by Maryse Conde
Never were children more cherished, more admired and encouraged to work harder and behave better. She pinned up their drawings of blue seas, orange suns and red-roof cabins under the boughs of a mango tree and invited the astonished parents to come and admire these masterpieces. The carnival in Marie-Galante was usually an uncouth affair, three days of disorder when mass à kònn, gwo siwo and bwa-bwa, carried on poles, ran through the streets shouting and gesticulating. Cathy dressed up her little negro boys and girls as marquises and princesses complete with cotton wigs and fans. She got together a choir that performed for the mayor of Saint-Louis and town councillors who could not believe their ears. Although, under her management, the school garden produced nothing, neither cassava nor Congo peas, the older pupils were capable of reciting poems in French-French to whoever liked to listen. One of them had his poem published a few years later in La Cravache and made a name for himself locally.
Des Antilles, nous sommes la phalange Du grand Parti de tous les travailleurs Qui vont bientot retirer de la fange
La Guadeloupe aux mains des exploiteurs.5
Consequently, after only one year of teaching, ninety-five per cent of Cathy’s pupils received scholarships and six fishermen’s children were admitted to the lycée Camot in La Pointe.
4 Forward girls, To the last bastions! It’s been too long, Since men have taken the fore. We want to prove, We are the equal of these tyrants.
5 Antilleans, we are the phalanx, Of the great Party of all the workers, Who will soon pluck Guadeloupe from the mire, Out of the hands of the exploiters.
2
The School Mistress and Razyé II
He was a good foot taller than she was. So she had to raise her head to figure out his face in the deep shadow of his bakoua hat.
She hesitated.
“I have never prepared anyone for the school diploma. I don’t know whether I can.”
“You can change grandsons of slaves into marquises,” he said. “So you are capable of doing anything you want.”
She felt he was poking fun at her and replied on the defensive: “That was for fun. The carnival is an amusement.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“You could have played at other things. Dressing them up as Mandingo ancestors or Maroons, for example.”
She stood dumbfounded, wondering whether he was joking. No, he seemed serious, even earnest.
“Do you know the history of this piece of land?” he continued. “And of these people who seem so harmless to you?” She did not say a word, but, despite herself, she felt tears rushing to her eyes. His voice became softer.
“I’ll take you to the Punchbowl Pond or else Tartenson Heights, where a few years back the crowd stood up to the gendarmes. And you’ll see who the people of Marie-Galante really are, the people you think are as tame as turtles.”
She caught her breath again.
“If you’ve got nothing but stories of killings and massacres to tell, I’ve got better things to do.”
“Go on,” he said, mockingly. “Cover your eyes and ears. Convince yourself that everything is for the best and that our island is a real paradise.”
She looked out at the languid sea which, under a dull sky, was turning grey and sombre, like the young man in front of her.
“That’s not what I’m saying. I know we’re going through difficult times. All Monsieur Schoelcher’s fine work has led to nothing. The former slaves respect neither God nor work.”
On hearing these words, he flew into a temper.
“You talk like the slave-owners,” he cried. “And stop going on about Monsieur Schoelcher, Monsieur Schoelcher. You’d think the slaves did nothing to win their freedom.”
There was silence.
“Having given it thought,” she said drily, “I don’t think I’d be able to teach you anything.”
With no further comment, he shrugged his shoulders. As he turned round and headed for the classroom door, she felt ashamed of herself. What did she blame him for, in fact? For having mocked her endeavors at carnival time, that was all. All at once she realized how ridiculous her behavior had been. What had got into her to powder the peppercorn heads of her little children like hoar frost? She called to him as he stepped outside.
“Why are you so keen on this school diploma?”
He stopped, barring the entrance, blocking the daylight with his well-built body.
“To make your dear Monsieur Schoelcher happy,” he answered ironically. “‘Educate yourselves, savage Africans, and shame your detractors.’ Isn’t that what he said?”
She had to laugh.
“I don’t even know your name!” she declared, as if they had made peace.
He hesitated, then hurriedly let out as if he was reciting a lesson: “First-Born. That’s how my papa christened me. After me came a string of children. Six in all: girls as well as boys. My mother’s womb waited seven years for me and my parents were only too pleased when I turned up.”
In actual fact, Razyé II had had to put the sea between him and La Pointe in order to save his life. One evening Mona had finally confessed to his father what had happened. Puzzled, Razyé II had never stopped asking himself what her motive had been. Was she tortured by her conscience or was she toying with the impossible hope of making him jealous? How can you ever tell with women? The fact is that Razyé took it very badly and around midnight returned to the Place de la Victoire in a rage, bent on flaying the hide off his son. Razyé II had fled to Les Abymes, to his employer’s house, a good fellow, who referred him the next day to his younger brother, Tonin, a blacksmith in Saint-Louis on Marie-Galante in need of an assistant, for he was overloaded with work: oxen and horses to shoe, cartwheels to ring, and picks, shovels, hoes and tools of all sort to repair and weld.
