Feast of All Saints (80 page)

It was a Creole plantation,
Sans Souci
, not one of those massive Grecian temples, cold and indifferent, and come so late to Louisiana with the Americans. Rather it was the old style of house, simple, harmonious, and built for the climate and the terrain. And Marcel had come upon it quite unawares in the hour just before dawn as his packet wound its way through the Rivière aux Cannes, not knowing that this distant lovely house, a vision emerging from the mist beyond a thinning line of forest, was in fact his aunt’s home.

He had left the great palatial steamboat on the Mississippi the night before, transferring to this smaller boat which then chugged inland on its serpentine route at an abominable pace, time and again stopping at a darkened pier beyond which the swamp, not so dense perhaps or so forbidding as it was one hundred miles south, nevertheless threw up its mysterious wall against the impenetrable and starless sky. And unable to sleep, he had come out on deck in the dark to find the morning warm and alive with whispering creatures and the slapping of the smaller paddle wheel somewhat soothing to the anxiety which had increased as he drew closer and closer to this unknown world. And then the sleepy porter had come out with the trunk behind him and as a slave appeared on the pier beyond, his lantern high in the clearing mist, had said,
“B’jour, Michie, c’est Sans Souci.”

High on a foundation of whitewashed pillars it stood, its broad verandas enclosing the main floor on three sides and supporting its deeply pitched roof with slender graceful columnettes. Narrow gabled attic windows looked out over the river, and a broad stairway ran down
from the front gallery with its double doors to the avenue of young oaks below.

Marcel’s heart was pounding as he mounted the steps. It had been years since he had seen his Tante Josette, and there came a sweet moment then when she took him in her arms. She was the eldest of the three sisters, and seemed vastly older than either Louisa or Colette, her hair pure white now, waving tightly back from her high forehead to a pair of pearl-studded combs. Tall, stiffly slender, she could look Marcel straight in the eyes in spite of his height, and when she kissed him there was a simple sincerity of affection to it which put him at once at ease. Memories came back to him, myriad impressions of her which had lain dormant in his childhood soul. The special perfume she always wore, a mixture of verbena and violets, and the particular feel of her firm hand.

She took him directly into the big parlor, its French doors open to the mild September air. There was strong coffee for him at once, and he sat back on a long couch and surveyed this high-ceilinged room with its immense old-fashioned fireplace (no mean coal grates here) and its many oil portraits hung over mantel, sideboard, between the windows, everywhere indeed that he might look. They were all dark faces, some bronze, amber, others the perfect cream of
café au lait
, and he recognized Tante Louisa and Tante Colette among them, and men and women he did not know. He had never seen such a vast collection of painted
gens de couleur
, and he was to remember the curious effect of it afterwards because it forecast the particular world to which he had just been admitted, the nature of which he could not have really guessed. In the coming months he was to study these pictures often, noting a style that ranged from a Parisian perfection to a cruder, ill-proportioned work, very expressive, however, which reminded him painfully of his own sketches. Tante Josette meantime settled at her high
secrétaire
against the wall, turning to face him in a Queen Anne chair. Her eyes had an intensity he remembered at once. They were youthful or timeless as was her voice which hadn’t the slightest timbre of old age. But the face was lined, the cheeks slightly sunken, and the dark blue broadcloth dress with its somewhat narrow sleeves and proper white lace collar completed the figure of advancing age. None of that frivolity that marked her sisters, the abundance of rings and frills. Only the two pearl-studded combs.

“You’re in good health,” she said. “And you’ve got your father’s height which is always an advantage and your mother’s delicate bones. And I see an animation and intelligence in your face which seems the best of them both. So tell me why you did such a foolish thing as to go to your father’s plantation, why you let that man humiliate you, why you let him put his boot in your face.”

All this was said so calmly that it took Marcel’s breath away.

But Tante Josette went on in the same even voice.

“Don’t you know who you are, and who your people are, Marcel?” she gave a short sigh. “When you let a white man humiliate you, we are all humiliated. When you give that man the opportunity to degrade you, we are all degraded. He knocked you down on the floor of a slave cabin, and so he knocked us all down. Do you understand?”

