And then, in January 1861, Louisiana seceded from the Union. Three months later Fort Sumter was shelled, and the War Between the States began.
V
I’m what they call in the business a monkey woman. I can photograph anything, but it’s monkeys I’m best at and monkeys I’ve built my reputation on. I owe a lot to monkeys; and helping to publicize the plight of an endangered species like the Louisiana spiders is my attempt to repay some part of that debt. I am, incidentally, utterly opposed to the eating of monkeys.
I am also a Southerner, and like all Southerners I’m obsessed with history. But unlike most, I’m not interested in glory and romance. I’m not interested in resurrecting the Old South in a hazy splendor that far outshines the historical reality. Nor do I cling to the Lost Cause. The Old South is to me an example of a society dedicated to the greatest good for the smallest number. Endorsing such a society I consider the moral equivalent of eating monkeys.
Have you ever noticed, for example, how the slaveowners of the Old South emulated Classical Antiquity? They copied the architecture of ancient Greece and named their slaves after Roman statesmen. Like the Romans they also made sure the women stayed at home and had no control over their own affairs. The Southern gentleman who “sheltered” and “protected” his women—those fragile blossoms, spotless as doves —in fact shackled them; in a very real sense they were slaves, and that young William Belvedere should have detected this, and sought to exploit it, doesn’t surprise me in the least; he was merely imitating his father.
The war changed all that. The war turned everything upside down. Randolph was gone, and William, lacking any inclination to take up arms for the cause, took to his bed with a “nervous fatigue” instead. Lydia Belvedere remained mired in apathetic melancholy, and all the slaves deserted save one, a taciturn fellow called Caesar. Upon his shoulders, and Camille’s, now rested Marmilion’s fate. Many of the great houses had been burned to the ground by the advancing Union army; how could these two, the woman and the slave, hope to turn back such an implacable foe?
It is with this tantalizing question that Camille’s correspondence with Mathilde abruptly ceases. No explanation was available; simply, there were no more letters. Imagine my frustration. After three days spent deciphering Camille’s spidery hand in a dusty, subterranean reading room—after immersing myself in the intimate details of her day-to-day existence, and constructing a plausible picture of her unhappy family— just as she faces the major crisis of her life, the letters stop. The source dries up. It was not to be borne. I walked the shady streets of Baton Rouge like a woman demented. One question alone burned in my brain: what happened next?
Late that night, as I sat, by myself, in a little bar on Pinel Street, an idea made its tentative way into the parlor of consciousness. I entertained it; grew warm over it; and went to bed nursing a small flame of hope. The next morning, early, I again presented myself at the Archives and asked, with beating heart, to see the letters of Dr. Oscar de Trot. The archivist came back shaking his head. My heart sank. There were no such letters. There were, however, the doctor’s journals; but they were kept in New Orleans.
I left within the hour.
VI
How did Caesar and Camille turn back the Union army? With charm and hospitality—the old Southern virtues. When the inevitable troop of soldiers appeared, Camille was ready for them. The officers were treated as honored guests; they slept in the beds that Randolph had imported from Paris, drank the finest wines in his cellar, dined on wild duck, she-crab, and roast quail. Quite predictably they looted the furniture and plundered the storehouse; but when they rode away Marmilion was still standing, intact but for a few smashed window shutters and a broken pillar by the fireplace. William was in a state of collapse, for he had feared for his life every hour the Northerners were under his roof; and Lydia had been rather roughly handled by a drunken captain from New Jersey one evening. But otherwise there was no damage done. Camille handled the situation superbly, wrote the doctor. “She rose to the occasion fully mindful of the responsibility she bore both toward her children and toward her house. She is indeed a plucky little woman, a woman of unsuspected fortitude.” Patronizing ass.
Marmilion survived the war; but when it ended, the “plucky little woman’s” troubles were far from over. The South lay prostrate, exhausted, a wasteland across which roamed bands of desperate men—landless farmers, liberated slaves, and various shabby remnants of the Confederate army. On several occasions Marmilion was visited by such scavengers. Each time, Camille appeared at the front door and shouted at them to get away, if they valued their lives. Her words at first had no effect; but when she told them that the house had been used by Union forces as a yellow fever hospital, they soon drifted off. Camille went back inside—where Caesar was waiting with a loaded shotgun, as a defense of last resort.
VII
As you see, I wasted no time in getting at de Trot’s journals. I often tell people that the secret to locating monkeys in the wild is to think like a monkey. It was the same with those journals; it was all a question of sympathetic imagination. For to construct a cohesive and plausible chain of events from partial sources like letters and journals requires that numerous small links must be forged—sometimes from the most slender of clues—and each one demands an act of intuition. It’s a project fraught with risk, but it’s the only means we have for constructing a credible representation of historical reality.
