Whenever the day had been without incident or misfortune, the evening arrived with a smile of tenderness.

From as far off as I could see the approach of M’man Tine, my grandmother, at the end of the wide road that took the blacks into the cane fields of the plantation and brought them home again, I would rush off to meet her, imitating the flight of the mansfenil, the gallop of the donkeys, and with shouts of joy, carrying along the entire group of my little friends who, like me, were awaiting their parents’ return.

M’man Tine knew that once I’d come to meet her, I must have behaved myself properly while she was away. So, from the bodice of her dress, she would take some tidbit which she would give me: a mango, a guava, some coco-plums, a bit of yam left over from her lunch, wrapped in a green leaf; or, even better than all that, a piece of bread. M’man Tine always brought me something to eat. Her work companions often made this observation, and M’man Tine would say that she could not put anything whatsoever to her mouth without keeping some of it for me.

Behind us there appeared other groups of workers, and those of my friends who, recognizing their parents, rushed off to meet them, doubling their shouts of joy.

While devouring what I had to eat, I let M’man Tine continue her conversation, and I followed her quietly.

“My God, thank you; I’ve made it back!” she sighed, placing the long handle of her hoe against the shack.

She then removed the small round basket of bamboo slats perched on her head and sat on a stony outcropping in front of the shack which served as a bench.

Finally, having found in the bosom of her dress a rusty tin box, which contained a limestone pipe, some coarse tobacco, and a box of matches, she began to smoke slowly, silently.

My day was also at an end. The other mamans and papas had also arrived; my little friends returned to their shacks. Games were over.

To smoke, M’man Tine occupied almost all the space this huge stone offered. She would turn to the side where there were beautiful colors in the sky, stretch out and cross her earth-stained legs, and seem completely engrossed in the pleasure of drawing on her pipe.

I remained squatting beside her, gazing steadfastly, in the same direction as she, at a tree in bloom—a completely yellow macata or a blood-streaked flamboyant—the colors of the sky behind the hills, on the other side of the plantation, whose glow was reflected even beneath us. Or else, I looked at her—on the sly—for she told me time and again, often vehemently, that children must not stare at adults.

I really enjoyed following the curves of her old straw hat, its form crushed by her basket, its rim water-soaked and made wavy by the rain. It would be pulled down over her face the complexion of which was scarcely any lighter in color than the land of the plantation.

But what amused me the most was her dress. Every morning, M’man Tine would have to sew something on it, all the while grumbling that there was nothing like cane leaves to eat away at poor black women’s clothes. This dress was nothing more than a squalid tunic where all colors were juxtaposed, multiplied, superimposed, blended into each other. This dress which, originally, as far as I could remember, was one of simple flowered cretonne, intended to be used for communion, the first Sunday of every month, then for mass every Sunday, had become a thick, padded tissue, a heavy, ill-fitting fleece which nevertheless seemed to be the outfit most suited to the root-like hands, to the swollen, hardened, cracked feet of this old black woman, to the hut we lived in, and to the very habitation in which I had been born five years ago and which I had never gone far from.

From time to time, neighbors passed by.

“Amantine, you’re having a nice smoke,” they said by way of a greeting.

Without even moving her head, without so much as glancing at them, M’man Tine replied with a grumble of satisfaction, and remained imperturbably lost in the pleasure of smoking her pipe and deep in her reverie.

Can I say whether she was dreaming, whether she let herself go, at that precise moment, whether the smoke from her pipe carried her off somewhere else or altered in her eyes the entire panorama of the plantation?

When she was finished smoking, M’man Tine would say:

“Good!”

But it was rather a cry of great effort, a personal exhortation.

Then she would put her pipe next to her tobacco and her matches in the small tin box, get up, take her basket under her arm, and enter the shack.

It was already dark inside. Yet, in a wink, M’man Tine had examined the entire scene, deciding whether I had moved some utensil or done any damage.

But, after days like that one, I wasn’t afraid. For lunch, I had had just the amount of cassava flour and the small bit of salt codfish she had left me. I had not used too much oil, and couldn’t find the sugar tin which she must have stashed in a hiding place only the devil himself could unearth. I had not broken any plates, and had even swept the smoothened earth floor of the hut, so as to clean up the specks of flour that had fallen while I was having my lunch.

The truth was, innocence and reason had possessed me all the time that M’man Tine had been gone.

Satisfied at finding everything impeccable, M’man Tine asked herself under her breath (she often spoke to herself in this fashion):

“What am I going to do tonight?”

Standing undecided in the semidarkness, she yawned at length.

