“Look,” Thomas said now, pointing between the buildings at the end of the square. “The Seine,” he said, the river Madame Bernault had been talking about earlier.
Beal didn’t know why it was so special, but she and Thomas were both children of the Chesapeake and of its rivers, and she smiled back at him. Both smiles were forced—Beal knew that in his own way, Thomas was working as hard as she was just to get through these hours—but smiling felt good.
“We’re just a few blocks from the station,” said Madame Bernault. “We’ll have to hurry when we get there.”
Beal still hadn’t looked at her. A nice person, she believed. Beal was trying to feel better, as if feeling better were a costume she could put on, and she calmed herself by looking around with more interest at the churches that seemed to pop up on every block, at the soldiers and police in their brilliant red trousers, at the children playing tag, laughing. Women in black and gray were heading home from market with bread and the long stalks of some sort of late-season greens sticking out of their baskets; protruding through the end of one basket, the tail of a large fish flapped up and down comically as the woman strode along. All that was reassuring to Beal, timeless and placeless. She looked ahead at what must be the train station coming into view, and among all the muted tones of the buildings and the clothing, she spied a sudden dot of color above it. Her chest tightened when she realized what it was, that dot of color, the hat worn by M. Touré. Yes, she knew he was going to be on a train to Paris, and she feared it would be the same one, and there was nothing she wanted less than to see him or to be seen by him. Before she could think, she let out a small, troubled breath, and it was loud enough and expressive enough for Madame Bernault to notice, to turn and glance ahead and see the same dot of color and then look back at Beal and finally their eyes met, and it was in a sort of shock and confusion, but also in full acknowledgment of the cause of the problem, if not of the true nature of the problem. How quickly the nun seemed to figure out that at the very least, Beal did not want to be arriving on the platform at the same time, and Madame Bernault cried, “M. Marain, un moment, s’il vous plaît,” which must have meant for him to stop, because he did stop, and she fumbled about her feet as if she had forgotten something, her bag or her cloak. Thomas noticed none of the drama, but he leaned forward as if to help her find whatever it was that she had lost.
“How silly of me,” she said, still not offering a reason for all this. “Such an old fool.”
“Hardly,” said Thomas, and he glanced at Beal in a lighthearted way.
This time, when Madame Bernault looked up from her searching, Beal was ready to meet the care of her gaze, to thank her with high eyebrows, but also to promise her that she had not done wrong, that she was hiding nothing from her husband, that this man would disappear into the station and that would be that.
* * *
The first night after leaving New York, Beal had descended four ship ladders to the lower dining salon on the Touraine. She was so homesick and frightened that she wanted to die, and she was also hungry and worried about how she was to get her supper in this place. As she dropped deeper into the ship, farther and farther from real light and real air, she was thinking as well of those horror stories of the slave ships and of being chained in the bowels of a vessel. She had heard these tales time and time again from an old woman at home—Aunt Zoe Gale—who had been driven crazy by the history of her people in America. Why, oh why, did God let them bring us here? That was Zoe’s refrain, that was her question, and she kept asking it to the very end, when she could no longer dress or feed herself or keep herself clean. She kept asking, as if an answer that made sense to her would suddenly wipe away the visions of bondage and mutilation that clouded her eyes and thus would silence the screaming of the lost and damned she heard in her ears. Beal suffered no hallucinations, heard no voices as she entered the dining salon, but it seemed to her, with Thomas and their escape and the lie about being his maid all muddled in her head, that she understood what it meant to be utterly and completely powerless to influence her fate. Whether she wanted it or not, whether she’d had second thoughts or just wasn’t quite ready, this ship was taking her to a new world.
She stood at the doorway to the salon swallowing terrible, hollow gulps of air, trying to steady herself with a hand on the railing that ran on almost every wall throughout the ship, but nothing about the scene in front of her calmed her fears. She gazed down the long tables, the lines of chairs bolted to the deck on swivels, and as baskets of bread and pots of stew were set down, people rushed for the seats, and men—fathers—raised their fists and their voices in a dozen languages while setting out places for their children. Elderly women spat out insults in perhaps universal languages as they seated their more decrepit husbands or sisters. Beal did not know that the territories being claimed would stand as assigned seating for the rest of the voyage, and that after this free-for-all there would be only occasional rough words if someone innocently counted off the wrong number of places from the head of the table and sat in someone else’s seat.
