Pride's Folly

by Fiona Harrowe

  The house was built of pine logs chinked with plaster, with additions of clay brick at either side. Harry’s wife, a stout woman with faded brown hair, greeted me pleasantly. She made no comment when Harry said, “Julie this is my son. Didn’t know it until ten minutes ago.”

  She stared at me as we ate the midday meal, her eyes never leaving my face. What she thought she never said, at least not to me. There were five children, three girls and two boys. The two eldest girls had married and were gone. It was strange to think of the youngsters seated about the table as half-brothers and half-sisters, even though if one looked hard enough a family resemblance was apparent. Several times I caught myself staring at them just as Harry’s wife stared at me, hoping, I suppose, to discover something in their faces that would make me feel I belonged.

  Oddly enough, even though I liked Harry Page very much, my fondness was more in the way of comrade to comrade than son to father. I couldn’t explain it. Was it his uncouthness, his unpolished manners and speech that made me want to deny a closer relationship? I didn’t like to think I was still that much of a snob. Perhaps, I told myself, my feelings had to grow; I couldn’t leap into the role of returning son on such short acquaintance. And yet I would have been happier had there been no gap between us.

  He was proud of me, proud that I could shoot and ride and drink like a man, proud that I had gone to college. When I revealed my wish to breed racehorses he praised my ambition.

  He was ambitious himself. He told me all about it the next afternoon as we sat in his store, chairs tilted back, smoking pipes, sipping a potent, homemade whiskey while our knees toasted in the glow of a potbellied stove.

  “If’n I could git my hands on some cash, I’d be in the way of makin’ a fortune,” he said.

  “They do say money breeds money.”

  “I ain’t just waggin’ my tongue, son. Lissen to this . . .” He hitched his chair closer to mine. “Toward the end of the war I was with Hood in Tennessee. The general had messed up his chances to lick the Yankees at Spring Hill there. Shoot! Hood diden know his left hand from his right, piddle diddled and let the whole Union Army slip through his fingers.” Harry spat. “Well, ain’t no use goin’ through the damn war again. To cut a long tale down to size, we got into heavy fightin’ at a place called Franklin—hand to hand in a farmyard. There was this Union cavalryman—a darkie, mind you—had his horse shot out from under him. When he sprang up and reached for his saber I got behind and coshed his skull and down he went agin. I was ’bout to put a ball through his brains when his eyes suddenly opened. Well, son, it’s one thing to kill a man across a field or even at ten paces, but to shoot him like a helpless hog when he’s lookin' at you, I dunno. He diden beg, nothin’ like that. His eyes just met mine. Then I saw he was bleedin’ from a hole in his arm, so without thinkin’ I drug him inside the barn.

  “He said, ‘What’s yer name, Reb? And where you from?’ “I told him and he said, ‘I’m goin’ to repay you someday.’ “I diden give it another thought. After that we was too busy runnin’. A whole slew of fresh Yanks come up and gave us a chase I ain’t forgettin’ in a hurry.’’

  He leaned down and picked up a handful of sticks from the woodbox, opened the stove door, and threw them in.

  “Well, about a year after I got home,’’ Harry went on, “I was still on the farm then, I got this letter from New York. Seems like the Yank had died—Jean Per . . . well I can’t pronounce them Frenchie names—and he’d left me a coffee plantation in a place called Haytee. Know where it is?’’

  “Yes. In the Caribbean. I’d say a coffee plantation is a generous gift.’’

  He must have heard skepticism in my voice, for he planted his hands on his knees, leaned forward, and said, “Don’t believe me, do you?’’

  “Well. . . .’’

  He got to his feet. “Just wait a minute.’’ He went to a cupboard and fiddled with a padlock. When he returned to his seat he had a large, thumbprinted envelope. “See for yourself.’’ He withdrew an official-looking document.

  It was the deed to the plantation made over to him, just as he’d said: five thousand acres of land in Haiti on the Guayamouc River. Les Domaines des Étoiles, it was called, and the deed was signed by Jean-Pièrre Beaumont.

