“Maman, will you tell one of your stories?” Philomene asked.
Suzette hesitated, but only for a moment. Whichever direction they took on their travel Sundays, whether to the Fredieu farm or walking to the Hertzog plantation to visit Gerasíme, Suzette could bring herself alive again.
“Did I ever tell you about the Christmas party on Rosedew?” she began.
Philomene dropped Palmire’s hand and ran far enough ahead to face the two sisters. Reverse walking, and deftly dodging pine trees at her back, she pantomimed Gerasíme playing the fiddle, then became Elisabeth picking up her skirts to dance, and back to Gerasíme throwing a broad wink.
Palmire smiled and nodded, and Philomene laughed. It seemed the only time either of them was playful was with each other.
“Tell it again, Maman. Don’t leave anything out,” Philomene pleaded, taking up Palmire’s hand again.
* * *
When they reached Narcisse Fredieu’s farm, they turned south at the clearing around the farmhouse and headed out back. Narcisse owned only six slaves. There were only two cabins, hardly a quarter at all, both rough-and-tumble one-room houses. Elisabeth came out on the stoop of one of them to greet the visitors. Wisps of coarse white hair peeked out from under her tignon.
“Rest yourselves on the porch,” she said. “I already put some fresh greens from the patch on, and fatback.”
Elisabeth looked appraisingly at Philomene. “Go on and get the comb. Let me fix that pretty hair,” she said, and Philomene disappeared inside the cabin. Elisabeth sat on the porch chair, and when Philomene came out to sit at her feet, her back to Elisabeth’s knees, Elisabeth clamped her thighs on either side of the girl’s shoulders. She unbraided Philomene’s two plaits, ran the comb through her long chestnut hair from scalp to tip, and began to rebraid, and they all talked of small things.
Midmorning, in a cloud of dust, Doralise and Gerant arrived in Doralise’s buggy. Gerant dropped the reins, helped Doralise down, and waited by the buggy until she adjusted her skirts and angled her open umbrella against the sun. They all stood, and it took all of Suzette’s willpower not to run to her son and fling her arms around him. Instead she memorized each change since she had last seen him. Gerant had grown almost a foot taller, both his body and face had filled out, and he had the beginnings of a thin mustache. He looked healthy and well fed, a striking, honey brown boy, quiet, with trouble-avoiding eyes.
Elisabeth offered Doralise the porch chair.
“I brought Gerant to visit,” Doralise said, once more arranging her skirts as she sat. “His pass is to stay the night, but he needs to be back before dark tomorrow.”
“Can we offer you cool water?” Elisabeth asked.
“Merci,” Doralise replied. “Let me just find a bit of shade before I am on my way.”
Gerant stood by the buggy while Philomene fetched a gourd full of water and brought it back to the porch. Doralise whispered to Philomene, Philomene whispered back, and Suzette saw a small article exchange hands and disappear into Philomene’s apron pocket.
Doralise drained the water and stood. “I will be going now,” she said.
“Madame, I want to thank you for bringing Gerant,” Suzette told her, hurrying to her side.
“He misses all of you.”
“Madame, can I ask what passed between you and Philomene?”
“Just a little rock Clement found and thought she might like.”
“He’s only a field hand, Madame.”
“They seem devoted, Suzette,” Doralise replied firmly. “After all this time.”
Suzette shrugged.
“I will continue to look after Gerant,” Doralise said to Suzette, and Gerant helped her back up into the buggy.
After Doralise had clicked the horse on its way, Gerant joined them on the porch. It took a while before they could stop touching and hugging him.
* * *
One raw gray morning in the fall of her third year on Ferrier’s farm, Suzette heard her name called from Palmire’s cabin. She had spent the night on a chair in the children’s room, nursing Oreline’s son, waiting for his fever to break.
Ferrier’s shout was insistent.
“Suzette!”
