Feast of All Saints Page 9

  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.

  Colette turned. Louisa merely stood with her back to the blinds, her hands clasped in front of her, her face dark.

  Marcel was staring ahead of him. He was looking at the droplets from the sherry, and very slowly he moved his fingers toward them, and then his hand closed around the glass.

  “We never let that baby out of our sight after that,” Colette said quietly. “Your Tante Louisa and me…And when Josette went upriver again to Sans Souci, she wanted to take your maman but that baby got under this table right here in this room, and clung to the leg of this table, she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay here with us. Strange, it was as if she turned on Josette, she wanted to stay here with us. ‘Well, that baby’s been through enough,’ Josette said. ‘If she wants to stay here in New Orleans with you, then she can stay.’ ”

  They were quiet.

  Marcel was looking at the glass of sherry, and then very slowly he lifted it to his lips. He drank it all down, and put the glass back very carefully, and putting his elbow on the table he rested his forehead in his hand.

  “Go home, Marcel,” Louisa said. Her voice was thick and low. “Leave him alone,” Colette said.

  “You go on home,” Louisa said. “And don’t you ever say a word to your maman, you hear me?”

  It was late afternoon when he came home. A bundle of white lace lay on the dining table. And the long slanting rays of the sun found all the glass in the cottage.

  It seemed at such times when it was hot and cloudless that the brilliance of light combined with the moving air to make the clutter of mahogany and shining what-nots shabby in the swirls of dust. Sun shone in a pool on the waxed floor, and rendered the gilt framed picture of Sans Souci a glaring mirror.

  Marcel, sitting very still with his hands on his knees, merely looked at his own slender fingers, the few veins drawn on the backs of his hands. There was no sound except the buzzing of flies.

  Then the tread of boots on the path and the sharp sound of his mother opening the latch.

  He saw her silhouetted ag
ainst the sun, a black hourglass of a woman, tiny wrists, fine fingers that delicately closed the parasol and set it by the door. She moved closer to him, brows knit, her eyes gleaming in her dark face, one hand neatly gathering the pleats of her green taffeta skirt. She wore a cameo at her throat on a band of black velvet, and the white lace beneath it lay in scallops over her breast. “Marcel?”

  His impassive face gave no sign that he had heard. She seemed to him a timeless being as she stood poised there, someone who had not been born at all but had come into life full-blown when fashion reached some perfect peak that suited her, so that moving toward him she was like the bric-a-brac and petit-point that everywhere surrounded her, something solid, exquisite and unsubtractable from the whole.

  A great gulf lay beyond her. As if the door of the Ste. Marie cottage swung open onto chaos, and rushing there on some pretext of normal errand, Marcel might find himself clinging to the knob above a chasm. History stirred in the awesome dark, the stench of burning fields, drums, the black faces of slaves.

  He shuddered as he rose to his feet. It seemed the very walls were disintegrating, the baubles of the crystal candlesticks were on fire. Going out the front gate, he heard her for the first time calling his name.

  III

  RAIN FLOODED the streets. By midday it had overflowed the low brick banquettes, poured into the shops, lapped at the steps of the cottages and made of the narrow mud thoroughfares flat lakes spreading beneath the pelting drops from one side to the other. The fenced garden of the Ste. Marie cottage was a swamp.

  But with the afternoon it had stopped; the sun poured down on the receding waters, and Jean Jacques, after sweeping out the shop and bringing down again the chairs he had hung on hooks around the walls, went back to work. In the past he had sent his fine pieces out to be gilded, but this year, whether out of boredom or simple fascination, he did not know, he was going to do it himself. He dipped his brush into the pot of glue he had softened on his stove and painted invisible wet curlicues along the oval frame of a mirror. And now, raising the gold leaf ever so carefully on the tip of a dry brush, he blew it in a fine spray so that those curlicues seemed to Marcel to come to life perfect and golden along the mirror’s polished border.

  He would rest from time to time, light a cigar for a few puffs and continue to talk.

  “…I don’t know that anyone would have taught me if I hadn’t shown the will to learn. It was more than will, to tell the truth, it was a passion, a passion…” The word was uncommon to him, he said it with emphasis. “I wouldn’t leave that old carpenter alone. Of course he didn’t want to bother with me. My mother had been nothing but a field hand, and me one of the barefoot bunch that played at the back door.”

  Marcel studied his profile against the fiery light outside. A sheet of water still lay at the corner of the Rue Bourbon and the Rue Ste. Anne, and a hack turning fast in the softened ruts below sent a flashing spray toward the shop. Children squealed with laughter.

  “But I wouldn’t leave his tools alone. ‘Don’t you touch my tools,’ he would say, but I wouldn’t pay him any mind. I’d stay right there, planted by his side asking him over and over, ‘what are you going to do with that, what are those pegs for…’ ’Course he didn’t make furniture like this furniture. He fixed things, fixed the porch railings and the wooden blinds, and he’d make simple chairs, rocking chairs and tables and benches for the kitchens and sometimes for the other slaves.”

  “But how did you learn, then, to make fine furniture?” Marcel asked.

