And stopping for the second time, Grandmother would say slowly, so as to make us feel the gravity of the question:
“Tell me, my little embers—is man an onion?”
“No, no,” we’d answer, very knowledgeable in this field. “Man isn’t an onion that can be peeled, not at all.”
And she, satisfied, would go on briskly:
“Well, the Man who Tried to Live on Air, up on his mare, one day he was weary of wandering, and he longed for his estate, his house, the song of the rivers. But the horse still carried him away, further and further away. His face drawn, gloomier than death, the man groaned on from town to town, country to country, and then he disappeared. Where to? How? No one knows, but he was never seen again. But this evening, as I was taking in your washing, Telumee, I heard the sound of galloping behind the cabin, just under the clump of bamboo. I turned my head to look, but the beast aimed such a kick at me that I found myself back here, sitting in my rocker telling you this story.”
The light of the lamp faded, Grandmother merged into the darkness, and Elie said goodnight nervously, looked out at the dark road, and suddenly took to his heels and fled to Old Abel’s shop. We hadn’t stirred, Grandmother and I, and her voice grew strange in the shadows as she began to braid my hair. “However tall trouble is, man must make himself taller still, even if it means making stilts.” I listened without understanding, and got on her knees, and she would rock me like a baby, at the close of those old far-off Thursdays. “My little ember,” she’d whisper, “if you ever get on a horse, keep good hold of the reins so that it’s not the horse that rides you.” And as I clung to her, breathing in her nutmeg smell, Queen Without a Name would sigh, caress me, and go on, distinctly, as if to engrave the words on my mind: “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.”
4
ALL RIVERS, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their streams, all rivers go down to and are drowned in the sea. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river. You can make meander after meander, twist, turn, seep into the earth—your meanders are your own affair. But life is there, patient, without beginning or end, waiting for you, like the ocean. We were a little apart from the world, little streams dammed up by school and protected from violent suns and torrential rains. We were safe there, learning to read and sign our names, to respect the flag of France our mother, to revere her greatness and majesty and the glory that went back to the beginning of time, when we were still monkeys with their tails cut off. And while school was leading us toward the light, up there on the hills of Fond-Zombi, the waters were intersecting, jostling, foaming, the rivers were changing their courses, overflowing, drying up, going down as best they could to be drowned in the sea. But however much care it took of us, and our frizzy little pigtailed heads, school could not stop our waters from gathering, and the time came when it opened its sluices and left us to the current. I was fourteen, with my two breasts, and beneath my flowered calico dress I was a woman. How often had Queen Without a Name told me that all rivers go down to and are drowned in the sea, how often had she told me? I pondered, I watched life wax and wane before my eyes, all the women lost before their time, broken, destroyed—and at their wakes the mourners tried, in vain, to think of the name, the true name they had deserved to bear. And so some looked on the sun while others disappeared into the night. And I pondered, calculated everything, wondering what loops, meanders, and gleams would be mine on my way to the ocean.
The time of the flame tree was well and truly over; we rode a great, continuous, shuddering wave; Fond-Zombi was astir as never before. We used to inundate the hamlet with our clatter. Shouts of laughter clashed and rose to the very tops of the trees; the air was a violin string, a pounded drum; gangs yelled to one another wildly. At all hours of the day, on the bridge, on the hill, on the road, under the lean-to roof of Old Abel’s shop, there was some group of young idlers waving their arms about, discussing love at the tops of their voices, trumpeting their conquests, and quarreling, fighting, giggling about everything. They would walk up and down the valley, twitting those among them who’d found a job. With their women’s bodies and children’s eyes, my friends felt quite ready to get the better of existence: they intended to lead their lives full tilt, to overtake their mothers and aunts and godmothers. Warnings shot up on one hand, jeers on the other, and this whole new ovenful of hot bread rushed joyously to its fate in the ocean. Bellies grew round, wide skirts became the fashion. Flat bellies were mocked, were greeted with the song:
No mother
No father
Bravo!
