Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

My father sat in the chair by the TV. He hadn’t moved or taken off his boots. “Jazen drive all night?” he murmured. “Sais pas. Maybe he know somebody.”

  I couldn’t picture Jazen and Alfonso having girls all along the route. Were they souris? Mice? Or were they hunting someone, for more money?

  I took a long shower. In the steamy bathroom, I put on the last clean tank top from the pack, and my new black jeans, but my feet were not having the boots. Still swollen. I rubbed them for a minute. All that walking I did, miles and miles every day, never bothered my feet, but this driving was killing me. I put on the flip-flops I’d worn at home, the impressions of my soles dark on the straw matting.

  Being in a motel made me feel more normal. I wanted to check e-mail. If I couldn’t work, I would go crazy. I towel-dried my hair. My father was watching the Weather Channel. “Hurricane,” he said. “Come past Florida.”

  I drank some water. “I hate plastic cups,” I said.

  He stared at me. “You come home from school, say, That not a cup, that a glass. Lafayette tell you shut up, and you say, That not a carpet, that a rug. Rug don’t touch the wall.” He unlaced his boots but didn’t take them off.

  My laptop was out on the bed. “I always figured nobody could steal my words. Not even Lafayette or Reynaldo.”

  “Oui,” my father said. “Somebody can.”

  “Not once I send them off through that electronic maze,” I said, hanging up the towel.

  “Tante Monie say you like Jean-Paul.”

  “When we were down there in Azure?” I said.

  “Oui. When you talk all the time. She say you like Moinette boy. The one die. Say he care too much about clothes and talk and he won’t—” My father paused. He was still looking at the television. “Go under nobody.”

  “He wouldn’t obey? I thought he lived with her. You said Moinette bought him out of slavery.”

  “Oui, buy him and then he still have to work. He won’t—drop his head.” He rubbed the side of his jaw, where tiny silver stubble showed like frost in the blue TV light. “He get kill for smile too much.”

  I had no response for this. Everybody died, in every story. I looked at the slim hotel amenities folder. “Papa, there’s no Internet in here. I’m going to check in the lobby. See if Victor e-mailed me.”

  But I wanted to write about the Aare River first. Just a few paragraphs.

  There was no lobby, only two maroon velour easy chairs and the television near the check-in desk. A little girl with two brown braids tied by yellow ribbons sat nearly hidden in one of the chairs. She waved hesitantly at me.

  “My granddaughter,” the woman behind the desk said. “I watch her until midnight, when my daughter gets off work.”

  The little girl had a coloring book and kept glancing up at the television. The woman gazed at me and the laptop. Her forehead was so white that her frown lines looked pink. But then she said, “I could open the breakfast room for you. There’s an Internet connection in there. You have to dial up using our number.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said, following her down the hallway to the small room with imitation oak chairs and the microwave and the packets of instant oatmeal. “I won’t eat anything,” I said, and she smiled.

  “You don’t look like an oatmeal person,” she said. I was startled, but she smiled again. “But there’s fruit. In the morning I make coffee and I do put out scrambled eggs.”

  She left the door open. The refrigerator hummed. Paper doilies under coffee cups. Like a Coen brothers movie. Deceptive? Weirdly comic? But the darkness and fear were upstairs in my room, and outside all around this bright dull room.

  I opened the laptop. I saw the Aare River, rushing white through the narrow cleft in the mountains, the path that led all along the Aareschlucht glistening with damp and risen mist and delicate ferns, and the elderly Swiss women in their heels and dresses and thick hose, walking with their grandchildren, whose calf muscles were like apples already in those strong legs. Honoring where the water was born. And then, through the narrow passages of black stone, out a gate, and there was a café with ice cream sundaes and strong coffee.

  The small park in Zurich where Jane and I hiked up a steep cobblestone street, overlooking the Limmat moving swift and ruffled. The bronze figures of military-garbed people holding tall pikes, their backs to the water so their faces wouldn’t be seen by the invading army coming up the river. The men were gone, to another battle. The women of Zurich put on uniforms and helmets, formed a line of defense, and held their weapons aloft, and the scouts told the invaders to turn around.

