by Anne Rice
Home. An ugly reality awakened him. Monsieur Philippe had returned to the cottage, and Marcel, when in the name of God would he see his room again? And why in the name of God hadn’t he bought the magic box, the Daguerre camera, during that millennium when he had been a rich young man, his father filling his pockets with ten-dollar bills? He could have had it, that wonderful instrument to fix all that he could never draw, precisely as the eye saw it, as the eye chose to place it in the frame. But that was gone, wasn’t it, the young gentleman who was forever hanging over Duval’s shoulder with ten dollars for a whole plate whenever he chose. Sheer exhaustion called him back to the African house, and the gentle drifting into sleep commenced again. He found himself in Christophe’s classroom, in the midst of one of those familiar lectures in which Christophe was striving to make the point anew: the world is filled with varying standards of beauty and civilization so that the edicts of one small time and place must never be accepted as supreme. Ah, he must ask about the African house, he must discover…
But there was much to be done the next day.
He was determined that his little charges would be able to read their French well for their grandmother before he was called back to New Orleans, and he had promised to help Marguerite copy out some poetry from a borrowed book. He liked Marguerite but was a little afraid of her, of that luscious and familial affection which she so easily displayed. So he forgot about the African house, and did not think of it until years after, knowing no more then of its origins than he did now.
Christmas had been heaven at Sans Souci. Days before, the slaves had made the effigy of a cow, marked with all the cuts of beef, and when this was mounted on a pole, shot at the animal to win the cuts as presents for their Christmas table, all this in a ceremony known as the papagai. The plantation rang with music within the great house and without, and all the family round came together for dancing, and on the solemn night itself they made the long carriage ride to the church of St. Augustine for Midnight Mass.
Marguerite had made a long knitted scarf for Marcel, and sometime in the hours after midnight on New Year’s Day, when he was sick of the sweet punch and had gone to the pantry himself to see if there wasn’t just one more bottle of vintage claret, Marguerite had pressed close to him, offering her tender child mouth for him to kiss. She was soft as a baby, and he felt shame afterwards, and resolved not to be alone with her again before he left.
So one week after New Years, when he was still carrying Christophe’s letter of two days before, and reading it over and over, and feeling impotent that he could not be with Cecile and Marie in New Orleans, he was quite surprised to find his aunt one morning at her desk with a grave expression, saying to him, “Sit down, Marcel, I want to talk to you about your cousin, Marguerite.”
She had a letter in her hands. At first he thought perhaps it was something more from Christophe. But after folding it neatly, she laid it aside and told him to close the parlor doors.
“Tante, I meant no disrespect for her,” Marcel said. After all, this was just an innocent kiss. But what if her aunts had seen them, this penniless ne’er-do-well from New Orleans with their precious and pretty little girl.
His aunt’s face was particularly tired this morning, and she flexed her fingers stiffly before turning in her chair so that she could see him.
“I have some news for you from home, but with your permission, let me put that aside,” she said. “And I promise to be brief. You’ve made an excellent impression here, Marcel, you are much liked and much admired, and I think you know you could make a tolerable living as a schoolteacher in these parts.”
He couldn’t conceal the expression on his face. This wasn’t the life he wanted, he had taught the children because their parents had wanted it, and it was all he had to offer.
“But there are other avenues open to you, and I should like to get directly to the point. Marguerite’s father owns two plantations upriver, some 150 acres of cultivated land. The man is willing to settle one-fourth of that land on you, and to build a house upon it for you, should you enter into marriage with Marguerite.”
“Marriage? With Marguerite!” Marcel was stunned. “But does he know my circumstances, that I could bring nothing to this marriage?”
“Marcel, you bring a gentleman’s education and breeding, and a gentleman’s honor. That would be quite enough.”
She waited, then went on.
