Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  They were like two giant rivers joining to make a new one: the Africa river, the Europe river. The French were down here then, the whole damned Gulf was theirs and the big river too, all the way to Canada, and later the Spanish were here, and always the Indians were here, and together they brought to America the men and women of Africa. All of them made us, and later they called us the gens de couleur libre, the free people of color, the Creoles. We just called ourselves The People. We came from all those fucks of Africans and Europeans, fucks in the woods of the empty land, fucks in the August fields, fucks in slave quarters and masters’ beds, fucks at gunpoint and fucks freely given.

  The white men looked at us, at the women most of all, and they wanted us. They had no women here, or their women were pale and scrawny things, their heads full of Christian damnation (though some of the women did wander to the woods with black men and add to The People and that’s in The Story too). The white man tried to label us, ignoring the fact that before we ever saw a white skin or a blue eye we had the names of Africa, where we had lived since time began, and where later the Arabs chained us and put us in the holds of ships to be carried across oceans. The white men labeled us as if we were goods, and of course, to many of the whites, that’s what we were. But late at night it didn’t matter how white we were or how black. The white men wanted us.

  Maybe that was the beginning of the pride: their wanting us. Maybe that was why we went with them, to break them down, to make them love us, knowing that if they loved us, we owned them. Maybe that led to the pride. The true sin.

  So you look at me now, here in this place in the fifties, and I guess you think I’m one woman walking in the world. But the truth be told, looking at me you’re also looking at people long dead and gone. Their blood’s in me. The blood of The People. I can’t even go all the way to the beginning of The Story. Can’t go to Africa, child.

  But I know that in 1742, on a plantation near Natchitoches, a woman named Coincoin was born. Her parents were from Africa, slaves of a French family, they gave her a Christian name, Marie Thereze, but always called her Coincoin in the old language. In The Story, that’s the name that was always used.

  That slave couple had other kids, but Coincoin was the smart one, the beautiful one, black and smooth and big-assed and ripe. She knew the language that came across the ocean in the slave ships, but she spoke French and Spanish too, and could read all the books in the master’s house. She also knew all the healing that could be done with the simple things of God’s earth, roots and herbs and plants and magic mud. And though she was Catholic and read the Bible and went to the church, she had the old religion too. She knew all about the gods of the rivers and forests and wind, the sun and the moon. By the time she was twelve, she was famous all over for healing. White folks came to her and black folks too.

  But for all the respect they gave her, Coincoin knew one terrible thing. You hear me? She was the property of other men. She and her mother, her father and sisters and brothers did other men’s work: cooked their food, plowed their fields, picked their crops, nursed their babies. And because they were property they never got paid, no more than a mule got paid. And though the Code Noir said they couldn’t, the white men could grab the girl children and make them sleep with them. And then they could sell them off the way you might sell a saddle or a cart or a mule.

  One night when she was sixteen, Coincoin found herself on her own. On that single night her mother died, her father died and the master died in an epidemic that ran through the whole area and killed hundreds. They tell how the master’s wife got sick too and how Coincoin drew on the old medicine and saved that woman’s life. They say her father on his deathbed asked her to look for the kee-ah root, and Coincoin went foraging in the deep woods, was gone for four days. But when she came back with the secret root, it was too late to help her own father and mother. The Story says Coincoin hated the master and let him die. But when she was certain the man was gone, she saved his wife.

  When the plague was over, her slave family was split apart. Coincoin and a brother were given to the master’s son. And The Story says that he was kind to her; after all, she had saved his mother. But for all the kindness, she was still property. And in those days, the females were like brood mares to the damned masters. The more children they had, the more human beings the master could sell at a profit, or keep around to work the plantations. So the new master made Coincoin live with a fresh new slave from the old country. She must’ve felt something for the man because she had four children with him, one after the other, and along the way, started knowing better about the true world.

  And then, so The Story goes, when Coincoin was twenty-five, the Frenchman came to Natchitoches.

  Her Frenchman.

  He was tall and blue-eyed and kind, two years younger than Coincoin, free of family and responsibility, come to Louisiana to make his fortune. His name was Metoyer. He met Coincoin. They fell in love. And within a few months, Coincoin’s black man was gone, sold off into the country, her children by him were sold, and Coincoin was living in the Frenchman’s house.

  This wasn’t easy to do, child. She was someone else’s property, not the Frenchman’s. She couldn’t come and go when and where she pleased. But the Frenchman wanted her, and she wanted the Frenchman’s wanting. So the Frenchman went to Coincoin’s owner and made a deal. He rented her, like you might rent an ox to work your fields. And there, in the Frenchman’s house, the Frenchman and Coincoin began to make The People.

  They stayed together for twenty-five years. She gave him seven children. The humiliation was always there, I guess, because though he leased her, all her children belonged to the original master. Still, they lived a moral life. She was his woman, simple as that, his black wife living in the house and taking him inside her and giving him children.

