Those were the last words Philomene spoke, as far as Oreline could tell, to anyone. She stopped singing to the children, her own or Oreline’s. As arranged, Suzette was sold to Augustine Fredieu, and when Suzette left Ferrier’s farm for her new home, Philomene hugged her mother but did not utter a sound.
* * *
One of the Slaves Mented to Marrie Her [ Philomene ] But He was sold, Narcease wanted Her for His Self.
--Cousin Gurtie Fredieu, written family history, 1975
* * *
Oreline was in a sorry mood, uncertain how her future would braid itself together. She found herself short-tempered and angry all of the time and struck the girl several times when she hadn’t intended, but she never once withheld visiting from her on Sundays. The Sunday visits and her twins seemed to be the only things that kept Philomene together.
Even though the girl stopped talking, Philomene remained useful to Oreline, taking over all of the household chores on the farm as they waited for Oreline’s second wedding day. The cows never missed milking, and the wash was boiled, scrubbed, pounded, hung, dried, ironed, folded, and put away. On her hands and knees, Philomene scrubbed the floors with a bristle brush. The children were tended and the meals cooked and served. But still she never spoke.
Three Sundays after Ferrier died, Philomene came to Oreline. She held two of her fingers upside down and made a walking motion with them.
“Where are you asking to go, Philomene?”
Philomene pointed to the woods, toward her grandmother.
“You can talk, Philomene,” Oreline said. “Talk to me instead of this foolishness.”
Philomene stood stubbornly in front of her, saying nothing.
“I do not have to allow you to go.”
Philomene remained rigid, silent.
“All right,” Oreline said, and wrote the pass. “But be back before dark.”
18
O n a hot, muggy Thursday morning, Philomene struggled to get moving. Bet and Thany had both been fussy for almost the entire week, in spirits as low as Philomene’s own, and the girls had cried tiny choking sobs all through the night. Philomene ached everywhere and assumed the twins did, too. Even the touch of their skin hurt her where she held them, and she could not bring comfort to either them or herself.
At first she thought the mix of her own suffering and want of sleep and the dead places in her heart were the reason she had such a hard time getting up before the sun to nurse her babies and light the morning fires on the farm.
Philomene wouldn’t allow herself words, even with the babies. There was a freedom in not talking, an extra corner of calm to be gained by not having to participate fully in a world without Clement. If not for the twins, she might have tried to run off, to get to him somehow, but she didn’t know where Virginia was or where Clement was likely to be held there. Even if she could manage to find him, she would be sent back and punished. There was no encouraging course of thought, no plan she could devise that made any sense. There was no place to go, except into silence. Philomene wondered if her aunt Palmire had felt this same fragile, soothing distance.
Ever since they had first told her that Clement was gone, she had been enveloped by the same heaviness that she recognized in her mother. Then Suzette was gone from her as well, and the facing of each new day was too much effort. The farm seemed flat and unfamiliar, absent of all of the people who had made it home. It had become nothing more than a discarded, temporary shelter for Oreline and her three children, and Philomene and the twins, a stopover until the next place.
If not for my babies, Philomene kept thinking, my mind would slip away, and my body would follow.
Philomene propped Bet and Thany in the corner where she could check on them and went about her work. They were fussy, demanding, and she could barely keep her thoughts on cleaning out the wall altar in Oreline’s bedroom. The day was already blistering, and before the morning had barely started, the rag that she kept in her apron pocket to wipe the perspiration from her face was as soaked as her scrub rag.
As the sun blazed higher in the cloudless sky, she felt her legs melt in the dripping Louisiana heat, felt her cheek slippery and hot against the floor she had just cleaned. Voices floated like dandelion wish-weeds around her, none of her concern. River noises had been set loose in her head, drowning out everything else.
She woke up cold and shivering. The noise was louder; fiery water surrounded her. Only her head was above the roaring waves, and she could barely see through the fog that sat on top of the river like soft muslin. The water turned freezing cold and then hot again. She could only make out dim shapes until her eyes got used to the tricks of light and shadow, and then a color, taking on form and getting larger. In the distance she saw a yellow boat coming toward her. In the narrow dugout was Clement, nut brown and strong, his powerful arms straining with each pull of the oars, rowing straight and true toward her through the rising water. Smiling at her, a smile full of certainty and knowing. Without taking his brown eyes from hers across the distance, he scooped up little Thany from the raging water and placed her carefully beside him, safe in the boat. Hadn’t she left both girls together somewhere else? Where was Bet?
Philomene lost strength each time her head dipped below the water. She could still make it to the boat, but she refused to go without Bet. If the noise stopped, she could think. There was a stench in the air riding along the surface of the river like a poison cloud, threatening to choke her. It was thick and powerful and carried the harsh sting of burning tar deep inside her chest. The water started to boil and bubble, sending hot blasts of spray at her face and into her eyes. Clement held out his hand to her, palm up, in their old secret code of attachment: “I’m here, you’re there. But we’ll manage to be together later.”
Philomene wanted to go to Clement, so she could cradle her head against his chest, have him soothe the noise away with his fingertips. She wanted to go deep into those brown eyes so that the attacking water could not touch her anymore, but he was telling her to find Bet. As if willed into being, she heard Bet’s startled baby cry behind her, weak but certain.
