He might as well be made of stone, Joseph thought, till he realized the man was trembling.
“Africans run around naked in Africa,” Frederic assured him. “They’d prefer to stay that way all the time. They’re like animals, Joseph. You don’t turn red when you see a horse penis, do you?”
Actually, those did make Joseph uncomfortable. And how did they know being naked didn’t embarrass the negroes? The problem was, you couldn’t tell when they were blushing.
Chapter 12
This little girl struck her fancy, and [Madame Talvande] offered to educate her, making one stipulation… Monkey (whose real name was Charlotte) could only visit her Mother occasionally…
— Mary Chesnut, Two Years (1877)
Uncle François invited Joseph’s family to stay in his new cottage on Sullivan’s Island. Joseph had received his boots, and Frederic said the beach would be the perfect place to learn to ride. But his cousin’s friends were also visiting, and Frederic was occupied with them.
So the first day, Joseph walked along the shore with his parents and sisters. They had taken the ferry to Sullivan’s Island many times before. Joseph and his father would swim in their under-clothes. Hélène would wade out with them in her own bulky bathing attire and dunk herself, screaming with delight. Mama permitted it because Hélène was still young. Mama and Cathy entered the ocean only with the aid of bathing machines. They did not seem to enjoy themselves but endured the process like a purgative. Usually Mama and Cathy simply strolled or sat. They rarely even took off their boots.
They were still looking for a place to settle when they came upon a woman with a group of girls, accompanied by their maids.
Cathy gasped. “That’s Madame Talvande!”
Joseph recognized the name of the founder and headmistress of the French School for Young Ladies, because his sister talked about it incessantly. Madame Talvande’s establishment was the most exclusive girls’ school in Charleston.
First, Cathy fretted about not having a mirror or her false curls, though her hair was mostly hidden under her bonnet. Finally, she ran up to the woman and curtseyed. “Bonjour, Madame Talvande,” she began in a stream of easy French. “I am so pleased to meet you. My name is Catherine Lazare, and I hope to attend your school very soon.”
“But your French is already perfect!” the headmistress replied in her native language. “Are your parents French?”
Cathy nodded, then frowned: “Well, my grandparents are French. My parents are Creole. Papa was born on Saint-Domingue.”
“Ah. My husband and I are also from that unfortunate island. I prefer this one.”
“Here’s Papa,” Cathy announced. “He’s a doctor. His name is René Lazare. Have you heard of him?”
Their father chuckled and kissed Madame Talvande’s offered hand.
“I believe Bishop England has mentioned you, Dr. Lazare,” the headmistress smiled.
He turned to introduce Mama, who was hanging back as usual. But they were interrupted. “Monkey!” shrieked one of Madame Talvande’s pupils in exasperation, as a plump little girl darted toward Joseph’s sisters. “Monkey” was younger than the other girls. Her hat hung from two ribbons down her back, revealing a mass of coiled black hair. Her dark eyes wide, Monkey stared at Cathy and Hélène as if she wanted to say something, but then she dropped her gaze to the sand. Cathy glared at her.
Madame Talvande tsk-ed. “What have I told you about your hat, Monkey?”
Without looking up, the girl tied it back on her head.
Hélène curtseyed. “Pleased to meet you…Monkey. My name is Hélène Lazare.”
“Monkey isn’t her Christian name, of course,” the headmistress explained as she straightened the girl’s hat. “If it weren’t for this hair, you’d hardly know, but she’s colored.” Madame Talvande stepped back to assess her work. “Monkey is my little experiment—a true test of my powers. I said to myself: ‘If I separated her from her parents, could I make a proper lady of her?’ She sleeps at the foot of my own bed. She’s become quite the pet of the other pupils.” The headmistress looked up to see Joseph’s father frowning. “She doesn’t eat with the other girls, of course.”
“Is it true Bishop England dines with you every week?” Cathy put in.
“We do have that honor.”