Beal didn’t care where she sat, and as she waited, the groups making a dash for the table became smaller and smaller, less and less aggressive, until it was clear that the remaining ten or so passengers waiting to seat themselves were each traveling alone. As she watched this process, she’d been slightly comforted that there were several other colored people in the room, one family with a gray-haired patriarch, three boys not much older than she was and, from the look on their faces, not much more at home. But as she waited to sit, she became aware that one man had sidled over to her, perhaps in the expectation that these last stragglers would simply form a line and file into place. He was very tall and quite formally dressed, with skin so black that in the shadows of the gaslight she could barely discern the shape of his nose or the point of his chin. When at last it was her turn, he jumped forward to a seat and swiveled it around for her with a gesture of his open palm, which, like his eyes and teeth, was one feature she could really make out. She did not know, even then, whether she liked him treating her as his charge, but she allowed herself to be seated in this way, and when he took his place beside her, she turned to give a nod of thanks to him. He was not through with serving her. He reached one of his very long arms out to grab the pot of stew, and he held it while she ladled a little into her bowl.
“Thank you,” she said, not at all sure he would understand English.
“You are welcome. There is no need for anyone to fight for food,” he said, beckoning with disdain toward the other tables. “I am Monsieur Diallo Touré.” He spoke precisely, enunciating every syllable as if a little unsure that he would be understood. He was not like any black man, any man at all, that she had ever met.
“This is your first crossing?” he asked.
She said it was.
“You are domestic?”
He had made the assumption he was supposed to make, and really, she’d never minded her job a bit, but for a reason she could not yet discern, she was wary of disapproval from this man. She answered, “I am a domestic, but that don’t make me domestic.” Her brother had once made a joke of the word, teasing her that if she were domesticated, she’d be like a cow.
M. Touré was confused by this, but then he realized it was his grammar that she was correcting. “Oh yes,” he said. “A domestic. English is not my first language. I am more comfortable in French, though I was raised speaking Wolof, the language of my tribe.”
Beal couldn’t imagine having all these different words in her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be fresh.”
He smiled; he had regained the upper hand. “Not at all,” he said grandly. “You are correct. In French one does not use the article when stating one’s profession. Je suis diplomate,” he said, apparently illustrating his point.
She nodded uncertainly, hoping she hadn’t gotten into something here. She took a spoonful of stew and found it delicious, not too greasy, a sort of sweet flavor t
o the broth. She reached for a piece of bread, which, fortunately, did not require M. Touré’s help.
“And what is your business in France?” he asked.
She had no idea how to answer this question and took herself to that surest of all places of refuge, a state of ignorance: she didn’t know why they were going to France; no one had told her.
“An intelligent girl who can make jokes about grammar should ask more of herself. You are no longer in America. American prejudice has its missionaries all over the world, but you are leaving the worst of it behind.” Touré paused here, as if swallowing a bad memory. For a second the cocky demeanor wavered, as if the thought of America were too much to bear, and he continued to stumble a bit. “In Paris there are Ethiopians, singers, troubadours, who revel in mocking themselves and our people for the amusement of the ignorant. Shocking.” One more slight pause, and then he ended this on a firmer note. “But you will find things very different in France.”
She didn’t understand the early part of what he said—missionaries? Ethiopians?—but the last part was what she had been led to believe, though honestly, she couldn’t imagine how her life was going to be so different, except that she would be with Thomas and away from her family.
“I am Senegalese,” he said proudly, puffing up his chest a bit. When he saw that she didn’t understand, he added, “From Africa.”
“I don’t know anything about Africa,” she said. “My Granddaddy told me that Maryland once tried to move us all to Liberia, even us who was free.”
“A shameful episode, but if it had come to pass, you would be living a very different kind of life today.” A better life, he meant, not one where you could be taken across the Atlantic Ocean without knowing or asking why.
Beal tried to imagine this, but she had no idea how people lived in Africa, how she might have grown up if her parents and grandparents had all been forcibly relocated. Were there really no whites there? Did they have real houses, like her family’s two-story house in Tuckertown, or did they live in huts made of straw? What clothes did they wear? She knew it was stupid of her not to know anything; how hard her mother had tried to make her attend to her studies, to maybe go to college like her brother, but she was a silly girl, a pretty girl, and then before she knew it—as if from the day she was born, born into this—she had agreed to marry Thomas. Beal thought it was love, or maybe something less breakable than that.
M. Touré broke into her thoughts. “You should come to Africa to see how our people are rising.”
She could think of no way to respond to this, so she stood. Most of the passengers had already left, headed into their cramped staterooms or into the steerage lounge or onto the fantail of the ship, where they could see the sun set over the horizon with a sudden burst of orange and then watch the froth of the propellers disappear in the moonlight. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Going to France is all the traveling I am fixing to do.”
He paid this no mind; he made his face blank, as if she’d said nothing.
“Thank you for helping me get on,” she said.
He had stood when she did; he was all frame, with skin stretched over his high cheekbones, hands with sharp, darting fingers and powerful claws. “I look forward to more conversation with you. I hope to learn more about you, and I will tell you about our homeland.”