Philomene’s head felt fused and stiff against her shoulders, but she forced the muscles in her neck to obey, turning her head. She saw Bet clearly now, off to her right. The little girl was naked and helpless, face up, looking small against the endless blue water. Philomene managed to grab one of her daughter’s chubby arms and pull Bet to her, still breathing. It wasn’t too late. If she got Bet to the boat, they could all be together. But as she fought the pounding water with her free hand and turned back with Bet protected in the crook of her arm, Clement and Thany and the yellow boat were gone.
A chill wind was blowing the damp river fog away, and both the noise and the tug of the water were becoming still. There was a faraway sound, but she couldn’t make it out, didn’t want to make it out. She couldn’t bear to leave this place without finding Clement and Thany first. The beckoning sound became louder, and deeper, and broke through to recognition.
“Philomene. Philomene. Come back.” It was Narcisse Fredieu’s voice, pulling her where she didn’t belong. “Philomene?”
Philomene was weak and empty, confused. There was something unfinished, something that nagged at her not to leave the fever dream. Even in the afterlight, as she lay on the narrow cot, fever broken but too worn out to move or feed herself, she knew Clement and Thany had been forever connected, as had she and Bet, but what did it mean?
It took two days before Narcisse and Oreline thought Philomene strong enough to tell her that both her babies had died of yellow fever.
She had no more water for tears.
* * *
The beginning of the summer had held such promise, some small measure of fulfillment, even if it was a satisfaction on loan, as it always was for a slave’s life. By the end, Philomene was alone, her husband and her children gone forever, a family wiped out as if they had never existed.
Suzette reappeared on the farm, as nat
ural and as foreign as Clement’s appearance in her fever dream. Suzette rushed in and out of the cabin as Philomene recuperated, using time stolen from her other chores on the farm. The arrangement was only temporary, orchestrated by Oreline to secure help with both the farm and Philomene. Her mother had come back only on short-term loan. Suzette explained it all to her, but Philomene kept losing track of the thread of her words. She held more surely to the sound of her mother’s humming and the familiar hands that held cool rags to her forehead. Time had no anchor for Philomene now, so she wasn’t sure how long she had been sick or if she had ever been well. The days drifted, tumbling one into the other, full only of muffled sound, loss, and indifference.
Philomene’s only willing thoughts were of her fever dream, its meaning beyond her grasp. Each day that she gathered strength, she tried to puzzle it out, but it wouldn’t be solved.
They both nursed her, Suzette and Oreline, taking turns the way they had with Ferrier, and Philomene wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to live or die. She didn’t care. The quiet she tried to gather around herself didn’t stop the others from talking and poking, trying to draw her out, as if her withdrawal were a personal offense to them. They tried halfheartedly to get her to break her long silence, but there was nothing to say that anyone could bear to hear.
A need had begun to take shape in Philomene’s mind, becoming more persistent with each day that passed; but it floated out of reach until almost the end of her convalescence.
She had to see her babies’ graves.
* * *
Philomene’s rocking and digging motions were obvious in meaning. Oreline and Suzette agreed that it was a good strategy for Philomene’s recovery to get her up and moving for any reason, even if her shaky steps led her to the quickly dug grave for her children. Together Oreline and Suzette took her out to the grove of fig trees that had become the farm’s cemetery when Ferrier died, and Philomene first saw the gentle curve of the freshly turned mound that held her babies, now that she could not. There was only one grave, only one smooth, flat stone from the river that had been placed at the top of the mound to mark the spot. No names adorned the site anywhere. She would not have been able to read them if they had.
One. Only one. Philomene looked at Oreline in disbelief, held up one finger.
“Why is there only one grave for the two of them?” Suzette asked Oreline, becoming Philomene’s voice.
“Monsieur Narcisse took care of all of the arrangements. He dug the plot himself, in between nursing you and nursing me, during the worst of the epidemic. If not for him, I don’t know how any of us would have fared. We all got at least a touch of the fever, except for him. He said he wanted your two girls to keep each other company, even in death. He has been very concerned.”
Philomene saw Oreline’s lips moving, heard some of what she said. Bet and Thany, only one grave between them. Maybe this was a blessing. Maybe it was they who had been spared, as she had not.
* * *
Philomene missed Clement and the babies as a physical ache. Her breasts were still full of milk that no eager mouths needed. She caught herself expecting to see Clement rounding the bend of the road to come to her for their end-of-the-week time, hot and musky, giving off the sweet sweat of the road and anticipation as he always had when he walked to her. She waited for him to come in from the day’s work to the late-evening meal they would share together, he and the girls.
For Philomene there was no more talking, only listening, if not to words, then to the song underneath the words. She knew she should have been grateful to have her mother back close, if only temporarily, but gratitude eluded her. There was nothing that could begin to fill so many empty places inside. They were treacherous, these gaps, and had begun to pulse and echo if she dwelled on them for any amount of time. Her mother talked to her, as she had when she was small, one-sided conversations that demanded little from her, and sometimes even the listening seemed too much to give.
