by Lara Parker
“Don’t you know what’s happening tonight?” said Angelique.
“Yes. I know tonight they be a ceremony,” answered Thais. Angelique was jolted.
“Tonight? No! Not tonight!”
“Yes, Massa ride off early this morning. He told me make you perfect in every way. I be goin’ to the tower right now to fetch the white gown.”
“I won’t do it,” Angelique said.
“What you mean? You won’t do it. You crazy, chile! Why you such a little fool?”
“When he comes back, tell him if he says I must pretend to be Erzulie again, I will come outside and show myself to them all. I’ll tell them it’s all a lie!”
Thais’s mouth fell open, and she stared at Angelique with complete bafflement. Then she rose and scurried to the door, locking it behind her.
Angelique wondered whether the things Cesaire had told her were true. Conflicting worries racked her brain. Was there really to be a revolt? She wondered if she should have told her father the plan. This might have been her chance to escape, but not if the slaves found her first and treated her like a white planter’s daughter. Would her father keep her safe? Fight for her life? What was he doing now? Would he alert the militia? And would they even believe him?
She had a sudden longing to return to the room behind the altar. She went to the window and saw that the grounds were deserted; even Thais had disappeared. Angelique eased the lock and dashed through the corridor and down the stair.
Once in the room she realized that it had been months since she had performed the failed ritual to call up Erzulie, and it seemed strange to feel the familiar pulse quiver through her when her fingers touched the sacred powder of the vévé. As she sifted through the paraphernalia on the dusty shelves, she felt that something had changed. Various objects no longer seemed mysterious, but instead, perfectly useful.
Unconsciously, she began matching the items—bits of insect and leaf, the jars of salves, and boxes of herbs, little sacks of sea creatures, even the fleshy masses within the smoky jars—with the words of the chants and the instructions filling the pages of the book. Somewhere in her heart she felt sadness over the loss of Erzulie, and she wondered if she had been unworthy of the goddess.
Something flickered in the corner of her mind. She reached for her mother’s ouanga, which still hung at the hollow of her throat. Inside was the tiny skull, the moonstone, and the snippet of Chloe’s hair. These things kept her safe. I will not perform the ceremony, she thought. The memory of the dark figure was too terrifying, and she knew that somehow they were inextricably joined.
She found herself drawn into the great leather volume once more, newly bewitched by the words. Something hovered over her, like a great bird, and she felt comfort and peace beneath its wing. Deeper and deeper she plunged into the sounds of the chants, rolling the songs over in her mind. They seemed the secret writing from the beginning of time.
Tiring at last, she rose to leave, but stopped, and once again took the jeweled kris from its case, turning it in her hand to see the stones catch the light. After running a finger along its keen edge, she wrapped it up again and placed it in the box. A piece of dark paper or black ash fluttering high in the corner of the room caught her eye. Drawing closer, she gasped when she saw that it was a bat, dangling upside down from the rafter. Its wrinkled wings were folded across its back, its fur gleamed, and its beady red eyes stared at her with calm recognition. Shivering, she left it there and crept out of the room.
* * *
Later that day, when she was writing in her journal, there was a knock at her door. The key jingled, and when the door opened, her father was standing there. Her muscles stiffened, but to her surprise his demeanor was contrite, even remorseful. The inferno deep within his bulk seemed quieted now, and he stood before her with his head drawn into his shoulders and his huge hands dangling at his sides.
“May I speak with you, Angelique?” he asked.
“I won’t perform the ceremony,” she said. “It’s stupid, deceitful. I’m sick of it. I won’t do anything for you, ever again.”
“I have decided to let you go,” was his answer.
She was stunned.
“You are right,” he continued. “I have misused you, and I regret it. You have every reason to resent me. But I have much to fear today, and I only ask your help one more time.”
“No,” she said. “I hate you! You are cruel and a murderer! You can’t make me do it.”
“Listen to me, Angelique. I have found your mother. She is working at the plantation at Trinité, as a physician in the slave hospital. I will take you to her myself, tomorrow.”
