Windward Heights

by Maryse Conde

  He is the reason I have made up my mind not to stay a day longer in this house, a home only to grief. I’ll go and seek the rays of happiness elsewhere. When I was little, only one person understood me: my nursemaid, mabo Julie. She was my real maman. Black as the bottom of a cauldron, with her hair straggling out from under her madras headtie, and the smell of sweat hidden in the folds of her loose­ fitting dresses. Everyone found me too argumentative, inquisitive and insolent. Except for her. She answered my questions and helped me as best she could to decipher the world.

  “It’s true, they say the earth is round like a ball, flat at each end, and if you start at one point and keep walking you’ll eventually arrive back where you began.”

  I suppose the Good Lord had something in mind when He created the Blacks, the Whites, the Yellows and even the Reds. He wanted to show that some colors have all the misfortune imaginable, while others are his favorites. To get to the school we had to ford the Ravine-Blanche. When it rained the stepping stones would be well under water and sometimes the gully overflowed. So mabo Julie would perch me on her shoulders and take me across. When she heard of all my misadventures—my elopement, my pregnancy and my nameless child—she tried to find out where I was, to get a letter to me. When I returned from Dominica she came over to see me at l’Engoulvent, and without bothering to take me to task she offered me her help and assured me of her affection. I shall go to her house to hide before leaving for some secret corner of this earth where nobody, nobody will find my baby and me.

  Here he comes, as stiff as a poker, cutting across the savanna. His strides are mechanical and he looks like a zombie. Cathy was the salt of his life and he has lost her. He no longer eats nor sleeps. At night I can hear him ranting and raving in front of his window wide open on the spongy, barren darkness.

  “Where are you? Tell me where you are. Are you hiding in the shooting star that has just fallen in the sea? Or in the firefly that glows all on its own? In the mason-wasp that sharpens its sting? Or in the frog that rasps in vain for water?”

  In the hour before dawn he throws himself exhausted on his bed and tosses and turns till morning. Sometimes in the middle of the night he goes and joins Justin, who is drowning his sorrows in rum, and the two souls of the damned down one bottle after the other in a torrent of most dreadful abuse. At times I can hear them singing “Faro dans les bois.”

  No, I’ll not stay one minute longer in this house. I have already folded the few wretched clothes my child and I possess in a small wicker basket. When the eye can no longer distinguish a white thread from a red one, I shall slip away and leave all this shame and mourning behind me.

  Razyé is standing in the middle of the paved yard, looking up. You’d think he was looking at me, and yet I’m quite sure he doesn’t even see me. He peers at the shape of the clouds in the sky and measures the void of his remaining days. Another thirty, another forty years left. What is he going to do with all those remaining years? He finally enters the house and I can hear him shout sharply at Justin.

  “What are you waiting for? I’ve already told you I don’t want to see you in my house anymore! Take your child, pack up and go! Get the hell out of here!”

  Where can the wretched Justin go? He no longer has a cent to his name. I would have pity on him if I didn’t loathe him so much. His hands groping my body! His breath laden with rum! One night he suggested I break with Razyé and begin a new life with him. I threatened to tell the police and he never repeated his offer again.

  Razyé mounts the stairs and passes my bedroom door. Not an evening passes without my heart beating in the senseless hope that perhaps he will stop, look in on the child he hardly remembers, and who knows, life will start all over again. He never loved me. Yet there was a time when the longing for his body gave me the illusion. That is all I miss. He enters his bedroom, opens the window, and I can hear him moan as he does every night: “Cathy, Cathy!”

  Deep down I despise him. How can he fall into the depths of despair for a woman! After all, what did this Cathy have that we didn’t have?

  Mabo Julie lives in Petit-Canal, a featureless little town that people pass through without noticing. Her cabin stands at the entrance to a lakou, a tenants’ yard, that opens out just steps away from the cathedral. Her two rooms are neat and clean, piously decorated with pictures of the saints. Now that she is too old to find an employer for her services, she has set herself up in business with her five daughters, all with children of their own. Together they wash and iron the clothes of the white Creoles and society mulattos from all over the district. As nobody wields a tallowed iron better than they do, people have nicknamed them “miracle hands,” and they have countless customers.