Suzette dropped the firewood she was carrying into the kitchen and rushed outside. When she got to the door of the cabin, breathless, Ferrier was pulling on Palmire’s arm, trying to get her up from her pallet. His face was knotted with frustration. It was harvest, and he had been coiled tight all week, pushing hard at Suzette and Palmire as well as himself to get the crop in. Palmire was still on her pallet, looking unsteady and dazed, but when she saw Suzette behind Ferrier, she motioned for her to come close. A rank smell overpowered Suzette as she approached her sister.
Palmire brought both of her hands up to her temples and squeezed at her head, twisting her face in pain, and then she put both hands on her stomach as if to vomit again. She reached out to Suzette, her hand so contracted that it looked like a bird’s claw, and drew one of Suzette’s hands to her chest, guiding it in fast pats. Her eyes were deep in their sockets, and she looked panicky. It was as if the very flesh on her face had shrunk overnight.
Suzette turned to Ferrier, keeping hold of her sister’s dry hand.
“I have to take care of her, M’sieu Ferrier. She is sick. Palmire never gets sick,” Suzette said, rising.
“I cannot spare anyone today. We have to get the crop in,” Ferrier said without hesitation. “Call Madame Oreline.”
“Please, M’sieu, no one is like I am with Palmire. Let me stay.”
“Go get Madame Oreline,” Ferrier repeated.
Suzette let go of Palmire’s hand and ran to the house. “Madame, come quick,” she called. “Palmire is in a desperate way.”
Oreline threw on her wrap over her nightgown without doing her morning toilet and followed Suzette to the cabin. Palmire had already passed into a fitful sleep.
“She is sick right enough,” Ferrier said to his wife as she came into the cabin. “You have to spare Philomene from the house today. She comes to the field with us. Can you look after Palmire?”
“Of course,” said Oreline, and to Suzette, “I will do what I can for her. Go on now.”
In the field, Suzette worried all day. Philomene, unaccustomed to crop labor, stumbled often in the fierce heat between the rows of cotton, and Suzette couldn’t erase the image of Palmire’s terrified face when she had reached out her hand to her that morning. When at last the sun began to lower in the sky, Ferrier let them come in, hot and sweaty. Suzette rushed to the cabin, and as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw first Oreline in a chair beside the bed and then the unnatural color of Palmire’s face and body. Her sister had turned a leaden blue, dark and mottled. Palmire’s skin was wrinkled and folded, as if she were an ancient woman, and her breathing was ragged and uncertain. Palmire turned her head slightly and vomited, but there was no longer any food in her to bring up. What came up was like rice water.
“She just gets worse,” Oreline said, looking to Suzette.
Suzette came closer and took a rag to wipe her sister’s mouth. When Suzette touched her jaw, Palmire’s mouth flew open. Her tongue looked like a dead fish.
Suzette turned to Philomene. “There’s tasso you can heat up for supper,” she instructed, “and make some biscuits with cane syrup. Go.”
Philomene ran toward the farmhouse.
“I can take over now, Madame,” she said to Oreline.
“I did what I could for her.” Looking miserable, Oreline left Suzette and Palmire alone.
Suzette wiped Palmire’s forehead, and when her sister’s arms and legs began to spasm uncontrollably, she massaged them. She tried to get Palmire to connect with her, to meet her eyes and challenge the sickness, but she was drifting from listless and unaware to coma.
Palmire never regained consciousness and died that night. Fast, from one sundown to the next. It wasn’t until the next day they found out that on the Fredieu farm, Narc
isse’s wife, Tranquillin, had been stricken with the same symptoms as Palmire’s, ending in the same abrupt death coma.
Cholera had come to Cane River.
* * *
After Palmire died, Suzette was no longer certain she could resist the pull of the black fog.
Philomene found her way to Suzette’s side as often as she could, coaxing Suzette to tell her stories, anything to get her talking, but it was all Suzette could do to keep moving and do her work. She tried to hold on for Philomene’s sake. She wanted to reach out and stroke the girl’s hair, to tell her something important about how to protect herself, but it was too much effort, and she didn’t have anything worthwhile to say.
