“The times seem to have left me behind,” said Narcisse. “I know you buy my land out of loyalty, not need, and I appreciate it, my young friend.”
Joseph laughed. “Young indeed. Fifty-four this summer.” He turned sober. “Don’t be absurd about the land, Narcisse. It is located perfectly for my needs.”
“Not a promising beginning to a conversation where we need to talk truth, Joseph.”
“Monsieur, not again.”
“Yes, again. You’ll always be my dear friend, like a son, but face facts. You cannot hold back every hothead in Grant Parish. You have enemies, Joseph, and they grow in strength and number. This is not only about you. Emily is my daughter. Those are my grandchildren. You cannot go on under the same roof. I am not so influential as I once was. There’s a new crop of men around here now, and the talk is ugly. Local and statewide petitions are being circulated to get cohabitation between the races declared a felony. Not that the locals need law on their side. If you care about Emily and the children, you have to protect them. Provide, yes. Love them, yes. Joseph, you need to move them somewhere safer.”
Joseph’s face was hard. “That I will not do.”
“Keep them close, but marry white,” Narcisse said. “It is the way of things.”
“My position in Aloha is stronger now than in ’88 when you convinced me to run,” Joseph said. “We keep to ourselves, we don’t go together to town, we don’t provoke. We just want to be left alone.”
* * *
For his fifty-fifth birthday Joseph gave himself a small party, bringing out his mandolin for the first time in months. They laid in large quantities of food and liquor and invited only his closest friends, the ones who accepted him and Emily together. It was a small and lively group, old women, young men, children, white, Negro, colored. Emily enlisted the help of Philomene and Suzette in the kitchen, and Gerant came, too; and Joseph invited Narcisse Fredieu, Joseph Ferrier, Antoine Morat, and Jacques Andrieu, Angelite’s beau. The children were allowed to stay up late, even Mary, and everyone danced while Joseph played. Emily and Joseph sang several songs together, their high and low voices complementing each other well.
Old man Narcisse Fredieu and white family.
“More, more,” called Narcisse, clearly enjoying both the homemade wine and the singing, and Joseph began to play “Danse aux Ma Mamselle.”
The music and voices were so loud at first that Joseph did not hear the horses outside. Jacques, who stood closest to the window, began to quiet everyone and motioned for Joseph to stop playing.
“Come on out of there, Joseph Billes.”
The gay mood of the evening evaporated at the sound of the deep voice.
“Take everyone to the back,” Joseph whispered to Emily, and handed her his mandolin. Emily, Philomene, Suzette, Gerant, Angelite, T.O., Josephine, Joseph, and Mary all slipped quickly into the kitchen, near the rear door.
Joseph picked up his Winchester. He strode boldly out the front door beyond the gallery, and Narcisse and the other white men from inside the house followed.
“What do you want? What are you doing on my land?” Joseph said loudly to the men on horseback. There were three of them. “Alphonse, is that you?”
“Joseph, we came to talk to you quietly, no need for the gun. We didn’t know you were entertaining.”
“Then go on now and we’ll talk over any business later in town,” Joseph said.
“This is personal,” the lead man said. “What’s going on here isn’t right. It would be best for us to get down and discuss this calmly now.”
“Just stay on your horses.” Joseph walked toward the men, his rifle in view. “Your boy enjoying the clerkship I arranged, Alphonse?”
“You’ve been good to this town, Joseph, but you can’t expect us to stand for this abomination before God any longer. You have to quit it, or we can’t be responsible. The others wanted to make a different kind of visit here tonight. I’m here instead because of what you did for my boy.”
“This is my home, and my land, and you have no part of that,” Joseph said angrily. “I say what happens here. Get off my property.”
“It’ll go down hard on you, Joseph. See reason.”
Narcisse walked closer to the horsemen and stood directly beside Joseph. “We go back a long way, Alphonse,” he said.
“Evening to you, Narcisse.”
