Feast of All Saints (10 page)

No one understood what he was doing there. Richard would leave him at the corner on the way home from class with a shrug. The streets were filled with the shops of such free colored craftsmen, good men all of course, but they worked with their hands, what was the fascination? Especially for Marcel who possessed for Richard always, the panache of a planter’s son, born for drawing rooms and crystal glasses, as if he had been nurtured in the big house itself, and not in the demimonde.

Cecile, observing Marcel once at the back of the shop, turned beneath her parasol with a stiff back. Marcel was humiliated until he was sure that Jean Jacques had not seen.

“Well, they told me you made yourself at home in that shop,” she said that night at dinner. “Would you please be so kind as to tell me why?”

Marcel played with the food on his plate.

“I don’t want you hanging about a shop,” she said, as she gestured to Lisette for more soup. “Marcel, are you listening to me? I don’t want you with that old man.”

“But why?” He looked up as if from a dream.

“That’s what I asked you, Monsieur. To tell me why?”

He paid her no mind whatsoever. It never occurred to him to do so. Sundays were unspeakably dreary to him because Jean Jacques’ shop was closed, and every other day now he was there at one time or another, and sometimes, swelling with pride, was left to watch for a moment or two while Jean Jacques in the backyard fed the fire with the day’s debris.

At last one afternoon as he sat on a stool by the stove, staring at that open ledger, Jean Jacques, who had been writing in it since he had come in, turned to say, “It’s my diary,” as if he had heard the wordless question aloud.

Marcel was amazed. Writers kept diaries, and so did the planters,
and so did Jean Jacques. He would get a diary himself at once, why hadn’t he thought of it before now?

Jean Jacques laughed lightly, soundlessly at the expression on Marcel’s face.

“Why, you stare at this book as if it were alive!” said the old man. He shook his head and closed the ledger carefully, running his hand along the cover. “Well, it’s precious enough to me. Forty-nine years ago when I left Cap François, I didn’t have anything with me but the clothes on my back and a diary just like this one in my hands. See there?” He pointed beyond the front room of the shop to the small rear bedroom. Marcel saw a shelf above the neatly made bed and on it was a row of such ledgers. “That’s the very same book there, which I began in Cap François, and next to it are those I’ve filled for forty-nine years.”

“But what do you write in it, Monsieur?” Marcel asked.

“Everything,” Jean Jacques smiled. “How the day begins and how it ends. What I do that day and what happens to others. All those events that took place in Saint-Domingue, those I saw with my own eyes, and those that were told to me by others.” All this he said slowly, thoughtfully, his eyes off to one side as though he were seeing the things of which he spoke. “I imagine you’ve heard plenty about those times,” he went on glancing at Marcel. He rose from the chair, and pressing his hands to the small of his back, he stretched.

He looked like a young man when he did this. But then his shoulders came forward as they’d been before, his vest sagged open as he stooped, and he was the old man again, his steps slow as he approached the bench and looked at the tools before him.

He had said more in these few moments than the sum of all that had ever passed between them, and Marcel had liked his manner of speech. His French was not formal but almost perfect. In short, he spoke like a gentleman. “Your aunts must have told you enough,” he said. “I mean Madame Colette and Madame Louisa. I remember them when they came, and your Maman when she came, she was just a baby…like that.” He made the gesture with his hand to indicate she had been so high.

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…”