The old bachelor greeted them coolly—until René looked up at him. Then, Thierry smiled. “You have her eyes,” he declared, referring to his late sister, Matthieu’s mother. “The very color of a blue Morpho!” This was, apparently, a butterfly from South America. Thierry showed them a specimen of the creature, for which he’d paid a ridiculous sum. If he could afford to throw away money on something like that…
“Aren’t those wings the prettiest blue you’ve ever seen?” Thierry asked the child.
“Blue,” René agreed solemnly. It was only a murmur—but it was the first word he’d spoken in weeks.
The old man was obsessed with butterflies—and their “caterpillars.” They looked like worms to Marguerite. No wonder Thierry had never married. The reason he lived on the outskirts of Charleston was insects. Day in and day out, Thierry went traipsing about the nearby fields to collect his worms, which he brought home alive.
Outside his house, the society was hardly better. Directly across Archdale Street: not one but two Protestant churches. Directly behind them: a brewery, a poor house, and a jail, in that order. This was hardly the return to civilization Marguerite had hoped for. But as these English-Americans put it: “Beggars must not be choosers.”
Besides, Charleston was only a sojourn before Marguerite and René returned to France. She wrote to her brother Denis, who was relieved Marguerite was alive and delighted to learn he had a grand-nephew. They were welcome to join him in his presbytery—as soon as France was safe again.
Then, the Terror began. It proved the commoners were a separate race from the nobility: while they claimed to worship Reason, they acted as savage as Africans. They rid Marguerite of her husband and parents, when it hardly mattered anymore. “Let us go to the foot of the great altar,” one of the revolutionaries declared, “and attend the celebration of the red Mass” at the “holy guillotine.” They sacrificed nuns to their machine and cried: “Let us strangle the last King with the entrails of the last Priest!”
Still Marguerite urged her brother to swear allegiance to the new republic. Would taking a wife really be so terrible? Denis would be excommunicated—but that was reversible. Death was forever. Even after the September Massacres, the fool did not have the sense to flee. Denis chose martyrdom instead.
How could Marguerite return to such a country? The France she had known was as dead as her brother. The National Assembly abolished slavery itself, though even this did not appease the negroes on Saint-Domingue. They slaughtered planters and soldiers till they claimed the island for themselves. They renamed it Haïti, as if they were the Indians’ rightful successors.
Thousands of refugees from France and Saint-Domingue sought asylum in the former British colonies. After all, Frenchmen had helped these United States win their independence. Now, the fledgling country could repay its debt. Many of the Saint-Domingue émigrés brought their slaves with them. Apparently their property was more precious to them than their lives. If crocodiles devour your neighbors, Marguerite thought, you do not leave the swamp and take the crocodiles with you!
The whites from Saint-Domingue made her anxious too. Someone might know Gabriel had no legitimate heirs. The refugees sought her out to commiserate. Marguerite always turned the conversation to France. They consoled her with platitudes like: “We would find the winters there difficult, after so many years in the tropics.” They rejoiced in Charleston’s similarities to their lost island: “The architecture! The flora!” She would counter: “The hurricanes! The earthquakes! The mosquitos!”
Worst of all were South Carolina’s mulattos, so like Saint-Domingue’s: the vain descendants of black whores and soft-hearted white fathers, some of them appallingly wealthy. The island’s mulatto émigrés joined Charleston’s Brown Fellowship Society, where they congratulated each other on the number of slaves they owned and on the complexion of their daughters’ fiancés. They shunned anyone who looked more African than themselves.
Some of these mulattos would have rejected René. Marguerite’s regimen of milk baths did nothing to lighten her grandson’s skin. His nose remained wide in spite of the clothespin she kept on it whenever they were alone. At least it had a bridge. She could do nothing about his lips. Wigs and even powder fell out of fashion before he was old enough to wear them. She hated his obstinate black curls. But Charleston inundated René with English, while Marguerite and Thierry spoke French to him. So her grandson soon lost his Creole, and surely he forgot all about being colored.