With no questions asked, Tonin had offered Razyé II a place in the wattle cabin he shared with his wife and litter of children. They ate root vegetables from a kwi. They slept on the ground on pieces of jute. They relieved themselves wherever they could, here and there, in the mud of the swamps. They washed when the skies deigned to let a cloud burst. As a meagre consolation Asturias, Tonin’s eldest daughter, let him take his pleasure with her whenever he liked. So, one night, while everyone was snoring all around him, he looked the life that lay in store for him straight in the eyes and got scared. The remnants of his education were fast fading and nothing distinguished him from an animal. His body had become increasingly ungainly. His intelligence had degenerated. He spent days on end without speaking, blinded by the sparks of the forge, deadened from toiling like a brute. His sleep was dreamless. Was it for this that his African ancestors had revolted and gained their freedom by drenching the earth of the plains and the hills with blood? He recalled Jean-Hilaire Endomius’s inflammatory speeches on the dishes served up at the banquet of education and he had a vision of the path he had to take. Unfortunately, unlike Justin-Marie, he had not paid much attention at school in La Pointe and had not really suffered when his father had taken him away. He had been content to see his body grow stronger, his shoulders grow wider and feel his gaze soar higher and higher above the heads of those who spoke to him.
He had long hesitated before going to see Cathy. She belonged to a family that was hateful to him, not only because of what Razyé and the Socialists repeated about the whites and the mulattos, but because it had been an example of racism and caste prejudice by condemning his mother to a life of poverty and suffering. Yet when he came face-to-face with her—tiny, fragile and, of all things, almost as black as he was—he quickly understood that she was a de Linsseuil in name only. Good Lord, she had come out the wrong color, like himself! Could she be the illegitimate fruit of a rape? Who was her maman?
He stepped outside into the dusk, under a sky now soiled with long black streaks. Night had almost fallen. A breeze was swaying the tops of the almond trees on the
square in front of the new church that had replaced the one smashed by a hurricane. On a corner, street criers announced a political meeting for next Sunday. On hearing them shout the name of Razyé, people came out on their doorsteps to know more. They could expect some disturbances, perhaps even a brawl and some blood. Whatever the case, the white Creoles would be in for it. At first Razyé II shivered. Then he realized that his father would have difficulty finding him under his borrowed name, First-Born, to which he had added Sabrimol, a name he had devised just like that out of his head.
Now that he was far away he had almost forgotten the ill treatment of his childhood and was at a loss as to whether to hate his father or pity him, look upon him as a victim or a torturer. He had got a muddled picture of his past and knew just enough to deduce that in his youth, Razyé had felt terribly ill-treated and made everything an accessory to his revenge. Because of a tragic passion, he had rejected the joys of a second union and considered wife and children an unbearable burden. No woman deserves to be mourned for the rest of a man’s life. What men call love is in fact nothing but a sickness of the mind.
Razyé II, or First-Born as he had chosen to be called, had made up his mind to lead quite a different life.
Left all alone, Cathy pensively placed the wooden bars on the heavy classroom doors. The more she thought about it, the more the conversation she had just had opened up old wounds. She realized she was not at the end of her troubles. It wasn’t enough to turn her back on the Linsseuils with the excuse she was not of their blood. She had to discover who she really was. Mandingos, Maroons, she had certainly heard of them, but always in a negative fashion. The most terrible stories were rumoured about them. Stories of rape and robbery, massacres and murder. So it would never have occurred to her to revive their memory for a carnival procession.
Likewise, the late Aymeric professed a boundless admiration for Monsieur Victor Schoelcher, all of whose works he possessed. He had dog-eared one of them in particular through reading it over and over again: De l’esclavage des Noirs et de la législation coloniale (On the Enslavement of the Negroes and Colonial Legislation). For him, Schoelcher was the greatest benefactor of the black race.
She set off along the stony path leading into the village. At this time of day, the great slabs of limestone floated in the shadows and she had the feeling she was fording a river in leaps and bounds. Soon she entered Saint-Louis, politely greeting folk as she went. Yet, despite her smiles and agreeable manners, the villagers had little fondness for her. They found her too headstrong and too rational for their liking. Despite all her achievements with the school they did not appreciate what she was doing. Didn’t she forbid the children to speak Creole? Creole was our mother tongue, they grumbled. Anyone who prevented its natural expression silenced a child for life.
Cathy was oblivious to the looks she got. Her thoughts were far away. In all her life she had never looked at another man except her beloved papa, her brothers or perhaps a favorite cousin. Now the desire to see First-Born again swept over her like an infection. She knew he spoke French badly and smelled of sweat. She could see he had never held a book in his hands. But he was unlike the usual country bumpkin. He was strong and tall! His voice was beautifully resonant! She tortured herself with countless questions, trying to guess who he really was.
