The noon break was nearly over. Then we’d leave the shelter and go back to work under a sun that moved as we did, following us, stooping when we did, then going on, getting lower, getting lower and lower until it leveled glowing brands against us. Sweat would trickle off our bellies, but we wouldn’t give in, and then in the end the sun would grow weary and weak.
But at the beginning of the afternoon nothing stirred, the birds were silent, drowsing in the motionless, scentless trees. Here and there on the ground, red scabs of earth would crack open and out would come the indefatigable ants. Then we’d sit near the shelter, in its shade, and there would follow one of my favorite hours. I bent over the hearth of stones and took the hot vegetables out of the pot and cut long twists of cucumber over them from a cucumber that went limp in the steam. Then I picked some half-ripe pimentos and arranged them on the edge of each plate, and, sitting on the ground, our knees relaxed and our toes exposed to the cool air, we would begin our meal. Amboise would take a slice of vegetable on the prongs of his fork, dip it all around in the hot sauce, then look at it for a moment and put it in his mouth, chewing it much longer than necessary, as if he couldn’t bring himself to cease from tasting it, as if each mouthful had its own flavor that he must follow through to the end. So it became a great and mysterious celebration, a silent argument for the continuation of life, life in all its forms, and especially those no one can buy, such as a satisfied belly visited by all the fruits of the earth.
At the end of the afternoon, when the animals had been brought in, Amboise would strip off his thick, rough, ragged clothes, the color of our soil, fold them up, and put them on the dome-shaped top of a young orange tree. Then, naked in the light of the setting sun, he waited for me. And that was another hour I loved, for his muscles, at rest, hoped for me, and I came and poured over him the citronella-scented water I always remembered to put to warm in the sun in the morning. The water flowed over his body with a murmur, its scent saturating the air as if it were sap, while Amboise splashed about making long spurts of water that soaked and drenched and carried me away. Every day I put on my canefield dress, my second skin, two flour bags softened by frequent washing and steeped in my sweat. It was a shapeless, lifeless object, held in around the waist by one of the Queen’s scarves, the one with pale yellow checks the color of a setting sun. I folded it across and tied it so that it would support my back as I bent and straightened up, straightened up and bent, all day, sowing and hoeing. I wasn’t any good at doing my hair in the current fashion, swept up or back, and every morning my head would be covered with braids that I tried to sort out as prettily as possible and arrange in a crown on top. Got up like this as I sat in the shade of the cabin, I was nervous when Amboise looked at me, afraid that in his look there might be a touch of regret or disappointment. But he could read me like a book, and he’d throw back his head to get the land breeze that always rose at evening, and then, bending on me his clever, passionate, innocent glance, he would say how pretty I looked in that dress that fitted my shape, without fashion or paint. “For, he would add, smiling, “it’s corpses and those who have something to hide that are rouged and dolled up.”
He was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, in a little cabin that sheltered three generations of Negroes, including an old woman who’d been alive in the days of slavery and showed one breast marked with her master’s brand. In his youth he had worked in the Carenage factory, unloading trucks of sugarcane from Grande-Terre, and one day during a strike, without quite knowing why he did it, he flew at the throat of a mounted gendarme who was galloping through the crowd. He didn’t care to talk about the time he spent in prison. Apparently, at the beginning, the beatings only made him kick, but then he became more tractable, having come to see his position as a Negro in another light. The man who shared his cell explained the world to him, saying gravely: “My friend, a white man is white and pink, God is white and pink, and where there’s a white man, that’s where the light is.” Amboise had already heard from the lips of his grandmother that a Negro is a well of sins, a creature of the devil. But in prison, his head splitting from beatings, Sunday sermons, and the words of the man who shared his cell, he came to be horrified at the “blackness” of his soul, and wondered what he could do to wash it clean, so that one day God might look at it without aversion. And that was how, he told me with amusement, he got the idea of going to France, where he lived for seven years.
He didn’t like talking about France either, lest certain words, certain descriptions, should suck up people’s souls and poison them. In those days Negroes were rare in Paris, and used to congregate in the two or three hotels that made no objections. The people in his hotel were chiefly musicians, waiters, and dancers; there was even one who earned his living actually “being” a Negro in a cage, yelling and throwing himself about like a lunatic, which according to Amboise was just what the whites liked to see. As for himself, having no special skill he fitted little bits of iron in various kinds of hole from morning till night. At first he admired the strength of character of the white men, who all had an air of solitude and self-sufficiency, like gods. The most difficult thing about the first few months was that he felt under no obligation whatever to go on living: he might disappear at any moment without anyone noticing, because nothing depended on him, he corresponded to nothing either for good or ill. But at the end of two or three years he felt as if he were living in a nightmare, one of those nightmares he used to have as a child after certain bedtime stories. As soon as he left the hotel he felt as if he were going through places peopled with evil spirits, strangers to his flesh and blood who watched him go by with complete indifference, as if for them he didn’t exist. He spent all his time now warding off invisible blows, which apparently these people strike at you without even thinking. However much he straightened his hair, parted it on one side, bought a suit and a hat, he still went through an invisible avalanche of blows in the street, at work, in restaurants. People didn’t notice his efforts, didn’t see he had to change everything, for in a Negro what part is good? That’s what Amboise asked himself during his seven years’ stay in France. He could never say what took place inside him, and how by the end of the seven years he had come to regard white men as mouths that cram themselves with misfortune, burst bladders that set themselves up as lanterns to light the world. When he got back to Guadeloupe all he wanted to do was go barefoot in the sun, and speak the words of long ago in the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre. “How are you doing, brother? Don’t let go, hold tight, for it’s a tough fight, man, really tough.” That was his dream, that and to plunge into the deep water of the women here, to stroke our wild short hair that never grows any longer. He’d washed all white ideas out of his head, but he bore no grudge. Those people were on one shore and he on the other, they didn’t see life from the same side, that’s all, brother.
