Yellow fever! I try not to think of Madame Laveaux’s little boy who died in the summer, try not to think what the slaves say, how Madame Laveaux pierced her dead boy’s heart with a butcher knife to keep the bokor from his grave.
Friday afternoon, September 26.
The doctor finally came and looked at Catherine. He prescribed Hoffman’s Drops with sugar. He said she’s been seized by an ague that has been succeeded by a fever, but that it’s not yellow fever, that there’s nothing to worry about—but why is she getting worse?
I told Mother she should call the doctor back, but she said, “What’s the point? He’ll just say the same thing and charge another livre.”
September 27, 10:00 P.M.
Tonight Catherine was talking in a dream, crying out and screaming. Then she jumped out of bed and ran around the room. She thought little Manette was a giant crab trying to pinch her. Mother, Da Gertrude and I tried to hold on to her but she was strong. I couldn’t believe it, she’s sothin. Finally she weakened and Da Gertrude put some herbs in a pair of socks and tied the socks onto her feet. It helped, she went to sleep.
October 6.
Catherine gets worse. Manette and I are not allowed to go in her bedchamber. We stand at the door, but it’s hard to see her through the nets.
Thursday, October 8.
Tonight I sneaked into Catherine’s room after Mother fell asleep. I sat on her bed under the nets and we talked, whispering in the dark. Before I left I took her hand.
“You mustn’t touch me,” she said, pulling away.
“Imagine this. Imagine that I’m holding you,” I said.
She began to cry, so I put my arms around her and held her close. How could I not?
October 10.
Father came home late tonight. I heard him stumbling in and then I heard Mother: “Catherine is dying and where are you? Getting drunk, you damn fool!”
Sheet lightning lit up my room and in the dark silence I heard the shrill whistle of the fruit bats. Catherine is dying?
Monday.
After morning chores I went down to the river, looking for Mimi. I needed her help. Mimi knew the ways of the spirits, the mystères.
She was up to her knees in the bathing-pool washing linens, her flour-sack chemise soaked. Under a lilac bush the two pugs sat watching. A chicken was scratching in the mud nearby.
It began to rain. We took shelter under a tree laden with green oranges. The pugs scuffed around at Mimi’s feet.
“Remember when we went to the obeah woman’s hut?” I said.
“You think I’d forget?” She threw a pebble at the chicken, to shoo it away.
“I never told you something.” I paused. The rain was coming down heavily now, dripping through the leaves. I began to feel a little ill, the way I do when a wind starts up. “The old woman told Catherine she’d be in the ground before her birthday this December. And now Mother says Catherine’s—”
“Catherine went?”
“When I was in the basement room.”
“You never told me!”
“I promised not to tell.”
“That girl—!”
“And now Mother says Catherine is …” I stopped, tears choking. “What if what the obeah woman said comes true?” I blurted out. “Can’t you change it?”
“Undo it?”
“Yes!”
Mimi rested her chin on her knees, thinking. “A paquets Congo,” she said finally.
“Yes,” I said, taking a breath. A paquets Congo, properly made …
I spent the afternoon helping Mimi gather the ingredients: a toad (which Mimi killed, not me), a tcha-tcha root, a bag of mombin leaves and some hairs I took from Catherine’s comb.
“It must be buried under a mapou tree,” Mimi said, securing the bundle with a bit of red string, the type barren women wear at voodoo ceremonies. “By moonlight.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Not at night.”
“It’s safe if you keep your eyes down.”
“It’s Mother.” Mother doesn’t believe in voodoo, but she fears the mystères, the voodoo spirits.
“I’ll do it then,” Mimi said.
“Alone?” I asked, in awe of her courage. I don’t know how late it was when Mimi climbed in my window. “I did it,” she hissed, shaking me awake. I could hardly see her in the dark. “I buried the paquets.” Faintly, through the steady drone of the rain, I heard drums.
“You’re wet,” I said, touching her hand.