A woman without two men
Isn’t worth a straw.
As they dragged their swollen legs about the streets, each carrying before her a little calabash of trouble, Queen Without a Name would throw up her arms and pray: “I only hope the breeze goes on blowing on their poor balloons, I only hope it doesn’t stop! So many pretty coconut flowers that will fade before their time. Hold fast, my girl, cling on, you must ripen, you must give forth your fruit.” I listened uneasily, looking at her gaunt cheeks and bony hands, at her eyes worn out with suns and rains and tears, with all the things she’d seen that had sunk into her retinas, slow to react of recent weeks, and sometimes sad and veiled with irony. Under the eternal three-cornered scarf a kind of light silvery nest had formed in the nape of her neck; it looked as if it would blow away at the slightest gust of wind. I should have loved to relieve her of her garden, her kilibibis and crystallized fruit, and her poor penny barley sugars, and sit her in her rocker as was right at her age, to drink in through her ample nostrils the scents that wafted to her doorstep. That, that was what ought to await a poor she-ass of an old black Mama who had spent her life sweating and slaving. Since school I hadn’t been idle. From sunrise to sunset I’d done nothing but tear about and drudge and wear my blood out. But only at odd jobs for which I was paid practically nothing: to bring in any money to speak of you had to go into the canefields, with their prickles, their wasps, their biting ants, and the foremen who were connoisseurs of feminine flesh. Grandmother herself ruled that out, saying my sixteen years were not going to provide them with their day’s special. As for Elie, the very word cane drove him wild, filled him with incomprehensible fury. His dreams of being a great scholar were left far behind, the Customs had disappeared with school, and the convertible, the suit with the ruffle, and the brocade gowns with cross-over collars had all melted away into the same bitterness. All that survived were confused visions, a few pictures of snow and strange leafless trees in a book, a map of France, and some illustrations representing the seasons; the famous letters themselves, once the bearers of hope, they too were now fading into mere shades. Elie railed and swore by all the gods the cane would never get him, he was never going to buy a knife to go work on the land of the white men. He’d rather use it to cut his own hands off, he’d hack the air and cleave the wind but he wouldn’t accept that fate. These words, uttered in the shop, entered the ear of a tall reddish-brown Negro called Amboise, a silent fellow, a philosopher, by trade a sawyer, who smiled and said: “Here’s what a Negro should do rather than go among the spikes of the canefields: cut off his right hand and make a present of it to the whites.” Next day Elie set off for the woods with Amboise, carrying a saw over his shoulder. By a mere word tossed into the air he had escaped doom.
From then on I only saw him on Sundays, for a few hours by the Blue Pool, where all the world’s bustle died away. I used to tease him about his new trade. “Do you want to die before your time, up there on the scaffolding in all that wet?” He would burst into his old laughter, the laughter of that first day on the path to the river. “How are we to shelter our little carcasses later on if I don’t saw planks?” And he’d laugh again, wheedle me, get around me with a thousand words, imagine dresses for me, blue, red, and green, and end up by saying I was like a rainbow standing there before him. “Oh stay, there where I ca
n see you—don’t disappear like that into the sky.” And he’d hold me so tight, to stop me from disappearing, that I could hardly breathe. One Sunday as I was sitting on a rock, in the cool, Elie sat down on another rock nearby and said:
“I think of the Blue Pool, like you, my little goatling, when the heat gets too much for me in the forest. You can run about when I’m not there, you can jump and dance—but you’re mine, and your rope is tied around my waist. When you skip to the right, I go to the right. When you skip to the left, I go to the left.”
“Right. You’ve gone to the left. And then what?”
“Only you, leaping about far away from me—only you know that.”
“If I skip about, it’s with my eyes fixed on your flesh and bones. You say my rope is tied around your waist. Don’t pull on it, give me a little respite, a little time to breathe, that’s all.”
