Island Beneath the Sea (41 page)

"My father has two hundred plus slaves that one day will be mine," Maurice confessed to Cobb.

"Is that what you want, son?"

"Yes, because I will be able to emancipate them."

"Then there will be two hundred plus Negroes abandoned to their fate and an imprudent boy in poverty. What is gained by that?" his teacher rebutted. "The struggle against slavery is not done plantation by plantation, Maurice, the way people think; the laws in this country and the world must be changed. You must study--prepare yourself and get involved in politics."

"I'm no good for that, sir!"

"How do you know? We all have an unsuspected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test."

Zarite

I
had stayed on the plantation almost two years, according to my calculations, before my masters again brought me to serve with the domestics. In all that time I had not seen Maurice because during his vacations his father did not let him come home
;
he always arranged to send him on a trip to other places, and finally, when his studies were complete, he took him to France to meet his grandmother. But that came later. The master wanted to keep him far away from Madame Hortense. Neither was I able to see Rosette, but Monsieur Murphy brought me news of her every time he went to New Orleans. "What are you going to do with that pretty girl, Tete? You'll have to lock her up to keep her from stirring a storm in the street
,"
he would joke with me.

Madame Hortense gave birth to a second daughter, Marie-Louise, who was born with a tight chest. The climate did not suit her but since no one can change the weather, except Pere Antoine in extreme cases, not much could be done to make her comfortable. It was because of her that they brought me back to the house in the heart of the city. That year Dr. Parmentier had arrived in New Orleans after a long time in Cuba, and he replaced the Guizot family's physician. The first thing he did was stop the leeches and mustard rubs, which were killing the child, and the next was to ask about me. I don't know how he remembered me after so many years. He convinced the master that I was the best person to look after Marie-Louise because I had learned a lot from Tante Rose. Then they ordered the manager to send me to the city. It was very sad to bid farewell to my friends and the Murphys and travel for the first time alone, with a permit to keep from being arrested.

Many things had changed in New Orleans during my absence
;
more garbage, more coaches and people, and a fervor of constructing houses and extending streets. Even the market had been expanded. Don Sancho no longer lived in the house with the Valmorains, he had moved to an apartment in the same neighborhood. According to Celestine, he had forgotten Adi Soupir and was in love with a Cuban woman whom no one in the house had ever seen. I moved into the mansard room with Marie-Louise, a pale little thing so weak she didn't even cry. It occurred to me to bind her to my body--that had given a good result with Maurice, who was also born sickly--but Madame Hortense said that that might be fine for blacks but not for her daughter. I did not want to put her in a cradle--she would have died--so I opted to always carry her in my arms.

As soon as I had a chance, I spoke with my master to remind him that I would be thirty that year and was due my freedom.

"Who will care for my daughters?" he asked me.

"I will, if that is what you want, monsieur."

"You mean that everything will be the same?"

"Not the same, monsieur
;
if I am free, I can leave if I want, none of you can beat me, and you will have to pay me a little so I can live."

"Pay you!" he exclaimed with surprise.

"That's how coachmen, cooks, nurses, seamstresses, and other free persons make a living, monsieur."

"I see you are very well informed. Then you know that no one employs a nursemaid
;
she is always part of the family, like a second mother, and later like a grandmother, Tete."

"I am not a part of your family, monsieur. I am your property."

"I have always treated you as if you were family! Well, then, if that is what you plan, I will need time to convince Madame Hortense, though it is a dangerous precedent and it will cause a lot of gossip. I will do what I can."

He gave me permission to go see Rosette. My daughter had always been tall and at eleven she looked fifteen. Monsieur Murphy had not lied, she was very pretty. The nuns had succeeded in curbing her impetuousness but had not erased her dimpled smile and seductive gaze. She greeted me with a formal curtsy, and when I hugged her she went rigid. I think she was embarrassed that her mother was a cafe au lait slave. My daughter was what mattered most to me in the world. We had lived like a single body, a single soul, until my fear that she would be sold, or that her own father would rape her, as he had me, had forced me to separate from her. More than once I had seen the master feeling her, the way men touch girls to know if they're ripe. That was before he married Madame Hortense, when my Rosette was an innocent little girl and he set her on his lap with affection. My daughter's coolness hurt me
;
to protect her, I might have lost her.

Nothing was left of Rosette's African roots. She knew about my
loas,
and Guinea, but in the school she had forgotten all that and become a Catholic
;
the nuns were nearly as horrified by voodoo as by Protestants, Jews, and Kaintucks. How could I reproach her for wanting a better life than mine? She wanted to be like Valmorain, not me. She talked to me with false courtesy, in a tone I didn't recognize, as if I were a stranger. This is how I remember it. She told me she liked the school, that the nuns were kind and were teaching her music, religion, and to write with a good hand, but no dance because that tempted the devil. I asked about Maurice, and she told me he was fine but that he felt lonely and wanted to come back. She knew about him because they wrote each other, as they'd done ever since they were separated. The letters took a long time to arrive, but they kept sending them without waiting for answers, like a conversation between fools. Rosette told me that sometimes a half dozen came the same day, but then several weeks would go by with no word. Now, five years later, I know that they addressed each other as "brother" or "sister" to throw off the nuns, who opened their students' correspondence. They had a religious code for referring to their feelings
:
the Holy Spirit meant love, prayers were kisses, Rosette posed as the guardian angel, he could be any saint or martyr from the Catholic calendar, and, logically, the Ursulines were devils. A typical letter from Maurice said that the Holy Spirit visited him at night, when he was dreaming of the guardian angel, and that he waked with a desire to pray and pray. She answered that she prayed for him and had to be careful among the hordes of devils that were always threatening mortals. Now I guard those letters in a box, and though I can't read them, I know what they say because Maurice read me some parts, those that were not too daring.