Cathy kept worshipping Madame Talvande. Monkey peered hopefully at Hélène again, who produced a shell from her pinafore to show the girl.
Joseph realized that one of the maids was staring at his father. The negress stood a little apart from the schoolgirls. Perhaps sixty years old, she wore a yellow head kerchief and large gold hoops in her ears. Her skin was ebony, yet Joseph could see a pattern of raised scars across her cheeks. They must have been done long ago in Africa.
Perhaps she felt his gaze: the negress turned her attention to Joseph. He scowled, but she approached him anyway. “Pardon, sir, but you are the son of René Lazare?” It took Joseph a few moments to understand her, to translate in his head. Joseph had studied Creole out of curiosity. He was not fluent, but knowing French helped.
“Oui,” he answered cautiously. Who did this negress think she was, addressing him so boldly?
“Your father was born in the parish of Acul on Saint-Domingue? About two years before the Revolution there?”
“I was,” Joseph’s father answered for him. He’d stepped closer.
The negress grinned. “I thought you must be him. Lazare, it is not a common name. I am called Ninon. You would not remember me, but I helped bring you into this world.” Then she glanced at Madame Talvande, who was still occupied with Cathy. The negress looked anxious. She moved farther away from the others and closer to the water, still carrying her basket.
Joseph’s father trailed after her, as if it were something they’d agreed to do. He looked worried too, but eager at the same time. Joseph had to follow. His father glanced over his shoulder and frowned at him, but he didn’t tell Joseph to leave. Perhaps he thought Joseph wouldn’t understand the woman’s patois, or that he wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the roar and hiss of the waves.
When his father and the negress stopped, they stood with their backs to him, staring out at the ocean instead of each other. Joseph pretended to be fascinated by the holes in the sand and the bubbles they emitted each time a wave retreated.
His father asked the negress: “You knew my mother?”
“Only a little.”
“What was she…like?”
The woman turned to him. “She did not leave Saint-Domingue with you?”
Joseph’s father shook his head. “I came to Charleston when I was two years old with only my grandmother, Marguerite Lazare. She told me my father, her son, died during the first uprising. My grandmother said my mother died when I was born—and that she was Spanish.”
“Spanish!” The negress laughed as if this were a joke. “That was clever. But your mother didn’t die when you were born. I came back to that plantation maybe a year later, to catch another baby, and your mother was still with you then. It was good to see her happy. You were just learning to walk. She was so proud of you.”
“You mean she didn’t…” His father’s voice faltered. He was staring down at his feet. “She had every reason to hate me.”
“Oh, no. She was stronger than that. Your birth, it was very difficult—that was why they called me. Your mother was only a child herself. I don’t think, that night, she knew how she felt about you yet. She was in so much pain, and she was angry at your— But when I came back, and I saw her with you, I could not doubt it: your mother adored you. You were her whole world. She must have died before you left Saint-Domingue, or she would never have let you go.” Her head was turned so that Joseph could see half her smile. “Even if you do look more like your father.”
“Ninon!” Madame Talvande shouted behind them, startling Joseph. “Mademoiselle Foster wants her luncheon.” The headmistress stood beside a pouting blonde girl and pointed at the maid’s basket.
>
“J’arrive, Madame,” the negress called back.
Before she left him, Joseph’s father caught her arm. “What was her name?”
“I don’t know what her mother called her. But her slave name was Ève.” Without waiting for him to reply, the negress hurried to the schoolgirls.
Joseph’s father took a step toward the ocean. And then, he sank onto his knees in the sand.
Joseph kept scowling. His grandmother’s name had been Maria Dolores. What did the negress mean by her “slave name”? None of this made any sense. Joseph must have misunderstood again. Hadn’t he learned his lesson about eavesdropping?
Why was the thought of his grandmother being Spanish amusing? Why had his father assumed his mother hated him? Why was he acting as though all of this was very important?
The negress couldn’t have meant— She couldn’t—
Joseph didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to understand. He wanted to be far away from it. He turned and fled from his father.