Not even Rudolphe could have said it better, if Christophe had ever given him the chance. Marcel felt his cheeks grow hot but he didn’t take his eyes off his aunt.

“Well,” he said, “at least we come right to the point.”

She uttered a small dry laugh. He himself did not realize he had said these words somewhat casually and confidently in a voice that was no longer the child’s voice she remembered, and she respected him for it.

“I was angry and bitter, Tante,” he continued. “I lived all my life with the idea I would go to Paris when I was of age, that I had a future. All that was changed, and I was angry, and bitter, and foolish.”

“I know that,” she said. “But had you no pride in yourself in the here and now, where you are? Paris may be the City of Light, Marcel, however, it is not the world. This is the world. Where was your pride?”

“I should have had it,” he said. But he could divine from her expression that she knew he did not entirely mean what he said. This, the world? How could he live in this world? He wondered if his mouth showed the bitterness, the positive anguish he felt at being on her charity here, on her hands. After all, she was not really his aunt, these were not really his people, he found himself looking off and shaking his head. “I have no fortune now, Tante, and no future, but I have money enough that I won’t be a burden to you while I’m here. I regret that…”

“Nonsense, you insult me. You are my nephew and this is my house.”

“Tante, I know about my mother. Years ago I got it out of Tante Colette. I know you picked her up off a street in Port-au-Prince in the time of Dessalines. It’s quite an accident my being here…”

“It’s an accident any of us being here or anywhere,” she said at once, with the same calm but quick manner. “It’s all an accident and we don’t care to realize that because it confuses us, overwhelms us, we couldn’t live our lives day to day if we did not tell ourselves lies about cause and effect.”

This he hadn’t expected. He turned slowly to her again and saw her meditative face in profile, the white hair rippling back through those combs to the chignon on the nape of her neck. An uncomfortable realization confronted him which was at once exciting. Why had
he thought this woman so peculiar in years past, so eccentric? Because she was intelligent?

“Tante, I wouldn’t insult you for the world,” he said. “I’m painfully aware, however, that I’m a burden to you whether you say so or not. I occupy space and I require food and drink. I’m on your hands. Please understand my anger in this helplessness and allow me my apologies. You’ve always treated me as if I were your own flesh and blood, my unhappiness now is no recrimination.”

“Hush, Marcel,” she said, but again she had been secretly impressed. “You’re being a bit of a fool. I love you and your sister just as I love your mother, don’t you understand the true nature of love?”

Of course he understood it. It was unselfish and unquestioning in the final analysis and it was loyal. He was humiliated by this love.

“You misunderstand it all,” she said. She had made her narrow fingers into the steeple of a church which she touched lightly to her lips, her eyes on the wall above her. “I know what my sisters told you, of how I snatched your mother from the shadow of that dead Frenchman in Port-au-Prince. But that’s the mere bones of the matter, not the real flesh and blood. Love can be quite selfish, Marcel, love can serve itself.”

She shifted in her chair so that she might see him. Her slight eyebrows were black still against her brown skin and arched lightly over the deep-set black eyes. Her thin Caucasian mouth was only a line now in old age. But her expression leapt from the eyes. “I had no right to take your mother from that street. She was a dark child for all her French features, those soldiers of Dessalines would not have harmed her. Oh, starved and lost for a while she might have been, you cannot imagine the sheer clumsiness and confusion of war. But she was not orphaned. Yet I took her, took her as if she were the spoils of a battle in which I myself was not even engaged.”

He looked away. This seemed absurd. But Tante Josette went on.

“I took her on the spur of the moment, Marcel, and plunged her into my world of my own will because I wanted to do it. She became my property at that moment, and
my responsibility
thereafter. More keenly perhaps than any child which God has sent to me since.”

There was no doubt she meant these rather extraordinary sentiments. She was not speaking this way merely to put him at ease. And seen in this light, the sordid battle, the moaning frightened child, and the brave woman going down the stairs to rescue her from the torn street—these images changed in Marcel’s mind slowly but richly; however, nothing distinct emerged. He attempted, just for a moment, to see it her way.