“I can’t stay.” She tightened her kerchief around her head. “There’s a séance.”
I watched her climb down the mango tree, watched until I could see her no longer. I felt a chill pass through me, smelled the faint scent of a cigar. Trembling, I shut the window, pulled the drapes tight against the dark night.
October 15.
Father Droppet came today. I must have looked suddenly pale, for he guided me to the sofa in the parlour and suggested I rest for a moment. Mother came in then. She took his soaking wet cloak and hat. “I was afraid you would not be able to make it,” she said. “The roads are so bad.”
“The roads are bad,” he said.
He was in with Catherine for a very short time. When he came out, Mother offered him tea, but he said he must be on his way, because of the roads.
After he left I went to my bedchamber. I took the heavy wood cross down from the wall and kissed it, pressed it to my heart. Don’t take Catherine, I prayed. Don’t. Don’t!
October 16.
When I woke it was quiet in the house except for the sound of Mother crying and Father talking in a tired, sad voice.
I tiptoed into Catherine’s room and I saw her lying there, still and all alone with no one fanning her, no one praying. I watched to see her chest rise and fall, her eyelids flicker, but there was no movement, only silence.
I willed myself to touch her, to wake her, but I could not. I stumbled back down the hall to my room. Catherine is dead. I began to shake.
I climbed out my window and down the mango tree. I ran up the trace to the slave shacks. Mimi was asleep on her straw pallet. She opened her eyes, seeing me slowly.
“You said it would work!” I cried. I hit her with my fist.
“Oh …” She grabbed my wrists, hard.
“Do something!” I was blubbering. “Make her come back!”
Mimi began to cry then too. “Oh, that little brat,” she moaned. She held me in her arms and rocked me, whispering, “It’s done, it’s done, rest now.”
7:00 P.M.
The rains stopped. “We are blessed,” Mother said, her eyes shining. She washed Catherine all over with rum and laid her out in her festival gown on a patchwork counterpane. Father told me and Manette to go gather flowers. We were bringing in baskets of roses, red jasmine, orchids and honeysuckle all morning. Mother laced the orchids through Catherine’s hair and arranged the other blossoms nicely all around her.
“She looks beautiful,” Manette said, awed.
But so still.
Mother tried to get her best crucifix, the iron one with the tiny ruby in the centre, to stay in Catherine’s hands, but it kept slipping to the floor.
“That will do,” Father said. I don’t think he liked Mother fussing so.
Mother laid the cross on Catherine’s chest and it stayed.
In the afternoon, neighbours began to arrive, gaping at our worn rugs. Later we began the journey to Trois-Ilets, two carriages and a wagon through the mud to the graveyard behind the church. The roads were perilous but it was so hot we dared not wait a day. One of the horses foundered in the deep footing and several times we had to stop to pull a carriage out of the ruts.
The sun was going down as the box was lowered into the tomb. My knees gave way as the top was fastened on. Da Gertrude helped me to my feet. All the way home, fireflies circled us. Circled us and circled us.
It is late now. The air is heavy with the threat of rain. I listen to the land breezes stirring the mango tree outside my window
, the noisy cabri-bois. Father Droppet says Catherine’s in Heaven, that she’s with God. Yet I feel her in the wind, in the dark shadows. I feel her tears and I think, Why Catherine? Why not me? The beating of my heart such a terrible sin.
Sunday, October 19.
Mother and I took a potted ginger lily to town today to put on Catherine’s tomb. Then Mother told me to go sit in the wagon. When I looked back I saw her kneeling in the dirt. I ran to see if she was hurt. She had her fist in her mouth and her face was wet. It frightened me, seeing her thus. I didn’t know what to say or do.
“Is there a God?” she cried out. I could see rage in her eyes.
I was afraid to answer, afraid that something I said might condemn Catherine to eternal Hell. “We’d better go,” I said quickly, reaching out for her, fearful of what she might do in that holy place.