  “D’you reckon how much money there’s in coffee?’’ Harry asked.

  “I should think a great deal, since we have to import it.’’

  “You got it! But hell, what’s the good of it? I ain’t ever had the money to go. This danged store don’t do nothin’ but keep us alive.’’

  “How much would it take?’’

  He gave me an oblique, hopeful look. Then suddenly grinned. “I dunno.’’

  “I haven’t much.’’ My money belt held about twenty dollars, hardly enough to buy my ticket back to New York. But I did have a couple of thousand made out to me in a bank in Richmond. Ian’s horse money. I had been too proud to touch it. But now . . .

  “You’d double, triple—maybe more—whatever you spent,’’ Harry urged. “We could be partners.’’

  I didn’t care about making money, but the adventure appealed to me. I knew very little about Haiti, hardly more than Harry, but it sounded mysterious, challenging.

  “I think I can lay my hands on some cash,’’ I said.

  “Whooeee!’’ He removed his hat and tossed it into the air. “By ding, I knew my luck’d change some day. When can we go? Tomorry?’’

  “Hold on. We can’t just take off. What about the store, your family?’’

  “My brother’n-law and Julie can look after the store. Probably be happy to be shut of me.’’

  “It might be a long while before we’re back.’’

  “As long as it takes. If the place does good, then I’ll send for the wife and kids. Son, don’t you see? It’s my only chance.’’

  Perhaps it was mine too.

  Chapter 21

  We booked passage from New Orleans on an old scow carrying calico, mineral oil, and sewing machines. There were four other passengers besides ourselves, two sociable Englishmen and two mulattoes who kept to themselves. Harry was like a boy let loose in a pie shop. He enjoyed everything: the food, the tossing white-foamed waves, our narrow cabin, and the noisy engine room, where he would stand wide-eyed for hours watching the men stoke the fiery furnaces. He never once grumbled or complained, not even during an attack of seasickness. But when we got to Haiti he received the shock of his life. It was a black republic!

  It took a while before it dawned on him, and to be honest, on me too. Passing through customs in Port-au-Prince, Harry noted that the government hirelings were black, but in his eyes they were menials and he gave it little thought. However, when the clerk at our hotel proved to be a Negro also and when he saw men and women of color dressed in smart, fashionable clothes registering along with us, his reaction was one of bewilderment, then outrage.

  “Would you like to go back?” I asked.

  “No, dang it! But niggers . . .”

  “Listen, Harry,” I said, “we are in a foreign country. Its citizens happen to be—”

  “Are you cuckoo? I know what they are! Damn you. You lived too long in Yankee land, that’s yore trouble.”

  I didn’t want to quarrel with him. I wasn’t the most tolerant person in the world either. But my prejudices were of a different kind: class, for the most part, not color. San Francisco, though a melting pot, had its share of bigotry, which was reflected in various laws and social barriers set up against Negroes and Orientals. But the city managed to mask its racial policies in an aura of general acceptance that was as remote from Harry’s world as the moon.

  “You can’t do anything about it, Harry.”

  He agreed. He’d have to put up with it. “But,” he said, “that don’t mean I like it.”

  What neither of us realized at the moment was that Haiti (excluding the few resident whites) had its own sharply defined racial divisions: the noirs and the mulâtres. The ebony-black, Creole-sp
eaking noirs, direct descendents of the rebellious African slaves, formed the bulk of the population. Illiterate, poverty-stricken, eking out a bare living from a depleted soil, they were looked down upon by the mulâtres. This lighter-skinned elite, the French-speaking upper ten percent who had varying traces of Caucasian blood, lived in the grand houses of Port-au-Prince or the Cape. They sent their sons to be educated in the universities of Europe, drank imported French wines, and dressed their women in the latest Parisian fashions. Cultured, well read, the mulâtres supported the arts, frequenting the theater, concert hall, and opera as the upper classes did in any of the great European cities. Although Haiti, since its successful revolt against France, had had several noir leaders (its present president, Salomon, was a noir), the country had been ruled almost exclusively by the patrician mulâtres.

