“I will try, my dear girl, in some small measure, it is true, to right the wrong done by others of my kind.”
Then she asked Jasmine to send the girls over to her every day from eight o’clock to ten o’clock in the morning.
With that settled, Mme Acquaire returned home to share the good news with Scipion. The slave, overjoyed, told Mme Acquaire that the good Lord would reward her a hundredfold for the good she was going to do and that she was now guaranteed a place in heaven. Mme Acquaire, skeptical regarding anything that concerned rewards in the afterlife, smiled and, opening her piano, began to play and sing. She was a woman of thirty or thirty-five years, not particularly beautiful, but slim and lively as a bird. Thanks to her training as a dancer, her figure was supple and flawless. As bohemian as her husband, she believed life consisted of moments of good luck and streaks of misfortune, both of which she accepted gaily. Before the death of her parents, important planters in Saint Domingue, she had left for France at the age of fifteen only to return at the age of twenty, having been trained in singing, elocution, and dance. She was a good catch – and thus did the Count of Chastel, an important property owner and slaveholder, ask for and win her hand in marriage. The wedding was to take place two months later, but then one night a great fire destroyed all the properties of the young Creole girl’s parents. A slave who had been punished the night before was accused of the disaster – he was to be punished further but had disappeared. The Count of Chastel, upon hearing the news of his fiancée’s ruin, claimed that he had to leave immediately for France to take care of some business matters. He only returned two years later, duly married to a white French woman from the mother country. The young Creole girl managed to hide her disappointment and agreed to marry M Acquaire, a Creole like herself, whose penniless father crafted wigs. From this sudden financial ruin and disillusionment, she understood that the Count – like all the men from the island’s big families – had wanted to marry her for her fortune, and that the devastating fire, of which the slave had been accused, was in fact the consequence of all the ill-treatment to which the slaves had been subjected. As a girl, she had witnessed horrific tortures ordered by the colonists, both by friends of her father and her father himself – a man who never missed an opportunity to point out that it was necessary to treat “that species” as harshly as possible.
She had seen an entire family die from poisoning. No slave from that plantation had been willing to betray the guilty party. Three of them were tortured, to set an example, and they died screaming in pain without ever revealing their secret. From then on, the young girl had begun to think. Such instances of refusal and revolt, on the part of poor souls considered nothing more than animals, made her think that perhaps they were not really that unintelligent and that, hiding their rage, they only accepted their condition thanks to those sporadic opportunities for vengeance against their masters. She regretted nothing of the past, for she was not unhappy with M Acquaire. They had similar tastes.
Obsessed with dance and the arts, the same age as his wife and, like her, not particularly good-looking but well built, M Acquaire swore that he would never succeed at anything but the theater, having been born an artist and, as such, a natural enemy of commerce and politics. When the old garage that had been used as a performance hall since 1762 was destroyed by an earthquake eight years later, it was replaced by a beautiful space with seven hundred and fifty seats that merited the name the Comédie of Port-au-Prince. This was the moment when M Acquaire made the acquaintance of François Mesplès, agent for the new theater who, despite his greed, grudgingly agreed to advance them a few pounds, with interest, on days when money was especially tight. It soon became clear to François Saint-Martin, director of the theater, and to François Mesplès, the agent, that with their enthusiasm, their imagination, and their true love of the arts, the Acquaires had become indispensable to the functioning and, indeed, to the success of the Comédie. This earned them, on the one hand, the generous sympathy of the young director and, on the other, the admittedly self-serving tolerance of the agent.
While Mme Acquaire was still singing, the door opened and her husband appeared. As soon as he saw his master arrive, Scipion rushed to serve him some of his favorite rum punch with lemon and to help him remove his linen jacket.
“I’m just back from the Comédie,” said M Acquaire, comfortably installed in an old, half-destroyed armchair. “I saw Mesplès. He advanced us a few pounds.”
Mme Acquaire planted a few chords and sang: “Oh joy, life is good…”
Then she stopped herself and turned toward her husband:
“Do you know who I’ll soon be giving lessons to? Guess…To Jasmine’s little girls.”
“The little neighborhood nightingales?” asked M Acquaire, abruptly closing his right eye.
He suffered from a tic.
“That’s right.”
“And are you being paid?”
“No. Not a single cent.”
“And so, why do it?”
“It makes me happy.”
“You play the benefactress and you live in a hovel. Ah! These Creole women, they wear their heart on their sleeve.”
“Don’t you go generalizing. I know plenty of Creoles who are more like that Mesplès of yours.”
M Acquaire removed his shoes, tensed his feet in a perfect arch, and stretched. “I’ve been chasing after Mesplès for too long. My muscles hurt,” he said, his tic twitching even more forcefully.
Mme Acquaire seemed to be pondering something. All of a sudden, she looked at her husband and said:
“Those little ones from next door, they have extraordinary voices. One of them in particular. I don’t know yet if it’s the elder or the younger, but that child sings the opera songs she hears from my window with amazing mastery.”
“True,” admitted M Acquaire, less enthusiastic than his wife, “she has a nice voice.”