  In a way, living at mabo Julie’s might look like a fate worse than living at l’Engoulvent. Here I rely on the kindness of a servant. I live off her entirely among our former slaves. But I have never taken pride in my color.

  Before I knew Razyé and brought his child into this world, I took an interest in the negroes. I was born well after slavery was abolished, and mabo Julie always described it as hell on earth. Yet it is difficult to imagine how the conditions of slaves could have been worse than they are now. I saw the negroes coming and going through the house like subordinate, inferior shadows, satisfying our slightest whims. My father maintained that they should not be trusted; my mother recalled the duties of a Christian toward them. In fact, nobody took the trouble to know precisely who they were. I believe their passions to be more heated than ours and the dreams inside their heads wilder. I believe them to be unruly. Because they have truly suffered, they are susceptible, aggressive and slow to confide and tell the truth. In their minds, nothing will ever free them from life’s wickedness.

  When the rumour of my presence at mabo Julie’s spread, people popped out from everywhere to stare at me as if at a strange animal. It wasn’t every day that a white woman falls so low. The house never emptied, and I was surrounded by a buzz of words and exclamations in Creole. The village gossips stopped to stare on their way to market or on their way back from the chore of fetching water from the standpipe with their buckets on their head. The children had nothing better to do than play at touching me. The girls tirelessly combed my hair. The boys caressed my arms and my neck. I myself looked at them out of curiosity. At that time the island was going through a difficult period. Black politicians were covering the country on horseback, hollering out speeches on equality and racial justice. Blacks were now mayors, assemblymen and senators. But this did not change things very much for their brothers of color. After they headed for the towns where they thought life would have a sweeter taste, the men had quickly returned home to become yet another mouth for their women to feed. Monsieur Victor Schoelcher’s workshops were not working, and those who did not want to return to a slow death from the scabies of the sugarcane had no other solution but to die of hunger. It was rumoured that gangs of looters ransomed travellers in broad daylight, and the short distance between Petit-Canal and Anse-Bertrand was filled with dangers. Since the prisons were overflowing, the police executed all those they caught in front of the cathedral, and the thieves died with a defiant smile on their lips. Another scourge was the threat of arson. Every night the plantations went up in flames. The fire was lit at different places in the same cane­ field and nobody could ever lay hands on the culprits. In the meantime the French Republic had declared education compulsory and a school was opened somewhere in town. But nobody ever went. I don’t even know whether there was a teacher.

  I made use of my time in Petit-Canal to have my child christened. I called him Aymeric, like my brother whom I had so offended, in the hope that this saint’s name would triumph over the bad blood that blackened his veins. The priest deliberately humiliated me by making me have Aymeric christened on a Saturday, the day reserved for children born out of wedlock and of adultery. I meekly took my place in the long line of derided women carrying babies of every
color as it stretched out under the palms and almond trees around the square. Those who hadn’t yet seen him twisted their necks to catch a glimpse of Razyé’s child, sleeping in his humble cambric blouse. My plan, as I said, was to stay a few weeks in Petit-Canal, then look for a place to live in another corner of the island, perhaps even on another island. Many were leaving for Haiti, which apparently was governed by negroes, very intelligent though, like the whites, and where there was plenty of work. But the day after the christening I heard a resonant step on the pavement that I could recognize in a thousand. My whole body turned to ice. Razyé entered, blacker, more handsome and yet more terrifying than the man I remembered. His eyes were flashing. His hair coiled around his head like snakes. Without uttering a word, he gave me two slaps that knocked me to the ground. Then he knelt down beside me, and while I sobbed he pounded into my ear: “You dared give my child the name of the man I hate most on this earth? Did you think I’d finished with you? You and your child are my instruments of revenge. For I shall take my revenge, a devastating revenge, on what Heaven, in league with the white Creoles like yourself, has done to me. And my story will go down in the history of this country.”

