But there’s the prince, with his big ideas. So you have to help him out.
You see, it all came to a head because of the workshop.
He wanted to enlarge his tailoring business. The sisters were real happy with the idea: the business was clean, the clients were from the best families, they thought he could work at home. But that was the fly in the ointment: working at home.
They wanted him to set up shop in his house and stop paying rent for the workspace. They were ready to hand over some of their savings to create the biggest and most spectacular tailor shop in town.
They talked it over for days and days and even long into the night. He allowed himself to be convinced; he wasn’t against the idea. “So how are we going to make this happen?”
It was Aunt Lise who had the idea about the salon and formal dining room. He just had to annul the lease on the workshop with his landlord and transport all his equipment into that large room in his house. “You have that great big room; there’s enough space for the workshop and a little office in the back for taking orders and paying bills.”
“But what about the furniture? Where do we put all that?”
“Well, you sell it!”
“But it was our wedding gift from Emma’s mother. We can’t do that.”
“She has to choose. Does she want a future for her children or would she rather keep useless furniture? You always eat in the courtyard, and I’ve never seen you receive anybody in that room, which is always so perfect and clean—but what for? You can just buy something else when you have the money.”
Stupid! Real stupid what Lise was saying, at least that’s how I see it. You don’t ask a woman to get rid of her family’s wedding gift in order to make your own dreams come true. Maybe you can get your way for a while, but believe me, even if I’ve never been married, even if I didn’t really have a mama, I know you have to pay attention to your partner. Especially when you have four sisters who’re the apple of your eye and you’d never not listen to them for anything in the world. You have to be dumb not to understand that. But Lise insisted, and the other sisters agreed with her; so Sauveur Emmanuel tried to impose his will on Emma.
“Nothing doing. I’d rather see the workshop go up in smoke!”
She really said that! Sure did.
“I’d rather see your workshop go up in smoke than lose my mother’s wedding present.”
Of course I’m not going to recount everything that he said about her, about her mother, about past generations and generations to come, about the idiocy of little negresses who don’t understand anything about coming up in the world! Of course he dared compare that pitiful descendant of a washerwoman to his blessed, adored, and understanding sisters. And so the small bubble of resentment already forming at their wedding burst. The sisters were forbidden to ever come to their home: “You will not bring my children to them either, and if one of them ever tries to greet me on the street, I’ll tell her to go where Ti-Jean sent his stepmother!”
And that was that. Everybody knows where Ti-Jean sent his stepmother.
Boy oh boy! That was truly a declaration of war. He tried to retreat, to make her see his sisters didn’t really have anything to do with the idea. He tried everything to make up for the mistake, which he willingly admitted to, but nothing doing. The sisters could never go to his home again. The children grew up without roots, but it wasn’t going to kill them.
But today, what Émilienne pulled off—I tell you, you have to respect it!
Some children are like that; they’re born and you ask, why did the family need a ninth kid, how are they going to feed it with all the others?
I’ve already told you—did I tell you?—I saw the little one’s mama crying crocodile tears when she learned she was pregnant again. How she was raised, what her religion told her, she wasn’t going to get rid of that child, and her husband would never have agreed in any case. No question about that! No, Emma didn’t want that last one, like the three last ones before it. But every time they came, she loved them, even if she was a little harsh sometimes. She knew how to make them laugh, tell them stories about how bad she’d been when she was little, and give them those big wet kisses on their eyes.
Not so true for the bigger ones, but that’s normal. Where we live, when a child grows up, you put some distance between herself and yourself. You yell and hit rather than give hugs. The big ones forget they’d ever been hugged, but they had their share of it, just like the others.
So, some children just surprise us. You wonder why they come and then one day you see what they’re good for. Everyone has a place; everyone has a purpose.
When the child and her mama turned the corner, the conversation must have really taken off in the sisters’ house. Lise probably got yelled at. You’d think that one was married to her brother! You had to hear her say, “Emannuel frè an mwen! Ti-Manno an nou!”
But “my little Mano” or not, if the sisters decide to set things straight, they’ll send Sauveur Emmanuel home in a flash! Because they don’t kid around with discipline when they get started.
Especially Augustine. Émilienne’s right. Augustine is scary; she’s like a skeleton and it seems like her face is always in shadow, even in full daylight. As if she had an extra layer of skin on her face that kept any emotion, any laughter, any smile from showing. Just sternness and shadow. When she speaks, Emmanuel can be as smug as he likes, but he knows he has to toe the line.
I think the child got them worked up because—even if nobody said so—she’s the exact replica of her grand mother, and this flock of women, with their one rooster in the yard, is really devoted to their mother.
