Eden Burning (30 page)

The light grew and the torches were put out. A crowd of little boats turned back toward Covetown as the night fishermen headed home. They had all come a long way, skirting the island. A scalloped line of treetops became distinct as the minutes passed and the sky grew white. Cattle were moving dots on hillside pastures. Village rooftops glittered when the sun reached them. A fine house with lawns like a great, swooping skirt emerged from shadow.

“Chris-Craft,” Clarence said, waving toward the private dock. “Look at that beauty. Fifty thousand, if it’s a dollar.”

Low on a bluff stood the house, the familiar porticoed and columned home of the West Indian planter. Its shutters were still closed; it slept.

“Florissant,” said Clarence. “Belongs to the Francis family. Right behind it there’s Estate Margaretta. Belonged to the Dry dens. One of them married a Francis when I was a boy. Pooling the wealth, sort of. Colonel Dryden was my colonel in the First World War.”

Will sat up. This was the first really interesting piece of information that he’d heard on the outing.

“You were in the First World War! You never talk about it.”

“Don’t like to. It was a bad time to remember.”

“Did you kill anybody?”

“Never ask anyone a thing like that,” Clarence said seriously. “If a person did, it wouldn’t have been his fault and he shouldn’t be reminded of it. As it happens, though, I didn’t. I worked in the mess.”

“What was so bad about it, then?”

Clarence considered. “It was just—oh, the whole business, the way we had to live. For instance, a black could never hope to be an officer in the British army, never be more than a sergeant, no matter how well educated he might be. At Taranto—that’s where I served in Italy—we weren’t allowed in the movie theater or the Y canteens. It’s things like that that make you so mad, they fester in you. Some of the men wouldn’t take it anymore. There was a mutiny at Taranto. It’s an ugly thing when men get so mad.” His voice dropped to a murmur.

“I can’t hear you,” Will said impatiently, wanting to hear.

“I said it’s awful to see men maddened that way! They do terrible things and terrible things are done to them. I lost a younger brother there.”

“Dead?”

“Dead. Shot in a riot. Then I came home. I worked on the transport ship
Oriana,
which brought the mutineers back here to serve out their sentences.”

“And that was the end of it?”

“Not really. The end never really comes. Every end gives birth to another beginning, doesn’t it? Well, in 1919, in Honduras and Trinidad, there were more riots. As soon as the troops were demobilized, they went rampaging, burning the homes and businesses of the whites.”

Will was excited. “What happened then?”

“Oh, the riots were put down. They always are. That’s why violence solves nothing. All the hopes and the fine talk came to nothing at the war’s end. You know,” Clarence said reflectively, “there’d been a lot of talk—in fact the British Labour Party had endorsed Du Bois’s idea about making an African state out of the former German colonies, the colonies that we helped win for Britain. Reparation for centuries of slavery, he said, giving us back our own land in Africa, where we were taken from. Some people in Barbados even had a scheme to repatriate West Indian Negroes—”

“What is ‘repatriate’?”

“To send you back to your fatherland. But,” Clarence said with emphasis, “I’m not sorry that part came to nothing. This is my home here. My people have been here six”—he frowned, counting on his fingers—“seven or eight generations, probably. Two centuries, as far as I can count. The same for you, too, I imagine. Has anybody ever mentioned it to you?”

“No,” Will said. Stupid question! Who would have told him?

“Well, you were too young to care about all that, anyway. You hungry now? Désirée made sandwiches and cake.”

Will noticed he had recently stopped saying “Dezzy” after Patrick said he hated it.

Clarence unwrapped the box. “Coconut cake, your favorite. She’s awfully fond of you, Will. You know that, don’t

you?”

Will nodded, feeling a small quick pain which was part anger. She wasn’t “fond” of him at all; she was good to him because Patrick wanted her to be, and because one was supposed to be kind to an orphan. Curious how you could sit back, not saying a word, just listening and watching, and figure people out! It was really easy, he thought now, eating the sandwich. Easy. Désirée was lazy, in a way. She didn’t want to have to think too much, just wanted to enjoy her peace, being loved and loving Patrick and the girls. She spent too much on clothes and fancy knickknacks for the house. Patrick complained, but he never did anything about it. Maybe he couldn’t. Mentally, Will shrugged.