She went into Ma Tétéche’s shop, supposedly to buy some tallow candles, but in fact to find someone who could inform her. Inside there was a rum shop filled at every hour of the day with rum guzzlers and wastrels, never at a loss for hawking gossip. But when she stepped over the doorstep she bumped into a young black woman with a pleasant face dressed in one of those wide shapeless dresses worn by pregnant women, who gave her such a look that she turned round and ran home. In her panic she was oblivious to what was going on in the village. And yet there was a great disturbance in the street. At the announcement of Razyé’s visit, the women party members of Legitimus’s Socialists, the “True Daughters of Schoelcher,” as they called themselves, were standing outside their cabins screaming their famous war chant.
La socyal, la socyal, Moun la lévé, lévé!
An Razyé, An Razyé menn!
Already half a dozen thugs were on patrol, brandishing their sticks or swirling their lassos with which they boasted they would catch light-skinned people.
At home Romaine had already lit the hurricane lamp and the insects were starting to swarm around it. Large crickets were roasting their legs against the glass, as they did every evening. Cathy sat down in the rocking chair, swaying herself in silence for a few moments, then she turned her head toward Romaine.
“What do you know about a certain First-Born who works, so it seems, for Tonin, the blackmith . . . ?” she asked, trying to hide the impatience in her voice.
Romaine did not even let her finish her question.
“First-Born?” she said hurriedly. “Everyone knows it’s not the name his mother gave him. What’s behind it, only the Good Lord knows! Some say he must be a bastard son whose family was ashamed of his color . . .”
Like me. Just like me, thought Cathy in ecstasy.
“. . . Others think he came here to hide from some mischief he committed in La Pointe.”
“That’s not possible,” Cathy protested, recalling his openly earnest face.
She would have walked though fire to defend this boy she had seen so briefly. Romaine was too sharp not to notice her mistress’s feelings and wanted to caution her. She hesitated, then said in a firm voice, for she did not want Cathy to go through what so many women have gone through:
“Everybody knows, except Tonin himself, of course, since the family is always the last to know, that he’s put a bun in his daughter’s oven.” Cathy started.
“That’s not true. It’s a lie. Don’t ever say that again, do you hear?”
Whereupon she ran and locked herself in her room. But that evening she had not the slightest inclination to read or correct the homework of her darling pupils. She did not feel like sleeping either.
If her father had been alive she would have plied him with questions. She knew how he felt about her mother and how he had never ceased to mourn her long, long after she died. She would have liked to ask him what love is and why it is born. When she was a child she had read a tale where the hero was suddenly swept away on a flying carpet. From his vantage point the earth appeared more beautiful than he had ever seen it, with its valleys, its hills, its beds of flowers and tangle of trees. The feelings aroused in her heart were sweeping her onto this magic carpet and she felt a strange ecstasy inside her. Yes, she had been born to conquer and to spread happiness. Yes, she had come to accomplish great things. For others. For herself. She did not know exactly what. For a moment she recalled the face of that woman who had given her such a mean look at Ma Tétéche’s, but she no longer felt frightened and she was silly to have been so scared.
She pressed her forehead against the shutters and caught sight of the moon, lounging on a cushion of clouds. It seemed to smile at her and she got the feeling it was a friend come to enquire the color of her thoughts.
3
Romaine the Servant’s Tale
I was born on this raft of land anchored in the sea whose mast the fury of the ocean winds has not yet broken. Our cabin stood high on a plateau scored by gullies. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but razyé, heath and sugar cane, more often than not yellowed and scorched by the sun. So ever since I was small I had wanted to cross the line of the horizon, to go beyond that thick blue line that marked the unknown. At home we lived off poverty. Papa, as black as the logwood charcoal he burnt, looked out at life through the two red gaps of his eyes. He had lost his forearm at the factory and could no longer work. So he tried to earn a little money with his charcoal and his fighting cocks, Zyé wouj and Fésé pyé. As for my maman, who was still only thirty, she looked like an old woman with empty udders hanging down her front. With
many a sacrifice, she did manage, however, to fatten up a hog that we killed at Christmas. It was the only time we ever saw any meat. I forgot to say I was the oldest of eight children. That meant there was never a Sunday or a day of rest. So every night, to escape my reality, I journeyed in my dreams. I saw La Pointe. The people who were lucky enough to live there never stopped talking about its upstairs-downstairs houses, so pleased with themselves under the red kerchiefs of their roofs, with bougainvillaea of every color on their balconies, its straight streets running between the legs of the almond and sandbox trees and its four-wheel carriages that outnumber the goats around here. So as soon as the blood flowed out between my legs, as soon as I became a woman, I tucked my meagre sugarcane money between my brand new breasts and set off to get a life.