Suzette was vaguely aware that Philomene took on many of her own chores. Philomene got up before dawn, filled the woodboxes with kindling, lit fires in the chilly bedrooms in the morning and evening, washed and ironed the clothes, parched the coffee, and stoked the fires at night while Oreline’s family slept. She cooked, fetched water and milk from the springhouse and meat from the smokehouse. She bathed, diapered, dressed, groomed, and entertained Oreline’s infant children. She spun thread and picked seeds from the cotton, gathered eggs, plucked chickens, and drove cows to and from the woods. When Suzette went to the field, Philomene toted water to her and Ferrier before heading back to the house, where she would comb Oreline’s hair, lace her corset, and arrange her hoopskirts.
Philomene tried to get Suzette to imagine happier days, off in the future, but when Suzette thought about Philomene’s glimpsing, of the long table piled high with food when they were all together again, she remembered who wasn’t there. Not Palmire. Not Gerasíme.
Suzette’s old dreams of white dresses, St. Augustine, and freedom for her children had proven to be senseless and unreachable.
The future was too heavy for her to carry. It was up to Philomene now.
P ART T WO
Philomene
11
P hilomene Daurat turned the corner of the house on Ferrier’s farm with her long-limbed stride, her careless hair flying behind her. The beginning weight of the baby made her body seem different, foreign. Looking down at her forearms, exposed below the cuff of her thin gingham blouse, she could see that the Louisiana sun had already turned the ivory yellow color of her winter skin to the deep olive she became in summer. Her arms were muscular and firm from the constant demands of heavy farmwork, and her body was a woman’s body, caught up at last to the mind that had always seemed mature.
She was fully aware of the danger that accompanied the emergence of her high breasts and rounded hips, and thanks to her man, Clement, she also understood the pleasures. They were to be married in front of the priest in just five days. She would have jumped the broom, if that was the best she could have made happen, but she wanted something like the real ceremony the white people had. The way her marraine, Doralise, had done it.
It was well past first light. Philomene had stuffed her tignon in her apron pocket as she’d hurried out of the cabin, intending to capture her hair when she wasn’t so behind schedule. She was on her way to the henhouse to collect eggs for preparing breakfast, and her focus was on the task before her, as always. It was the way she had with everything, putting herself into it mind and body, without a spare thought or motion, until she turned herself to the next thing to be done.
She had to blink against the strong sun, still so low in the sky that the side of the house had blocked its glare until she had almost fully passed the front gallery. Before she even saw him there, she could feel his eyes on her.
Narcisse Fredieu.
He had always watched her, for as long as she could remember. She had grown up with those eyes always on her. In the beginning the watching had been just another condition of her existence, like emptying the stinkpots, or obeying Oreline’s orders, or the unchangeable fact that Monday was bake day.
At some point, she couldn’t recall exactly when, she had begun to sense the singular nature of his watching, and only then had it made her uneasy. Over the years she had added strands of different impressions, until they formed a dense, complicated knot of fear and anger, challenge and loathing, that she carried from place to place deep in the core of her stomach, not unlike the way she carried the baby now.
Narcisse applied different faces to the watching. One day it showed itself as fascination, on another day open desire, on still another domination. No matter the look of the moment, at its base was always a call for submission, so easily recognizable between white and dark.
When submission was demanded, the outward signs of submission were always offered. It was a well-polished survival technique, and Philomene used it especially carefully with Narcisse. Even as she bowed her head or rounded her back or averted her eyes with the watcher, she seethed at his right to invade her in this way, as a dangerous game, as a prelude. Anger had no practical or logical expression against a white man, so she tried to ignore the looks he gave her, his tendency to be in the same places she was, all of a sudden, drinking her in.