So when a little spit of a girl can make a whole family jump, can push her mama (who’s no pushover) to leave her neighborhood, cross through the darkness of boulevard Hanne, and go down to Assainissement, where she swore she’d never set foot again—when, in addition to that, the child’s presence evokes the exact image of your dead mother, it’s as if the deceased herself had come in person to tell you, “Enough! There’s no time to lose; now you have to straighten out this family and our heritage.” The deceased are really attached to this idea of heritage, and when a family tears itself apart, that’s the first thing to go.
The sisters must have discussed all that and decided this time to speak to Emmanuel: “What do you think you’re doing by not going home to your family for three days? Especially now, when the country is upside down?”
17.
It’s time for us to exert control again!
Queen Nono just cuts in without waiting for us to hand things over to her.
Of course the second figure in the quadrille is her favorite: it’s just as jumpy and peppery as she is.
Of course the caller says, “Unleash l’été! Take your places!” But she ought to know it really isn’t about unleashing yourself, but about separating ourselves, one from the other, with grace, to the right beat, and according to the dance’s structure.
18.
Just hold on there, you callers! With your permission, I’d like to say how glad I am to hear what this child is teaching us about our country—because I honestly wasn’t following along very carefully.
I’ve been busy trying to find that leg, and with what I was going to tell the Lord on Judgment Day. But, I’m not too worried about that because, besides a few minutes of pride here and there, on the whole I’ve pretty much walked the straight and narrow.
So this time, it looks like the construction workers have decided to keep protesting, right up to the end. Well, this just makes me think of how long we tolerated being mistreated by our bosses. Instead of a raise, I’d get a present—a shirt, a pair of secondhand shoes—and we were supposed to be grateful. That’s what it was like in my time. Maybe I already said that? Thankfully, we had our aid societies. Without them we never would’ve managed to do a quarter of a quarter of everything we accomplished to better our lives. There weren’t any unions; it took a long time for them to come. And the
bosses, well, they were the first ones to organize. Those factory bosses had a union all right. They knew you had to be united to get anywhere, but it took us a lot longer to figure that out.
As for me, I never joined a union, even when I worked in a bakery that had one. Maybe I was wrong. Anyhow, those unions, they had some big strikes, and the dead—well, there was a whole pack of them. I heard about those deaths during the union struggles. I don’t remember all of them, but in 1910 there were already several: six dead, and a lot wounded at the Saint Marthe factory. I was forty-three, so these aren’t childhood memories or stories people told me. There were deaths in 1930 as well, and in ’52. Unions won some of the battles, but I always counted on my mutual aid societies and tontines. That’s why you have neighborhoods, friendship, and family. You can’t joke about that—no, you can’t!
19.
That’s enough, Nono! We really have to move this story along and listen to the other musicians.
So, please, keep quiet!
The time has come for Julien’s brother to speak. Julien is the teacher’s husband, whom Émile mentioned.
“Yeah, I saw that Julien in front of the police department in the middle of all those people who were yelling because some poor fool had been arrested.”
We don’t need your comments, Émile. Thank you very much.
We call forth Henri, Julien’s brother. We believe he can help us see how Madame Ladal’s departure from school is tied to what’s happening in our country.
Let him come forward and play his part in one long movement. We’re running out of time!
Which instrument? How about maracas or the siyak?
Small but essential! You can’t do without their percussive effects.
One, two, three—let’s go, Henri. Transition from l’été to la poule!
20.
This Thursday, May 25, 1967, as I unfolded my body, stretched, and massaged my lower back after spending hours bent over working the land—and the land is low, my Lord, is it low!—there they were, not moving, right at the top of the field: Colette and my brother Julien.
Both were standing on the edge of the road, on the blinding white limestone, both motionless under a flamboyant tree whose orange-red flowers carpeted the ground. She, in a pale green dress, delicate, stunning against the coral earth, with her black-as-night hair braided down her back, her eyes waiting for the answer to a question that hadn’t yet been asked. He, in pants of some inexpensive cotton, a yellowed shirt and straw hat, the latter item born of a long-standing desire to blend in with the peasants. For once, he wasn’t speaking.
I made a mental note to tell him just how out of place his hat looked. That’s probably what I would have started off with if she hadn’t thrown these words in my face: “Henri, I beg you. Please protect Julien. I’ll figure out a way to take care of myself.”
Anguish—I could hear it in her voice.
How’d she manage to drag my brother out here anyway?
Then him: “I need you to invite Colette to stay; I have too many things to take care of.”
He must have been incredibly worried to drive her all the way out here, forty kilometers from Pointe-à-Pitre. That brother of mine who never stopped complaining about my having moved so far away from town, even though he was proud of how I’d successfully “returned to the land.”
Caught up in my own thoughts, everything started rushing together, their words devouring my air: gendarmes, political action, unions, fear. Slowly the words formed into sentences.
“Julien has never been careful. It’s wearing me out.”