“Go on and leave now,” Narcisse said. “Your message has been delivered.”
The lead man stared down at Narcisse and then Joseph and turned his horse around, heading toward town. The others followed. Narcisse put his arm around Joseph’s shoulder, and they walked back to the house.
The party was over.
One week later a fire broke out in the barn, and they barely managed to get the animals out before dousing the flames. Within a month of the fire Emily came out one early morning and found five of their chickens thrown onto the front gallery. Their throats were slit.
37
I n 1896 Narcisse Fredieu died of pneumonia, leaving behind a small estate laden with debt, one legal widow, sixteen surviving children, and eight grandchildren. His widow was forced to sell off his possessions to pay the debts, and no one expected much left over. The value of his estate was reflected in the old age and condition of his oxen and the barely usable old tools he gave to his sons Nick and Matchie before he died. The inheritance he had hoped to leave behind eluded him.
* * *
For Emily, her father’s presence had always meant a certain kind of immunity. As long as he was just across the river, she believed she could rise above common opinion, could confound the law. She was Joseph Billes’s woman and Narcisse Fredieu’s daughter, an implicit warning to others to think twice, to keep their hands to themselves. It had always meant a pass, the benefit of the doubt. Narcisse claimed race mixing as an individual right, an old-school throwback, but his death coincided with a moral hardening of the times against such a minority view.
His children paid him the purest homage. From oldest to youngest, colored to white, from Emily to Edd, they grieved his passing and took care of his grave. Week after week following Narcisse’s burial, Emily asked her mother to visit the gravesite with her, but Philomene always refused.
Settlement of Narcisse Fredieu estate.
Finally Philomene bent in the face of Emily’s persistent appeals and consented, and Suzette went with them. Narcisse Fredieu’s presence had always been an unbroken force, snaking back and forth through all their lives, master, consort, father, tormentor, protector. It took some adjustment to conceive of a world in which he played no part.
The three women traveled together by buggy to the Cloutierville cemetery, a long and dusty ride. When Emily identified Narcisse’s burial spot for them, Philomene stood motionless at the foot of his grave, studying the inscription on the cool, polished marker.
“What does it say?” she asked.
Emily read the chiseled message. “It says ‘Narcisse Fredieu, 1824 to 1896, Beloved husband and father.’”
The granite, ordered and paid for by Joseph Billes, gave off a mottled gray sheen of pedigree and respectability. Philomene ran her fingers across the slab. Then, with slow deliberation, she hitched back her shoulders, drew deep down into her throat, and spat on Narcisse’s grave, putting her full weight into it. Calmly she wiped her mouth with the handkerchief she kept in her dress pocket. Emily kept surprise from her face, thinking how little she knew of these women she came from, trying to do as Bet would and listen. She studied the set to her mother’s jaw, the stiff back, and saw a small flicker of confusion, an involuntary knitting of Philomene’s dark eyebrows.
“He was a thief.” Stone-faced, Philomene paced at the foot of the plot. “He stole my youth, he stole my man, and he stole one of my children for twenty years. He made me hard. I want satisfaction.”
Suzette didn’t move from where she stood, the high sun full on her, no shade to be had. She shielded her eyes from the bright light with one hand and tal
ked quietly to Philomene. “Daughter, you always were smart, and you had the glimpsings,” she said. “But you got powerful in yourself. Narcisse Fredieu forced some of that on you.”
“Are you defending him?” Philomene said, eyes darkening against her mother.
“I do not excuse one thing the man did, but he is part of the children you’re so proud of. Maybe not the best part.” Suzette tried to break the tension with a throaty chuckle. Philomene did not soften. “You and Gerant were the only children of mixed blood not sold away early on Rosedew. Privileged among the scorned. To free you were slave, to field you were house, to whites colored, and look at you now. You made a place for yourself and family. Your own land, children who can read and write. Narcisse Fredieu is six feet under the ground and you’re here standing on top.”