  Then he forced me to get up and follow him.

  I returned to l’Engoulvent.

  On 1 January 1900, the day this century was born, I mar­ried Razyé at the town hall in Petit-Canal. Don’t judge me. I loved this man, my executioner.

  Since I was underage, Razyé had to write to my parents to get their permission, and my mother answered in her withered, shaky hand: For us, Irmine is already dead. Do what you will with her.

  The man who married us was a fat jowly negro, a cabinet­ maker by trade, who had angered the white Creoles and also the mulattos by winning the municipality under a new political party ticket: the Socialist Party. Refusing to speak simply in Creole, he gave a short homily in bad French, describing a future when the notion of color would lose its meaning. But his eyes contradicted the words in his mouth, and it was as clear as crystal that he hated me because I was white and despised me for marrying a black man. Justin and Zébulos were our witnesses, and since the latter did not know how to write, Justin held his hand for him to draw a cross on the big marriage register.

  When the ceremony was over, Razyé mounted his horse and galloped off along the main street without bothering about us, while Justin and I set off on foot for l’Engoulvent. The sun’s knife scored the face of noon above our heads. The road was covered in dust between the fields of cane and I longed for death. When we arrived in sight of the little graveyard where the tombs of the Gagneur family were dotted among the scrub, Justin, who up till then had not said a word, took my arm and whispered: “Thank the Lord I haven’t got much longer to drag my body around. All I ask you, when I am gone, is to continue to watch over my poor Justin-Marie. You’re the only person he’s got!”

  I was at a loss for words.

  It’s true I had grown as fond of Justin-Marie as my own son, little Aymeric. He was going on four and really a handsome child. He looked exactly like his Aunt Cathy. He had her eyes, her smile, her despondent pout. Nevertheless, you sensed that the sensuality that had been her downfall would be tempered in him by intelligence and sound judgement. Because of this resemblance, Razyé could not help showing him some feeling. The father who wouldn’t look at his own son would bring Justin-Marie back a fleshy white guava, a black coco plum or a honey-sweet Bourbon orange, clasped between his shirt and skin, and I could see that often he had to keep himself from showering him with kisses. Yet this love that was speaking over and over again to another through the child had something perverse and formidable about it.

  A few days later Justin passed on.

  That morning I was awoken by shouting. Gertrude, the scullery maid whom Razyé had hired to help me about the house, had gone into Justin’s room and found him tangled up in his rags, long cold, with a look of liberation on his face. Since there wasn’t a single pair of good sheets in the house, I had to borrow some from mabo Julie, and Zébulos laid the body out in the living room. To my surprise, out of pity or curiosity, a few people came over from the surrounding villages, and around midnight there were about twenty of us mumbling the words from Ecclesiastes amidst the smell of coffee and melting candle wax.

  “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again. All things are full of weariness; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing.”

  That night Razyé did not show up. He couldn’t care less about Justin’s death, for which he bore full responsibility. I went out into the yard and under the full moon I could see him striding over the savanna, head up toward the sky, like a dog barking at the moon. He was still wailing for his Cathy.

  In that murky white light around four in the morning, he came home dishevelled and haggard. He walked across the living room, without even making the sign of the cross, oblivious to everything and everyone, and went up to his room. He did not show up at the funeral the next morning either. Since all three priests from the neighboring parishes had refused to set foot inside l’Engoulvent, Zébulos unceremoniously slid the rough wooden coffin he had made himself into the grave that had been gouged out of the stony ground. Whereupon we threw in a few lilies. That evening Razyé came into my room. Ever since my return I had prayed for and feared this moment. How should I greet him? How should I react? I took pleasure imagining myself wildly refusing his advances. Yet that night, no more than the following nights, did I have the strength to refuse him. He took me with his usual savageness, without even bothering to remove his clothes. While I was catching my breath, he hurled at me on his way out: “Pack your things and get the children ready. Tomorrow we’re leaving l’Engoulvent.”

