by Anne Rice
But walking back from Benediction one night alone he found himself by no accident standing before the high facade of the Salle d’Orléans, swept up at once by the music, violins raw and lovely in the cold air, so that he did what he had never done before which was to linger in this spot, turning his head slowly but boldly toward the commotion in the open doors. Carriages crowded the cobblestoned streets, and black capes glistened as they shook off the rain. Young white men, sometimes arm in arm, talked rapidly as they pushed through the candlelit vestibule, and beyond Marcel saw the bare shoulders of a dark woman on the broad stairs.
The music swung violently with a waltz, and through the high French windows above he could make out the shadows of swaying couples on the walls, women he knew to be colored, men that he knew to be white.
Overhead the stars went out behind the winter clouds and a voice beat beneath the gentle pounding of the rain, speaking to him of what he’d always known, that he would never be admitted to this place. White men only were admitted to this place, and all places like it. Though of course even now he could glimpse the colored musicians against the windows and just catch the rise and fall of the bows of their violins. But there had always been such balls, they were a tradition as old as New Orleans, why think of it? He felt the sudden shame of someone who invites misery, it was senseless. Yet it was at such an affair as this perhaps that Cecile had met Monsieur Philippe, and perhaps it was beneath this very roof that Tante Colette had approved Philippe’s promises, promises that built the Ste. Marie cottage, promises that would send Marcel to Paris when he was of age. Paris, it struck him with a new searing intensity, and in a mercurial vision he saw all doors opened to him, dim places of fashion where dark men might dance with beautiful women while music this sweet cut the winter air. “What is this to me?” he all but whispered aloud. “Why, in Paris, soon enough…” But he’d been distracted from some other path, some other thought which came back to torment him now, like the press of a child’s face against a windowpane.
It was Anna Bella he had been thinking of, Anna Bella who should have been with him tonight but could not be. They would have walked hand and hand through this sprinkling rain, his arm from time to time about her waist, talking softly, listening to one another. He might have shared his anguished soul and come to understand it better. And it was Anna Bella whom he saw now, above, in some vague vision of that whirling ballroom, Anna Bella with the glint of a woman’s jewels, those rounded arms bare.
His pulse quickened. He turned to go. But all along he had been wondering, why not admit it, was she now destined for this—white men kissing that dimpled hand, white men whispering in that tiny ear? His mind said stop this. Shut the door. Why, after all, should you care? “Paris,” he whispered as if it were a charm, “Paris, la cité de la lumière …” But he had lost her, lost her! In all the fine confusion of this dreadful year, she’d been snatched away, long before the pain of leaving her for the world abroad had ever come to test him. It was as if he’d turned his back, and she’d grown up. But if it was to be so, why had he not known it, why must every commonplace truth become a shock? Did this not happen around him day after day? Where had he gotten those blue eyes that stared at him morning and night in the mirror, white men, dark women! It was the alchemy of his history. But Anna Bella, he’d taken her for granted, years of childhood binding them tight, that arm about his shoulder as he wept for Jean Jacques, that blinding sweetness when at last he’d dared to kiss her. Stop this, shut the door. Yet it seemed suddenly that it was something in himself that had thrust her out of reach, as surely as Madame Elsie’s malignant sneer, some mounting force within him that brought their lips together. Mais, non, you are no longer children, hmmmm? No. He was astonished to feel the blood flow from the palms of his hands, and lifting them suddenly in the slanting silver rain he saw that his own nails had broken the flesh. No longer children, no. But what if…what if he were not going, if foreign portals didn’t await him over wine-dark seas? The rain pelted his palms; the blood vanished only to reappear.
And above the music surged, while the wind came in cold gusts. It was lovely music, was it not? He pressed his lips to make a thin, fine whistle, and moving on was vaguely conscious of another melody in the air, the high-pitched falsetto of a black voice near him, singing faintly, softly as he slowed his pace. And through the dark he saw the glittering eyes of the black coachman leaning against the side of the carriage. Marcel knew the tune, he knew the words, and the Creole patois in which they were sung, and he knew it was meant for him:
Milatraisse courri dans bal,
Cocodrie po’té fanal,
Trouloulou!