After a few weeks he had taken up with his former life again, his old habits, his little job at the Carenage. And he maintained total silence about France and the whites, even avoided looking at those he passed in the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre, with that air they have of floating somewhere above their bodies and only being there against their will. One day as he saw one of them approaching along the sidewalk he suddenly felt a mysterious desire to slit his throat. There was nothing special about the man, he was just one white flesh among others, with white thoughts running right across the grainy white skin of his brow. Meanwhile Amboise had gripped his knife down in the depths of his pocket and was preparing to stick him like a pig right there in the middle of the Rue Frébault. But at the last moment the thought of what he was about to do stopped him. During the days that followed, the spirit that had entered into him returned to the charge: now it was an unbearable torture, a constant struggle between the longing to cleave a white skin and the horror of doing such a thing. His will was no longer his own, so he went and placed it in the hands of a wizard, who said to him in terror: “Amboise, my son, I can do nothing for you, for you are inhabited by the spi
rit of Satan himself and you are under his orders.” And the next day he said goodbye to his friends and plunged into the farthest hills of Guadeloupe, reaching the foothills of the mountains, far from the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre, far even from the canefields, far from any white face. That was how he came to be a sawyer in our forest at Fond-Zombi.
Here, when he spoke of France, people looked at him as if he were a lost sheep that had strayed and seen so many things it had been driven mad. So Amboise fell silent, and as a dumb protest would go many days without opening his mouth. He would often stand bolt upright or lean against a tree, a chair, or the wall of our cabin, all the weight of his body on one leg, the other tracing circles and arabesques on the ground while he calculated and plumbed the depths. His neck would seem to go out of joint, his head was no longer in a straight line with his body but stuck out sideways toward the sun, so that he was forced to lower his eyes to see what was going on below among men. And in his eyes there was a sort of constant alert, as if at any moment he might hear the word that would comfort him forever, as if that word might come from any mouth at any time. But it did not come, he never heard it, for no one here could utter it, and my own mouth was sad and silent. Then he would bend over me and say gently, in a voice that came from the very abyss of solitude and cold, “Telumee, we have been beaten for a hundred years, but I tell you, girl, we have courage for a thousand.”
We spent such times like two octopi attacked at the bottom of the sea, shooting out ink so as not to see. But he always came back to shore in the end, to the godforsaken land of Guadeloupe that so much needed to be loved. But at first after he got back he would feign indifference, saying man is only a fish that eats other men, and that he had given up blaming sharks. The sky was the roof of the world, the house was vast and various, but the doors were all closed, and there was no way from one room to another. And picking up his old pipe he filled it with an air of longing, and turning to the sky, sent up to it a few puffs of smoke.
With the years these absences from the world grew rarer, then disappeared, giving place to a calm and peaceful astonishment at the Negro’s vagaries, his beauty as of something unfinished, something perpetually springing into life. We could only be seen like this by one who had crossed the sea, and known the temptation of being far away from home, of looking at our country through foreign eyes, of denying it. He said enemy hands had gotten hold of our soul and shaped it to be at war with itself. And now people pricked up their ears and listened to him, because of the way he said all this, and some looked at him wide-eyed, vaguely dazzled, trying to see their wavering lives more clearly. And if someone said the Negro deserved his fate because he couldn’t summon up the energy to save himself, Amboise always asked him the same question: “Tell me, brother, what energy will save the tethered kid from the knife?” And everyone smiled, and we felt we were like the kid tethered in the field, and we knew the truth of our fate was not in ourselves but in the existence of the blade.
When he came to me Amboise was just in his fifties, and since then he had aged steadily, though his body was still full of youth and vigor. That was why people laughed and said, “You know who I mean? The man with the father’s head on a son’s body.” All those years had gone by, new streams had come to the rivers, and I hadn’t felt the passage of time because of this man who bestowed on me a breath of eternity. Our waters had mingled and merged, and little warm currents ran through them all day long. And at that good time in my life it seemed to me that even the wicked themselves lived in peace, practicing a kind of activity indispensable to their fulfillment, and I looked on them with an indulgent eye, the eye I had for the sting of bees, the translucent tail of the scorpion, the plume of those marvelous saffron flowers that poison you at a mere touch of the finger. For our plowing we’d bought an ox that had come to know Amboise’s voice, and slowed down to listen when he was saying something interesting. I loved the ox, and every day I congratulated myself on being of this world.
