Dance on the Volcano

by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

  “My Lord, do they sing beautifully!” exclaimed a poor, elderly white lady dressed in rags and powdered like a Harlequin. “True little prodigies…”

  She opened her mouth in a circle, held out her hand and pointed with a deformed index finger: “I’m one to judge – I was a singer at the Royal Comédie.” She leaned toward Jasmine: “I’m telling you, my dear, you should be proud…”

  The girls’ mother looked at her girls without smiling. Yes, they were gifted, but so what! Her staring eyes, opened wide, seemed to pierce right through them. Everything around her faded away. She was suddenly back in the past. This had been happening to her quite often lately. An unhealthy obsession kept her on a sort of leash, bringing her thoughts back to her very worst memories. She had visions of the large shack she had lived in as a child, of the market where she had been sold, the red-hot iron that had branded her right breast, the lashes of the whip that day she had been caught learning to read with an old slave, the eyes of her master on the night he had desired her, the hatred of her mistress and the numerous punishments it had earned her…She shivered without changing position and saw once again the birth of her daughters and, finally, the will that, upon the death of her master, made her a free woman.

  Noticing her mother’s fixed and unhappy stare, Minette abruptly stopped singing, let out a little cry, and went to bury her head in the folds of her mother’s camisole. At twelve, she already understood many things. She accepted them as inevitable, yet questioned them all the same. Why? Why were things this way and not another? Why were some people rich and others poor? Why did people beat their slaves? Why were some masters kind and others cruel, some priests good and others evil? Why did catechism teach the things it did and why did the priests act the way they did? They said: we are all brothers, but then they bought slaves and beat or otherwise tortured them. Why should she have to hide herself in order to learn to read? Why had Rosélia, one of the neighborhood vendors, been imprisoned for hiding a runaway slave? And above all, why – knowing what could happen – had she hidden that slave, who she did not even know? Minette had the feeling her mother really did not want to answer whenever she posed these sorts of troubling questions. She had figured out on her own that money could buy everything: beautiful dresses, plantations, slaves, and carriages. Thinking like a true freedwoman, she thanked God she had not been born a slave; she made a point – following her mother’s advice – always to speak French, so as to give the impression of refinement, and though she lamented the slaves’ condition, she considered them an inferior and pitiable class. She was, however, unconsciously sensitive to the injustice of their situation, though she was still at the age where one easily confuses revolt with pity. And so it was not insignificant, she realized instinctively, that her mother’s hand trembled in hers on market days when slaves were being sold. Still, she did not know everything about her mother’s terrible past.

  II

  JUST A FEW days after the arrival of the new Governor, someone knocked on the door of the little house on Traversière Street. Minette ran to open it and found herself standing before an eighteen-year-old young man, dark-skinned with kinky hair. Of delicate appearance, he had extraordinarily honest eyes – eyes so full of candor that they gave his otherwise rather unlovely face a captivating expression of smiling goodness.

  “Is your mother home?” he asked the girl, respectfully doffing his straw hat. “I am Joseph Ogé.” And leaning toward her he added: “I’ve come as a tutor. I’m not here to ask for anything. Your mother will pay me as much as she can afford.”

  He expressed himself in perfect French yet with the slight lilt of a Creole accent. Minette slipped away to let her mother know. Jasmine came immediately. She looked at Joseph Ogé for a long time then spoke, leaning toward him: “I trust you, professor,” she said aloud.

  He burst out in frank and youthful laughter: “That’s the fastest way to give ourselves away. Why don’t you just call me Joseph. People like us don’t have titles.”

  “Okay, then. Joseph.”

  The lessons began and the girls soon knew how to read perfectly. And so he brought them history books. With him, they entered into a whole new world. He spoke to them of the King of France, of the Queen, of their children, of their predecessors. He promised them that later he would introduce them to Racine, Corneille, Molière, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Lise yawned, while Minette – her eyes aglow – listened intently.

  Soon Joseph was no longer their tutor but a friend none of them could imagine being without. Jasmine herself began to love him like a son.

  For his part, as if long hungry for this kind of intimacy, Joseph became less and less reserved every day. He told them that he lived alone in a room he rented from a mulatto freedman, a real miserly sort – heartless…

  One evening, he arrived drenched in sweat as if he had run a great distance. When he opened the door, he stood leaning against it without saying a word, trying to catch his breath. Jasmine and her daughters had him sit down and served him some leftover jam they had set aside for him.

  But he was unable to eat and pushed away the plate.

  Minette was the first to break his worrisome silence. “Joseph, why did you run over here?”

  He rose from his seat and Jasmine was unsurprised to hear revolt rumbling in his voice when he answered: “I had to run from the police like a thief.”

  “Run? But why?”

  “They caught me teaching some young slaves to read.” He paced up and down the room, fists clenched and eyes brimming with tears. “They dress up our own brothers as policemen and have them chase us. They promise to pay them, to promote them – and they turn them into assassins…”

  “Why?” asked Minette, standing up and blocking his path. “Why Joseph? I want to understand.”