The wind snatched Joseph’s hat from his head, and the sun stung his eyes immediately. He did not stop, though the sand beneath his feet seemed determined to swallow him. Behind him, over the pounding of his heart in his ears, Joseph heard his father calling his name.
No sooner had Joseph arrived at the cottage and caught his breath than Frederic appeared on the porch with his friends. His new valet accompanied them, a dark-skinned boy who could not be more than twenty.
“Joseph!” Frederic greeted him. “We were just going swimming. Would you care to join us?”
Joseph nodded fiercely. He trailed behind Frederic and his friends but kept ahead of the slave. His side ached from the effort. As they hurried along the beach, Joseph wondered why they had to go swimming at such a distance from the cottages.
At last they halted. Frederic and his friends began peeling off their clothing, tossing pieces at the negro, who caught most of them. Joseph shrugged his braces from his shoulders and unbuttoned his trousers. But the other boys did not stop undressing when they got to their shirts. They did not even stop when they got to their drawers. Joseph averted his eyes at once.
Frederic noticed his hesitation. “You can swim, can’t you?”
Joseph nodded without looking up. He was quite fond of it, the freedom he felt as he floated in the water. But he never swam naked.
“Come on, then!” Frederic encouraged as he threw his drawers at his slave.
“What’s the matter, kid?” one of his cousin’s friends laughed. “Afraid a fish might emasculate you?”
“I bet he’s still hairless as a baby!” teased the other boy.
Joseph made the mistake of raising his eyes. Whooping like wild Indians, the naked trio dashed into the breaking waves—but not before Joseph caught a glimpse of their own hairy genitals. What startled him was not the hair but the color of their skin there. Very like the color of his mother’s nipples, or the Blessed Virgin’s.
Joseph felt as if there were sand in his throat. It was true—what the negress and his father had said, what they had implied. Even if he had wanted to, Joseph could not disrobe like Frederic and his friends. They would see him and know. Where the sun should never reach, in the most private part of themselves, the other boys were pink. Joseph was brown.
He was colored. Just like his monstrous father, and his grandmother the slave. Just like those hanging negroes who had plotted to burn the city, the naked mulatto in the pen on State Street, and that nodding clock in Grandpapa’s shop.
You couldn’t be part African. You were either pure white or incurably colored. Joseph had wanted to be Charleston’s first native Priest. He had wanted to be a black swan. Instead, he was just black.
When Mama had called mulattos “unnatural,” this was why his father had defended them—why he was friends with Noisette and their own slaves. This was why his father abused his mother, and why Joseph struggled so often with his own lusts. Negroes couldn’t control themselves—everyone knew that.
Their black blood explained everything. Il porte le vice dans le sang, the French would say. Great-Grandmother Marguerite had used that expression when a bastard became debauched like his father. Of course he had: He carries vice in his blood. But vice meant other things in French, too: defect, flaw, blemish, viciousness.
Joseph tried to tell himself that the water in his eyes was because of the sun. He sat half-dressed on the sand while his cousin’s slave folded the three sets of clothing and finally settled beside him, at a respectful distance. Eventually Joseph realized that the longer he stayed there under the sun without his hat, the more he would resemble the negro.
Unsteadily, he rose, re-dressed himself, and followed his footprints back toward his family. Four white boys and one black had left these tracks, he thought. Three white boys and two blacks would retrace them.
“There you are, Joseph!” Cathy cried, startling him. He was only halfway back to the cottage. “Mama didn’t want to start our picnic without you, so Papa made me come looking for you. We found your hat.”
He pulled it back on, hard.
Cathy turned on her heel to walk beside Joseph. She kicked at a piece of driftwood and muttered, “I hate Papa.”
“Why?” Joseph asked cautiously.
“He says I can’t attend Madame Talvande’s, that it’s too expensive! That’s because she teaches girls how to be ladies! If I don’t go to Madame Talvande’s,” Cathy wailed, “I’ll never attract a good husband!”