Thierry suggested that the boy have a “mammy,” but Marguerite would not hear of it. The last thing her grandson needed was another negress encouraging his bad habits. Marguerite kept him away from Thierry’s slaves as much as she could. Mightn’t they recognize one of their own kind?
No one white read the truth in his features. The word “Spanish” covered a multitude of doubts, as did René’s disposition. Far from lazy or violent, the boy was industrious and reserved, if independent. Perhaps that was the Indian strain. His African blood had certainly not dulled his mind: he was brighter than she could have hoped.
Often René reminded her so much of Matthieu, Gabriel, or Étienne, her heart literally ached. In those moments, she knew she had made the right choice. Her grandson belonged here with her, not amongst savages. But after all she had done for him, the boy never warmed to her.
For years, he pestered her with questions about his mother. Questions meant he did not remember, Marguerite assured herself. She would repeat her story about the tragic young Spanish woman, or she would change the subject. If her grandson pressed her for details, Marguerite would begin weeping and berate him for asking her, when the thought of Saint-Domingue was so painful. Finally he stopped asking.
Instead, René grew fond of Thierry and their neighbors, and they of him. One by one, houses began to sprout up in the surrounding fields. On the very next lot lived the Saint-Clairs: good Catholics who had fled the revolution in France. Gérard Saint-Clair merely sold and repaired clocks—he was of no consequence—but he had a boy René’s age, Sébastien. If her grandson went missing, Marguerite usually found him with Bastien, and often with Bastien’s little sister, Anne.
The girl was certainly pretty, fair as sunlight—such a contrast to René. The way Anne followed him around, the way he doted on her, her family teased that a wedding was inevitable. Then, when Anne was four, scarlet fever took her hearing. She forgot how to speak properly, so René and the Saint-Clairs amused themselves by teaching Anne hand shapes from books.
René also endeared himself to Thierry, and the boy seemed to act from genuine affection. He helped the old man capture and catalog his butterflies. In Thierry’s final illness, her grandson proved a tireless nurse. René hardly left the man’s side, when the slaves could have done all of it.
“I’ve already written my will, you know,” Thierry wheezed. “You won’t persuade me to change it.” But the old man was smiling. He’d left René everything—except his books and specimens, which went to the Charleston Library Society.
A boy of fourteen needed an executor. The old man named not Marguerite but Gérard Saint-Clair. In the end, René required little guidance. He wanted to attend medical school. So the year Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor, Marguerite ventured back to her homeland with her grandson.
Despite the revolution, Paris still had the best schools. There was even a place for Anne Saint-Clair. Her family’s pantomime was not sufficient to communicate why they were sending her away. When Marguerite and her grandson left Anne at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, Marguerite was relieved, the girl was terrified, and René was as miserable as if he’d betrayed her.
In a flurry of panic, Marguerite embarked on the quest that had truly brought her back to France: the copy of their parish register from Saint-Domingue. The record of her grandson’s Baptism would note his mother’s color and status. Marguerite saw them in her head, those cold terrible words that would change everything:
mulâtresse
quar
teron
esclaves
She must find that page and destroy it. She would tear it into pieces and devour it if she had to.
The fawning little Priest apologized, but the volume covering 1789 was missing entirely. Perhaps it had been misplaced during the revolution, or perhaps the ship carrying it to France had sunk. Sans doute, the original in Le Cap had been lost one of the times the city burned.
The missing register meant she had no proof of her grandson’s valid Baptism. So René was baptized again conditionally just before his Confirmation, his mother’s name now officially recorded as Maria Dolores, deceased. Libre was not considered necessary. Of course she had been free.
René had studied his catechism without enthusiasm, though he spent nearly as much time at Anne’s school as his own. He learned all the signs and wrote her fretful parents of her progress. Before he began his doctorate, by flapping his hands at her, René asked Anne to marry him.
Her own teachers—the ones who could hear at least—worried she could not understand what he meant. Anne’s body might be seventeen, but her mind would always be a child’s; to make her a wife, a mother, when she could not truly give her consent… There were reasons the courts usually forbade such unnatural unions.