  “Here’s the truth,” he responded with a deadened voice. “They’re afraid of us becoming educated, because education encourages men to revolt. Ignorance creates resignation.”

  He sat down without looking at Minette and put his head in his hands before continuing: “Just like you and Lise, I learned to read in secret. When my mother died, I was left alone in the world. One day, I stole fruits from the market because I was hungry. Someone called the police and they chased me to a house where I was hidden. It was the home of a mulatto freedman named Labadie, plantation master and slaveholder. He put clothes on my back and protected me. I grew up with him. After giving me an education, he promised to send me to France to learn a trade. I was supposed to join my half-brother Vincent, who had already been studying overseas for several years, but a new law had been passed forbidding colored people from entering the mother country.”

  “Why doesn’t your brother come back?”

  “Come back for what?” he said with the same dull voice. “Everything is forbidden to us. Everything is closed to us. We can’t even learn the trade we want.”

  He lowered his head as if overwhelmed:

  “Me, I’d so like to…” He cut himself off, smiled sadly and made the unconscious gesture of placing his hand on his chest. “Let’s just drop it.”

  Then, thinking better of it perhaps, he leaned toward Jasmine and looked her straight in the eyes: “Have you heard anything about the Black Code?”

  She made a sign to indicate she had not.

  “Well,” he added, “this Code was drafted about a hundred years ago to lay out our political rights. Article 59 of this Code says that we, the freedmen, have the same rights and the same privileges as people born free.”

  “The Whites haven’t kept their promises?”

  “Labadie thinks they resent the fact that we’ve become educated, that we own land and, especially, that there are so many of us.”

  “Might they be afraid, Joseph? Might they be afraid?” asked Jasmine in a voice so passionate that for a second Minette wondered if it was really her mother who had spoken.

  As for Joseph, he did not answer. But he looked at Jasmine with such intensity that she shivered. Wha
t did that look mean? Did he want to remind her of the runaway slaves hidden in the mountains and the disturbing messages they transmitted with their drums and lambi horns? But what could those poor souls possibly have in common with the class of freedmen, to which she now belonged? Had she not carefully hidden her old life from her entourage? For all of them, as for her, that past was dead, completely behind her. “Daughter of a slave” – people used those words as an insult. Was it not better to live peacefully, and to be more or less respected, by letting people believe that her daughters were born free? At the very core of her being, she kept hidden an immeasurable pity for her former brothers in misery. But what good was her pity? And what would be the use of confessing? Since she had had the good fortune to be freed – since things had turned out that way, since in this world there would always be colonists, freedmen, and slaves – she might as well resign herself.

  Resign herself! Joseph had just completely shaken that certitude. How he had looked at her when she dared – her, Jasmine – to talk about the white men’s fear! The arrogant Whites who must tremble at night listening to the harsh and terrifying sounds of the lambi horns. How many times had she herself listened to them, alarmed, asking herself why they resounded so loudly and if everyone else was hearing them, too.

  She hadn’t forgotten about Makandal and his bloodthirsty rebels. Who could have possibly forgotten about them? He had been killed, it is true. But a leader who dies sets an example…Yes, those were all the things Joseph’s look meant to express. Yes, the slaves were far less resigned than anyone thought and the Whites were truly ignorant if they took them for passive beasts of burden. So then, by the grace of the Lord, there was hope…that one day…No, it was not possible. That Joseph could think otherwise proved that he was nothing but a child.

  “Has anyone ever seen the masters fear their dogs?” she blurted out, shaking her head sadly.

  “Yes, when they become rabid,” responded Joseph harshly. And as he spoke, he held Jasmine’s gaze with the same searching intensity in his own eyes.

  And immediately she understood that he was not speaking to her, Jasmine the freedwoman, but rather to the former slave, she who had been bought, beaten, humiliated – the former slave that she had never really stopped being, with her chronic fear and her woeful resignation.

  “You’ve known, then?”…she asked softly. And she was surprised to feel herself overcome by a pleasant sense of peace. “It feels better not having anything more to hide from those we love,” she added, and a sad smile crossed her lips, moving Joseph so deeply that he lowered his head.

  Lise let out an awkward little cough, declaring the conversation mysterious and tiresome. Joseph looked at her: she had an annoyed and distant attitude, as if everything that had just been said had gone in one ear and out the other, without leaving the slightest trace. Minette, however, lowered a worried forehead and looked straight ahead, as if pondering something…