  That was enough. For now.

  I had 226 e-mails. I could write nothing to Jane or Tony or Rick. Their names were in a line down the screen—No Subject. Because we talked about too many things.

  Jimmy Taco, My New Thai Piece. He sent everything to everyone: Oh my God! Tacos de Lengua and Tacos de Cabeza at this new place in Boyle Heights last night! Come for the usual at my place September 1—can you believe August is almost over? Thai Street Food. I’m making skewers but they’re not some crappy satay. And if someone can catch the alligator in Lake Machado, we’ll have alligator burritos.

  Jesse James Martin: Get together? A second one from her: Neighborhoods of LA? Hermon and Atwater?

  My editor at Vogue: Oaxaca piece ready?

  What could I write? “I’m in Weimar, Texas, contemplating the ironies of history.”

  Nothing from V1World—Victor’s address. Did he have batteries for his iPod, an outlet for his laptop? He had everything, all the time, he said. Bambocciante for life.

  I slid in the first CD he’d given me, keeping it so quiet that I bent my head to the keyboard. “Check It Out: Ironic Mix.”

  The White Stripes, doing an old Son House song: I got a letter today said the gal you love is dead … When I got there, she was laid out on the cooling board …

  Cake, doing Barry White: Never never gonna give you up, I’m never ever gonna stop … It was torture.

  I opened the CD case. Inside was a meticulously folded and stapled booklet. The cover was hand-drawn—four cartoon guys with Mohawks, Afros, spikes, and dreads. The liner notes:

  Marraine—This is for you. A copy of something I did just before graduation. Professor Z’s assignment: Compare the Crossfertilization. Ray Charles doing country, Run DMC doing Aerosmith. Son House: somebody in class thought Grandpere would know that one. Cause I’m black. I didn’t even try. Son House is Mississippi Delta, not French Louisiana. Yeah. Like expecting some Cuban dude from Miami to listen to Tejano just cause their last names are both Hernandez. The White Stripes—ain’t no way he’s looking at some chick laid out on a cooling board. I saw the cooling board. He doesn’t know shit about it.

  He’d seen Glorette. Lying dead in my mother’s living room, while my father and Gustave built her coffin. My God. Her photo stared at the ceiling of my car now. Breast milk pooling inside her.

  I hate Barry White, and I like Cake, most of the time. But this one just doesn’t work. He doesn’t sound like he wants it. Not really. Not like the older brothers I know, when they want it.

  Last one is Led Zeppelin, and Memphis Minnie’s original version. Grandpere saw the water. He told me that a couple of times. But art versus technology—Robert Plant and Jimmy Page have the imagination and the hella big sound. It’s, like, mesmerizing. Swirls around you like a storm. She had the voice and guitar, basically, and that was it. But she sounds so sad. Her throat holds all this tragedy. So that’s Soul—to live the shit? And Art is to use the shit? Like Eazy E and Eminem. One gotta die, one gotta get rich. Blackface. Whiteface. Face up to it. Which one?—Victor Picard 2005

  The mournful weird sound of electrified harmonica, reverberating drums like thunder, and guitar riffs whirling around—he was right. The Zeppelin version was amazing. Like being inside the turbulent storm, but then this guy with a bossy high voice is telling a strange story. If it keeps on rainin, levee’s gonna break … Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan �
�� cryin won’t help ya, prayin won’t do you no good …

  For the last song, he’d written:

  Marraine—Under the Bridge is mine. One of the most powerful love songs ever—to his city. Your city? I want to love a place. Not love a person. Again. They die. Peace. VP

  Anthony Kiedis sang so softly, She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy, I never worry, now that is a lie …

  V—I feel like you’re ahead of us by three hours, but where? You guys have to stop and sleep sometime, so I figure you’re in a motel or someone’s house, and you can check e-mail eventually.

  You can be a flaneur. You are a flaneur. When I’m in Paris, I think of paintings of the young men who began this. They were called dandies—because they wore all these fancy clothes, and they pulled stunts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. They refused to do what was expected. Their deal was to walk leisurely.

  Basically, they didn’t give a shit what people thought.