“Colette was evaluated yesterday. They’re going to make her pay.”
Their confessions stirred the beginnings of an argument I didn’t think I’d be able to contain.
“Pay what? Pay for how you’ve riled them up? Who did what? You dare ask that! I’m going to lose my position!”
“A criminal regulation . . .”
“You’re not the first . . .”
I didn’t want to fall victim to their hysteria, get caught up in their panic. I took a couple of steps backwards, trying to disguise my retreat. Did they notice?
I thought then about how I never allow myself to just stop and look at the sea. So I left behind the green-apple dress and the straw hat that had invaded my farmer’s life: my bananas, my harvests of gigantic yams, twisted and covered in little nobs that reminded me of the corns on Grandma’s feet. They had invited themselves onto my land just when the sun’s brilliance strikes the leaves of the trees and races to the ocean, descending down the hill in the middle of hundreds of banana trees standing at attention and protecting their offspring, as though they’d ambushed a squad of soldiers in training.
The trunks of banana trees always look solid and proud, right up till the first windstorm that bends them almost completely over, tearing up their leaves, turning them into a defeated army, messy and desolate.
Banana trees aren’t meant for hurricanes. They can’t even stand up to minor winds—sixty kilometers an hour or so.
I turned towards the sea and the faraway islands, all those Saints insolently bathed in light and softness. But I could feel the two silhouettes behind me, their presence strange in that landscape.
“What’s going on?” My question was abrupt and meant to signal I’d heard enough—enough talk—and I didn’t understand what they were talking about. “Let’s try to make sense out of all this. What do you want from me?”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you for the last five minutes, but as usual you weren’t listening.”
Colette was looking at me as though the sky had fallen. A kind of we were counting on you and you let us down.
“Come on, speak up. Out with it!”
“I was evaluated yesterday.”
“And it didn’t go well?”
“My class was fine, but the meeting afterwards not so good. I’m sure it was all planned in advance. That guy was looking for anything to make trouble for me.”
And he found things. It wasn’t hard. Colette said as much.
“He only had to glance at the notebook of one of my girls.”
It was a sentence about how Napoleon reinstated slavery.
“Are you a historian, madame? You’re rewriting history books now?”
A lesson on the civil rights movement in the United States—with some words by Malcolm X: “Every man should be recognized as a man, without trying to find out if he’s white, black, red, or tan.”
The examiner, then, aggressive, “How long has this been part of the syllabus?”
“What?”
“You want them to think about the current political situation? Why not introduce the Cuban revolution while you’re at it!”
And Colette, to us: “I almost told him I was considering it . . .”
“And you’ve omitted the morning proverb, expressly selected by the rectorate. You’ve replaced it with a phrase for them to think about. I can’t say this was complete idiocy, but madame, when our children enter their classroom, we want them to have a point of ethical reflection that will stay with them for the entire day. Whereas your children are given free rein to deal with moral issues themselves. Do you understand what that means?
“And you’re studying the first lines of a poem by Sony Rupaire, ‘Joue pour moi,’ copied out of an issue of Esprit. You called him a Guadeloupean poet, but you forgot to mention, madame, that he’s best known as a deserter, that his French nationality was stripped from him and that the review from which you extracted that poem has been censored—all of its copies seized by the court!”
“You get the picture,” Colette concluded.
While my sister-in-law was giving me details of her conversation with the examiner, Julien came closer. He summed up the whole thing: “I think that’s what it was, Henri; that guy was looking for something specific. As though he needed to verify some information he already had. Don’t you see? Because really, Henri, do you know many people who’ve heard o
f Sony? Or are aware that Esprit was censored in 1962? No, no. That guy had too much information. Someone informed on Colette, as if she were a common criminal!”
Gesturing wildly, absolutely livid, pacing to and fro—Julien was the same agitated man he’d been before he shut up enough to let Colette speak. And he had more to say: nobody was going to stop him from confronting that principal in her wig. Everybody knew she had access to the top; they saw her slip into the rector’s office every Thursday morning, probably to report on what she knew. And didn’t she look like a mongoose, stimulating fear, ready and eager to kill a snake with a swift bite to its neck with her sharp teeth; and didn’t that mongoose creep into the office under the stairs while Colette was being interrogated by that coward—him, too, like a mongoose, and that principal ashamed of her frizzy hair! He’d make her talk; he’d be the one to grab her by the neck; she’d be the serpent and he’d be the mongoose. He’d squeeze the air out of her lungs until her body started to convulse every which way, and with her eyes bulging out of their sockets, she’d beg him to stop. That’s what you have to do to traitors, make them vomit their guts out. And didn’t he already have an idea about how to get into her house. He knew the right time to find her alone: when the courtyard is finally empty and the concierge is in her own house making dinner. Then the principal takes off her wig to cool off what’s left of her brain.
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