“Look,” Clarence said. “Remember, I mentioned Estate Margaretta a while back? You can see the roof from here. It’s an interesting house with a rotunda. I always thought I’d have liked being an architect, if the circumstances had been different.
Margaretta,”
he mused. “They used to name their places after their wives or after their daughters when the house was given as a wedding present. Yes, it must have been a great life for a planter way back then! Plenty of
servants to bring you the best food and drink on a silver tray, gardeners to keep the house filled up with flowers, black mistresses dressed up in gold lace.” He chuckled. “Not bad, not bad at all. But it didn’t last. That’s one thing history teaches—nothing lasts, not the Roman Empire, not anything. Say, have you read that piece I gave you about Wilberforce, who brought the slave trade to an end in the British Empire?”

“Not yet. We haven’t come to it in school, anyway.”

“Yes, and you may never come to it, the way the schools are. Read it for yourself.”

The old man was a nut about history. Again Will felt impatience, but because he liked the old man he wouldn’t show it.

“Yes, and then came the hard times for the estates. Debts, mortgages, and bankruptcies.”

“Served them right,” Will interrupted.

“My grandfather told me you could ride around and see great houses gone back to jungle with trees growing out of the rotting rooftops.” Clarence stopped abruptly. “You’re bored with all this, aren’t you?”

Will grinned.

“You may be only eleven, but that’s not too young to start understanding the past.”

“Why?” Will asked, arguing the question.

“Because that’s the only way to make the future better.”

“Have you made it any better?”

Clarence looked at him sternly. “Yes, I have. Listen here, my grandfather worked a full year on a sugar estate for wages of five pounds. He lived on the estate and paid rent for his house—-his hovel—and could be evicted at the owner’s pleasure. And you ask whether it’s better now? Yes, I’ll accept credit for my part in the labor movement that has made it better, although not nearly good enough, God knows.” He pulled on the oars and they creaked. “Now I’m too old. It’s in the hands of men like Nicholas Mebane and your father.
They’ll push us still farther along. I’m glad your father left teaching. He can use his powers in larger ways.”

Something bursting in Will’s chest came out in a harsh voice, in harsh words. “He’s not my father! Why do you always call him that?”

“He is! He’s fathered you more than anyone else ever did! Sometimes you puzzle me, Will. You seem so critical, so sullen. But you’re much smarter than your age and I think by now you should be able to see yourself and see the people around you for what they are.” And letting up on the oars, he placed a hand on Will’s knee. “It hurts me to hear you shouting out ‘he’s not my father!’”

“All right, I’m sorry,” Will said.

“Then why do you keep doing it?”

“Look at him! And look at me!”

“The color, you mean? That bothers you? Why? Do you think you’re pure African or I am? It’s only a matter of degree. Listen, it took years to work out the resentments between the browns and the blacks. The browns had the good jobs, the money, and the vote. You know when they started to get together and work together? After the blacks got ahead a little bit and sweated themselves enough to buy a scrap of land, why then they got the vote, too, and the browns wanted their votes to get elected to the legislature. So,” and here Clarence, laughing, leaned back while the boat drifted toward shore, “well, a black man, knowing that, would simply not pay his taxes; so he wouldn’t be able to vote, and then one of these upper-class light skins would pay his taxes for him in exchange for his vote! Clever, wasn’t it?” he cried, wearing a frisky expression.

Will was not amused. “Tricks. That’s all it still is. Tricks, instead of having their rights. He and Mr. Mebane, hanging around Mr. Luther, up there in that fancy house! ‘Eleuthera means free,’ he tells me every time we go there. Free for who? Not for people like us! You think we’ll ever live in a
place like that? He gives you a cold drink and a piece of cake and thinks he’s so grand.”

“Who does? Francis Luther? It happens you’ve picked on one of the most decent men on the island.”

“I heard you say once you didn’t trust him.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, exactly. I was being wary. Give him a chance to prove he means what he says, that’s what I meant. And so far he has. He’s built houses, he’s opened a dispensary with a nurse on his place, and a doctor comes out once a month for checkups. Nobody else has done what he’s been doing. A very decent man,” Clarence repeated firmly.