Toward the end, in the last few weeks of Amboise’s life, strange rumors circulated throughout the countryside and even reached our little cabin on the hill at La Folie. It was said the cutters at Grande-Terre had gone on strike, led by some bold Negroes who knew how to talk to the factory in a way that could really be called talking, and who’d gotten a raise of two sous for a man and one for a binder. Amboise made no comment on this, but his eyes lit up with a strange gleam that soon appeared in the eyes of all the men around, in La Folie, in Valbadiane, in La Roncière, in Fond-Zombi, and even in the cabins of the Negroes living in the valley, in the very shadow of the factory. The price of food had risen steeply in the last few years, but the tokens with the factory’s initials on had not produced any offspring. The shops had closed their credit books long ago, and the people who worked in the canefields grew exhausted, and their children became like birds on the branch, left to the mercy of heaven. Tongues wagged, necks stiffened, and some asked where were the laws of the land if the very shops wouldn’t give credit any more. The foremen, who scented trouble, shouted threats from their horses, and galloped uneasily back and forth along the rows of cutters. But the words went on their way and generated other words under the tall heads of the canes. A strike was called, and woe to anyone who went to the fields, for he might find death instead of bread. One evening three men, from Fond-Zombi, Valbadiane, and La Roncière, came to our house and asked Amboise to represent the three communes next morning at a meeting with the factory authorities. The people at Grande-Terre, they explained, had found some clever men to present their grievances to the owners, and that was why they’d gotten their two sous. But in the out-of-the-way communes around here, Amboise was the only man who had traveled, the only one who could find, in the French of France, words that would both win over the hearer and express the Negro’s determination. What did he say?
I saw my man go off into a long reverie, and as he chewed at the stem of his pipe and puffed a wisp of smoke into the air, one of the three envoys said curtly:
“Amboise, what energy will save the kid from the knife?”
Amboise took his pipe out of his mouth, smiled at the reminder of his own words, and said quietly and tranquilly:
“You are right, brother.”
From dawn onwards the hills echoed with lambis shells being blown all over the district, rallying the undecided, the fearful, and the disillusioned. From all sides ragged processions of men in tatters straggled toward the factory, moving forward in a stunned silence, heavy with centuries of fear and bitterness. Once near the factory, a single column was formed with Amboise at its head, followed by the three men who had chosen and sought him out. As soon as the column entered the yard a white man appeared at the top of the steps leading to the office. Amboise stepped forward and said in a high clear voice that shook a little:
“Some cutters came the other day and talked to you and received nothing but threats. What do you think—is a working man a bird? And are his children the young of a bird? I beat my breast and ask you: who toils here, who plants the canefields and cuts them and burns them? But everyone knows an empty sack cannot stand up. It falls, it cannot help but fall. So we have come to ask you if you’ve decided to make the sack stand up. What is your answer?”
“My answer is still the same.”
And the man from the factory turned on his heel and disappeared. And everyone started to shout and shove, trying to rush into the factory all together to sack it and tear it apart. At that moment someone inside switched on the boilers, which had vents opening into the yard. Jets of scalding steam fell on those jostling one another outside the building. Three were burned to death, including Amboise, others injured, one blinded. The mounted gendarmes who had arrived in La Ramée during the night and been at the ready since dawn, charged the crowd, now bent on destroying both the staff and the buildings of the factory. No one ever found out who had released the jets of boiling steam. Amboise was wrapped up in a sack and carried on four men’s shoulders to our cabin at La Folie
. After a wake at which no one spoke and there was no singing or dancing, he was carried hastily to the graveyard at La Ramée, for the burns had accelerated the process of decomposition.
At dawn I would go and sit in the shade of our palm shelter and watch Amboise eat, chewing slowly in his pleasure, and then the citronella-scented water would splash over his skin and the smell would fill the air, the inside of the cabin, and even the sheets on our bed. In the evening I would bar the door and the night would go by as of old, in the same glory, the same bodily enchantment that gives and takes and is annihilated. After a few months I was waxen, corpselike. People begged me not to live with a dead man—he would exhaust me and wither me up, and before long the earth would take me in its embrace. I must pull myself together before it was too late, go down to the grave with sharp acacia branches and whip it as hard as I could. But I couldn’t struggle against Amboise. I waited for him every evening, and the life flowed out of my body in a continuous stream. One night he appeared to me in a dream and asked me to help him join the dead—he was not properly one of them yet, because of me, just as because of him I was not properly living. He wept and implored, saying I must keep up my position as a Negress to the end. The next day I cut three wands of acacia and went down to the graveyard at La Ramée, and I whipped Amboise’s grave, beat it and whipped it.
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