We’d bathed together, and the sun was drinking the drops off us as we lay resting on a huge flat rock, burning hot, right in the middle of the river. The water slipped gently past it, and further on disappeared into a tunnel of mombins and giant ferns, which cast a restful but somewhat solemn shade. Turning toward Elie, I saw on his face the drawn expression he used to have under the flame tree when we were at school, when he spoke of his father, and the forest, life and its thousand and one paths, and his fears of getting lost. He dipped one hand into the clear water and said thoughtfully: “You’re right. Jump and frisk far away from me. What have I to offer you, and what good does it do me to see you as a fairy princess? One day our table will be set, our plates will be filled, and the next day we’ll have salt water and three specks of oil staring at us. Only, Telumee, don’t forget this: in my eyes nothing in the world is good enough for you, and if I have ten measly francs in my pocket and I see a dress that costs ten francs, I’ll buy it for you, but it won’t be good enough.”
I thought of lying there on the pebbles for Elie to stretch out at full length over me, but instead of that, lost Negress that I was, I took to my heels and ran away by the river while he called after me: “But what did I say? What did I say?” But I kept running, and his voice got fainter and fainter, and soon all I could hear was the breeze among the cassias beside the path, and, somewhere, people laughing, people singing. I was back in Fond-Zombi.
Despite my wearing my fingers to the bone, cleaning the cabin where the women had their babies, looking after the animals owned in common, carrying the market women’s loads to the main road, we still got barely a pound of fresh pork every Saturday and a cotton dress once a year. The tree of fortune didn’t grow in Fond-Zombi. In spite of the grass that cut you, in spite of the red ants and centipedes, I’d willingly have broken my back among the canes and the pineapple rows. But every time I suggested it, this was all the encouragement I got from Queen Without a Name: “My little sun, why would you want to serve up your sixteen years as a dainty morsel for a foreman? And all in exchange for what, for what wonderful reward? Just to be given a decent patch of ground to weed, a job that won’t make you spit blood, where you won’t cough your heart out among weeds taller than you are. And tell me this, too: where have you seen cane planted all the year round?” And if I thought of hiring myself out, behind the white man’s chair, Queen Without a Name would say in a tone of deep reproach: “Did I say you were in the way here? Did I?”
Seeing our hesitancy, our indecision, illness came and fell upon Queen Without a Name. From day to day she wasted away; little ailments came and perched on her old body, came and nested there like birds on a tree struck by lightning. On Ma Cia’s advice I treated her with copious infusions and packs and wet cups. But proper pills were needed, too, and at every visit to the pharmacy our savings dwindled like a candle in a draft. Soon, however much we turned our purse upside down and shook it, not the smallest coin fell out. I’d have to go away, hire myself out by the month, sell my sweat in the usual regular manner. But where, in this out-of-the-way hole, was there a porticoed house with a gate and bougainvilleas? The biggest cabin in Fond-Zombi consisted of four rooms without the veranda. Grandmother and I went around all the neighboring areas hoping to find a well-off house that might need a living-in servant. But our heads spun, and still not the slightest gleam appeared on the horizon. Then one day Queen Without a Name’s face lit up and she said in a faintly reproachful voice: “Why didn’t I think of the Andreanors, and their big shop in Valbadiane?” But this beautiful vision was as short-lived as lightning. Grandmother, overcome with gloom, muttered: “There are some very strange illnesses in this world. Man’s blood turns to pus.”
I looked at her in astonishment, and she explained.
“The Andreanors are supposed to have leprosy in their blood, from father to son. I forgot it, thinking of Mamzelle Losea with her beautiful mulatto’s hair and gentle sad eyes, who always puts a kind word in with the things she sells. The others, those you never see, the ones who hide their lions’ faces out behind the shop—they went completely out of my head.”