“Left to me,” she said in a tone of complaint, “I wouldn’t even light a fire, I’d put a pinch of salt on my tongue so the worms can’t attack my heart, then go straight to bed.”

For she was tired, tired, she said.

But thereupon, breaking her torpor, she busied herself, taking from her basket a breadfruit which she cut in four, peeling each quarter which she then cut into two “squares.” This operation was still amusing to my eyes—the filling of the canari, an earthenware cooking-pot, in the bottom of which M’man Tine placed first of all a layer of peelings, followed by the “squares” of vegetable, a pinch of salt, a piece of salt codfish, and finally filled with water.

In addition, she often brought back from the field where she worked a bundle of greens and this methodical filling was rounded off with a layer of this grass covered with peelings in a criss-cross fashion.

Outside, a leaping flame, pushing its way up between three black stones, already provoked in the inside of the canari a most healthy-sounding rumbling and shed in front of the shack a tawny, vibrant glow in which M’man Tine and I sat, she on the huge stone and I quite near to the fire in order to put bits of wood in it and kindle the flame upward into a roar.

“Don’t play in the fire,” M’man Tine shouted, “you’ll pee your bed.”

And all around us on the plantation, there were in the darkness of the night similar fires, cooking canaris, making the facades of the shacks and the faces of the children come alive with all those reflections that give fires at night so much seductive appeal.

M’man Tine hummed one of those monotonous songs that continually rose from the habitation and which I sometimes sang as well, along with my friends, when our parents were away.

I thought that the sun was an excellent thing because it took our parents off to work and left us to play quite freely. But night was also a marvelous thing when flames were lit and songs were sung.

Some evenings I didn’t want to remain a long time waiting for my dinner. I was hungry and found that M’man Tine was singing too much instead of checking to see if the food in the canari was ready.

On such evenings, it was so painful to wait while M’man Tine prepared the sauce to go with the breadfruit. How slow she seemed to me as she took a small earthen saucepan, rinsed it (Oh! How M’man Tine loved to wash and rinse everything!), cut up some small onions, grated some garlic, went for some thyme behind the shack, took some black pepper from one of the many little bits of paper tied up in balls in a corner, some pimento, and four or five other seasonings! How long I found the time all this remained browning before the vegetable soup, the piece of cod, and the greens were poured in. And it was never good right away. Always a bit of clove to be added; and it had to simmer a bit more!

M’man Tine lit her kerosene lamp, and the table was lit up amidst all the shadows, including ours which, enlarged out of proportion, weighed on the wretched walls of the shack.

She was sitting on a narrow chair near the table; the large ware bowl with blue and yellow stripes from which she ate with her fingers, was between her knees, but she insisted that I put my aluminum plate on the table and that I use a fork, “like a well-bred child.”

“Is your belly full?” she asked me when I was finished eating.

Three breadfruit “squares” had filled me till I felt about to burst; and I scarcely had enough breath left to say in a clear voice: “Yes, M’man.”

Then M’man Tine gave me a small calabash full of water, and I went to the threshold of the door to rinse out my mouth, taking care to shake the water vigorously between my cheeks and to spit it out as violently as possible.

While doing the dishes, M’man Tine kept talking to herself under her breath, and I remained sitting on my chair listening to her as if she were speaking to me. In this way she went over her entire day: the incidents, quarrels, jokes on the plantation; she became so seriously indignant that I was afraid I’d see her break the canari or the bowl she was in the process of rinsing. Or, she sniggered so gustily that I too burst out laughing. And she would stop suddenly to ask me: “What are you laughing at, you li’l devil?”

At other times she was not angry, but talked on and on in a deep, vibrant voice; and not fully understanding what she was saying to herself, I leaned over to see if there weren’t tears running down her face. For I felt myself in such anguish! . . .

I remained staring steadfastly at the lamp for a long time, and allowed myself to be entertained by the little moths that darted against the flame to tumble backward on the table, dead or singed beyond ever flying again.

And my eyelids grew heavy and my head at times seemed to slip off my neck down to the table, when I would catch myself just in time.

Now, M’man Tine was constantly drying and putting away her utensils. On more than one occasion, she moved the lamp in order to clean the table. When, oh when, would she get up from that corner where she had stooped to fix some bottles?

Then, I deliberately rested my head on the edge of the table.

Finally, M’man Tine shook me by the shoulder, calling me in a loud voice so as to chase my sleep away. Holding the light in her hand, she took me into the bedroom.