Take William. It was for him, now, that Oscar de Trot supplied laudanum, Camille having abandoned the habit soon after Randolph’s disappearance. William, we may be sure, was by this stage little better than a parasite, providing nothing of moral or material value to Marmilion. He was tolerated, I would guess, only because he was Camille’s child, and a Belvedere; precisely the same could be said of Lydia, though she did manage some needlework, and now, it appeared, might even be instrumental in propagating that curious little society inhabiting Marmilion. The one blessing, you see, that Lydia’s apathy had bestowed was that it enabled her to suffer the war less traumatically than others of her class. In fact, apart from the incident with the officer from New Jersey, the war did not touch her at all. Nothing did. It was for this reason that she responded with compliance to the sexual attentions of Caesar.
This development I quickly gleaned from de Trot’s journals. You may imagine the doctor’s emotions as he records the disgraceful information. Imagine, then, his utter horror when Camille subsequently informed him that her daughter was pregnant by Caesar!
As for William, when he heard the news he became hysterical. It was probably the last straw; for I’m sure he was aware, at least to some extent, of just how wide was the gulf between himself and the sort of man his father had been. Perhaps, with the laudanum, he still maintained illusions about himself, rationalized his failure in some manner. But the news that his sister had been impregnated by Caesar—whom William still considered a slave—‘would have punctured those illusions and revealed to him just how low he had sunk: that he could permit his own sister, under his own roof... but I hypothesize. The fact is, William became hysterical and went after Caesar with a bullwhip. It was probably the first time since Randolph’s day that he had attempted to exercise authority in Marmilion; and it was a fiasco. Dr. de Trot tells us that William— who was very overweight—came upon Caesar behind the house, and attempted to thrash him there. Without difficulty Caesar took the whip from him, and then lashed him with it three or four times before the fat man went howling like a child back into the house, to his mother, who was the only one who could have persuaded Caesar to desist from inflicting a punishment that had long been deserved. It seems that from then on, William’s pathetic lassitude began to take an increasingly malicious turn, and the object of the new flame of hatred that smoldered in him was, of course, Caesar.
VIII
The time came for me to return to the Charenton Swamp and shoot more monkeys. I’ve told you my technique for locating the timorous creat
ures, and on this occasion I expended more than my usual amount of sympathetic imagination; but for some reason they eluded me completely. Perhaps I expended too much sympathetic imagination, if such a thing is possible. Anyway, I crossed the blind lake and then for hours I drifted through the swamp, but not once did that sudden stirring in the treetops, that soft “swoosh,” alert me to their presence. I passed through one of the weird dead forests of Louisiana—the trees turned to gaunt skeletal frames, and the moss hanging from the branches in strips and sheets, all mirrored in the glassy still waters of the aimlessly wandering bayou. By late afternoon the failure to find any monkeys had somewhat dispirited me, and I consoled myself with a few artful shots of dead, moss-draped swamp maples rising from the quiet water. In the Louisiana climate, outdoor exposures have to be relatively heavy, as the high percentage of water vapor in the air acts to absorb and scatter light. It is the same light-absorbing quality that enables the moss effectively to kill off entire forests.
I returned to Marmilion at sunset. In the light of what I had learned about the Belvederes, I was intrigued, as you might imagine, to reenter the theater in which those strange and tragic lives had been enacted. Emerging from the oak alley, however, I was momentarily startled by the sharply defined profiles of the chimneys. How sinister they looked against the darkening sky, rising up quite blackly on either side of the house—which in some subtle way seemed unwelcoming this time, malevolent even—though doubtless my own ill-temper, the weather—which was cloudy and windy—and, in retrospect, the events of the night all conspired to influence my memory of those moments before I entered Marmilion again.
It was the worst night of my life. God alone knows what was up that chimney, but when darkness had fallen, and the wind came up, there was a wailing fit to wake the dead. Not until the first pale gleam of day came creeping through the shutters, which had wheeled and slammed on their hinges all night, did I manage to drift off for an hour or so; the rest of that night I sat up in my sleeping bag, with my back against the pillar, in a state of gradually intensifying unease, as what at first had seemed simply the eerie sounds that the wind always produces in an extensive chimney system slowly turned into a sustained shriek, as of some being in terrible, unending agony; and when it was at its fiercest, and the shutters were banging and from everywhere around me came howls and whimpers and groans—then it was that I seemed to hear, above and beyond it all, the scratching of that infernal nail. That was the worst moment of all. By then the rain had started—I could hear it drumming on the corrugated tin, and dripping through the ceiling—and from somewhere so close that I even began to think it came from inside my own skull, that hideous sound kept grinding and scraping away, on and on through the wildest hours of the night.
When the dawn came the wind died a little and, as I say, I dozed off for an hour or so. I awoke desperately tired, and felt as though I’d barely survived a storm at sea; and I gathered my things and left in haste. I turned to gaze at Marmilion before entering the oak alley; and against the sky of that gray morning, against the driven clouds, the old house heaved and rattled like a thing in pain, like a broken engine, like a ruined heart.
