Love, Anger, Madness

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

  Tonton Mathurin, who lived alone in a large beautiful house like ours, was for a time tolerated by decent society in our little city. When he was suddenly accused of consorting with riffraff and of luring local young maids to his home for unsavory purposes, he was quite simply quarantined. My parents threatened to lock me up if I ever spoke to him.

  “He lives in sin,” my mother explained to me, “and sin is contagious.”

  Despite my precautions, once in a while I caught a glimpse of the man sitting in a wicker chair hidden behind a bush a few paces away from his gate. Once, coming home from school, I found myself face-to-face with him and stood there mesmerized, staring at his enormous eyebrows and his good-natured black face, his wide innocent mouth grinning ear to ear. I spit at his feet and made a sign of the cross.

  “Heh heh!” he said. “Do you think I’m Satan in the flesh?”

  I fled when I heard him say that, and the next day sought comfort in confession with Father Paul for the vile sin I had committed. In return, each time Tonton saw me he’d thumb his nose at me or show me his fist.

  The Grandupré house was next to his. Poor Agnès reminded me of Sophie Fichini, [19] gaunt and weepy-eyed, shrieking every day under the blows she received. She too was pilloried. One day, my mother said:

  “You are not to play with Agnès Grandupré anymore, neither in school nor at her house. You’ve got that? She’s a nasty little girl who goes to old Mathurin’s house behind her parents’ back.”

  Agnès’s vice intrigued me. I thought about it so intensely that I began to spy on her from my house. One day, I saw her weeping on her veranda after a thrashing. I called her over. She showed me her legs and arms covered with scratches and, turning a distraught eye toward her house:

  “They’ve beaten me again, Claire,” she said to me. “They won’t let me see Tonton Mathurin, but he’s the only one who’s good to me.”

  “What does he do to you? What does he say to you?”

  “He strokes my hair and tells me about Suzette, the daughter he lost. I look like her.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes, I swear.”

  I heard my mother scream. My father rushed up and when he saw us together turned pale with anger.

  “Come here, Claire.”

  Agnès leaped to the street and ran home.

  “Come here,” my father repeated.

  And when I was before him:

  “Who gave you permission to play with the little Grandupré girl?” he yelled, smacking my back with such force that it knocked the wind out of me. “Who? How many times have you seen her? What did she tell you? What have you done together?”

  Each question was reinforced with a terrible blow from his belt. At the third lash, I started screaming as loud as Agnès; at the twentieth, I passed out. The next day, I had such a high fever that my mother sent for Dr. Audier.

  “I must say! I must say!” he said, shaking his big head, as I saw him staring at my father reproachfully under his glasses.

  “What do you expect, my friend, I am instilling values and I mean for them to be respected,” he said to him. “Ours is a race lacking discipline and our old slave blood requires the lash, as my late father used to say.”

  “Is that the slaveholder I hear in you?” the doctor gently asked him.

  “Maybe! We mulattoes have a little of everything in us, as you know. Tell me, if you hadn’t known me for so long, would you have believed that I have black blood in my veins? This means that my own black blood has been reabsorbed and that I inherited certain traits that will blemish her unless I correct her.”

  At that moment, I noticed the milky whiteness of his skin, hardly more tanned than my mother’s. I stared with astonishment at my dark arms resting on the sheets. Was I really their daughter? No, it did not seem possible. How could I be the daughter of two whites? My mother wept quietly and I saw Dr. Audier give her arm a gentle squeeze before leaving.

  We lived surrounded by servants my father worked with an iron rod. Some were hired like that young boy a scapegoat my father took in after his parents’ death and brought home one evening from Lion Mountain. He turned out to be insubordinate and insolent.

  “Black, you’re black like me,” he once said to me, pulling my hair, “and when I am bigger I will marry you.”

  I repeated those words to my father, who beat him so badly he ran away. We never saw him again. He was replaced with Augustine, whose parents themselves brought her to us from Lion Mountain, and from the abuse we heaped upon her, I learned to give thanks for my social position and to appreciate my father despite the beatings he continued to visit upon me. We were about the same age, Augustine and I, and I would have loved to share my games with her, but my mother flatly refused to permit this.

  “She’s just a servant,” she said, “a black girl from the hills we don’t even pay! Your father would be furious if you played with her. Invite Jane, Dora and Eugénie, and leave that girl to her work.”

  Dodging my parents’ surveillance, I sometimes went to meet an old stable hand, a jack-of-all-trades they called a “groom” in Parisian fashion. He slept on a mat in the stable near the horses. I took out the sugar cubes I had stolen for him.

  “Thank you, Miss Claire,” he would say. “A good person, you are.”

  Then I went to hug Bon Ami, who would wrinkle his nose to eat the sugar out of my hand.

  Félicia was four years old at the time. My mother, who didn’t trust the servants, forced me to help look after her. I had no time to myself. After learning my lessons and doing my chores I had to look after my sister without a break. I took revenge on the sly by leaving her to her own devices as much as possible. Once I let her take a tumble down the stairs on purpose and this got me another thrashing. Yet another comment by Augustine about the color difference between my sister and me prevented me from loving her, and gradually I began to envy her.