  I thought I had misheard and stammered: “We’re leaving l’Engoulvent? Just like that?”

  He kicked open the door.

  “We’re going to live in La Pointe.”

  In La Pointe? In the end I had become attached to l’Engoulvent as a prisoner, I imagine, becomes attached to her jail. The world outside frightens her and she huddles up in her captivity. And what’s more I was born in this region of Grande-Terre. I’m used to the rustle of the sugarcane, the droughts, the scarcity of rain and the unexpected, violent gusts of wind. I only left it once for four or five years to go and study Latin, Greek, geography, arithmetic and above all hypocrisy at the convent boarding school of Saint-Joseph de Cluny at Versailles. Before I lived with Razyé, I always thought those years were the unhappiest of my life.

  I spent the night praying and weeping. What would I do in a town? What did tomorrow have in store for me?

  14

  Mabo Julie’s Tale

  I am seventy-two today. For fifty years of my life I have served white folks. I have said: “Yes, right away.” I have lowered my eyes. I have scrubbed the floors, done the cooking. I have satisfied desires, the master’s as well as his friends’ and visitors’. Sometimes standing up on the stairs. Sometimes lying down in the attic. I have soothed the stomach of my illegitimate children with oregano and arrowroot, and I have kept the nourishing, frothy milk from my breasts for the children of the house. I have cared for their fevers, their worms and their diarrhoea. I have sung our folk songs to them. Several times the priest has mentioned my name from the pulpit to congratulate me, and in the end one of the governor’s men came over from Basse­-Terre to pin a silver medal on my breast. I have kept it with other treasures—a picture of the Sacred Heart blessed by the bishop, a lock of Julie-Marthe de Linsseuil’s hair, an angel whom the good Lord called to Him as soon as she was born, and Irminette’s milk-teeth.

  And despite all that there is only mourning, hatred and resentment in me for the fate that has inflicted my color on me and condemned me to hell. Of the two men I loved, Bois d’en Bois had his spleen burst by a head punch from a foreman and died. The other
, Cyrany the Mulatto, was hanged. In front of my very eyes. I watched his body swing from the lower branches of a silk-cotton tree, then I received him in my arms, lifeless, lacerated with red stripes and as heavy as a trunk of mahogany. All that happened during the turmoil that preceded the abolition of slavery, during the days of frenzy and hope, before the country slumped back into its rut of wretchedness and despair. The only spot of tenderness in my heart is for Irmine—Minette, as I used to call her when she was little. Why? Because from the very moment she started to think and speak I saw she was not like the rest of the family, except for Monsieur Aymeric. Those two have their hearts filled with genuine goodness and compassion. But the world is unjust. Those two are the ones suffering, victims of their naïveté.

  When I learned that the Demon—in my opinion he doesn’t deserve a better name, after having done what he did to her—wanted to take her to La Pointe, I went and offered her my services, old and bent as I am. My daughters reminded me of my old age and called me all sorts of names. Oh no, slavery isn’t over for someone like me. I suppose I’ll always remain a slave to white folks.

  We left for La Pointe at the break of dawn, Razyé gallop­ing in front, the sun behind us like a jailer who never loses sight of his prisoners. The church bells in Petit-Canal, Anse-Bertrand, Morne-à-l’Eau, Le Moule, and even Saint-François and Port Louis, were pealing, for the cane­ fields were going up in flames. Over a thousand acres went up in black smoke. This time they arrested a certain Siriapin, off the boat from Calcutta a month earlier, and the Indians were running all over the place in their fear of the police. They hid in their temples whose red flags you could see fluttering under the mango trees.

  Around four in the afternoon we arrived on the outskirts of La Pointe, swarming with people, which didn’t surprise me since it seems that La Pointe has twenty thousand inhabitants, three churches, including a cathedral made of stone, and two hospitals with doctors who have studied in France.