“Some would not have bothered, Tante,” he said. “Some would have trampled her underfoot in the escape.”

“I wanted her,” she said, arching those fine eyebrows.
“Wanted her.”
She studied him. “It was that desire for her, and certainly an impulsive desire, that lay at the root of the magnanimous act. I was widowed then, and barren. I wonder if she had not been such a beautiful child whether I would have noticed her at all.”

Marcel’s eyebrows knit tightly in a frown.

“Later, there was war between my sisters and myself when I came here to the country. They wanted to keep her, I wanted to take her with me. She decided it herself, loving Colette as she did and crying not to be taken with me here. Did you ever think what the lives of my sisters might be today if it weren’t for your mother? If it weren’t for your mother, and your sister, and you?”

He had never perceived it in that light. Of course Tante Louisa and Tante Colette had their lady friends. But they had lost all the babies they had ever carried, their lovers were long gone now, and it was the little Ste. Marie family that rooted them deeply and firmly into the community with its generations, it was the Ste. Marie family that was their world.

Of course Tante Josette had married again, Gaston Villier who had built
Sans Souci
, and one son born late in his mother’s life had survived the scourges of childhood to run this plantation after his father’s death with two sons of his own. But Louisa and Colette? Marcel, Marie, and Cecile were their life.

But how could he not be grateful for this, nevertheless? How could he wish himself back on that blood-torn island, if, in fact, he would ever have been born at all? Tante Josette was watching his expression, she was studying all of him as if she had only just had the vantage point from which to see the young man who he was. “You are part of me, Marcel,” she said, “just as I am part of you. And you belong here now.”

He wished he could believe it. He wished above all he could convince her that he believed it, so that he might stop causing her trouble, and find some corner here out of the way where he would not be underfoot for however long this exile must last.

“Thank you, Tante.”

“You did not acquire this wit from your mother or your father, I suspect,” she said, musing, her fingers made into the church steeple against her mouth. “You must have got it from God. Shall I make my point more keenly? Turn those blue eyes to me again, and let me see if you would really care to know the truth?”

“Don’t I know it already?” he said. “Isn’t the rest a matter of comprehension which must come with time?”

She gave a short negative shake of the head. “This will make it clear.”

Just a flicker of fear showed in his eyes, but there was no shrinking.

“We didn’t leave the island the day that we found your mother,” Josette said. “The massacre of the French continued, so did all the random and dreadful acts that are inevitable in war. But there were Americans left unmolested in Port-au-Prince, and it was with them that we planned to escape.

“Meantime our house was shuttered like a fortress. We bathed your mother, rocked her, combed her long hair. Whatever food we had we gave to her. But she was stunned. She whimpered like an animal. When she did say a few words they were African, quite distinctly African, though what tongue it was I couldn’t have told you then nor could I tell you now.

“But it was on the morning before we were to leave that we heard a frightful banging below. I heard it all the way to the back of the house where I was sleeping with your mother. Your aunts, Colette and Louisa, were huddled together in the front room. Of course I demanded to know what was it, and why hadn’t one of them even peeked from the shutters to the street. ‘You leave it alone,’ they said to me, both of them, ‘just some mad woman down there, some savage right from Africa, don’t even look.’ Well, my sisters could never fool me for long. I knew there was more to this, and I was bound and determined to tell what.

“It was a savage all right, a tall woman, very black, handsome I suppose, I couldn’t tell you, but dressed in nothing but a swath of red cloth and African to the marrow of her bones. She was pounding on the door with both fists and when she heard the shutter creak above she shouted in Gombo French, ‘You give me back my child!’ ”

Tante Josette paused. Marcel was staring at her, enrapt.

“Others had seen us take your mother, others were standing about, watching, as this woman pounded on the door. But that house had survived years of siege, and we huddled inside of it not making the slightest sound. I crept to the back and gathered little Cecile in my arms again, covering her ears.