Angelique could not believe his words. Joy surged through her body.
“My mother? Really?”
“I beg you to do this for me,” he said, his voice steady. “I have been to Saint-Pierre to alert the authorities. Perhaps this plot can be avoided. But the slaves are restless, obviously … eager for revenge. I suspect what you heard might have had some truth in it.”
He paused and turned away from her. She could see beads of sweat dotting his forehead. He reached for a handkerchief and pressed it against his brow, his movements slow and heavy.
“I have promised them a ceremony,” he said, “and I will sacrifice a goat. I have promised them tafia, all they can drink. They are so simpleminded and depraved, my hope is they will be caught up in their frantic dancing and won’t turn against me, but instead turn on their own kind.”
At that instant, she heard the drums begin, and she recognized the tambour of the ceremony, the Maman deeper than a beating heart and the Cata, brighter and sharper than birdsong. She felt a quickening within her. Faintly, she heard the chanting, and the calling of Legba; wisps of smoke from the ritual fire seemed to curl in her nostrils.
He lifted his eyes to her, like polished coals. “If you will appear in the ceremony,” he said, “I give you my word, I will return you to your mother.”
“All right,” she said simply. “I will become Erzulie one more time.”
* * *
The night was still, the air warm and moist. It was near midnight, and the drums were pounding more frantically and insistently than ever behind the doors of the chapel. Thais prepared her for the ceremony, and Angelique looked at the gray head and stooped shoulders of the slave.
Thais’s spirit is broken, thought Angelique, as Thais bent over her, fastening her dress.
The woman’s body was heavy, and she groaned when she had to stand. The harvest had broken her, long hours over the kettle, stirring, skimming, pouring, breathing the hot vapors. Angelique harbored a fleeting thought of taking Thais with her to Trinité, caring for her, as she would now be free to care for her mother.
Thoughts of her mother flooded her mind, and she felt the tears brimming in her eyes. It was three years since she had seen her. She had grown, and her mother might not recognize her. She was tall, with hips that curved softly above her long, slender legs. Small breasts swelled on her chest, and her shoulders were bony but broad. Downy fur had begun to grow between her legs and under her arms.
As she smoothed the white gown over her flat stomach, the dress felt tight beneath her armpits, as if it had been made for a much smaller girl. Angelique was struck suddenly by something she had always known but never given much thought. There had been other goddesses before her.
“Will they choose another Erzulie?” she asked Thais.
“Yes, chile, when you be a woman.”
“But this is my last time,” she said. “My father is letting me go tomorrow.”
“What you mean last time?” Thais cried, her voice sharp.
“He has promised to take me back to my mother.”
Thais’s face underwent a sudden transformation, and she rose and clasped Angelique by her two arms.
“What you mean? What you mean—let you go? He won’t let you go!” She raised her hands and let out a wail. “Oh, Lord God in heaven, help us.” A harsh sob followed her plea.
“Oh, Thais, I will miss you, I really will. Please don’t cry. What is it? Oh, Thais, you mustn’t grieve so. I’m glad I’m finished with this.”
“But, chile, you don’t know. You can’t know, what’s to happen to you now.”
“Yes I do know. I’m going to see my mother. I want so much to be free, to walk through the streets of the village—talk to other girls, to run on the sand, and swim to my caves—maybe meet some nice boy and tease him and make him laugh! Oh, I’m so happy. You have no idea how lonely I have been! And now it’s all over—Thais, what’s the matter?”
Thais was sitting with her arms around her stomach, staring out and holding herself, rocking as though she were in pain. She looked at Angelique, and her lips formed words that made no sound, The sacrifice!
At that instant Angelique heard a cart rumbling on the courtyard stones. She ran to the window and saw Father Le Brot scramble down from the wagon, with a lantern held before him, and move toward the door of the plantation house. His plump body filled the folds of his habit, and she could see his wooden cross bouncing upon his breast. Not thinking, she reached for the charm at her neck and pressed it with her fingers.