  It wasn’t always easy. A Spanish priest came to Natchitoches and tried to break them up. But Metoyer loved his Coincoin, and he fought the authorities and they stayed together until, when the owner was on his own deathbed, Metoyer bought Coincoin from him. Bought her outright. And then, because the Code Noir said that no owner was allowed to father a child by one of his own slaves, the Frenchman freed her. And she stayed there in the house with him and their children.

  Finally, Coincoin started to get old. And the Frenchman came to her one night and said he wanted to break up with her. This was after twenty-five years and seven children. See, he was rich now and prosperous, this Metoyer, the owner of more slaves than anyone else in the region and thousands of acres of land. He said he wanted to marry a white woman that he’d met in New Orleans. That was the only way under the law that he could pass on his lands to someone, because he wasn’t allowed to pass it on to black people. Well, we just don’t know what Coincoin said to him when he brung her this news. I like to think she looked at him across a table and said, Go ahead, Frenchman, go to your white woman, but you ain’t ever gonna find no woman like me again. Not in your bed. Not by your side. Not ever.

  Whatever was said, they stayed friends for the rest of their lives. He arranged to buy her some land on the banks of the Cane River. He gave her money. He made sure all their children together were free and that they carried his name and that they knew how to read and write.

  And in spite of her years, Coincoin used her freedom.

  She and her children, with their brown hair and blue eyes, set about making something of the wild land along the Cane. They planted tobacco, and loaded it on the boats that would take it to New Orleans and then to Havana to be made into cigars. She raised chickens and turkeys, selling them in the market at Natchitoches, and then bought more land, and planted indigo, which made the dye used in the uniforms worn by the soldiers of Europe. In the early years, she and the children acted like they had no money, lived off the land, and with the money they made, bought more land. Coincoin found empty land along the river and asked for it from the King of Spain (who now owned it all) and got herself a deed written in the king’s name. Bec
ause the king’s deed said they had to, they cleared the land, hunted off the bears, built roads and bridges during those hot and endless days.

  Coincoin built two small houses, and saved her money and then went chasing through all the plantations until she found her lost black children, and she took her saved money to their masters and bought them back too. If she was free, she said, then her flesh and blood had to be free. And maybe, someday, they would all be free.

  And then came the part that was like a curse, certainly a sin, because more than anyone else in the region, Coincoin knew what she was doing.

  She began to buy slaves of her own.

  I think of her sometimes deciding to buy that first slave. She who had been the property of others. She who had seen her black children taken off like puppies from a litter. And I wonder what she was thinking and I can’t ever get it right. She was a woman alone except for her children, and maybe she thought the only safety was in land: If you owned the land, they couldn’t take it from you. But you had to work the land to make it valuable, to defend it, see? And she was getting older, and would never have another man, and maybe she thought, well, just for now I’ll play the white man’s game, cause eventually this crime will end. I live in the white man’s world. I got no momma, no daddy, no husband, and I have to live and build and grow.

  So she bought the slaves, and even had a jail built for slaves who didn’t do her bidding, she the queen bee now, the mother of the land. She lived on until 1816. It’s in the histories. You could look it up. But her slaves—well, when she died, they weren’t freed. And her children, held together so long by Coincoin, didn’t fall apart. They too wanted to grow and make themselves safe, and so they went down the river from Natchitoches and found the Isle Brevelle. It wasn’t really an island, just a giant hunk of land formed by the old and new channels of the Red River. The old channel was called the Cane. The children had been there with Coincoin (chasing bears through the unfenced wilderness) and she had showed them how deep and rich the soil was and how easy it would be to defend.

  So even before Coincoin died, The People had begun to buy the land on the Isle Brevelle. They built houses of mud held together with deer hair or Spanish moss. They turned their profits into more land and more slaves, always telling Coincoin what they were doing, and listening for her approval.

  And by the time Coincoin died, The People owned twelve thousand acres and more than a hundred slaves.

  They knew they couldn’t exist on their Isle without fresh blood. But that too brought them up against the sin of pride. You see, they wouldn’t mate with blacks: they didn’t want to darken their skins again. Blackness, nothing more, had made them the property of strangers. So they wanted to be lighter and lighter. That made it all right to mate with white men. Or with men and women like themselves, part African, part European. But never with pure blacks, for that would be to go back. So they had to go looking. The young men traveled into New Orleans and saw there the beautiful women at the octoroon balls, parading their beauty for the rich young whites in hopes of finding lifelong protection. But not many octoroon beauties came to Isle Brevelle, because they too were part of The People, and would only mate with whites. The young men of New Orleans were something else, those poor lost men with mixed blood; nobody would set them up in houses, as white men did for their quadroon beauties. So some of the men came upriver to marry the women of Isle Brevelle. They had no money, no property other than their bodies and blood. But they were needed, and they came.

  The Isle grew fat and rich. The land was turned to cotton and corn, the cotton sold in New Orleans, the corn for cash in Natchitoches. By 1840, The People owned the richest plantations in the parish, owned more slaves than the white men. King Cotton made The People rich. It allowed them to loan money to white planters, and invite them over to the mansions that had replaced the mud huts. It brought tutors from New Orleans to teach their children. It built a Catholic church where whites came to pray. It brought silk stockings and perfume and bands to play waltzes.