His sister was eleven; he did not think she should be despairing about her prospects just yet. At least, not because she lacked feminine accomplishments. Cathy lacked breeding. Should he tell her about their grandmother? If their places were reversed, wouldn’t he want her to warn him? Joseph began walking more slowly. “I think…it might be dangerous for you to attend Madame Talvande’s, Cathy.”
“What?”
“Aren’t most of her teachers from Saint-Domingue?”
“Yes! They’re French! The best in the city!”
“But one of them might have known Father there.”
“How could that be dangerous?”
“I overheard him talking to one of Madame Talvande’s slaves—a midwife. She witnessed his birth.”
“And?”
Joseph realized they’d nearly reached Uncle’s cottage. He could see their father, Mama, and Hélène seated at the table on the back porch. From here, you couldn’t tell anything was wrong. Joseph stopped. “His mother wasn’t Spanish, Cathy. She was a slave.”
“A-An Indian?”
Joseph shook his head.
His sister’s eyes widened, then slitted in indignation. “That’s impossible. The midwife was lying.”
“She had no reason to. Great-Grandmother Marguerite did.” The woman made a little more sense to him now. “The slaves killed her husband and all their children. Our father was the only family she had left.”
Cathy gaped at him in disbelief.
“The way Father talked to the midwife—he already knew.”
“But—” Cathy turned her attention to their father. Her hand went to her hair. “You mean—when Theodosia said I looked like a… She was right?”
Joseph nodded.
“What are you two doing?” Hélène ran up to them and yanked on their arms to pull them after her. “I’m starving!”
At the table on the porch, Mama chided them for their long faces and the fact that they weren’t eating. ‘I know Cathy is upset about Madame Talvande’s,’ Mama prompted. ‘Is Frederic neglecting you, Joseph? Is that what’s bothering you?’
Joseph could only nod. He certainly couldn’t meet his father’s eyes. Instead, Joseph studied him when his father’s attention was elsewhere. He saw the truth written in every line of his father’s face—in the broadness of his nose, the thickness of his lips, and the dense curls of his hair. Why have I never noticed this before? This man was born a slave. He should still be a slave.
He had no right to a woman like Mama. When he boun
d her wrists to his bed, did his father laugh? Did he congratulate himself because he had made a white woman his slave? Joseph stared at his father’s hand against Mama’s: at the difference in their skin, at his fingers trapping hers any time she was not signing. Joseph shivered in spite of the sun.
After luncheon, Joseph wanted to escape again, but he got no farther than the porch steps. He felt as if he’d never leave this island, or at least that a different boy would leave it. Before Sullivan’s Island became a summer resort, he remembered, it had served a different purpose: as a quarantine site for Africans.
His father found him on the steps. Joseph sprang up immediately and strode toward the ocean. “Joseph!” his father called behind him. “Come back, please!”
Joseph ignored him. He did not slow down till he felt wet sand beneath his bare feet. He did not stop till the tide washed up and splashed against his thighs. He was still in his trousers, but he didn’t care.
His father followed him, relentless, wading out to him through the next crest. “You understood my conversation with Ninon, didn’t you?”
Above the snap of the wind and the churning of the waves, Joseph was practically shouting. “How long have you known?”
“I didn’t, till today,” his father yelled in return.
Joseph glared at him over his shoulder.
He heard his father’s sigh of acknowledgement only because the man was so close. “I have suspected for a long time. Since I was a child.”
“Then how could you do this to us?” Again and again the ocean smashed into them, but Joseph refused to retreat. If only that foam could wash him white.
At the corner of his vision, he saw his father narrow his eyes. “What exactly have I done?”
You “suspected” what you were, and you violated Mama anyway! Even now, Joseph could not say it aloud. “You took advantage of the Grands! They didn’t know, did they?” Every wave sucked at the sand around his feet, burying him deeper. “If I hadn’t overheard, would you ever have told me?”
Necessary Sins Page 13