* * *
It was only four years until the turn of the century, and groups of Night Riders haunted the backwoods of central
Louisiana. They were small in number, informal and inconsistent, and drew their ranks from across culture and class, from hill men to businessmen. Most of their work was under cover of darkness, terrorizing Negroes they decided had overstepped in some way, had forgotten their place. They randomly burned, maimed, even killed, and were seldom challenged. Such was the force of their mission for racial purity that they served up reminders to white men as well.
Jacques Andrieu.
Jacques Andrieu received a visit from three men he did not know late one night in 1896. Rousted from a sound sleep, Jacques found himself jostled outdoors in his nightclothes. Two of the Night Riders forced him down, his back to his woodchopping stump near the house. The third man poured gasoline around his barn and set the match. Jacques helplessly watched the flames consume his property as the man who lit the match strode back casually.
“Hold his hand out flat,” he barked. On the block, wedged blade down, was Jacques’s hatchet. The leader shimmied it free.
“That the hand you use to touch the nigger gal?” Without waiting for a response, he brought the cold, sharp edge down on Jacques’s little finger, below the knuckle, a clean slice. The stroke seemed almost effortless.
“We don’t need your kind here,” he said. “We mean to keep this land pure.”
* * *
Angelite came to Emily as she tied back the grapevines in the small vineyard behind the house on Billes Landing.
“Maman, Jacques is leaving to go back to France,” Angelite said.
“Alone?” asked Emily. Angelite looked tired, her eyes rimmed red, her cool, pale skin drained of color beneath her sunbonnet.
“I do not want to go with him.”
“He would marry you in France,” Emily said. “Jacques came to Joseph to plead his case. He wants the baby born in Perpignan.”
“Do you want me to go?” Angelite asked.
“I want you to think about the child. If you stay, we’ll take care of both of you, but Jacques asks you to be his wife once you get to France, the way he cannot here.”
“He’s asking me to turn my back on family. He says to remain here punishes the child for what he calls an accident of birth. Jacques wants to bring our children up white. I won’t pretend to be white, here or in France. I will not pass.”
“Your uncle Eugene took that road,” Emily said with sadness. She hadn’t heard from her brother since he’d left Cane River for Texas.
“I want to stay near you and the Grands,” Angelite said.
“Remember Grandmémère Elisabeth?” Emily asked. “The touching before she died ten years ago?”
“Of course,” Angelite said.
“For months after I was starved for family, and Mémère never left my thoughts. I struggled with where I belonged. On one day I would see myself as weak and alone, and the next as the sum of everyone who had come before and everyone who would come after. Joseph tried to be helpful, but somehow I knew my comfort lay on the other side of the river, with Bet and the Grands. Mémère Elisabeth touched each of us, Angelite, and when I understood that she was with me, in me, forever, that became my inheritance, not the quilt she left to me. Whatever you decide, to follow Jacques or stay here, you already have that inheritance, too.”
“Jacques is not like Papa,” Angelite said. “He will not stay to fight.”
“The Night Riders have become more bold, striking white men. Jacques is right to be afraid. His little finger was a warning. Only his white blood kept him from death that night. And now that the baby is obvious . . .”
“Papa stood up to them.” For a moment Emily clearly saw herself in her daughter. The blind desire for a strong man to keep her safe from the reality of the times.
“Joseph has a stronger place in the community, and he and your grandfather stood up together. Narcisse Fredieu is gone now.”
“I told Jacques I would give him my answer by the end of the month.”
Emily nodded, unsure of what Angelite would choose.
Jacques returned to France exactly six months after Narcisse died, leaving Angelite behind. When the child was born Angelite christened him Joseph, after her father, the same as her brother, but they called him Buck.
* * *
It was a blow to the whole family, not just Emily, when Joseph Billes married Lola Grandchamp.