“Marcel, don’t you see, ours is a small community, and we have intermarried over and over, and perhaps too much. My son married his second cousin, my grandsons were second and third cousins to their wives, and so it will probably go with their children as well…” But when she said this last about the grandchildren, a distress distracted her so that she made a little gesture of opening her eyes wide as if to clear them. “But let me make it simple. There are not many eligible men here for Marguerite to marry, and all of us would look with favor on this match. You need not give your answer now, Marcel. There’s no doubt in my mind that you could manage a plantation, that you could learn the cultivation of cotton, the management of the slaves. You’d be under more of a watchful eye than you’d want, besides.” She sighed as though reciting all this more from duty than anything else. “You’d have your own home. You would be the master on your own land.”
She displayed no enthusiasm whatsoever and Marcel was perplexed. Surely she wasn’t trying to convince him.
“Do you approve?” he asked.
Again she appeared distressed, distracted.
“Is it what you want, Marcel?” she asked.
“Tante, I can’t stay here. I don’t need to think it over. Oh, it’s tempting, it’s beautiful.” He was feeling that peace again that he’d felt so strongly in the church of St. Augustine, that sense of community where one would never encounter a white face without the community’s strength to bolster him, the community’s warmth.
“I have to go home,” Marcel said. “I have to go back to New Orleans to whatever future I can make there. I don’t know what I will do or how I will do it, but it’s the city to which I belong, with all its strife and its challenges.”
And all its vicious injustice, too.
“When I came here, I brought with me a little book,” he went on. “I believe I showed it to you, it was the first issue of a literary journal, published by men of color entirely. Christophe’s sent me several numbers of it since.”
“Marcel,” she sighed. “Poetry doesn’t mean anything in this world, it never has meant anything and it never will. If men of color in New Orleans write poetry it’s because they can do precious little else! Don’t give me that wounded look, that proud expression. It’s true and you know it. What future has a man of color in New Orleans?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “And this little quarterly, it may have no significance as you’ve said, but I respect it. I respect it! And all my life I’ve been searching for something to respect. All my life I’ve been trying to understand what really matters, and I tell you, this book, L’Album littéraire, matters. And there are other things that matter…Christophe’s school, the business that Rudolphe Lermontant has built…I don’t want to enumerate these things, I don’t want to be placed in a position of having to defend them. This country’s beautiful, Tante, and I should like nothing better than to let it enfold me and protect me so that I could pretend all the world was people of color, but I can’t do it. I can’t cut myself off from what I perceive to be the real world. So I have to go home.”
She appeared thoughtful and then she said,
“I have been alive too long.”
“Don’t say that, Tante!” he said. He did not remember it now, but these were the words Jean Jacques had used the night before he died.
“Why not?” she said. She began to murmur as if he weren’t there…“Picture the Plaine du Nord where I was born, that splendid island, and La Belle France when I first went there, and this rude country when Monsieur Villier first brought me to this stretch of s
wamp and told me he’d make it our home. I don’t believe in anything.
“I tell you after what I have seen in my life of Saint-Domingue and this place, I don’t know what a man of color can do anywhere in the world. I don’t know. We are a doomed people, Marcel. Whether you stay here or go to New Orleans it makes no difference finally. Oh, I don’t tell my grandchildren these things. I tell them the world is a good place, that in their time they will enjoy a greater measure of equality with the whites than we do now. But this is a lie. There’s no equality. And there never will be. Our only hope is to hold onto our land here, to buy and to cultivate more land so that we can keep our community as a world apart. Because the white Anglo-Saxon heart is so hardened against us that there’s no hope for our descendants as the Anglo-Saxon takes over, as he supplants the French and the Spanish families around us who understood us and respected us. No, there is only one hope and that is for our descendants to pass when they can into the white race. And with each one who passes, we are diminished, our world and our class dies. That’s what we are, Marcel, a dying people, if we are a people at all, flowers of the French and the Spanish and the African, and the Americans have put their boot in our face.”
“Tante, stop this! What about the here and now?”