I was drunk with sleep and nothing made any more impression on my senses. M’man Tine undid a large bundle of rags which she spread for me to sleep on over a sheepskin lying on the ground. She undressed me; I barely mumbled the words she had me repeat to the glory of God. I perceived everything as from the depths of troubled waters. When finally I said “Good night, M’man” and collapsed onto my bedding, I was like a drowned man coming back up to the surface.

---

*  *  *  *  *

But, on most occasions, the day ended badly.

On mornings, as soon as I was up, I picked up my mattress of rags and went to spread it out in the sun, on the huge stone in front of the hut, for it was nearly always wet in certain spots. M’man Tine, at that time crouching in the corner of the shack where there was a small earthenware stove, of the type that used wood coal, was preparing her coffee. Through the window of the room, the daylight poured onto her back, which showed a withered skin through the holes in an old dress that had become as perforated as a net, and that she slipped on to sleep in. On the fire, water was singing away in a small jelly tin, and with it M’man Tine sparingly wet the little filter on the ground.

After changing my nightshirt for a long drill smock which was what I wore every day, I moved beside M’man Tine so I could watch her draw the coffee.

She collected the first drops in a little porcelain mug, added a pinch of sugar, and then stood leaning against the door-frame, one hand on her hip. From this spot, running her eyes over the horizon, she described what the weather was like, or would announce:

“The folks in Petit-Bourg can count on eating fish today, for the fishermen from Diamant will come back with their boats full . . . You see those little clouds: looks like the seines will be bursting . . .”

And she punctuated her words with small mouthfuls of coffee which made her click her tongue.

At such times I knew how careful I had to be not to disturb her, not to ask her anything whatsoever. She would fly into a rage. She would shout: “The sun is scarcely up, I’ve not even had a drop of coffee in my stomach, and this child is already tormenting me!”

In a large, thick porcelain bowl with blue and pink flowers decorating it, M’man Tine had given me some cassava flour soaked in light, very sweet coffee, and with my little metal spoon I put it all away, sitting on the threshold of the shack.

All during this time M’man Tine kept turning over and over on her knees her working dress, examined the complicated patchwork and hastily did a few urgent minor repairs. She then became very zealous in her movements to and fro, thus appeasing my sneaking impatience to see her set off. For outside, the trees, the fields, the entire savannah were already bathed in sunlight.

Finally, M’man Tine said to me:

“At noon—you know? When the plantation clock is about to strike—you’ll take a glass of water and pour it on this plate of flour. It already has oil and cod on it, all you have to do is to stir it up properly and eat.”

She showed me the plate which she placed at the edge of the table, where I could reach it; then, once more stepping up her preparations, she made herself a similar lunch in a calabash bowl which she very carefully placed in her bamboo basket with a few other things—among them the old black stockings she used as mittens and covering for her legs to protect her from being scratched by the cane leaves and, at times, a calabash full of fresh water.

She then filled her pipe and lit it, put on her wild straw hat over her kerchief, pulled tightly around her waist a raggedy string, and said to me:

“I’m off to see if the Good Lord still gives me strength to struggle in the béké’s canes! See how clean the shack is, and your clothes as well . . . no tears . . . and no mess in front of the shack? . . . And don’t go knocking about. Try and behave yourself so I won’t have to get vex tonight!”

Thereupon, she took two puffs on her pipe, filling the shack with smoke, bent down at the same time, raised the small bamboo basket which she placed on her head and, taking hold of the hoe as she started on her way, went through the door, saying:

“I’m off!”

Free at last! Free for the entire day.

But I did not dash outside to enjoy my freedom as yet.

Sitting on the doorstep, I allowed a few moments to pass. In her haste to leave, M’man Tine had very often forgotten something which she returned to fetch. In such a case, she must find me as well-behaved as when she left me. Then, assured that all was fine, I went outside, taking care to close the door properly.

Those of my friends whose parents had already left were in a group in front of the shack. They greeted me with great enthusiasm, and we waited for the others.

---

*  *  *  *  *

Black Shack Alley comprised some three dozen ramshackle wooden huts, covered with galvanize, standing at regular intervals at the side of a hill. To the top there stood, majestically, the house of the manager whose wife ran a little store. Between “the house” and Shack Alley, one found the overseer’s little house, the mule compound, the manure pile. Below Shack Alley and all around, stretched vast fields of cane, at the end of which one could see the factory.

This whole area was called Petit-Morne.

There were large trees, groups of coconut trees, palm trees lining paths, a river lazily flowing through the grass of a savannah. And it was all so beautiful.

At any rate, we children enjoyed it immensely.

While waiting for the group to be complete, we had fun right there, and our shouts and our laughter called to arms those who were missing.