C’est pas zaffaire à tou,
C’est pas zaffaire à tou,
Trouloulou!
Yellow girl goes to the ball;
Black man lights her to the hall,
Yellow man!
Now, that’s no affair for you,
Say, that’s no affair for you,
Yellow man!
Jean Jacques had been dead three months before Marcel caught Tante Colette at the door of the dress shop at dawn.
“But her mother…”
“What is it now, Marcel? I’m busy as it is, can’t you see that?” She was going through the mail. “Look at this, I paid this.”
“My mother’s mother, who was she?” he said in a low voice, his eye on the shop behind her. He could see the dark swish of Tante Louisa’s skirts through the glass. And hear a rumbling of heavy heels.
“What’s the matter with you, cher?” she reached for his forehead. “You have a fever, cher, now don’t do that.” He shut his eyes, his lips tense, his head going to one side in a near imperceptible negation.
“I don’t have a fever,” he said softly. “Tell me, surely you must have seen her mother sometime or other…you saw so much of her father.”
“Her father, cher, was the richest planter north of Port-au-Prince,” she said, feeling his cheek. He pulled back. Tante Louisa had called his name.
“Please, Tante Colette,” he said earnestly, and in an uncommon gesture he clasped her wrist.
“Oh cher, what mother?” She sighed…
“Surely she had a mother!”
“I don’t know, cher,” she shook her head, but her eyes held him steady. “It’s cold out here, you come inside.”
“No.” He reached beyond her and pulled the door to.
“Marcel!” she said.
“Tante Louisa won’t tell me,” he said glancing beyond her at the glass windows, “You know she won’t. And if you won’t tell me I’ll ask maman myself.”
“Don’t you do that, Marcel,” she said. “I tell you since that old cabinetmaker died, you’ve been a handful.” But as he turned to go, she caught his sleeve.
“She was one of those slave women, cher, I don’t know who she was, a slave on that plantation. ’Course they weren’t slaves by that time, oh, no, they were all free, she didn’t care anything for that baby the way I remember it, God only knows where she was when we took that baby, probably run off with that black army of General Dessalines for all I know, she was nothing for you to think about, cher, that woman had nothing to do with you…Marcel!”
He was a pace away looking at her. His lips had formed words, but she didn’t hear them, and she bit her lip as she watched him walk swiftly off, the crowd closing around him, his pale blond head glinting suddenly in a faint shaft of the winter sun.
Slave women, one of those slave women. The words refused to be made flesh:
Behind the garçonnière, he watched the slave women he had known all of his life gather the billowing sheets from the line, Lisette, running with arms out, letting the wooden clothespins pop in the air, while Zazu, her mother, blacker, thinner, handsome, swung the wicker basket on her agile hip.
Droplets everywhere turned the beaten earth black and a dusty scent rose on the cold air. Wandering under the bent banana fronds, listening to the tap-tap-tap and a storm in the cistern, he saw
them lighting the kitchen lamps, putting the flat irons on the glowing coals. Lisette, hands on her narrow waist, came to the door to scowl at him with a lowering head. “Someone put a spell on you, Michie,” she said voice deep-throated, scornful. “So you want pneumonia!”
It was Lisette, the copperskinned one who sometimes sulked, begged for gold earrings, and tied her yellow tignon in glamorous knots around her reddish hair while Zazu doted, loving to dress Cecile, to brush her long straight black tresses and wind them into soft curls. It was Lisette who whispered of voodoo, terrified Cecile with the mention of spells, and from time to time in a rage banged the kettle and vanished for a whole night, only to reappear at some odd hour the next day, her apron stiff with ruffles, hands busy with a dust rag as if nothing had happened. These women had rocked Marcel’s cradle. Monsieur Philippe had brought them from Bontemps, his plantation, before Marcel was born.