Mme Acquaire exploded:
“You call that a nice voice! Let me spell it out for you. If the child who sang back to me that complex melody from Three Sultans the other morning were to train her voice, she would become an extraordinary opera singer.”
“You’re getting carried away! What good will any of this do her? She can’t even go to France with this new law they just enacted against colored people.”
“It’s unfair. It’s disgusting.”
“Let’s not get political now, my darling. We’re actors – don’t forget that.”
“I’m not forgetting anything, but I find all of this…disgusting. Don’t stop me from saying it to you, otherwise I’ll just suffocate.”
M Acquaire yawned, played around again with the muscles of his feet, and reclined as comfortably as he could in the hole-ridden armchair.
The next day, Jasmine dressed her girls in the little cotton dresses she had starched the night before and placed in a drawer with nosegay flowers to perfume them. Then she gave them their sandals, rubbed with soot, and told them they glowed in the sunlight like mirrors.
“Be on your best behavior,” she admonished them. “Speak French and be elegant – make your mother proud.”
It was Scipion who opened the door to them. He smiled and, taking them by the hand, led them to the piano. They had never seen one before. They walked all around it, bent down to look at the pedals. It was open. Minette hesitantly put her finger on one of the keys, causing it to vibrate. They jumped back and Lise cried out gently.
“Don’t be afraid,” came the voice of Mme Acquaire. “I’m right here next to you, behind this screen. I’m just getting dressed. Go ahead, start again. Minette, put your finger on a note and then sing it.”
Minette randomly placed her finger on a mi, more confidently this time. She opened her mouth and the note reverberated throughout the little room, resonant and pure.
“So you were the one who sang back to me so beautifully,” said Mme Acquaire, emerging from behind the screen wearing a transparent chiffon tunic, her head wrapped in a handkerchi
ef whose ends fell across one of her shoulders.
She drew Minette close enough to look her over. The girl’s dark, slanted eyes looked into her own without the slightest shyness. Smiling, she caressed the girl’s long braids and tanned cheeks, amused by the sensual and willful expression of the girl’s full mouth, negroid and adorable. Minette had a special sort of charm that likely came from her dark, unwavering gaze – a gaze that did not falter, not even before a white person. A rare thing. The wings of her deliciously indented nose trembled with the slightest emotion, but never did the lashes lower to veil her eyes. Mme Acquaire, comparing the two sisters, found Lise to be the more beautiful of the two, with her less dark braids, her less slanted eyes, her less sensual mouth. But in Minette’s type there was something that pleased the artist in her. Lise lowered her gaze when speaking to her and Minette surprised her by looking her straight in the eyes, not impertinently, but with calm assurance.
From the very first lesson, the Creole woman detected such a perfect understanding of music and so much character in her favorite of the two girls that she gathered her in her arms to embrace her.
“I’m going to make you a great, great opera singer,” she promised her, laughing.
“And me?” asked Lise.
“You’ll also sing very well, but I predict that Minette will be an extraordinary singer.”
Over the course of the next few months, the two sisters came to their teacher’s home nearly every morning. Oftentimes, M Acquaire and Scipion attended the lessons. The former, sunk deeply into his old armchair, his tic twitching each time Minette hit a beautiful note, and the latter seated on the floor, a blissful smile on his lips, his long legs stretched out before him and his eyes fixed on the singers’ lips. During these months, the life of the two little girls from Traversière Street became exactly what their ambitious mother had always wanted for them. They had a schedule that kept them from idleness, that little sin to which so many women of the island succumbed – responsible, in Jasmine’s opinion, for all of their other vices. In the morning, Minette and Lise practiced singing, and in the evening they continued their education with Joseph. He had recently brought them a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in which Minette had discovered the phenomenon of a free white man obsessed with liberty and demanding it for all people, along with a play by Jean Racine, Athalie, through which she discovered the tragic form, classical art, resounding and forceful verse, and the harmonious rhythm of phrasing.
She was surprised to find herself reciting on her own the beautiful words the author had placed in the mouth of his heroine, taking care with her diction, in imitation of Joseph. Jasmine, overjoyed, listened to her rehearse and even went so far as to tell her – she who had always so carefully hidden her past from her daughters – that she had once known a young lady who, just like Minette, had recited beautiful verse before a crowd of listeners.
“Where?” asked the girl.
“Ah! A long time ago…it was a lady from…but that was so long ago…I’ve forgotten.”
She stammered whenever it came to recalling her past. Ever since her daughters were old enough to understand, Jasmine had never gotten undressed in front of them, even though they slept in the same room. Certain marks she bore had to remain secret. She was free now, as were her children. She wanted to forget the past, banish it from her memory. The future remained dark, but she could hold out a little hope that her daughters, later on, would make their living teaching singing to rich colored people. For there were some very rich members of that class, plantation owners and slaveholders just like the white colonists. They were numerous, actually – too numerous, according to Joseph, not to attract the attention of the wealthy Whites. How could they possibly be content to find themselves now competing with a despised class that had been long kept in a state so inferior that even education was forbidden to them? Everything possible was now being done to prevent marriages between Whites and freedmen. They were barred from certain professions, even when they showed innate talent. It was a merciless struggle. One day, after a revolt of “maroons” where hundreds of Whites had perished, the colored freedmen had been brazenly disarmed, having been accused of supplying weapons to the rebellious slaves. Their soldiers’ uniforms, different in every way from those of the Whites, of course, had become a ridiculous accoutrement, subject to insult from the “poor whites” who respected them even less since they had been disarmed. Just a few months earlier, however, Jasmine had seen the same men who were being humiliated today depart alongside the white soldiers for the battle of Savannah, from which they had returned victorious.