“At least you know what it is to want a man, and have him want you back. That’s something I never tasted, the choosing of it, the pleasure of it,” her mother prattled on one day when she came back from emptying the bedpan. “Your grandmother Elisabeth and grandfather Gerasíme were like that. Your marraine, Doralise, and Eugene Daurat had it for a time before the feelings passed. You and Clement had it in your hands for longer than some people get. They can take him away from you, but they can never take that away. You are young, Philomene, and you will figure a way to go on. We need to pray for Clement, that they treat him right in Virginia. We need to pray for Bet and Thany. It must have been their time, and they went on to a better place.”
Philomene heard her, and the others, and the pointlessness of the things they said. She watched words float past, plump and ripe, before they burst just outside her line of vision. She was surrounded by those who thought they offered her the comfort of an outreached palm, unaware that they delivered a fist. They were foolish to expect her to talk back to them, to respond to their words.
* * *
The long recuperation left her too much time to think. Philomene had begun to play back the glimpsings she had long ago, of the family reunited around a long table. There was some little hope and a great deal of fear in the glimpsings now. The happy picture she had carried for years, of her and Clement and Bet and Thany, had come true but had lasted such a short time. And now they were all gone from her. She wondered if it would be the same with the coming-together glimpsing. A scrap of happiness for an instant, making the ultimate loss a deeper pain. Still, she clutched at the image, trying to believe there could be a life less bruised than the one she was living now. An image with old and young both and promise of future.
There were times that Philomene thought she must have made up the coming-together glimpsing, to calm her mother when she was most skittish, but now she had fallen under its spell as well. The slightest chance of having her mother and grandmother and brother sitting around the same table in a distant future she couldn’t even imagine gave her some small measure of hope to weigh against the theft of her husband and daughters.
Philomene was no longer able to live her life in the present, and it was not in her nature to live in the past. She needed to begin again, to create a different future without the old dreams, empty of Clement and that kind of love, but she didn’t yet know how.
* * *
The first Sunday that she thought she could walk the distance, Philomene made her way to see her grandmother Elisabeth. She had to rest many times along the way, sitting for a few minutes on a tree stump or drinking the water she carried with her in the gourd, but she made it to the Fredieu plantation alone. Her mother had already been sent back to Augustine’s, the loan completed. Philomene would be moving soon with Oreline and her new husband, and the journey to see her grandmother would no longer be a short trip through the woods. Oreline had offered to take her in the wagon, but some proud part of Philomene did not want to accept.
She came through the door into the familiar duskiness of the small cabin that Elisabeth shared with three others. Without intending to do so, she flung herself straight into the warmth of Elisabeth’s arms.
There was still a dampness to the air, and the warmth of the fireplace with its full kettle, of simmering odors comforted Philomene. It was as if she were a small girl again back on Rosedew, using Elisabeth’s strong back to brace up her own.
She had a sudden urge to give in to the liberation of opening her mouth to talk, but nothing would come out. It was as if she had forgotten how, not that she had chosen to keep silent. The words would not come.
“Ssssshh, Philomene,” Elisabeth said, as if sensing her struggle. “You came to me to rest. You walked a long way for someone who bested yellow jack. You’ll talk when you’re ready.”
Elisabeth rocked her in silence. It was peaceful.
“I heard about Mam’zelle Oreline marrying again,” Elisabeth said at last. “You’ll be closer to your mother and Gerant now, liv
ing up that way. You can visit them. I’ll miss you here, child, being able to see you so often, but remember your glimpsing. I believe in it, and you need to hold on to that now, when you can’t hold on to me.”
* * *
Philomene’s first labor after she had fully recovered from the aftereffects of the fever was to pack up the place she had called home for the last seven years to move to a new farm, smaller still than the step down to Ferrier’s farm from Rosedew. If there had been a courtship between Valery Houbre and Oreline, Philomene in her sickness and recuperation must have missed it. Not even two months after Ferrier died, Philomene found herself in the Houbre house, a spare place full of the habits and children of a recently dead wife.
As they were unused to providing for slaves, there were no cabins on the new place, and Philomene fixed a spot for herself to sleep in the house in a small space that had previously been a storeroom next to the kitchen. The dark, cramped room suited what her world had become. Her moss-filled mattress filled almost the entire space, so she unstitched it and took out half the moss to make more room. Only then was there a place for her rocking chair. There were six children to take care of now, none her own, and she was the only servant.
She adjusted.
Philomene had to rely on the heat from the kitchen fire when the weather turned cold, as she did not have a fireplace of her own for either warmth, cooking, or light. Sometimes, instead of sleeping, she would sit in the dark and rock, naming what had been taken away from her. Her aunt Palmire. Her babies. Her man. What had been put out of her reach. Her mother, grandmother, grandfather, and brother. It was a sad list, and with each thrust of the rocker, she would fashion a silent prayer for each of them.
Clement was gone, far away from Cane River in a place so distant that her grandmother had taken days by boat to make the reverse journey from Virginia to Louisiana. It was small comfort to her that he had ended up in the place her grandmother came from, because her grandmother’s stories were not generous. She resigned herself never to see him again.
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