Once home I persuaded Mother to have a rum and syrup and got her to lie down. Her cry fills me still: Is there a God?
My quill trembles and tiny blots of ink like a flurry of tears cover the page.
In which I suffer a bitter-disappointment & hope is offered anew
January 3, 1778.
Uncle Tascher came from Fort-Royal today with a buggy-load of provisions: coarse cotton fabric for the slaves’ clothing, black crêpe for mourning clothes for us. Then he pulled a letter out of his vest pocket—a letter from Paris! From Aunt Désirée.
Father read the letter. He looked up at his brother. “It’s about Désirée’s godson—the Marquis’s boy.” He snorted. “My.”
“Are you not going to read it aloud, Father?” I sat down beside Mother on the sofa. Outside a gentle breeze stirred the palms. Our lovesick bull was bellowing in his pen.
Father began to read. In the letter Aunt Désirée informed Father that the Marquis’s son, Alexandre—“handsome and well educated”—was now seventeen. If he married, he would come into his mother’s inheritance, so Aunt Désirée has suggested he marry one of her nieces—one of us.
At last! I thought. My prayers had been answered.
But then Father read out a part about Alexandre preferring Catherine.
Catherine?
“But …” I stuttered. It was only two months ago we buried Catherine.
Mother put down her mending. “Let him have her then,” she said. She is like that still—strange somehow.
Father paced the room. “The young chevalier will command an annual income of at least forty thousand livres.”
“Forty thousand?” Grandmother Sannois said, coming into the room. “Did he say forty thousand? Or four?”
Father stood by the window. “Maybe they would take Manette instead,” he said.
“My thinking exactly, Joseph,” Uncle Tascher said, rubbing his chin.
I didn’t understand. Why not me?
“Manette’s too young,” Mother said.
“Four thousand would be an acceptable income,” Grandmother Sannois said.
“Manette’s eleven,” Father said. “By the time—”
“Only just,” Mother said.
“Eleven and a half. You’re not being reasonable!” Father raised his voice.
Uncle Tascher coughed and poured himself a rum. “Opportunities like this don’t come along every day,” he said.
“Why not me? I said, standing.
Father looked uneasy. He sighed. “Rose—” He glanced at the letter again. Then he cleared his throat. “The chevalier has expressed a preference for a younger bride. You are too close to him in age—you wouldn’t look up to him the way a wife should.”
Mother snorted.
“That’s it exactly,” Father said. He stomped to the door. “God help me!” He slammed the door behind him.
“I won’t let you take my baby!” Mother cried.
I ran to my room. I started to throw things into an old haversack. I was going to run, I didn’t care where. Anywhere. Even the empty slave shack down by the shore would be better than this. Even a cave in the mountains, with the runaways.
That’s when I saw Manette, standing in the door sucking on a stick of sugarcane, her battered wood doll under one arm.
“I thought you were playing outside,” I said. I didn’t care about Manette, to tell the truth.
I heard sniffles. “I don’t want to go!”
“Oh …,” I said. “You heard all that.” I took her in my arms. “Poor little scarecrow,” calling her the name the slaves had given her.
Sunday night, January 4.
I woke to the sound of billiard balls knocking against each other, the sound of men laughing. Uncle Tascher and Father were in the game room, I thought. How late was it?
“Why one of your girls, Joseph?” I heard Uncle demand.
I went to the door, pressed my ear to the crack.
“Not that they aren’t lovely,” he went on, “and of baptismal innocence, both of them—but face it, a girl without a dowry? The lad must be desperate. And if he’s such a fine specimen, why must he go halfway around the world for a girl he’s never even seen? And a penniless one at that. If he’s all our sister says he is, it seems to me he would have his pick of any of the pedigreed strumpets in France.”
“Désirée’s no fool,” I heard my father answer. “How old is the Marquis now anyway? Sixty? Seventy? When he hangs up his fiddle, Désirée will be—” Father made a rude noise.