A settled and mature woman in her late forties, Lola was from a marginal but old-line Natchitoches family. Never married and understandably closemouthed about her age, she subtracted several birthdays in her own mind over the years and still lived with her father on a small farm near Cloutierville. Lola was of unspectacular but sufficient lineage to blot some of the stain of Joseph’s scandalous behavior for the last twenty years. She was neither worldly nor clever, but she was unimpeachably white. Lola was as old-fashioned as her age implied, slightly stout in the Creole tradition, and a devout Catholic, with more pretensions to society than success in that arena. She would do for Joseph’s purposes.
There was speculation on both sides of the river why Lola would settle for a self-made Frenchman with such a conspicuous and dark past. Some thought it romantic that a woman her age could find true love, but they were very few. Most attributed her decision to marry Joseph to a quiet but desperate desire to change the contours of her days at home with an overbearing father and his third wife rather than enchantment with Joseph himself, not to mention his money. Lola carried herself with a superior bearing, and her scowl in even the most joyous of times betrayed her closely held belief in the inescapable disappointments of life. She vigorously disapproved of the life Joseph Billes had lived before approaching her and had been heard by those on the Natchitoches side of the river emphatically condemning any mixture of the races. But she also went on to defend her fiancé, and the salvation that awaited him, now that he had chosen to denounce his sins and rejoin the white community. He was, after all, a man of some means and, she assumed, eager to change.
Emily kept up with all of this from the house on Billes Landing. Information traveled along strange roads in the backcountry. Joseph never talked to her directly about his plans to marry, only about the need for Emily to move from their house, but stories of Joseph’s whereabouts reached her, and she was able to follow each stage of Joseph’s parallel life as he created it. The proposal. The acceptance. The setting of the wedding date. The donation in good faith to Lola Grandchamp of 850 acres of land, including the house on Billes Landing.
Emily no longer worked in the store, one more public display Joseph felt the town would not tolerate. He hired a full-time man to clerk and stock, replacing her there as he prepared to replace her elsewhere. Two miles away, at a bend along Cornfine Bayou, Joseph built Emily a house in the middle of seventy-four acres he deeded to the children.
“I built the house big enough to hold Suzette and Philomene, too. They could move in with you.”
“This is my house,” Emily said to Joseph, waving her hand broadly to indicate the front room where they stood. “Four of my five children were born here. Mary is not yet seven,
Angelite eighteen.”
“The new house is not far,” Joseph reasoned. “I will visit often, and the children can come back here anytime.”
Emily did not answer Joseph, busying herself elsewhere.
As Joseph’s wedding date approached, their conversations became more strained, with no new arguments to offer. The larger unspoken issue overwhelmed them both, exhausted them both, and by comparison the details of day-to-day living seemed too trivial to share. The silences grew between them like the lilies that skimmed the surface of the swamp, spreading wider and faster in the summer heat. The new house was finished, had been finished for over two months, empty and in waiting for Emily to accept her part with her usual dignity.
Two days before the scheduled wedding date, Joseph came in from the woods just before nightfall. He had cut timber that day and was spotted with the sticky amber resin from the trees, the smell of pine sap clinging stubbornly to his clothes.
“Emily, we have to move you to the other house,” Joseph said. “Tomorrow.”
“You better take off those overalls so I can wash them out,” Emily said. “Otherwise you’ll get that sap all over my good things.”
“There’s no more time, ’Tite. I called a few of the boys to come and help get you settled in the new place tomorrow. They’ll be here directly after sunup.”
Emily sat down hard on the settee and cast an accusing eye on Joseph. “How can you look at these children and toss me away? How can you look at the store? You weren’t here, always in New Orleans or off on some trip. It was me that built the store. It was me who rolled those barrels of flour until I could hardly stand up straight. It was me they held in contempt, doing the work, while they smiled in your face. Part of this is mine. Now you expect me to pick up my things and go so you can move that sour-faced white woman in here? These are my things.”
Cane River Page 31