IX
Lydia gave birth to a baby girl in the summer of 1871, on August 24 to be precise; three days later she died. The delivery was long and painful. Dr. de Trot had no chloroform with which to ease the mother’s ordeal; nor, one suspects, was he as scrupulous as he could have been about the complete and antiseptic removal of the afterbirth. He was an old man now, and his medical training had been undertaken in the 1820s. In any event, Lydia became infected, and de Trot stood by helplessly as puerperal fever ran its implacable course. Toward the end she apparently began to scream for her dead lover, Simon Grampus Lamar, until the convulsions exhausted her; on several occasions she even saw him at the end of her bed, and rose from her pillow, and beckoned him to come close... until, as the doctor records, “soul and body could remain together no longer, and she was transplanted to flourish in a more congenial soil.”
In the Old South the aftermath of a death was governed by ritual; both conduct at the death scene and reporting of the death itself reflected strict rules of decorum. Relatives gathered, last words were carefully recorded, and coffin and funeral were chosen to demonstrate the wealth and status of the deceased’s family. That was in the Old South; this was Reconstruction. Lydia died at the center of the bizarre microcosm Marmilion had become, a small world of anguished and embittered individuals, and her funeral was humble indeed. Caesar built the coffin, and an Episcopalian minister rode out to conduct the ceremony. The procession consisted of William and Camille, Caesar, and Oscar de Trot; the doctor’s old nag drew the wagon; and poor Lydia went to her rest beneath a simple wooden cross behind the disused sugar mill in the field beyond the kitchen garden. Her death did nothing to allay the animosity that crackled almost palpably now between the two men in the house— rather, the reverse, for William held Caesar directly responsible for the loss of his sister.
And now the story of Marmilion begins to move toward its grim, inexorable climax. Lydia’s child was christened Emily, and Camille cared for her while Caesar labored in the garden. Almost single-handedly that silent man had brought forth fruit and vegetables from the wilderness Marmilion had been at the end of the war. There were pigs now, and chickens, and a cow; and he planned soon to replant the good field beyond the sugar mill with cane. Perhaps in the closeness of his heart Caesar entertained a vision of Marmilion returned to its former glory—with himself as master. Perhaps he even shared that vision with Camille. The old doctor gives us a picture of the household in this, its last period before the tragedy, with Caesar the devoted father returning each evening from the fields to gaze with mute adoration on the coffee-colored baby Camille tended as if she were her own; while upstairs, soaking in the venom secreted by his own vile heart, William Belvedere bitterly schemed the black man’s destruction. We sometimes forget that the Creole aristocracy was descended from thieves, prostitutes, and lunatics—Parisian scum forcibly recruited to populate the colony in the reign of Louis XIV. We are about to witness the spectacle of one such aristocrat reverting to type.
X
(May 17, 1872)
The night was no worse than usual. I rose at eight o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek in Thucydides. I said my prayers and ate cake and boiled milk for breakfast. The weather was warm and sunny. I read a sermon and then took a little nap. I ate cowpeas and grits for dinner. In the afternoon I sat upon the necessary chair with scant result. I sat then upon my verandah and read a little Latin. Shortly before five o’clock I saw Caesar the Negroe coming across the fields. He walked like a sleeping man. He carried in his arms a bloody sheet that draped a corpse, and upon his back the swaddled form of his infant daughter. He entered my house without a word, and laid his burden on my table. I was forced to drive off the flies that clustered about it. It was with an exclamation of the deepest sorrow that I lifted the sheet and recognized thereunder the lifeless clay of the mistress of Marmilion. She had been dead some days. The Negroe gazed silently at his mistress for many minutes and though I ardently questioned him as to the circumstances of the tragedy he made no answer. Soon after he left my house, and I was unable to prevent his going. He made off toward the river. God help us all.
Despite the extensive searches that were mounted in the days that followed, Caesar and Emily were never found. Perhaps they got clear away, and started a new life in the North. Perhaps they were swallowed by the Mississippi.
XI
I have no more documentary evidence to offer. What follows is the construction of a sympathetic imagination.
It began, three days earlier, in the big room at the front of the house. Caesar was working there. He was sweeping out the ashes of last night’s fire; or more probably—almost certainly—and this is a leap of the purest intuition—he was working with mortar and trowel, rebuilding the great pillar by the fireplace. William entered from the gallery with
the shotgun. He stood in the doorway, and as Caesar went about his work he began to taunt him. I need not go into the precise character of his taunts; white men have been insulting black men in a manner essentially unchanged, I would guess, since—when?—Prince Henry’s African expeditions? The wars between Rome and Carthage? The neolithic revolution of 1250 B.C.? William Belvedere stood taunting Caesar with a shotgun in the crook of his arm.
Blood and Water and Other Tales Page 13