Then Uncle Robert said something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“If she can make this”—Father’s words became unclear for a moment—“she’ll be legally related. And it wouldn’t do, would it, for a relative to end her days in a charity hospital.”
I heard a chair scrape on the wood floor. “I can see the advantage to Désirée—but why would the son go along with it?” Uncle Tascher asked.
“Does the boy have a choice? Until he’s twenty-one, if his father tells him to jump in the Seine, he’s got to jump in the Seine. And if our sister tells the Marquis to make his son go jump in the Seine, I believe the old bastard would do it. The Devil knows what she does for him in return.” He laughed.
“So you think young Alexandre is being forced into this arrangement?”
“Not so much forced as bribed. Happiness is an unlimited income, if you ask me. The only way the young chevalier can get his hands on his fortune is to marry. And my guess is that his piss-proud father told him (at our beloved sister’s suggestion, God bless her): Look, if you want my permission to marry, it must be a Tascher girl.”
There was another burst of laughter and the talk turned to slave prices. I climbed back into bed. I felt a strange tingling in my belly. What did Father mean, that Aunt Désirée had done something to the Marquis—something that made him do her bidding?
January 5.
I told Mimi that Manette might be going to France to be married. “She’s scared,” I said.
“What’s to be scared of?” Mimi asked, mashing the plaintain with violent strokes.
I wasn’t really sure what it was Manette had to be afraid of, but I knew it was something—something to do with dogs climbing over each other, trembling in that pathetic way. “You know, marriage duty.”
“Is she in flowers yet?”
I shook my head. “What does that have to do with it?” All I know is that the cook isn’t allowed to cure pork when she’s in flowers.*
“Child, don’t they tell you anything!” But Mimi didn’t tell me anything either.
March 17.
Now Manette is ill—she has a fever, just as Catherine had. Mother says it’s her fear of getting married that brought it on.
I crawl in under the covers beside her and try to cheer her. I tell her how grand it will be in France. I tell her about the wonderful dolls they have there, and how our beautiful Aunt Désirée will look after her. I tell her how handsome the chevalier is, how smart and how educated, how noble and how rich. I tell her how envious I am. (Oh, but I am!)
But in her fever she only cries. There are nights when I’m so afraid she will die, as
Catherine did, in one big moment gone, just a limp body on a rumpled bed, no more or less than a rag doll.
June 23, 9:00 P.M.
Father came back from Sainte-Lucie yesterday. Right away he and Mother got into a quarrel.
“But Manette never did want to go!” I heard Mother say. “It was you put those words in her mouth.”
She started crying that he couldn’t take Manette from her, not so soon after losing Catherine. Father yelled, “You crazy créole women and your children!” I felt the walls shake as the door slammed shut.
June 24.
Father has relented. He wrote to Aunt Désirée, telling her he wouldn’t be able to bring Manette, she was too sick to go, but how about me? He explained that I wasn’t all that old, and already well developed.
“You know they may not like the idea, Rose,” he told me, sealing the letter with wax. “After all, you’re already fifteen.”
“When will you find out?”
“It will take a few months for my letter to get there and what with the war on—” He stopped to calculate. “Five months?” I moaned. Five months! I want to know now!
*The belief that a menstruating woman could spoil a ham was maintained into the nineteenth century. Doctors published papers in medical journals theorizing that when a woman was menstruating her skin became moist, preventing the pork from taking in salt.
In which I fall in love
Sunday, July 19, 1778.
There is talk of a new family in town, a woman and her son. At church I saw them after mass. The boy—about sixteen, I guessed, and comely—was watching three village boys chase a scorpion that had slipped under a pew. He fiddled with the handle of his cutlass, his long dark bangs hiding his eyes. His linen frock and leather breeches were patched.
“ Béké-goyave,” Mother said under her breath, pushing me outside, “vagabonds!”
July 25.
Mother allowed me to go with Mimi and Sylvester to market today. “So long as your chores are done,” she said. We set off for town in the back of the ox-cart.
The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. Page 3