Marguerite herself was appalled. Why would someone so full of promise chain himself for life to a savage, as the Institute’s own director had called his charges? Did her grandson suspect what ran in his veins? Did he think no one else would have him? Or was love simply deaf as well as blind?
When Marguerite demanded an explanation, that was René’s answer: “I love her, grand-mère.”
“You pity her,” Marguerite insisted.
“No, grand-mère.” Instead of the lechery of his mother’s race, the boy had inherited Matthieu’s inexplicable devotion to a woman unworthy of him. Marguerite could not let it destroy them both.
A dozen times she began a letter to Anne’s parents, then threw it in the fire. Gérard and Jeanne Saint-Clair prided themselves on being the kindest master and mistress in Christendom; but they would never let their daughter marry a negro, Marguerite knew—even if she was an idiot. Marguerite could put an end to this engagement at once. Yet in their fury at her deception, whom else might the Saint-Clairs tell?
A part of Marguerite hoped her grandson would never marry at all. As much as she wanted great-grandchildren, she also dreaded them. What if René’s African blood showed in his offspring even more strongly than in himself? She’d read that could happen. Marguerite could only cling to the theory that mulattos always became sterile by the third generation.
So her grandson obtained the Saint-Clairs’ blessing, found an attorney to argue his case, and married Anne. They mixed their blood with indecent alacrity. Their firstborn was premature, frightfully small, and too dark for Marguerite’s liking—all signs of degeneracy. But René and Anne would not let Joseph out of their sight; they were determined to keep him. The idiot’s one attribute was her color, and she’d failed to impart it. At least Joseph was a little lighter than his father and responsive to sound.
His sister Catherine was not much of an improvement. She was born during the Russian occupation of Paris, but named for the fourteenth-century Italian saint, not the Tsar’s grandmother. Finally Europe settled into peace and René completed his medical studies. He decided to return to Charleston. France was already overflowing with doctors, he said, and Anne wanted to be near her family.
Marguerite tried to dissuade her grandson, but in the end, she could only follow. In France itself, there were no slaves, and so few coloreds they were more a curiosity than a concern. In South Carolina, René’s position and his children’s futures would be far more precarious. So surely his choice of residence proved that her grandson did not know of his black blood, and that was the important thing. Her own children had never known they were illegitimate, so the truth could not harm them. If René thought himself white, if he acted white, others would take him for white.
At least in Charleston, her grandson would escape the influence of his liberal student friends. But Marguerite feared the damage had already been done—that René would remain unorthodox for life.
As soon as they left France, that missing parish register began to haunt her. What if it were not at the bottom of the ocean? What if it had simply fallen into some dusty corner of the archives? What if someone found it? Across the Atlantic, she could do nothing to ensure its destruction.
Across the Atlantic, they would be safer from its secrets.
Chapter 6
There is nothing they are bad enough to do, that we are not powerful enough to punish.
— Charleston Intendant [Mayor] James Hamilton, Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection (1822)
René had asked his father-in-law to look after his property. Instead, Gérard had improved it. He’d purchased a new pair of slaves. He’d added a three-story piazza to the house. And he’d set up an office for René in the front room, with a desk and two great cabinets: one for books and one for medicines.
Marguerite’s grandson might have become wealthy in Charleston, if he’d chosen the right patients. Instead, he threw away most of his talents on paupers, even masterless negroes. When they offered some paltry payment, René often refused it—even as he added more mouths to their household: another girl, Hélène, and another boy, Christophe.
The boy’s hair was as yellow as his mother’s, but its texture was alarming. And his nose! René and Anne did not seem to notice. Fortunately, Christophe died in his cradle one night. Marguerite’s fears of discovery, more potent than they’d been the past thirty years, were put to rest with him.