“Here and now, here and now? Each year it grows worse, the prejudice, the laws that restrict us. We live in a fool’s paradise here, shut off from the world on our plantations, but the world is right there, outside. You don’t know the reverses we suffered, all of us, in the depression of ’37, and you do not know the constant struggle with the land itself. You don’t know the mortgages that underlie some of the prosperity you see. This ‘here and now’ is fragile, indeed, for us and when it crumbles, what awaits us but the American Southland which is encroaching on all of us more day after day.
“Oh, I know how you feel, Marcel, you’re a European in your heart and mind. That’s what you’ve been all your young life, a European. But you must understand that the only integrity that you can claim for that image of yourself is in the sanctuary of your own mind. I tell you, the worst hatred is racial hatred, the worst wars are racial wars, I see no end to it at hand.”
“I am a man,” Marcel said quietly, his voice thickened, the picture of her at the desk slightly blurred. “A man!”
It seemed his tone pulled her back. Into some awareness of the room about her. She was looking at him. She was perplexed. “Well,” she said with raised eyebrows. “In all these years, with all my pronouncements I have never made anyone cry.” She laughed dryly. “Perhaps it’s a reason to go on living after all.”
He did not answer.
He was aware that ever since he could remember, one illusion after another had been shattered. The world was never what it seemed. And yet again, here on the Cane River, he had been drawn into another illusion, of peace and solidarity and something inviolate, only to learn from this wise woman that this too was but an illusion sustained day in and day out by a collective act of faith. Perhaps he had gone about it in the wrong way over and over again. Nothing was anything until someone defined it. Nothing was inevitable. Nothing was inviolate. Everything existed, perhaps, by an act of faith, and we were always in the midst of creating our world, complete with the trappings of tradition that was nothing more than an invention like all the rest.
And for the first time it occurred to him that the world of the white Southerner with all its doors shut in the colored man’s face might also be fragile, also dependent on the same enormous act of collective faith. It didn’t seem so. It seemed the one aspect of this world not subject to change. He smiled.
“I admire your decision,” Tante Josette said, her eyes on the windows beyond him. “I was old when I came here. I found a refuge in this country, a place where I could lay my head down. But you’re too young for that. I admire you that you choose to go home.” She flexed her hands again, slowly, as if the pain in the joints was bad, and then she lifted the letter she had put aside earlier, and opened it.
“But you cannot go now,” she said. “I don’t know how long your mother wishes you to remain here, or why, but she is adamant that you must not come home until she sends for you, though what I am about to tell you will certainly prove a trial.”
He snapped out of his reverie. “What now?”
“Monsieur Philippe died two nights ago in your mother’s house.”
VOLUME
THREE
PART ONE
I
THIS HAD TAKEN AGLAE by surprise, this apparent physical inability to set foot into the room. She had short patience for such temperamental nonsense in others and feared some excess of emotion for which she was completely unprepared. But it had happened this way. She had gone down the stairs, and approaching the parlor doors she had been unable to go in. Miss Betsy was crying. She had her arm curled under her face and leaning on a table cried, while her Tante Antoinette stroked her hair. And the room was filled with black-dressed men and women, Philippe’s brothers among them, who had turned to face Aglae at once as she stood there in the main hall. And beyond, along the far wall, stood the coffin with silver handles amid a veritable garden of fragrant flowers. She could see nothing of Philippe’s face.
And then it happened. She could not move. She could not, simply could not, enter the room. And she had turned much like a marionette, she imagined, and made her way up the stairs. People had spoken to her, her sisters, little Rowena from the kitchen who was proving to be such an attentive maid. But she had been unable to answer. Unable, imagine that. She had felt a tension in the muscles of her face. She could not open her mouth. So sitting in her room now, her elbows on her leather-top desk, fingers meshed, she stared straight forward, and was barely conscious that Vincent had come in behind her. It would be a fine thing if Vincent should speak to her and she would not be able to answer. With a gesture of impatience, she emphatically turned her head.