We left the Andreanors to their fate, and tried to find some property where a root of the silver tree grew. Two white families lived thereabouts. One, at Bois Debout, was of poor whites as godforsaken as we were. The other family lived in style at Galba, behind a wrought-iron gate. These two descendants of the White of Whites, the one who used to burst a Negro’s spleen just to relieve his own bad temper. They say a distant drum sounds best, but Queen Without a Name’s mother had heard it with her own ears, the din of this drum, and she told Grandma, and Grandma herself had unclenched her teeth once to give passage to this echo from the old days. So it was as if I’d seen him with my own eyes, the White of Whites, who limped, who could lift a horse, whose hair gleamed like the midday sun, who’d squeeze a little Negro in his arms until he died. But a root of the silver tree grew in their yard, and however much I went over and over them in my mind, Minerva and the White of Whites and the Negroes’ burst spleens, what was in store for me was the Desaragnes’ house, Belle-Feuille. A river in flood sweeps away huge rocks, uproots trees, but the pebble which will cut your foot open—it leaves that there waiting for you. But nothing lasts forever, Grandmother told me, not even shaking off the dust of the whites; and, dressing herself carefully, with a scarf around her waist, a burning fever, and lusterless eyes, she set off for Galba and Belle-Feuille. How she approached Madame Desaragne, what she said to her, I’ll never know.
I got a vague idea, later, one day when my employer said to me: “You may be your grandmother’s crystal glass, but you’re not anybody’s crystal anything here.” And then I suspected, then I could well imagine, what she might have said to that white woman, Queen Without a Name.
A few weeks afterwards, Grandmother launched me into the sky, gently, carefully, like a kite one releases, tries, flies for the first time. She gave me her blessing for all the sunshine I’d brought into her little cabin. Then, rubbing me with a mixture of wormwood, citronella, and patchouli, she said:
“It happens, even to the flame tree, to tear the guts out of its belly and fill them with straw.”
So I in my turn set out for Belle-Feuille, my linen tied up in a big handkerchief, my sorrow folded double inside me. It was early morning, the dew still clung to the underside of the grass and the shiny leaves of the trees, the crowing of cocks rose high into the air—all foretold a bright day. Some women were already doing their washing under the Bridge of Beyond, the frail footbridge linking Fond-Zombi to the world, which I’d crossed for the first time, eternities ago, with Queen Without a Name. Just before La Ramée I turned off the path leading to school and onto a road that ran between nothing but canefields, without a cabin, without a tree in sight, without anything to arrest the eye. It was the time of year when the whites set fire to their land, and black stumps stretched out endlessly, with a bitter reek of nature smoked and cured. I drew nearer to Galba, torn between rage at having to go and the hope, in spite of everything, of finding a little respite there, a little shade, before I too was engulfed in the sun of t
he canes. I could hear, in the wind, over the scorched earth, the voice of Ma Cia: “A Negro? A headless, homeless crab, that walks backwards.” Wandering thus in my head, I came to a long, silky green path all shiny with rich grass and shaded by clumps of white, pink, and red hibiscus. Just behind me the road between the canes went on still, but already I felt as if I were in another world. It was like going right into the chancel of a church, the same cool, the same silence, the same remoteness. And as I walked along, involuntarily almost on tiptoe, there suddenly appeared a huge house with colonnades and bougainvilleas, a flight of steps leading up to the porch, two metal arrows on the roof, and the amazing windows with glass and lace curtains that we used to talk about, Queen Without a Name and I. The whole front of the house was hung with scarlet flowers, deep and dazzling. Coming toward me from the porch where she had been sitting was the descendant of the White of Whites, a slightly built lady, rather old-maidish, with long gray and yellow hair, painted toenails, and sandals that she scuffed along like little paper boats pulled on strings across a pond. Two intensely blue eyes examined me—a gaze that struck me as cold, languid, and cavalier—while Madame Desaragne questioned me closely, as if she’d never set eyes on Grandmother.
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