Ah, Bontemps, that was the life, the picnics on the bayou and the dances, ah the dances, it was a whispered recrimination which Marcel had long ago ceased to hear. Occasionally, he said sardonically to Lisette, “And I suppose you don’t enjoy your Saturday nights on the town.” But when Felix the coachman came bringing Monsieur Philippe from the country, then it was party time in the back kitchen with Bontemps gossip, white linen on the deal table and chicken roasting in the pot. Felix in nifty black with brass buttons, said, “Bonjour, Michie!” with a slight sarcastic bow to Marcel and took his place at once on the stool by the door not waiting for a child to tell him he might sit down.
But on those days when Cecile with wringing hands whispered of waste and sass, or found some frightening bundle of mysterious feathers sewn into the hem of a sheet, Philippe would saunter out to them, shaking his head, rout Felix, and settling in his place draw the women near. “What’s happening to my girls?” he would begin, but soon sent them, with his low whispers, into peals of confidential laughter. “Now make your daughter mind,” he would turn eventually to the serious vein, his arm encircling Zazu’s waist.
“I don’t know what to do with that girl, Michie,” she would say in her soft deep voice, a tone mellow like the expression on her stoical black face. But then he would insist,
“Be good to my Cecile.”
He gave them dollar bills, declared the gumbo was better than in the country, and warned them over his shoulder at the cottage door, “Stay away from those voodooiennes!” But then he winked his eye.
Slaves.
From the corner of a narrow eye, Marcel watched the black prisoners in chains who bent their backs to shovel filth from the open ditches, winced at the snarl of the overseer, affecting a casual air, burned with shame for staring at a common spectacle he had been taught to ignore since childhood.
Was it possible he had thought suffering vulgar before this? And bondage merely degrading?
His eyes watered too easily in the cold wind, and wrapping his cravat high, he bent forward as he made his way to the City Exchange, hands numbed in his pockets.
He had a letter with him should anyone question his presence, he’d never hung about the place before, and wandered baffled through the open doors into the smoky din, gazing up at the high dome, and then from one auction block to another.
Pushing his way through the rumbling crowd until he stood before the block itself, he did not know that he had clenched his teeth, and then stared astonished at the smoothness of the wood before him. For a moment he couldn’t fathom it, that smoothness, that perfect gleam. He thought of all the hours that Jean Jacques’ hand would rub a surface, folding and refolding the small square of cloth soaked soft with oil. Until with a sickening jolt he realized this wonder. That it was the work of bare feet. A vague nausea threatened him. He needed the outside air. But slowly he lifted his eyes to the row of bright dressed men and women beyond, blue calico, tailcoats, and dark eyes that watched him from impassive faces. A child clinging to his mother’s skirts let out a wail. Marcel had frightened him with the mere intensity of his stare. He turned to go, the blood rushing in his chilled face and hands, but like a gun came the auctioneer’s bark. It was ten o’clock. The day’s business was beginning.
A tall freckled mulatto had stepped up before the tightening assemblage, rolling his pants above the knees and stripping the shirt from his back as he walked up and down, up and down, to show that he had no marks from the whip. “Now what am I offered for this lively boy,” came the guttural English. “What am I offered for this fine healthy boy, master hates to part with him, reared from a baby, right here in the city of New Orleans, but needs money!” And then in rapid rhythmic bursts of French: “The master’s misfortune is your good fortune, a household slave but strong as an ox, baptized right here at the St. Louis Cathedral, never missed Sunday Mass in his life, this is a fine boy, this is a good boy…”
And the boy, turning round and round on the polished block, as though completing a dance, bowed to the crowd, a smile like a spasm in his taut flesh. He bowed low and whipped the shirt up, deftly closing the first two buttons with one hand. Then his eyes moved furtively over the shifting faces, down over the rows that surrounded him, and fixed suddenly on the face more nearly like his own, looking up at him, blue eyes into blue eyes.
Marcel, motionless, lips slack, was unable to move toward the winter street.
Slaves.