She could remember his first wife, dimly, a pasty-faced woman with a soft voice and timid manner. The woman had always looked to Philomene as if the wind could come and blow her to some other place, without the world taking any notice. Mam’zelle Tranquillin, dead of cholera. They didn’t talk about her anymore, and Narcisse had started bringing out a new woman when he visited the farm, another of the endless Derbannes sprinkled around the Cane River landscape. The new one’s name was Mam’zelle Arsine Derbanne, and she always arrived with a chaperone or two in tow. Narcisse had not brought her along today. He looked to be alone, and early to the farm. He was here too often, as far as Philomene was concerned, but her opinion was neither requested nor expressed.
Philomene hurried her steps toward the henhouse, as if she didn’t know Narcisse was watching. She was careful not to glance in his direction.
* * *
Narcisse was waiting as she came out of the henhouse with her apron bunched around the still-warm eggs she had gathered to prepare for that morning’s breakfast.
“You’ve tied up your hair already, I see. What a shame,” he said, his voice sugary.
Philomene stopped several feet away and assumed her pose, aware of Narcisse’s deep-set eyes trying to find an opening.
“Morning, M’sieu Narcisse. I need to get these eggs into the kitchen.”
“I understand you want to marry one of Tessier’s field boys,” he said, brushing aside her remark. “You should have come to me for something so important. You deserve someone better than a field hand. You could do better. I’ve known your mother and your grandmother since long before you were born. I could help you do better.”
“M’sieu, I could do no better than Clement. It is meant to be.”
Philomene stared at an imaginary spot to the left of his elbow as she talked, her head not fully bowed. She kept her voice low but even. It would be easier if she could retreat into her mind and be as unaware as her mother sometimes was, or as patient as her grandmother, but her glimpsings made her promises, set her onto the path of intentions, made her too bold.
“I’ve heard about your ‘gift.’ What else can you see? Anything for me?” Narcisse put on a solicitous, playful air, as if he were passing the time with an overindulged child, but his voice betrayed genuine interest and something else, between respect and fear. The Creoles were a superstitious lot.
“No, M’sieu, I am sorry.”
“Surely with all of the powers at your command, you can look to wherever you go for your visions and tell me something that could prove useful for me to know.”
“Maybe you will have a long and happy life with a new wife,” Philomene said.
“You’ve seen that?”
Philomene could hear the quickening in Narcisse without needing to look into his face. “No, M’sieu. I just hope it for you.”
His interest waned, and he came back in a different direction. “What is it that you see in this boy?”
&
nbsp; “His name is Clement. We have known each other since we were children on Rosedew.”
“You don’t need a boy. You need a man. A man who could protect you.”
Protect her from what? Philomene thought. From being a slave? No one could protect her from that. “Clement is the only man I need. We will marry, and we will have children. They are already on the way. I saw it, and now it is coming to pass.”
Narcisse went on as if she had not spoken at all. “I told Ferrier that he shouldn’t let you marry that boy.”
Philomene stood immobile, seeming to study the ground at her feet, but she was shaken. Narcisse had influence over Oreline. But she knew what a stubborn man Ferrier was, not one to give in easily to outside influence, and all of the plans were already set.
“M’sieu Ferrier has already given his permission,” Philomene said, trying to keep her voice steady. “The wedding is Saturday. M’sieu Daurat is coming, too, to stand up for me.”
Philomene included both her owner’s and her father’s names, as if matching Narcisse’s resistance with the mention of two other white men could make him back down, make everything come out all right. She collected herself. She had said too much to Narcisse already. There was no advantage in talking overmuch.
“Will there be anything else, M’sieu Narcisse? They wait on me to prepare breakfast.”
“I’ve known your family for a long time. I want what’s best for you.”
“Oui, M’sieu.”
“I will be at the wedding. I have an interest in you. Don’t ever forget that.”
“Oui, M’sieu.”
“You have lovely hair, Philomene. I like to see it free of your scarf.”
“Oui, M’sieu.”
“You may go.”
* * *
Wednesday, wash day, Philomene removed a water-weighted bedsheet from the washtub where they had just boiled it clean. Suzette took one end, Philomene the other, and they stretched the white sheet between them, wringing out the excess water. It took both of them to smooth it out so they could hang it to dry.
Cane River Page 12