  Jean Jacques was thinking. “I learned simple things first, then I went on to those things I really wanted to make. You see, I have the belief, mon fils, that if a man can learn any one thing well, then he can learn most anything else that he puts his mind to.”

  He glanced at Marcel. Marcel sat on the high stool by the stove as always. The fire for the melting of the glue had long gone out and a clean breeze blew through the front doors and out those open to the yard in back. He seemed hardly wilted by the day’s heat or the day’s damp. On such days as this he had learned to move slowly, to walk slowly, and his clothing retained its crispness, though the high polish of his new boots had not survived the mud of the streets. Jean Jacques smiled at him almost wistfully and the change of expression took Marcel by surprise. But then Jean Jacques went on.

  “There were field hands on my master’s land, men who came over from Africa who made things in the evening after all the work was done, objects…” his hand opened, palm up and fingers somewhat rounded as if he were trying to grasp the thing of which he spoke…“pieces of art,” he said as if he had found the proper word. “They made these things with a simple knife, out of the hardest mahogany. Heads is what they were, African-looking heads with lips that were bigger than any Negro’s really, and eyes that were no more than slits, and the hair would be made into braids on the tops of these long heads, braids that were coiled round and round and came down sometimes to loop around the ears. To look at it, what would you think, that it was a savage thing, a…a…an African thing,” he said. “Yet I tell you the workmanship on that head was as fine as any I’ve ever seen. I mean the way that those braids of hair were carved, the way that the ear on one side of that face was perfectly balanced with the other…why, I can remember the smoothness of those faces when they were polished, and the way that they would appear in the firelight in the corners of those small cabins. Well, I tell you, if a man can make that object so perfect, that piece of art…because art is what it was…then he could make anything with his hands that he wanted to make. He could make this little secrétaire here, or that fauteuil. If he wanted to do it! If he wanted to.”

  “But how did you learn to read, Monsieur? And write?” Marcel had done it at last—he had found the moment for that question.

  “The way a hundred men have learned,” Jean Jacques laughed. “I got a book.…It was an old Bible that the master gave to me, in fact, its cover had come off, and I wanted to have it, and he said well, you can have that if you want it. And I took that Bible and sat down by the front steps. I was older then, and I helped around the house. There were lots of times when no one needed me, why there were whole days when all I did was to go from one room to another to find the master’s pipe for him, or run upstairs to get his tobacco. So I found this place in the honeysuckle by the gallery, and every time I had a chance to ask the master to tell me the meaning of one word, I would do it. Of course I had to ask him the same words more than once, but by the end of month I could read three lines of that Bible by myself, and I knew those words wherever else in that book that they would ever appear. By the end of the year I could read four pages. Don’t look so surprised, mon fils, many men have learned that way. And then there came this special afternoon. It was nothing special to anyone but me, but my master was on his long couch on the gallery and looking up from under his hat, he said. ‘Jean Jacques, you’re always reading that Bible, why don’t you read it to me?’ I came up on the porch beside him and read him those four pages, clearly, and the few lines I’d learned besides. ‘Jean Jacques,’ he said, ‘when you can read any page in that Bible to me, any page from the beginning to the end…I’ll set you free.’ ” Jean Jacques laughed softly, “Well, there was no stopping me then.”

  Marcel could not conceal the exquisite pleasure this moment in the story had given him.

  “ ‘What do you want to be, Jean Jacques?’ he asked me when the time came…”

  “When you could read any page!”

  “Mon fils,” Jean Jacques leaned forward nodding and winking his eyes, “I read him St. John’s Apocalypse!”

  Marcel laughed in spite of himself, hunching his shoulders and thrusting his clasped hands down between his legs.

  “Well, ‘I want to be a carpenter,’ is what I said to him. ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ was a carpenter, and that’s good enough for me.’ But you know, I think when I look back on it I just wanted to spite that old man, that mean old slave carpenter who would never show me
how to use those tools. I wanted to show him I could be as good as he was. And later on, my master sent me into Cap François to really learn the trade. I became a builder of stairways, I learned to build the finest stairways in the houses of the richest in the town. And the furniture, I came to make it in the time that I could call my own.” He paused; he appeared to be studying Marcel. Marcel was picturing with a special pleasure all the lovely stairways he had seen. There was in particular that long stairway in the Lermontant house that curved so gracefully at the small landing to double back above itself to the second floor. “But the best furniture making, that was done here in New Orleans after I came,” Jean Jacques said. “I made it from the furniture I saw in peoples’ houses when I went to make their staircases or to repair them, and I made it from the pictures I saw in books. I made a stairway once for your Tante Josette,” he paused again, watching Marcel’s face. “She came down here one summer from the Cane River and said, ‘Jean Jacques I want you to come up and make me a good staircase, a fine staircase at Sans Souci.’ ”

  Marcel thought of the times she had invited them all to visit her, of Cecile’s excuses and his own passion for his day-to-day city life. He had thought the country would be so dull. But he would go there, he would see this staircase, walk upon it and feel its newel posts, he would study how it was made.

  “We came on the same ship here,” Jean Jacques said. “Your Tante Josette and me, did you know that? And I remember thirteen years later when she went back to Saint-Domingue determined to find her sisters, and she brought them here and brought your maman here too.”