  We can figure out the money. I’ve managed all these years to do it. I do what I want. I’ll make sure you can do what you want.

  I’m kind of a flaneuse. That word never sounds as good. But I’m invisible. Your mother wasn’t invisible. She was in some alternate universe, like she was floating above all of us, kind of amused, always melancholy, and we could never get her back down.

  The Dread Flaneur? That’s you.

  It will grow back. And you can use your SAT words.

  My SAT. Marcus Thompson and I were the only black people in the study class. The night before the test, there was a freeze. I had to be out all night in the groves, with the smudge pots. It was January. So when I got to the test room, I looked like shit. I sat near this girl named Kelly Cloder. She thought I wasn’t black, till she thought I was. She held up her hand before the test started and said something stinks, I can’t concentrate, oh, it’s the girl behind me, she smells like smoke, isn’t smoking on campus against the rules, shouldn’t she have to leave. Slick.

  My hair had kept the oily smell, my fingernails edged with soot, my knuckles filled with black, even the lines on my palm filled in with darkness. I’d taken a fast shower, but it took days for the smoky residue to wear off.

  They moved me to the back of the room. I didn’t care. It just pissed me off. All those words were in my head. I only missed two questions on the language part. I scored in the top one percent of the nation. Fuck Kelly Cloder. I remember thinking that.

  I’m not saying the same thing happened with you. But you have all those words in your head.

  Now I sound like a coach in a bad movie.

  The Dread Flaneur. I put my head down on the table. Smell of Windex. Antoine. Picard. If I were going to tell Victor stories about the past, I’d better get it right. My father and Gustave were not brothers. Were they even related?

  I typed Moinette Antoine Louisiana in Google Search. Had I always lied? Lying was so much more imaginative, so easy, so rewarded.

  Twelve entries. There was no Google years ago, the last time I’d wondered. And I realized, clicking on the first entry, that I’d never wanted to know too much more than the family stories: how she learned to read from the owner’s blue-eyed daughter while she curled her hair, how she was sold and ended up in Opelousas, how she bought a brick building, and her son died but she raised two daughters. I hadn’t avoided her history because she was a slave. No. I hadn’t wanted to think about her particular job, which would have been to make a white guy happy.

  The first entry was in Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy. Slave sale records, hundreds of them.

  1814

  Moinette

  Gender: Female

  Race: Mulatresse

  Age (when this record was documented): 17

  Name of the Seller: Etienne de la Rosiere, pere

  Name of the Buyer: Julien Antoine

  Grouping: Sold as individual. Not sold with son

  Selling Currency: Piastre

  Selling Value: 800

  Seeing her name—solitary like that, no last name—and that she wasn’t sold with her son, and that a monetary worth had been allocated—to her cooking? her sexual skills?—sent a sliver of loneliness below my jaw. Under Skills and Trade Information, Personality, and Family Information, there was blank space.

  I did the math—she had been born in 1797.

  It really did make me shiver. I could touch the words on the screen. Her body sold. Property. Chattel. But had she run away from Julien Antoine, and been branded on the shoulder with the fleur-de-lis? Or from the one who sold her? If this man had held the hot iron flower to her skin, had she been forced to sleep with him—to have his child?

  The next entries were court documents, filed in Saint Landry Parish:

  At the court held for the Parish of St. Landry at the courthouse on this 20th day of July, 1818, present the Honorable George King, Judge of the said Parish, on the Petition of Julien Antoine praying permission to give liberty to his female slave named Moinette, a Mulatresse, and it being proved to the satisfaction of this court that the said slave Moinette is about 21 years of age and that for the last 5 years she has led an honest conduct and has not ran away nor been guilty of robbery or any criminal misdemeanor whatever and the said slave having been duly advertised as the law directs and no opposition having been made to her liberty, the said Julien Antoine has permission to emancipate his said slave Moinette.

  She was free. Why?

  The next entry was dated a month later. Moinette Antoine, using that last name now, bought Jean-Paul, quadroon slave, five years old, from Etienne de la Rosiere.