Rosette thanked me for the gifts of sweets, ribbons, and books that came, though I didn't know who sent them. How could I buy anything for her without money? I thought that Master Valmorain sent them, but she told me he had never visited. It was Don Sancho who gave the gifts in my name. May Papa Bondye bless the good Don Sancho! Erzulie, mother
loa,
I have nothing to offer my daughter. This is how it was.

A Promise to Be Kept

A
t the first possible opportunity Tete went to talk with Pere Antoine. She had to wait a couple of hours because he was making his rounds at the jail, visiting prisoners. He brought them food and cleansed their wounds and the guards did not dare stop him because word of his holiness had spread everywhere; some claimed that he had been seen in several places at the same time, and that sometimes a luminous plate floated above his head. Finally the Capuchin monk returned to the little stone house that served as his dwelling and office with his basket empty, wanting only to sit down and rest, but other needs awaited him and it was some time before sunset, the hour of prayer, when his bones took their ease as his soul rose to heaven. "I greatly regret, Sister Lucie, that I do not have the energy to pray more and better," he would say to the nun who attended him. "And why do you need to pray more,
mon pere
, if you are already a saint?" she invariably replied. He welcomed Tete with open arms, as he did everyone. He hadn't changed; he had the same sweet eyes of a big dog and the smell of garlic, he wore the same filthy robe, his wood cross, and prophet's beard.

"Where have you been, Tete!" he exclaimed.

"You have thousands of parishioners,
mon pere
, and you remember my name," she said, moved.

She explained that she had been at the plantation, and showed him for the second time the yellowed and brittle document of her freedom that she had been keeping for years, though it had done nothing for her because her master always found a reason to postpone what he had promised. Pere Antoine put on some thick astronomer's spectacles, took the paper over to the one candle in the room, and slowly read.

"Who else knows of this, Tete? I'm referring to anyone who lives in New Orleans."

"Dr. Parmentier saw it when we were in Saint-Domingue, but he lives here now. I also showed it to Don Sancho, my master's brother-in-law."

The priest sat down at a table with wobbly legs and wrote with difficulty, for the things he saw in this world were enveloped in a light fog, though he saw things in the other world with clarity. He handed her two messages spattered with ink stains and gave her instructions to take them herself to the two gentlemen.

"What do these letters say,
mon pere
?" Tete wanted to know.

"For them to come speak with me. And you, too, must be here next Sunday after mass. In the meantime I will keep this document," said the priest.

"Forgive me,
mon pere
, but I have never been parted from that paper," Tete replied with apprehension.

"Then this will be the first time." The Capuchin smiled and put the paper in a drawer in the table. "Don't worry, child, it is safe here."

That broken down table did not seem the best place for her most valuable possession, but Tete did not dare show misgivings.

On Sunday half the city gathered in the cathedral, among them the Guizot and Valmorain families with several of their domestics. It was the one place in New Orleans, aside from the market, where white people and those of color, free and slaves, mixed together, though the women were seated on one side and the men on the other. A Protestant pastor visiting the city had written in a newspaper that Pere Antoine's church was the most tolerant place in Christianity. Tete could not always attend mass--that depended on Marie-Louise's asthma--but that morning the baby waked feeling well, and they could take her out of the house. After the mass, Tete turned over the two girls to Denise and announced to her mistress that she had to stay a while; she needed to talk with the saint.

Hortense did not object, thinking that at last the woman was going to confession. Tete had brought her satanic superstitions from Saint-Domingue, and no one had greater authority than Pere Antoine to save her soul from voodoo. With her sisters she often commented that the Antilleans were introducing that fearsome African cult in Louisiana, as they had seen when, out of healthy curiosity, they went with their husbands and friends to the place Congo to witness the Negroes' orgies. Once it had been nothing more than shaking and twisting and noise, but now there was a witch who danced as if possessed with a long, fat snake coiled round her body, and half of the participants fell into a trance. Sanite Dede she was called, and she had come from Saint-Domingue with other Negroes and with the devil in her body. It was something to see the grotesque spectacle of men and women foaming at the mouth and with their eyes rolled back, the same ones who later crawled behind the bushes and wallowed like animals. Those people adored a mixture of African gods, Catholic saints, Moses, the planets, and a place named Guinea. Only Pere Antoine understood that hodgepodge and, unfortunately, allowed it. If he weren't a saint, she herself would initiate a public campaign to have him removed from the cathedral, Hortense Guizot made clear. People had told her of the voodoo ceremonies in which they drank the blood of sacrificed animals and the devil appeared in person to copulate with women from the front and the men from behind. It would not surprise her if the slave to whom she entrusted nothing less than her innocent daughters participated in those bacchanals.

In the little stone house the Capuchin, Parmentier, Sancho, and Valmorain were already seated in their chairs, intrigued; they did not know why they had been called. The saint knew the strategic value of the surprise attack. The ancient Sister Lucie, who came in shuffling her house slippers and with difficulty balancing a tray, served them an ordinary wine in chipped little clay cups and withdrew. That was the signal that Tete awaited to go in, as the priest had ordered.

"I have called you to this house of God to rectify a misunderstanding, my sons," said Pere Antoine, taking the paper from the desk drawer. "This good woman, Tete, should have been emancipated seven years ago, according to this document. Is that not so, Monsieur Valmorain?"

"Seven? But Tete has just turned thirty! I couldn't have liberated her any sooner!" the one addressed replied.

"According to the Code Noir, a slave who saves the life of a family member of the master has an immediate right to freedom, whatever her age. Tete saved the lives of you and your son Maurice."

"That cannot be proved,
mon pere
," replied Valmorain with a disdainful sneer.