  …Fortunately, not all of their evenings together took on this tragic tone. On the contrary, that instance where Joseph let himself go to the point of revealing his rebellious thoughts was the last time such a thing occurred. Generally, after their lessons or a group reading, Jasmine would take up some sewing and the girls would sing, while Joseph, happy and relaxed, listened to them smilingly. Sometimes friends from the neighborhood came by, requesting their favorite songs. And the girls, without needing to be begged, would delight their audience. Jasmine was proud. Within her, the beaten and debased former slave held her head high, forgot about the past, smiled at the future. But this brief feeling of joy lasted only as long as her daughters sang. As soon as the house was empty and her children asleep, she was once again overcome with worry, and trembled for her little ones. To the extent to which she could remember, she had learned this fear in her earliest childhood. She was afraid of her father the colonist, she was afraid when her mother died, she was afraid at the market where she was sold and also of her new master, the father of her children. She had been trembling with fear her entire life. In the end, it was possible – who knows – that she had been born to be married to one man, to be a protected woman with a legitimate name and a few kids hiding in her skirts. Life had been mistaken about her destiny and, in forcing her to accept this horrible condition, had destroyed all her strength. She had known others who were far more suited than she for battle and for vengeance. Her whole life, she had wanted to be protected, and faced with the horrors of reality, her damsel-in-distress nature had shrunken to the point of perishing. Only her daughters mattered to her in this world. And this child, this Joseph, who had educated them, molded them – how could she do anything but love him, too? He had come into their lives and been so generous that his salary amounted to little more than the affection she showed him. His eyes reminded her of those of a man she had once known, a long time ago, whose name and face she no longer remembered. It seemed to her to be a vague recollection that arrived in spurts but then faded just as quickly. But sometimes looking at him she said to herself, This child’s eyes remind me of someone else’s I once knew – but whose? And, confusingly, it seemed to her that if she loved him as much as she did it was likely because of this.

  III

  OFTENTIMES, WHEN Minette and Lise were singing, seated among the cheap wares of the market-women, the window of the neighboring house would open up suddenly and a blond head would lean out of it, astonished and delighted. Astonished, yes – for where had these two poor little colored girls gotten voices like that? Delighted, because this white woman was an artist to her core…Her name was Mme Acquaire. The rather modest house where she had rented a room bore a sign that read:

  SINGING, ELOCUTION, AND DANCING TAUGHT HERE.

  An actress at the Comédie of Port-au-Prince, she lived with her husband, a white Creole like herself. Son of a wig-maker, the dancer and actor Acquaire was overwhelmed with debt. On his worst days – days where he had lost at the gambling table everything he had managed to earn the night before from a performance for which he had taken in the profits – he would knock on the door of François Mesplès, a filthy rich white usurer who had a reputation for heartlessness and scrupulousness…

  “Hey, Scipion, there go those little nightingales from Traversière Street – singing away!”

  An enormous black slave, with a smiling and open face, joined her at the window that morning. “Yes, mistress, those are the little nightingales.”

  Mme Acquaire listened a little longer to their pure, young voices, then, leaving the window wide open, sat down at the piano and once again said:

  “Here’s my favorite game, Scipion. I sing and the nightingales echo me.”

  She sang a tune from a popular opera. Then stopped and cocked her ears. The little girls had also gone quiet. Mme Acquaire began and then stopped again. All of a sudden, one of the voices responded so beautifully that she rose from her piano in a burst of enthusiasm and said to Scipion:

  “One of these days, I’ll bring them over here, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, mistress,” answered the slave, smiling.

  He was one of those rare slaves who had been treated with humanity and, because of this, was entirely devoted to his masters. Because he, Scipion, was not beaten, because he was treated like a human being, and most of all because he could see the difference between his situation and that of the other slaves who were beaten, tortured, and tormented, he adored his masters. M Acquaire had bought him one day after a good turn at the gaming table; and, although he had been swearing ever since that he had wasted his money purchasing the jovial giant who served as a domestic for him and his wife, he did not really mean it at all, for he truly cared for him. Scipion put him to bed whenever he came home after his drinking binges, sullen and staggering. Scipion would put a bit of sliced lemon on his lips and pass a damp cloth over his forehead, and he never said a word about his master’s escapades to Mme Acquaire. Scipion prepared their meals, did the housework and, on days when funds were scarce, waited for M Mesplès by t
he side of the road and asked for money. Scipion had become as indispensable as the piano. Just as the Acquaires could not imagine their life without that piano, they had arrived at a point where they simply could not do without Scipion. Mme Acquaire even went so far as to confide in him – sharing her worries, her hopes, and her plans.

  Thus did he feel comfortable bringing up something with his mistress that was of great importance to him. Without fear of being beaten, he came back to the subject several times and spoke to her in flattering terms about the two little girls from Traversière Street.

  “Bring them here to sing for you, mistress, I beg you.”

  “I’ve been giving it some thought, but quit harping on it…”

  “At least let them see the piano, mistress. They’re so poor and you’re so kind,” the slave insisted bravely.

  Mme Acquaire did not answer, but now, whenever she passed by Jasmine’s house, she would pretend to look over the merchandise so she could listen to the two sisters at her leisure.

  One day, unable to hold out any longer, she left her house early in the morning. In the deserted street, the market-women had not yet laid out their wares. She knocked on Jasmine’s door and, as the two sisters were still sleeping, she was able to speak freely with their mother.

  “Jasmine,” said Mme Acquaire, already thrilled by the effect she knew her words would have, “would you be willing to entrust your daughters to me so that I might offer them singing lessons?”

  “Entrust my daughters to you!” The poor woman was trembling with happiness and would have gotten down on her knees to kiss the hem of Mme Acquaire’s dress. But the Creole woman, satisfied by the joy she had just occasioned, kept her from doing so and said, somewhat dramatically: