left with your mamma and come here…why, thirteen years had passed, and white had fought colored, and colored had fought black, and black had fought white. And black and colored had finally joined together to drive out the French…those French officers your aunts have told you about…and that famous Madame Pauline, Napoleon’s sister…they drove them out.

  “I wonder if there was an acre of farmland left…of coffee or sugar or anything a man can grow…I wonder if there was an acre of it on that island that hadn’t been burned ten times over before it was finished. I don’t know. It was in the very beginning that I left, set sail from Cap François during the first days of the black revolt.”

  He sat still. His eyes left Marcel and he stared forward as if seeing those times.

  Marcel was speechless. And when Jean Jacques looked at him again, his dark eyes appeared to search Marcel’s face for some glimmer of response, some little indication that he had understood. But Marcel had never heard a word of this before, he had believed his people to have been one with the whites, to have been driven out along with the whites, and he had that overwhelming sense which had come over him of late of all that he did not know or comprehend.

  Jean Jacques glanced at the open door. “Do
you feel that breeze?” he asked. “Winter’s over, and none too soon.” He rose and stretched as he had done before. “That’s the Angelus, mon fils,” he said.

  Marcel had heard it, the dull clanking of the Cathedral bell. “But Monsieur,” he began, “it went on for thirteen years, this war, this revolution?”

  “You’ve got to get on home, mon fils,” Jean Jacques said. “You’re usually gone by this time.” Marcel did not move.

  All the while he had imagined it so simply. One night the slaves had risen, and burned it all. “White, colored, it didn’t make any difference,” Tante Colette so often said with a weary wave of her fan. “They burned everything that we had.”

  He was excited. And yet he was frightened at the same time. It seemed he hovered on the edge of an awful, dismal feeling as he sat there, conjured by this vision of men of color in arms, and black men fighting with them. He barely heard Jean Jacques’ voice:

  “Go on, mon fils, your mother will be one angry woman if you don’t go on.”

  “But will you tell me tomorrow?” Marcel asked. He got to his feet but stood there looking intently at Jean Jacques.

  Jean Jacques was thinking. And that dismal feeling in Marcel deepened, something akin to the dusk in the street and the fading light around them within the shop. He watched Jean Jacques’ dark face and regretted that he had asked with such feeling. Marcel had made it seem too important by asking, and as so often happened when you wanted something desperately, then you couldn’t have it.

  “I don’t know, mon fils,” Jean Jacques said. “Maybe that’s enough history for a while. Maybe I’ve said too much as it is.” He was looking at Marcel. He appeared to wait and then Marcel said, “But Monsieur…”

  “No, mon fils, one day you can read all of that in books on your own. It seems you ought to know something about it. Those were your people.” He shook his head. “But you read it in books on your own.”

  “But Monsieur, I have no such books, I’ve never even seen them,” Marcel said. “I could go into the bookstores and ask them…”

  “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.

  II

  MARCEL 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!”