Almost immediately her father was at her door. “What are you doing?” he glowered at Thais. “Bring her down.”
Thais simply stared at him with an expression of such contempt and sullen refusal that Angelique thought she must have lost her senses.
Her father’s scowling face darkened with rage. “Come!” he growled, and seized Angelique by the arm.
They were halfway down the staircase when they met Father Le Brot, huffing on his way up. They practically collided with the priest, who lifted his lantern to reveal his round and perspiring face.
“Oh, Bouchard!” he cried out in great consternation. “I-I-I have come to tell you that you m-m-m-must not do this dreadful thing!” But Angelique’s father brushed by him with complete indifference, nearly knocking him off the riser. Pulling her by the arm across the entrance hall, he dragged her through the open doorway.
The rotund priest ran after them, shouting, “B-b-b-blasphemy! Sacrilege! You c-c-c-call upon the Devil for your v-v-villainous, c-c-c-cowardly hungers, and the Devil will come! He will come to you, I promise you that, Theodore Bouchard! Your soul is lost! Do not sacrifice your own daughter to the powers of evil!”
Angelique was astonished by his vehemence, and wondered at a faith so fearful and so resistant to other spirits in the world. Once again she thought of how greatly the priest feared the loas.
“Off with you, you meddlesome old fool! Go back to your stinking Mass with the body and blood of Jesus Christ upon the altar. What is the difference, tell me that? Your hypocrisy makes me laugh!”
“Theodore, I beg of you!” cried the priest, and threw himself in their path, raising his hands in prayerful supplication. Angelique was amazed to see tears running down his cheeks. Her father pulled back his booted foot and, with a vicious kick to the head, knocked the good man to the ground. His lantern clattered on the stones, and the flame sputtered out.
“Father!” she cried, struck by his cruelty, and tendrils of fear began to snake around her heart. He jerked Angelique across the dark courtyard toward the chapel.
The worshipers were in full ceremony, and she was met with the rush of heat from their writhing bodies and the bone-numbing resonance of the drums. The naked black dancers enveloped her in a dark cocoon, and she trembled at the power of their adoration. She felt a sullen lust emanating from them, colder and more frightening than ever before. Her father dragged her to the altar and forced her against it.
The fire was bright coals, the porcelain platter lying before it, clean and shining, and she thought of the goat that should have been tied for the sacrifice but was not there. Panic fluttered in her breast. The chanting rose in mournful dissonance, the songs sorrowful and repetitive. The flames of a thousand candles threw shadows on the walls. Suddenly, she felt her father seize her hands and wrench her arms behind her. She cried out in pain, as, with a quick twist of a rope, he bound her wrists.
A chalice was raised to her lips, but she took one sip and let the burning liquid flow back into the cup. She did not want to be drugged. She shivered, feeling the ropes tighten. Why was she bound? And then, in one shattering jolt, she understood. A colder fear than she had ever known took her in its grasp.
She saw their eyes as if for the first time, burning with hunger, and their faces frozen in expressions of dazed expectancy. She felt their fingers grazing her legs and prodding her thighs, and … something else was there, some other dark presence, icy hands groping, slithering beneath her skirt.… Some being was near her, nearer than her skin, and a voice like the wind moaned in her ear, “I am here…” But the pounding of her heart drowned out the sound.
At that instant, through the smoke, she saw a familiar wooden box fly open and a hand reach in and grasp the kris. As the drums thundered, the jeweled handle caught the firelight and exploded with vivid slivers of color. She was hypnotized by the kris, hard and shimmering, floating above her head, and then, as the chanting rose to a screaming pitch, she felt a sudden sharp stab of pain.
Incomprehensibly, she heard terrified screams—like those she had heard that first night when she waited in the tower, screams that had haunted her dreams—but this time the screams were her own. Abruptly, she saw her father’s face, warped with fury, his features blurred and twisted beyond recognition, as the knife plunged again, ripping into her flesh.