These same men, often searched in the middle of the street these days without the slightest apology, and from whom the tiniest little pocketknife could be seized, had surprised the Whites on the battlefield. Jasmine knew all of this through Joseph. Ever since he had been coming to the house, and especially since she began listening to him speak, long dormant impressions she believed to be well and properly buried were awakened in her. She no longer walked like an automaton, head lowered and shoulders slumped. She looked around her like a curious child discovering the world. Thus did she notice the look in the eyes of a young black freedman being rudely searched by a white man. Something was brewing, though she would not have been able to say what it was. But after a long period of blindness, it seemed to her now that certain members of her entourage had changed. Still, more than ever before, the freedmen were being repressed; more than ever, the slaves were being mistreated, tortured; and with every revolt of the maroons, the reprisals of the Whites were that much more brutal. But to console herself, she noted that many of the freedmen were rich, and she praised their intelligence and success while thinking that one day they would make respectable matches for her daughters.
…That morning, Minette and Lise arrived at their lesson late and found Mme Acquaire lying down, sobbing and whimpering, with a compress on her forehead. They ran to kneel next to her bed and both began questioning her at the same time. But the Creole lady continued to weep without responding. A worried expression on his face, M Acquaire took long strides back and forth across the tiny room, turning in circles like a caged animal.
“Oh! Would you stop – would you stop pacing up and down!” begged Mme Acquaire, beside herself. “Your steps feel like a hammer drumming into my head.”
M Acquaire sat down wearily on a stool that had been left at the foot of the bed, while his tic had his right eye twitching furiously. Looking at him, Minette wondered whether he was kidding around, as his incessant winking gave him an unexpectedly playful appearance.
“Haven’t you reached a decision yet?” he asked, looking at his wife.
“What do you want me to do? Sell the piano?” she responded.
At that moment there was a knock at the door and Mme Acquaire immediately stopped speaking. She made a nervous gesture toward her husband, who was bent over her.
“Those are the students,” she whispered to him. “Send them away. They mustn’t see Minette and Lise here.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
M Acquaire opened the door slightly: three little white girls greeted him cheerily.
“Your teacher isn’t feeling well,” he explained to them. “She asks you to excuse her this morning.”
“Couldn’t we speak to her just for a moment?” one of them asked.
M Acquaire’s eye twitched as he scratched his head nervously. “Ahem! I’m afraid she simply isn’t able to see you…Ahem!…”
“I see,” responded the girl, rather surprised. And not wanting to insist further:
“We’ll come back tomorrow.”
“Yes, please do. Tomorrow, then, tomorrow, young ladies…”
M Acquaire closed the door and let out a sigh of relief. “Phew!…That was a close one…”
Minette exchanged a glance with her little sister. She had just realized that Mme Acquaire was teaching them in secret! The only reason she had them come so early in the morning was so as not to risk the di
spleasure of her other students. They were being treated like they had the plague simply because of their color.
Minette’s heart was heavy and her eyes filled with tears. They were nothing more than two poor colored girls that a white lady was teaching to sing out of pity! Minette stood up, took Lise’s hand, and looked at Mme Acquaire, who continued whispering to her husband.
“May we leave, Madame?” she asked, in a plaintive little voice.
She sounded like a baby trying to hold back tears. Oh! She would not mention any of this to her mother. To what end? It was perfectly normal, and they had better accept it if they wanted to continue studying with Mme Acquaire. Likely that would be Jasmine’s response.
“Yes, do. Go back home, children,” answered the Creole woman insistently. “I’ll have Scipion let you know just as soon as I’m feeling better. And don’t forget that you mustn’t come here after ten o’clock – not ever. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Good then, now off you go. Goodbye, my children.”
“Thank you, Madame.”
Once Minette and Lise had gone, Mme Acquaire was free to express her anxiety. She sat up in the bed, took the compress off her forehead, and dabbed at her reddened eyes.
“Yes, so now what would you have me do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah! Why, why did you gamble away that money we made with our last play?”
M Acquaire’s tic was twitching so intensely that she felt sorry for him.
“So, Mesplès refuses to help us, you say?”
“Alas, yes! That scum claims he doesn’t have a penny to spare – that he’s half ruined himself. Exactly the kind of nonsense that a crook of his ilk shouldn’t be spewing. To think that I tried to soften him up with thirty payments in a single week! Add to that all the rehearsals at the Comédie and I’m broke.”
“My Lord, what are we going to do?” whimpered Mme Acquaire.
“There’s one possible solution left.”
“What’s that?”
“Sell Scipion.”
Dance on the Volcano Page 3