  I gathered these facts the day after my arrival in Port-au-Prince when I went down to the Palais National to insure the proper transfer of Harry’s deed. The Palais was located in Old Town, that portion of the city which stretched in a broad half-moon crescent along the water’s edge at the Gulf of Gonaves. Here in the sweltering lowlands, overlooked by the luxurious walled villas on the hills, pulsed the heart of Haiti’s capital, the busy harbor, the teeming native quarters, and the government buildings.

  The Palais National had been designed by a man whose imagination had run riot. Taking the Victorian motif to its extreme, he had constructed a towered rococo folly with turned spool pillars and windows and eaves edged in fantastic scrollwork. The edifice brought to mind a spun-sugar wedding cake.

  Once inside this architectural wonder I paused in the reception room and asked the man in charge to direct me to the Department of Archives. The clerk, black as ink, spoke only French. The few words I had picked up dealing with waiters in San Francisco restaurants hardly sufficed to make my wants known. We were dueling back and forth in sign language when a man waiting his turn caught my eye.

  “Pardon, sir,” he said in accented English, “perhaps I can be of some help?”

  “I would be most grateful.”

  A mulâtre with aquiline features and cropped black hair, gray at the temples, he was dressed in impeccably tailored clothes. I told him what I wanted. He smiled, and said, “You would be looking for registered land, then. But I’m afraid you will find very few records that go beyond 1883. In 1869 the old Palais was blown up, and what was left of our files vanished in the Semaine Sanglante, the bloody week.”

  “I have a deed that was willed to my father,” I went on to explain, showing him the document.

  “There’s more here than land,” he commented after he read it. “I see where your father was also given two hundred shares in Rhum Internationale, one of our largest rum distilleries.”

  “Yes. But neither my father nor I attached much importance to it.”

  “You should.”

  “Then it’s a profitable undertaking?”

  “Yes. I ought to know, I’m a principal stockholder.”

  “Well!” I exclaimed in happy surprise. “That is a coincidence.”

  “Isn’t it?” He studied the deed once again. “Perhaps some official stamp might be necessary. If you like, I will inquire.”

  “That will be most kind.”

  He spoke to the Negro clerk. Then, telling me to have a seat and promising not to be long, he disappeared behind a door carved in cornucopias overflowing with fruits and flowers.

  True to his word, he returned in ten minutes. “I’ve had it stamped,” he said. “But what state the plantation is in now, or who might be occupying it, no one can say. You’ll have to find that out on your own.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you. Perhaps I could invite you for a coffee—a rum?”

  He hesitated. I knew he was sizing me up, but apparently I met with his approval, for he said, “Thank you, I should like that.”

  His name was Jacques Duval. Later, on inquiry, I discovered that he could trace his ancestry back to the “Two Hundred Families” of the 1804 revolution, when Haiti won its independence from France.

  “You will pardon my ignorance, Monsieur Duval,” I said after we had seated ourselves in a small café and given our orders. “But I’m afraid I came to your shores ill-prepared, knowing little of your history. What, may I ask, was the Semaine Sanglante?”

  “The bloody week. Salomon’s answer to the assassination of his war minister three years ago. He armed his marchands, his soldiers, and noir peasants with kerosene, lances a feu, and muskets and let them loose through the commercial district and mulâtre neighborhoods. Fortunately, my family resides in Turgeau, where we could safely look down on the holocaust.” He sipped at his coffee. “It’s a sight I won’t forget in a long while. So many of our friends were killed: Frederic Marcelin, the Poulle home shelled, the Grande Rue in flames. And poor Alexander Bobo, the wealthiest of our importers—the mob sacked his shop, carrying off everything, but he considered himself lucky to escape with his life.”

  He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid you’ll find all of Haiti’s past steeped in blood, revolution, counterrevolution, murder, torture, and imprisonment. There hasn’t been a president in years who has left office peaceably.”

  “And now?” I asked, breaking a short silence.

  “Now, an uneasy truce. Well,” he said, setting his cup down, “enough of doom and gloom. Tell me a little of yourself. From your accent I take it you are a southerner.”