Anne grieved as if she were the first mother to lose a child. She showed herself for the savage she was, wailing like some sort of banshee and then lapsing into a catalepsy. Finally René coaxed her into mere despondency. He decided to take her back to Paris so that she could visit her school friends, who still lived together like nuns at the Institute—sensible men did not want idiots for wives. Marguerite hoped her grandson would leave Anne there, but she doubted it. The thought of crossing the ocean twice more made Marguerite nauseous—and the truth was, René could afford passage only with Gérard’s aid. So, while their parents were abroad, Marguerite promised to look after Joseph, Catherine, and Hélène.
At least, she could look after the boy, who generally stayed in one place with his nose in a book (his mother’s nose, thank God). Joseph was ten years old now. He still appeared delicate, but his health was surprisingly robust, and his mind was as quick as his father’s. “A very prodigy,” Gérard liked to call the boy. Joseph was hardly Mozart, though he played the piano ably and sang soprano remarkably.
His true talent was languages. Marguerite’s great-grandson could converse in French and in English with equal facility. He’d also taught himself a great deal of Spanish (believing it was his grandmother’s tongue), and he knew as much Latin as a Priest. To Joseph, Denis was a hero, their family’s very own saint.
Joseph’s sisters were more defiant, and they made Marguerite’s heart pain her. She should have been able to call on Anne’s parents to discipline the girls, but the Saint-Clairs spoiled them as atrociously as René did. If Catherine or Hélène did not find Marguerite’s rules to their liking, all they had to do was run bawling to their grandparents through the gate in their shared garden fence. Marguerite had to settle for an occasional whack with her cane as the girls darted by. Saint-Domingue had literally crippled her; she was lucky to have kept both legs.
Three decades after she thought she’d escaped it, that damned island pursued her. All over again, the slaves planned to gorge themselves on fire and blood. To ingratiate himself with his master, a mulatto domestic revealed this conspiracy rather than joining it. Charleston’s dubious Intendant wanted corroboration before he would act, so another mulatto spied on his fellow slaves and returned with a date: Sunday the 16th of June 1822. This time, Marguerite would be ready.
Eve
n as the City Guard patrolled the streets, carrying firearms for the first time in its history, Gérard would not believe the reports. “Surely it’s nothing,” he tried to assure Marguerite. “Our people have no reason to revolt. South Carolina isn’t Saint-Domingue. We don’t work our servants to death and replace them. We take care of them, and they know it.”
The only difference was that in Charleston, the negroes grinned and bowed as they plotted how to murder you. Unlike Gérard and his equally naïve wife, Marguerite refused to sleep inside that Sunday night or to allow the children to do so. What if the slaves set fire to the houses?
Finally Gérard agreed to obtain a pistol for her, but he also came back with a white tent for the children. This was not an adventure! Catherine and Hélène dressed up the canvas like the abode of a sheikh. Then the girls chased fireflies around the joined gardens, giggling, till they collapsed and slept like innocents.
Their neighbors took the threat more seriously. Across Archdale Street, the Protestant churches glowed like twin lanterns and reverberated with hymns as the congregants prayed for deliverance from these black devils. Even with all the outbuildings between them, Marguerite could hear Mrs. Mitchell becoming hysterical every time a patrol passed. Again and again, the woman mistook sounds for attacking negroes. Across the south fence, the Blackwood children were sobbing. Catherine and Hélène murmured in their sleep but did not wake.
In the insufficient, unnerving lantern light, only her great-grandson sat soberly beside her. Marguerite swung the pistol between their own slave quarters and the gate to the Saint-Clairs’ yard, her hands shaking with more than age. Her heart felt erratic and too large for her chest. While Marguerite tried to forget what Saint-Domingue had done to her boys, Joseph bowed his head over his rosary, murmuring prayers of protection.
He was as weak as his sisters. When the negroes assaulted them, her great-grandchildren would cower and submit. Joseph, Catherine, and Hélène knew nothing of the fear or hatred they would need to survive. From their parents and grandparents, they received only coddling. Marguerite must find a way to educate the children before it was too late.
Necessary Sins Page 6