“Aglae,” he said softly. He stood at the back of her chair.
A series of items passed through her mind, items of information to which she returned again and again. And without emotion, without emotion! This physical inability to speak was insane. That he had died in the bed of his colored mistress. That she had run out screaming into the street. That the body was so malnourished the face had darkened and collapsed. That it was the noteworthy skill of that colored undertaker, Lermontant, who had many rich white clients, which had restored the face so that the coffin might be open after all. That this mistress lived in the Rue St. Anne, and had two quadroon children! That she had been Philippe’s mistress for some eighteen years! That Felix, their coachman had resided there and here with the master for some eighteen years!
She shut her eyes and said quite plainly,
“Philippe Ferronaire! To die like that! Philippe Ferronaire!”
“Aglae, if you are to blame yourself for this I will not allow it,” Vincent said. “If you had not moved to take the reins of this plantation when you did, we might very well have lost it! Do you understand?”
Again she made that characteristic gesture of impatience with a slight scornful sound.
It seemed the motion was eternal. She could hear the clock ticking. And one carriage after another stopping below. Wind tugged at the French windows, and a frost obscured the sky beyond. Aglae had always liked the sound of a clock ticking.
“Did he die in this woman’s arms?”
They had not discussed it, she had not discussed it with any man, it was from women that she got the story, her sister, Agnes Marie, and her maids.
She heard his proper sigh. He didn’t want to speak of it, more properly, he did not want for her to speak of it.
“Did he die in this woman’s arms!”
“In his sleep,” Vincent said.
“And she awoke then to find him?”
“Yes.”
She sat back.
“Did you see her?”
He had gone to get the body. The Lermontants had had the body, surely they
didn’t lay him out in that woman’s house!
“Briefly, I saw her.” He sighed. “Aglae, I went to the house so that you might never have to think of the house, so that you might never have to mention it. I went to the house to make certain that everything was as I had heard it. Do you understand? So that none of it would reach your ears? So that there would be no unfinished…”
“I should like to know your impression of her, Vincent, you may leave off the rest.”
“Aglae, don’t…”
“Vincent, when I am in my dotage you may expect my obedience. Until then, you will please answer the questions I put to you…what was your impression of this woman?”
“She was…ill. Philippe had…uncashed bank drafts, some clothes…she gave these to me. There was a sum of money which I told her she must keep. She did not answer me, so I left it there.” Of course he had looked into the matter further, ascertained that she had family to provide for her, she would not be destitute. And he would clear Philippe’s debts.
“The woman, her appearance, her age.”
He drew himself up, emitting a small sigh again more or less without wishing it to be eloquent, and moved across the room. She was an attractive woman, more than likely, how at such a time could he tell? Petite, curvaceous, a marvelously delicate face rendered all the more remarkable by the texture of her very dark skin. A white woman with a black skin. How was he to put this into words, and for what?
“Don’t torment yourself, Aglae, you owe these people nothing, you do not owe them the slightest thought.”
“If you persist in playing the master of this house with me, Vincent, I shall go to the notary in New Orleans and find…”
He shook his head. “A good-looking woman, very well-bred,” he shrugged. How else to put it, that she had been anxious, trembling, like any white lady at such a time in that pristine little parlor among whatnots and petit-point as delicate as herself. She had hardly managed a word. She had wrung her hands, her gold and pearl rings flashing, suffocating in her tight laces, and the daughter, standing there, that beautiful young woman who looked completely white. It was the daughter who had confirmed the story for him, and so properly had she rescued it from the sordid and the ghastly. “Monsieur had gone to bed early, Monsieur did not feel well. When it was time for Monsieur’s breakfast, we went to awaken him, Monsieur would not wake up. Monsieur did not suffer…at all.” The girl had her rosary beads in her hand, and the woman, crying, tore her handkerchief in shreds.