He had never seen the country fields, knew nothing of the coffles trudging overland with children wailing, and had never breathed the stench of the slave ships long relegated to the distant and thriving smugglers’ coves.
Passing the slave yards, he saw what he was meant to see: bright turbans, top hats, rows of men and women in idle conversation eyeing him casually as if he were on display, not they. But what went on inside the walls? Where mother was ripped from daughter, or listless old men, their grizzled sideburns stuck with bootblack, hunched to hide from the probing buyer a racking cough; or gentlemen, gesturing with walking sticks, insisted perfunctorily they must see this bright mulatto girl stripped if you please, the price was exorbitant, what if there were some hidden disease? Would you please step inside? Of these and other things, he could only guess.
What he did know was New Orleans, and all around him the city’s poor—black, white, immigrant, Creole—cooks driving bargains for fowl at market, the chimney sweepers roaming door to door, carters and cabmen, dark faces blank with sleep in the shadows of the presbytère arches, hands limply anchoring the lap basket of spices for sale. In dim sheds nearby, black men forged the iron railings to grace the balconies that lined the Rue Bourbon or the Rue Royale, and amid showers of sparks beat with rhythmic hammers on horseshoes in the stables after dark.
And all through the back streets near his home there had always been those hundreds upon hundreds of independent slaves who hired out their services, renting a modest room with wages, only sending a sum now and then to a master they seldom saw. Waiters, masons, laundrywomen, barbers, you gave their grog shops a wide berth in the evenings, if you had to pass them at all, hardly noticing the eternal rattle of dice, the aroma of cigar smoke, high-pitched laughter. And in those same streets, here and there the softened silhouettes of scant-clad black women against lamplit doorways, beckoning languidly, then letting the curled fingers lazily drop.
It was prosperous slave men who often came, spruced and shining, to hurry with Lisette on Sundays to the Pontchartrain railroad for the ride in the starred Negro cars to the lake. And on holidays, in hired carriages, they came clattering to the gate, bright in new broadcloth waistcoats while she in her fine red dress would run to meet them, sidestepping the rain puddles in the narrow alley as if in a dance, her picnic basket rocking on her arm.
Slaves.
The papers complained of them, the world was filled with them, New Orleans sold more of them than any city in the Southland, and they had been here for two hundred years before Marcel was born.
Roaming aimlessly at a rapid pace, his eyes searched the faces that passed him, as if for some sudden illuminati
on, some undeniable truth. “I am a part of this, I am a part…” he whispered aloud, and sat at last among the books and clutter of his darkened room, cold, but unwilling to light the fire, staring at nothing, as if the power to do the simplest things had left him.
He was afraid.
All his life he had known that he was not white, but snug in the tender advantages of his special world he had never for a moment dreamed that he was black. A great gulf separated him from the throngs on either side, but oh, how dimly he had miscalculated, misunderstood. And pushing his fingers to the roots of his hair, he gripped it, pulled it, until he could no longer stand the pain.
As winter wore on, he knew what it was to be fourteen. Richard’s sister Giselle had come home with her husband from Charleston for the opera, and the family invited Marcel to go with them for the first time.
And weak with anticipation, he had been led through the brightly lit lobby of the Théâtre d’Orléans, directed to the loges pour gens de couleur and hurried to take the seat given him in the very front of the Lermontant box. The spectacle of his people ringing the horseshoe tier stunned him as he raised his eyes, silk flashing in the flicker of candles, white linen all but luminous in the azure gloom. Faces both light and dark glowed above the beat of feather fans, and there hung about him, as it were, a wreath of low, sonorous chatter sweet to breathe like the perfume in the air.
Richard in his white gloves was a gentleman of the world with his elbow on the arm of the chair, legs easily crossed, and Giselle wore a cluster of tiny pearls on a chain around her neck like the buds of a flower set among gold leaves. Bending forward, she raised a pair of ivory opera glasses before her eyes, the thick glossy corkscrews of her curls shivering against her pale olive throat; and the scent of camellias suddenly surrounded her like an aureole.