  But cotton also came from oxen and mules and niggers.

  I wonder now what happened sometimes in the evenings, when the masters walked out on their porches while the orchestras played. They could see in the distance the mud huts of the slave quarters. Did they hear forbidden drums playing? Did they hear Africa coming across the lawns?

  You pay for your sins. You know that, child. You’re a Catholic too. Like The People were. Like me. Pride goeth before a fall. Right? And that’s what The People carry around with them to this day. The Story of the Fall.

  It came in waves. The first was natural: there was only so much land, and when people died, they divided it among their children so that all the plots got smaller and harder to make money from. The Americans came. All of them Protestants, bony men with cold eyes. At first The People tried to ignore them, sticking to the old ways, speaking French and Spanish (the old language gone now), remaining Catholics as the Protestant tide flowed around them. They couldn’t believe that these pitiful river rats would forever replace the men of Europe. Paris was a thousand years old and Madrid was older. Washington was a village.

  But the Americans kept filling the surrounding lands, then running the banks and businesses and imposing a harder, more heartless attitude about color. Some of The People tried to befriend the Americans. They invited them to their homes, they loaned them money.

  But the Americans saw The People in a different way. Instead of marveling at what we had made with sweat and sacrifice, they envied it. And after a while they wanted to take it from The People without working for it as Coincoin and her sons had, plows strapped to their shoulders, hunting bear in the dark woods. So the Americans began to challenge the land grants given by the kings of France and Spain, scheming and cheating and calling upon God as their primary witness. They exhausted us in courtrooms. They sat down to play cards with our men, not for a few reales as in the old days, but for entire plantations. And sometimes they won: leaving families without land, and more women and children to be taken in by The People, further dividing the limited acres.

  So when the cotton market collapsed, and the Depression came, and the banks failed and the whole country was full of starving people, the Americans were waiting like vultures. All the cotton planters, white and colored, lived on credit, taking money from the banks at the beginning of the season that was paid back at harvest time. But the Depression went on and on for almost ten years. Everywhere, land, slaves, and tools were taken away to pay the debts, everybody thinking: This is just for now, soon the Depression will end and we can go back and do what we always did. Our young men were still told to walk straight and proud. The People still worshiped each Sunday in the church on Isle Brevelle where half the parishioners were white. There were still parties and marriages and love affairs. But the Americans were chopping away at us.

  So was God.

  For then one spring the Cane flooded and destroyed half the crops and a horde of caterpillars came behind it and ate the rest. The budworms came the following year, and then the price of cotton collapsed again all over the world. The banks failed. Again the Americans grabbed what they could of the good land cleared and made abundant by The People. It was as if the great sin of pride had brought down the full punishing wrath of God.

  And so when the last act of the tragedy began, they didn’t see it for what it was. The Civil War. The War Between the States. That was it, the final blow. And The People showed that they were no different in the end from other human beings. It was simple. They owned slaves. So they sided with the Confederacy.

  And when the war bounced off the North and drove back deeper into the South and the Confederates retreated, The People helped. The Confederates destroyed much of what had been built by The People and their slaves. And then the Union army arrived, chasing the rebels, and destroying the rest. They raped our women. They tortured our men. For one long weekend there was no night in the land as everything from Natchitoches to Isle Brevelle was set to th
e Yankee torch. They called us niggers. And then they moved on. Talking about freedom.

  Isle Brevelle never recovered. The slaves were gone, looking for the Promised Land, and The People had no money to hire new help. Crops rotted. Land went fallow. Families moved into the slave quarters, squatting on dirt floors, sleeping against mud and deer-hair walls. Reconstruction ended and the Americans made clear that all their talk of freedom was a lie. And The People learned permanently what they should have known from the beginning: to the white man, they would always be niggers.

  Some stayed along the Cane. Most drifted moved on. My folks went to New Orleans. For a long time after the war, The People were still allowed to live there. I mean, really live. Not live the way the white man wanted you to live. But free. Marrying who you want. Eating where you want. That didn’t last long. The rednecks took the South. They used their damn Bible to keep people down, to make them feel inferior, denying them even simple education and honest work, denying them freedom. They made sure you knew that no damn Yankee ever won a war.

  So here I am, child. You sittin there with your eyes wide open and your chin droppin. Sittin here with me. How’s it feel to know the damn Klan could do to me any minute what it did to Bobby Bolden? More: How’s it feel to know you been in love for a long time now with a nigger?

  Chapter

  58

  She drove away in the chilly morning fog. I stumbled through the woods, heading for the hole in the fence, my head full of pictures that weren’t there a few days before: Bobby Bolden’s ruined hands with the music beaten out of them; Coincoin hunting bears in the dark woods and punishing her slaves; the Klan lashing at Catty’s flesh, eyes red from white lightning and fear; the old black man with the shotgun warning me off the land. Rage was everywhere: my own and the rage of others.