Beal climbed back to first class. On the way down, she had not had to explain herself at the gates to second class and then to steerage, yet on the way up she was challenged by stewards to say precisely where she was going, what was the name and suite number of the family she served. All this subterfuge pained Thomas far more than it pained her; before they left Virginia, she’d overheard one last argument between Thomas and Mary about the plans for their escape. Thomas argued that they should just book a stateroom in steerage as the man and wife they were now, and no one would care, no one would bother them. But Mary had said, “Please, Thomas. We’re so close. Just do this for me. In nine days it’ll all be over.”
Beal was allowed to eat her breakfast at a special seating for servants and crew early in the morning, and lunch was irregular enough for her to avoid M. Touré for the most part, but he’d find her taking some air on the fantail from time to time, and at dinner he was always beside her. He gave her no quarter, and after a few days she did not resist so much; no one else said a word to her. He told her that his tribe was one of the ancient and powerful peoples of the area, that he was the chief aide to one of the two Senegalese deputies in the French National Assembly. Did she know that the Senegalese had seats in the National Assembly? He and his superior often went abroad to promote trade in agricultural products and groundnuts. He said that Senegal was to become a French colony; soon, he hoped, it would further cement its position as one of France’s great provinces. If that happened, he hoped to gain a major post, with homes perhaps in Paris and his native city, Dakar. How would she like that, he asked, to be the wife of a man with homes in Dakar and Paris?
This had been a rather long lecture, and she wasn’t listening all that attentively. But the word wife brought her back into the moment. They were sitting on the deck, leaning against a hatch cover, when he asked her that. He’d found her there; he always found her. She was thinking that the easiest way out of this was to say that she couldn’t be the wife of such a man, as she was already married to someone else.
“Ah,” he said. “You have been untruthful to me.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I did not expect to be misled.” He was angry and made no effort to conceal it. “And where is this husband you have been willing to leave behind, as if sold to another master?”
“You have no call to speak to me like that.”
He flicked away her protest. “I am not required to acknowledge this marriage if I am not apprised fully about it.”
Beal felt herself being subsumed by this man, by these demands and these rights he seemed to be claiming. One minute he would be complimenting her, showing himself charmed by her jokes; at other times he seemed to berate her. He called her a “stupid American” from time to time, pretending he meant it as a joke, but he did not; he said this only when she tried to assert herself. She did not understand this power he had gained over her, the way he was trying to twist her mind. She felt his desire for her and was horrified that she felt it working on her. She was being tugged somewhere by him. So when he insisted one more time that she tell him who this husband was or he would simply refuse to believe it, she told him that she was married to the man she was pretending to serve, Thomas Bayly.
His eyes became huge orbs of astonishment and horror. He said nothing for a few moments. She thought he might get up and leave her in disgust—that was one of the outcomes she’d hoped for in telling him the truth—but he did not. Finally he said, “He may have married you, but he’s still just the white master taking his privilege. Droit du seigneur, we call it.”
Beal wanted to slap him across his face, but she could not, partly because this was the same argument her brother had made before he died, Randall arguing that even though Thomas had been for many years his closest friend, whatever Thomas may have believed about himself in his heart, in the end he was making her into his whore. Others had said that too, though in nowhere near as awful language. They’d said that Thomas wouldn’t think of it as a real marriage; that when he tired of her, whatever vows he made could simply be withdrawn, forgotten, citing some law passed somewhere that said a white man who married a black woman could back out at any time he liked.
“And your children will be so pale that they’ll disappear in the sun,” said Touré. A few days earlier he had ridiculed her skin color as “mongrel skin.” Her tone was not actually so faded as all that, but she was brown, not black, not remotely as dark, as pure, as he was.
“Why do you care about me? Why do you follow me around this boat? I don’t owe nothing to you. Leave me be, if I’m such a stupid American. Go back to Africa where everybody gets a
long right nice.”
“This is not a real marriage,” he repeated. “In time you will understand that.”
“And then what?”
“Then I will be there to make you a real husband.”
“I will be wife number three to you?” He had told her about his two wives quite casually the night before. “Do you think I want that?”
“My other wives will be no concern of yours.”
At this, Beal finally got up and left him on the deck, and in the evening she told Thomas she was feeling a little seasick and would not be going to dinner. But the following night, their last before reaching Le Havre, she went back to the dining salon, and he was there, showing her to her place as if nothing had happened the day before. None of the people who sat around them had been to France, and he told them about Le Havre, where the train station was, how to send a telegram back to their families, ways to avoid being robbed. Looking at Beal, he said he would be boarding the first train to Paris, where he had a room in a flat with fellow Senegalese deputies. When the meal broke up, Beal lingered. She could not help it; she could not extricate herself from this man without some parting. She swiveled her chair toward him. “I want to thank you for helping me.”
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 3