  “Yes. Virginia. Do you know the United States?”

  “Only superficially. Very superficially, I might add. Your countrymen do not take to persons of color.”

  “No,” I said, turning a little warm. I wondered how he would react when he met Harry. And thinking of my father, I suddenly realized that Monsieur Duval must have been puzzled by our different surnames but been too polite to ask.

  I quickly explained it to him, recounting a story that Harry and I had made up to save us both embarrassment. I told M. Duval that my father had been believed killed during the War Between the States, that my mother had waited seven years before remarrying, and that I had taken my stepfather’s name.

  “I discovered Mr. Page was alive only a few months ago,” I finished, ‘‘and it was when I was visiting him that we decided to come to Haiti.”

  ‘‘What a fortunate and, I take it, happy reunion. I do hope your visit will prove fruitful.”

  He got to his feet and held out his hand. I rose and took it. He had a strong, decisive handshake. ‘‘It was good meeting you, Monsieur Morse. Come down to the plant—any morning will do. I’ll show you and your father around.”

  ‘‘That is kind of you. And thanks once again for your assistance.”

  ‘‘Think nothing of it. Adieu.”

  I watched him leave with a faint feeling of regret. I would have liked to know him better, but he didn’t seem interested in pursuing a friendship.

  That afternoon I got to talking to two Englishmen in the hotel bar, and they told me that it was highly unusual for a mulâtre to invite a stranger to his home. ‘‘They’re more French than the French,” one of them told me. ‘‘They rarely make up to foreigners. Haughty, you know.”

  So I was quite surprised the following day when one of the hotel’s minions brought me a note from Jacques Duval that said: ‘‘We would like the pleasure of your company for dinner tonight at Belle Vue. I realize that this is short notice, but I hope you are not otherwise engaged.”

  While the boy waited, I wrote out my acceptance.

  That evening I rented a horse and rode up the road that leads from the Champ de Mars to the villas of Bois Chène and Turgeau. I hadn’t asked my father to join me, not because the invitation had omitted him, but because I felt sure he would have declined. He had been uneasy at the hotel and had moved out to a wharfside inn that catered to American sailors. I had finally procured a map of the country, and we were scheduled to leave for the mountains and Les Domaines in two days. Meanwhile, Harry intended to look into the rum distillery th
at came with the deed.

  I thought of Harry as I jogged along. His reaction to Haiti had been exasperating, but I could not fault him, or expect him to change his views. He had held them too long—a lifetime. My only hope was that his experience here might make him a little more tolerant.

  I had been on the road a half hour when I came to an iron arch spanning two fretted gates and bearing the legend BELLE VUE in large, black curlicued letters. I gave my name to an elderly Negro in a long soutane who stood behind the bars, and he admitted me. Riding down an avenue of royal palms, I caught glimpses of smooth green lawns, brilliant flower beds, splashing fountains, and terraces shaded by trees. The villa itself was built in the style of a country house, with balconies and broad verandahs on three sides. Next to the house and behind were separate long, low buildings, which I assumed were the stables and coach house.

  When a little black boy came out and took my horse I was suddenly reminded of Wildoak. But except for the darkie, this tropical scene, with its luxuriant blooming gardens, fronded palms, and heady fragrances, bore little resemblance to the river plantation I knew.

  Another servant opened the door and took my hat, gloves, and stick. Then he led me down a hall floored in cool tile, to the threshold of a huge salon, where he announced my name.

  I was glad I’d had the foresight to dress in my formal best. A quick glance showed me that the people grouped about on richly upholstered sofas and rosewood chairs were also attired in evening clothes. M. Duval crossed an Aubusson carpet with his hand outstretched.

  “So glad you could come, Monsieur Morse. Let me introduce you.”

  There were a dozen or so guests, mostly colored, with one or two whites, people whose names and faces I tried to remember as Duval took me around. I met his wife—a tall, imperious-looking woman aglitter with jewels, who told me her eldest son was away at the Sorbonne in Paris “being educated”—a younger son, Pierre, and a daughter, Collette. And last, Aurore.