  The day I turned thirteen, my father ordered Demosthenes to saddle our horses and we galloped to his plantation. I was in a riding habit he had ordered from France, and he was in riding breeches, pith helmet on his head. In my long skirt, frilly white blouse, goose-feather hat, I had the pretentious air of a snob aristocrat of the eighteenth century. I had begged them to take out the feather, pointing out my youth and the embarrassment I would feel exhibiting myself in such a getup.

  “Allow me to introduce you to the finer things,” my father said angrily. “You will soon know why.”

  The coffee was in bloom. Thinking back, I can still smell the bitter-sweetness of the coffee cherries wet with dew, of mango and quenepa branches like open parasols over the fields; the smell of birds frolicking in the leaves, flying low enough to brush past us; the smell of fresh resin warming in the sun along the coarse trunks of oak and logwood trees. Caw, caw, the seahawks screamed, as the peasants chased them away waving their arms and shouting. I hadn’t seen the farmhands for some time and they were amazed to see a young woman before them. They shook my hand limply in the peasant manner, and one of them scratched his head and said:

  “By God, that’s one beautiful black girl you got there, Agronomist.”

  My father’s laughter seemed forced. He replied in a pretentious Creole:

  “Our race has surprises in store for us yet, Louisor; no one here can predict what type of child will come from his mother’s womb.”

  “Except for the real blacks, Agronomist,” retorted Alcius, the oldest of the farmers. “They know they can’t be fooled. A black man and a black woman will give you naught but little black babies. And that’s the truth.”

  My father changed the subject, crushed a coffee cherry between his fingers and breathed it in:

  “My coffee is the best in the region,” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “Listen, farmers, I know what’s happening on the other plantations: it’s a mess out there. The big planters are abandoning their coffee to dishonest people who steal from them. You know I trust you, but twice a week during harvest I come to check on
your work. You can see the result…”

  He gestured at the immense verdant expanse, where cherries gleamed between the leaves like rubies.

  “Even if I should disappear,” he continued, “you must faithfully keep your commitments. God declined to give me a son, but my eldest daughter will see to the proper upkeep of my business. Such is my will.”

  The peasants turned to me and stared with curiosity.

  Were they reassured that this very young girl, inoffensive and incapable, would replace my father in the event of his death? They fixed their amused and scornful eyes on me, and I bravely returned their stares.

  “But,” my father added, thumping his chest in a highly theatrical gesture, “I am solid as a rock and I will die when I’m a hundred. I am the lion who watches over this mountain, and even when I sit in the president’s chair, I will still make sure everything is in good working order here.”

  “God is good,” Alcius responded calmly.

  He gestured to his daughter-in-law, and she ran to the hut and returned with coffee steaming on a tray.

  “Sit down, Mademoiselle,” she said to me, pointing to a wicker chair.

  “So, will you be chief of state soon, Agronomist?” Alcius asked my father.

  “God willing.”

  “Agronomist,” said Louisor, Alcius’s son, walking toward my father and standing before him, arms crossed, locking eyes. “We have been working for you for a number of years now, but what you pay us isn’t enough to feed our children.”

  “Louisor!” Alcius exclaimed.

  And his fearful look was fixed farther away, at a hut whose door was closed.

  “Look elsewhere, black man,” my father answered Louisor simply, “and if you find better, you have my permission to leave.”

  “I built my hut on this land,” Louisor replied. “Might as well stay.”

  My father quickly gestured to Alcius and they walked to the hut with the closed door and knocked three times. An old man with a white beard came out, gave my father a military salute and made him come in, putting a familiar hand on his shoulder. Louisor’s wife squatted at my feet, knees at her chin, skirt gathered between her thighs. Her six children were playing under the mango tree, screaming and chasing each other. The oldest child, who looked about ten, was gathering palm seeds to grind and eat. They were dressed in short red jerseys that came to their navels. Even the oldest was not dressed more decently, and I tried hard not to look at what I called his immodest outfit. The youngest began to sulk and ask for bread. The wife gazed at me silently. Her long face stared at my own, and I could find nothing in it but a kind of stupid astonishment. As the child cried harder, I told her to make him be quiet.

  “Quiet, quiet,” she screamed at him, “enough.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

  “He’s hungry.”

  “Let him eat.”

  “It’s not mango season yet,” she said. “There’s nothing in the house; he’ll have to wait until tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s when Louisor will come back with the money he gets from selling the two bundles of herbs he takes to town.”

  “What do you do with the money my father pays you?”

  “Money!”

  That was all she said, and rising, she took the child and forced his thumb in his mouth.

  “Suck, suck,” she said gently, “suck.”

  The woman’s young face seemed hewn from stone. I got the feeling that neither joy nor pain could affect it. I was bombarded by a thousand thoughts I was unable to sort out at that moment. My father appeared at the door of the hut with Alcius and the old man. His neck was adorned with multicolored necklaces and his head was bound in a red kerchief. My heart skipped a beat. He called me, and addressing the old man:

  “There she is, Papa Cousineau,” he said.