  In 1819, she named him as indentured to Julien Antoine. In 1825, she mortgaged him to François Vidrine, for nine years, for $900, to be paid in equal annual installments. But something must have happened.

  The Saint Landry Parish Notary Book recorded: Jean-Paul, quadroon slave for life, originally acquired from Laurent de la Rosiere, sold by Moinette Antoine to Crespin Frozard for $750, on November 4, 1828.

  She sold her son.

  I had to stand up, to walk over and touch the microwave. She would have had a fireplace, to cook. She sold her son. Why? She never saw him again? The chill went across my scalp, and I made myself sit back down.

  In 1835, she bought Marie-Claire, mulatresse, aged five, from Joseph Ashleigh, trader, Virginia, for $200. In 1840, she bought Marie-Therese, griffone, aged five, from the estate of Philomene Artois, for $100.

  She must have had these two daughters with two different men, and then had to buy them. But I’d read it before: the condition of the child follows the status of the mother. A slave woman had slave children. Why would Moinette be required to buy her daughters, if she were free? Why her son?

  I closed the screen. How much of her blood was in me? Halfrican. Mulatto was a made-up word. No Latin origins. It was coined from mule. Moinette was a mulatresse, and who was the father of her daughter Marie-Therese, the one named for the grandmother she never met? The grandmother who died after Moinette was sold away?

  Who had told me she killed herself?

  If a mulatto and a mulatresse produced my mother and father, and they produced us, what were we? Quadroon and sacatra and griffon?

  I typed in Azure Plantation Louisiana. No results.

  I typed in Comtesse Plantation Louisiana. Two photos appeared, in a state historical collection. A plantation with citrus trees and a bone-colored fence. Then the house sagging into the Mississippi River, half of it submerged, the shutters still straight, one side in the earth collapsed in a dark slump. Below the photo was a handwritten caption: Crevasse. I knew that word—a flood caused by a collapse in the levee.

  I closed the photo and pulled up the next entry for Comtesse.

  A woman in black leather bondage costume, with a mask, her lips red, her skin golden, her breasts spilling out of the bustier. “Comtesse du Sade. Fulfill your painful fantasy.”

  Someone stood in the doorway. “Um, is there any water in there?”

&
nbsp; I turned around. A man about thirty with a sweat-ringed T-shirt and a baseball cap looked at my face, then at the laptop. I closed it quickly. He said, “Sorry, I was—”

  A woman pushed through from behind him. “Just get some ice,” she said, dismissing me with a flick of her eyes. Her camisole top was tight, her breasts compressed by the built-in bra and shivering over the top, and when she turned to the refrigerator, the excess flesh of her stomach formed a lifesaving ring above her waistband.

  I glanced back—she opened cabinet doors now. Her short bubble of hair was subtly streaked, three shades of caramel and blond. The hotel receptionist came in and said, “The breakfast room isn’t open, I’m sorry. You’ll have to let me lock up now.” Her granddaughter stood behind her, coloring book in hand.

  “But she’s in here,” the woman said, swaying a little. I could smell her breath—she was drunk. What time was it? Her husband said, “We’d better head over to the restaurant,” and put his hand on her back like a paddle and rowed her down the hallway.

  The receptionist said, “They’ve been here two days.” Her granddaughter put her arm around one of her legs, held on to her like a tree. “A family reunion.”

  I said, “Thanks for letting me work in here.”

  “You’re welcome. Is your father comfortable?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s fine.”

  But I went out to the car. My hair was a tangle of waves, from the humidity. I opened the glove compartment. Everything looked the same. No gun. Maps, CDs, a little notebook with coffee stains. I kept a packet of elastic bands there, too. I pulled my hair on top of my head but it was like trying to flatten a soft tumbleweed, so I left it in a ponytail to keep it off my neck.

  The window was open, but the air sat heavily on top of the car. Had my father put the gun here, and then taken it back out?

  Was he sitting with it now?

  I didn’t want to go back to that room.

  I couldn’t listen to “Poinciana” yet. I couldn’t listen to Marvin Gaye or Al Green, either. I reached inside the glove compartment. Feux Follets. Will o’ the Wisp. Transcendental Etude no. 5. Franz Liszt.