All at once she felt the floor beneath her split open and freezing air float up from under her feet, wrapping her in a sheath of ice. Visions of ink-stained pages flew past her inner eye. Her mind closed in upon itself. From beneath her twisted love for her father and the anguish of his betrayal, she summoned the power she knew was within her, a force ancient and tempered. From out of her lost childhood, she drew the magic, glittering and dark, that had lain dormant in her deepest core.
She spoke no charm or rune, but felt every nerve of her body harden and grow rigid as she became the kris, sharp, faceted, flung in the air. She heard her father cry out and saw his eyes grow wild as the kris came to life and twisted in his hand. She witnessed his horror as he forced it back, fought its downward plunge, but he might as well have tried to stop the lightning in the sky. Like an arrow loosed from a bow, she was the kris, and she rode it into his heart.
Fourteen
“Angelique!” a voice was calling, and a ray of light pierced the darkness. “Are you still there?”
“Yes! Cesaire!”
“Oh, good! I worry for you. Don’t move! I be back!”
“Cesaire! Wait! What’s happening? Are we safe?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Just stay quiet. I come soon.”
It was difficult to know exactly where she was. She was shivering, curled into a ball, and she had been waiting for what seemed like hours, hidden beneath the deck. The creaking of the boat and the gentle slapping of the water against the hull were mingled with the groaning of the anchor chain. The wind was a constant roar as the little schooner lifted and fell in place. There was another sound, close by and beneath her, of the moaning and muttering of human captives, slaves chained in the hold. The stench of human waste was putrid, almost more than she could bear, but the smell of wretchedness was even worse.
She pulled the hat Cesaire had given her down over her hair, stuffing the curls inside. The ragged shirt and pants she wore smelled of him, and she dug her hands inside the folds of the fabric and pulled it to her nose to blot out the other, foul odors.
Clashing images of her escape, each thrown into high relief, as if illuminated by a bolt of lightning, flashed through her mind. She remembered seeing her father collapse at her feet and feeling the sanctuary become deathly quiet when the drums ceased. She saw the slaves draw back, stunned by her power, afraid she would strike them as well. And then, from out of nowhere, her bounds were loosed, a firm hand clasped hers tightly, and she was running with C
esaire through the chapel and out the wide doors.
As in any nightmare, her feet were like lead, and she was certain the maddened slaves, their desires inflamed and thwarted, were nipping at her heels, as they chased her across the courtyard. She and Cesaire hung for an instant at the edge of the parapet, the dark water swirling beneath them, before he cried, “Jump!” Then they were flying, falling for the longest of seconds, and plunging into the sea.
Buoyed by clouds of bubbles, she clawed to the surface. Cesaire was at her side, thrashing, barely staying afloat. “The ship is there!” he shouted, and she saw the long black hull riding the swell and the tall spars piercing the sky.
She swam, pulling Cesaire beside her. He sputtered, “You swim good enough for two,” and they floated in an invisible current, buffeted by chop, as the swinging lights on the schooner’s side rose up, then dipped from sight. They swam and floated, clinging together, until the moment finally came when they brushed against the barnacled wood of the hull. Exhausted, they found a rope ladder and climbed aboard.
The quiet on deck was unexpected. “Where is everybody?” whispered Angelique.
Cesaire was sprawled on the deck breathing hard. Then they heard raucous laughter from below in the galley. “They be gambling with Old Father Rum,” he grunted. Finally, he sat up and looked at her. “Here, best put these on.” He pulled off his clothes and gave them to her. “Better me naked than you. Seamen want no women on board, but one little black sailor like me be fine. Hide your hair so’s you be a boy.” He handed her the knitted cap he kept in his pocket.
She tried not to look at Cesaire’s little penis, shriveled and gray, but she was struck by how skinny the rest of him was, shivering there beside her.
“Come on!” he said, and she rose to follow him across the deck until they found a small hatch, which opened to the hold.
“Climb in here!” he said in a low voice. “I’ll go see if I can find the captain. They be expectin’ me to come by dinghy, with a lantern and a big ‘Hallo!’ from your father, who was to pay for the right to come aboard.”