  The old man contemplated me for a full minute without saying a word, and then held out his hand to me:

  “She looks you straight in the eye, Agronomist,” he said, addressing my father. “That’s a sign that she has a strong head.”

  “I raised her like a man,” my father answered, “and now she is old enough to keep my promises.”

  “Since you are alive, keep your own promises to the loas. Lion Mountain will not survive if you abandon it. Your daughter will only succeed you upon your death, only upon your death,” the old man firmly stated.

  “Then she will have white hair.” My father burst out laughing and thumped his chest. “The lion is still strong, Papa Cousineau, solid as a rock. But don’t forget I am often absent. I will be campaigning soon and my chances of becoming president are good. I have given up on sending her to France, I have taught her to ride horses, I have taught her math only so that she can manage the land. She too must serve the loas”

  I looked him straight in the eye.

  “I only have one religion, Papa,” I slowly articulated, “and I will never serve the loas”

  “Then you will lose Lion Mountain.”

  “Don’t rush her, Agronomist,” the old man cautioned. “The Catholic priests and nuns have stuffed her head and talked of voodoo as if it were damnation. Give her time to grow up and she will come to it on her own like every good black woman.”

  “I will never serve the loas” I repeated.

  And I ran to my horse, which I mounted full of rage.

  Under my whip, Bon Ami galloped down the trails, nostrils quivering. I soon heard the hoofbeats of my father’s horse, reined in but champing at the bit. Guava branches stuck to my skirt, smacking me in the face and snatching my riding hat as their trophy. I arrived a few minutes before he did at the entrance to town. It was a Sunday. I found my mother at home all dressed up and, noticing me, she asked where my father was.

  “He’s coming,” I answered.

  “You barely have time to change and accompany me to vespers,” she told me.

  Augustine, her head bristling with nappy little braids, was following Félicia like a dog.

  I listened, panting, for my father’s steps. He opened the door, walked up to me and slapped me so hard that I almost fell to the ground.

  “What has she done?” my mother asked him.

  “Stubborn as a mule! Stubborn as a mule!” my father yelled. “You will obey me, you hear, and I will break you, even if I have to do it with a whip.”

  My mother lowered her head and sniffled. I went up to change and accompany her to vespers.

  “What have you done to your father this time?” she asked me on the way to church.

  “He does voodoo, Mama. I saw him at Papa Cousineau’s, dressed like a disciple.”

  “Alas!” my mother answered, “he was rash enough to accept the legacy of his black grandmother and he’s afraid not to keep his promises.”

  “I won’t keep them for him,” I screamed with tears in my eyes.

  Hush!” my mother said, rolling frightened eyes. “God forbid someone hears you and makes a scandal.”

  I didn’t sleep that night. I was so agitated with shock and distaste that I was feverish. Voodoo, which until now I had considered a shameful religion practiced only by the poor, suddenly took shape before my eyes and engaged me in a struggle I had very little chance of winning: I feared my father and dreaded standing up to him.

  “Resist, my child,” advised Father Paul, in whom I had confided out of sheer desperation. “Resist with all your might. In such a case as this, disobedience is permitted.”

  I resisted and was whipped for it. Time went by. My father was not elected. He reproached me for bringing him bad luck and swore he would break me.

  “I made a promise, you understand, I promised that you as the eldest would continue the legacy. But that was before your birth. How could I predict you would be a girl?…”

  Although my studies were rather intense, up to now I had read only ancient history and the fables of La Fontaine. My father declared all books unwholesome and my mother, on his orders, cleaned my room hersel
f in order to better rummage through my things at her leisure. My girlfriends’ fates were no happier; I resigned myself to mine, awaiting the marriage that would set me free. As I got older, I put together a life for myself. A very full and secret life to which no one else had access. Not even my friends. Solitude and idleness were my accomplices. To protect myself from prying eyes, I learned the importance of hypocrisy. With my parents I played the part of a perfect young lady. Once their backs were turned, I would undergo a revolution. Quickly changing my attitude, I arched my waist before my mirror, posing languidly, waltzing around and humming in a low voice.

  Around that time I saw Frantz Camuse again. He was returning from France, where he had been studying for several years. Our mothers had been friends and were seeing each other again for the first time in six years. He would visit us on Sundays with his mother, who would stroke my hair and who kept saying that I was the prettiest girl she had ever seen. She repeated this so often that I began to doubt her sincerity. My parents welcomed them warmly and went through a great deal of trouble to host them. Frantz was handsome and I began to think about him. I whispered his name in bed at night, my heart full of a delicious feeling, but I remained petrified in his presence.

  “The Camuse boy seems interested in our daughter,” my father said one evening to my mother. “Let’s give her a good dowry to encourage him. I am not able to get anything out of this stubborn mule, might as well marry her off. The Camuses are nearly ruined, they will be happy to dust off their coat of arms for us.”

  “They think they’ve sprung from the loins of Jupiter,” was my mother’s response.

  “I have money enough to make them stuff their prejudices, and after all, I haven’t given up my candidacy.”

  “Henri!” my mother implored with a look of despair.

  “This marriage will happen,” my father continued. “My money will help them forget certain things.”

  “Alas,” my mother sighed, stealing a worried glance at me.