Will snickered, remembering something. “He shacks up with Mrs. Tarbox in town.”

“What! What kind of talk is that? Where’d you hear a thing like that?”

“I heard Désirée talking to Pat—to Dad—in the kitchen. He said it wasn’t true, but she said people see him at her house.”

“People get me sick! Nothing better to do but spread lies and dirty gossip. I’m surprised at Désirée. And don’t you repeat it, hear?”

“Well, all right.” The old man was really angry, you could see that. “Well, all right. But still, Uncle Clarence, everything you said, sure it’s okay that he has a nurse there and all that stuff, but still—”

“Still what?”

“Still it’s only crumbs, isn’t it? Like the kids diving for money in the harbor when white tourists come. They think they’re so kind, throwing money away. The other day in town a man and woman, American, I think, by the way they talked, they stopped me on the street and handed me some candy. I threw it on the ground and told them what they could do with it.”

“Will, Will, that was mean! You shouldn’t have done it.
The people meant well, they meant to be kind. Don’t you see that?”

The crinkled face was distressed, its lines reaching up to where the white hair receded from the temples like cotton tufts. He’s old, Will thought. Too old.

“No, I don’t understand you, Will. It’s hard to remember what I was like when I was your age. But I don’t believe I was like you. No, I wasn’t. You’re a very bright boy, much more than I was. You don’t study hard enough, though. Sometimes”—Clarence spoke slyly—“I catch you sitting over your books, just sitting there looking at nothing. What are you thinking of?”

“I’m thinking that you people don’t do anything! You sit and talk about committees and elections and independence coming and how you can hardly make ends meet and shoes are so expensive. But in the Da Cunha shop they’re selling wine from France and diamonds worth more than your whole house. Talk, talk!”

“What would you have us do?”

“Get out in the streets! Get out and shoot! Burn their houses down and take what you need. That’s what.”

“That sort of thing gets nowhere! It’s not civilized. One works through government, through the labor unions! Ah, well, you’re a child. Come, here we are, let’s get rid of this fish and go home.”

A small crowd awaited the catch on the beach, where an impromptu fair and barter had been set up. Homemade brooms and hats and baskets, baked goods and flowered cotton aprons were set up on improvised tables and upended boxes. Will took the net of gleaming fish and laid it in a box while Clarence fastened the boat.

“Better not let anybody hear you talk about burning houses, son,” he warned, as he tied up.

Will stood there watching the old man fuss with the rope. Fumble. Fumble. Fumble your life away. He felt a strange softness toward the old man. He wanted to reach out and stroke him on the shoulder. Then anger filled him again, and he did not.

One day Teresa Luther went back to St. Felice. Tee Francis resisted still, but Teresa Luther gave in at last.

“How can you refuse?” Richard urged. “He’s asked us so many times, and now, with our first grandchild coming—”

“I have responsibilities,” she began.

“Nonsense! You have grown daughters who’ll look after Margaret. They’ll all get along without you very well for a few weeks,” he said gently.

Adversity had softened and weakened him. Oddly enough, she often thought, it had given him a greater dignity, as well.

“Look,” he said. “I got out this old album. Here you are.”

There she was, serious and pale under the dark fall of her hair. Here they all were, Père with his gold-knobbed cane on the lawn at Eleuthera and Julia, in flounces, standing with Tee in front of the twin staircase at Drummond Hall.

“That must have been taken not more than a year or so before we were married,” Richard observed.

“It must have been.”

He said unselfishly, “Francis would be so glad! I can see his face when you walk in.”

“And when you walk in.”

The album rested on the windowsill. A flurry of dead leaves, driven in gray, chilled air, blew past.

“It’s too bad we had to be so gray and gloomy on your first day in Paris,” Anatole Da Cunha had said on just such a day.

“You’re a strong girl, stronger than you know.” That was Marcelle, who had taught her to survive.

Strange, I haven’t thought of her in years. Not strange, I have made every effort not to.

“You can do whatever you have to do,” Marcelle had said.

That was true. A marriage without love, a secret like a box of dynamite in the closet—one could manage anything if one had to. Now, finally, I am called upon to go back. There can be no excuse this time, I have run out of them.