How many were we? I don’t think we ever counted. We did notice when someone was missing: we each had our favorites and indicated their absence if they were not there; and we also sensed when everybody was present.

First of all the leaders: Paul and his two sisters, Tortilla and Orélie. Gesner, my good pal, and Soumane, his younger brother. Romane and Victorine, as fearless as boys; Casimir and Hector. And myself. For I was also one of the gang.

Then came a trail of urchins who could be rather cumbersome under certain circumstances. You know, just a bunch of noisy brats, who couldn’t even run about without scraping their elbows and knees in the dirt, who couldn’t even climb trees or jump over a stream.

But we “bigger ones” knew the paths and the spots where you could catch crayfish with your bare hand, under the babbling rocks in the streams. We knew how to pick guavas and husk dry coconuts. And cane ready for sucking, that was our specialty.

Now it was just the moment when we could extract the greatest pleasure from the sun-filled freedom afforded us by the absence of our parents.

Furthermore we were the only ones with clothes on. Old men’s jackets floated on the backs of the other boys and were ripped asunder during their frolicking; or vests with so many holes in them that they in no way covered the frail bodies that pretended to wear them.

As for the girls’ dresses: a cord slung over the shoulder from which fringes loosely hung that hid nothing at all.

And everybody bareheaded with woolly hair made red by the sun, noses running with a greenish substance like teams of slugs, knees skinned like fowls’ feet, feet the color of stone displaying toes that were swollen with chiggers.

At 12 o’clock, Hector announced, “I’m having bananes naines for lunch, with codfish and oil. Maman cooked them before she left; it was still warm a li’l while ago.”

The food question was always uppermost in our thoughts.

“As for us,” said Paul, speaking for himself and his two sisters, “we have a large canari full of rice mixed with ‘red butter.’ And our maman told us we could have some flour if we’re not filled.”

“But you don’t have any meat,” Soumane pointed out.

“No, they don’t even have a bit of codfish!”

“Last night, my maman made a good meal,” Romane declared, gesticulating like a big woman: “breadfruit migan and a pig snout. It smelled real good! And that’s what I’m having at midday.”

When the menus failed to excite greediness, it was because we were not yet hungry. Besides, we were busy roaming from shack to shack. Not an adult left in Shack Alley!

Certain huts were even uninhabited, closed or wide open, for all the workers on Petit-Morne did not live in Shack Alley.

We were alone and the world was ours.

We examined everything, destroying this or that at our fancy, uprooting plants—the awful wormgrass especially, from which were prepared such bitter brews—and throwing pebbles in the barrels of drinking water. We could have pissed in them if we had wanted!

But often those who had plenty to eat, not being able to resist—and yielding to the desire of the other comrades, took the rest of us home and shared their meals with the most carefree generosity.

Then, finished, the entire gang would set off.

At random. From guava tree to plum tree, from coco-plum field to cane field. We crossed savannahs, joyously stoning the cows. We sometimes came across patches of greenery where the pomme-lianes grew in abundance.

“Ay, Trénelle far again?” Gesner inquired.

We came to a halt; those who were lagging behind caught up.

“Sure, it far. Why?”

“Because last night my father brought me some mangoes big so. Said he found them on the Trénelle road.”

“Then it can’t be very far.”

“Suppose we go down there!”

“Why not?”

It was perhaps far in actual fact, but didn’t we have the whole day to get there and back? And then, in a gang, just like that you covered a good bit of road without even realizing!

At the foot of the Hill, we met a cart full of manure and pulled by four oxen squeaking its way through the ruts. Gesner, Romane, and I immediately jumped up to the rear. The others, clinging as best they could, had themselves towed while the weakest among us followed in a trot.

Silence, so the driver wouldn’t realize what was happening!

The driver, for his part, standing to the front of the cart, goaded on his oxen, swearing to high heaven. His invectives were too stinging for us to repeat.

Intoxicated by these forbidden words, Gesner added others of his own invention.

It was a maddening round of chattering.

But while the cart continued on its way with its harsh din of clashing wood, its clanging of chains, the squeaking of its axles mingling with the crunch of clumps of dry earth under the wheels, there suddenly appeared before us the driver, brandishing his goad.

“Bunch of li’l runaway niggers, you! . . .”

The gang scattered, to regroup a little farther on.

And to help us regain our nerve, we showered insults at the disappearing team, all oblivious and bumping along the road.

“This is not the right road,” Gesner suddenly observed. “We should have gone down to the crossroad over there, behind, and taken the path going in the other direction, like that.”

Indeed, we were no longer headed in the right direction for Trénelle. That damned driver had led us astray.

We then retraced all our steps. So bitter was our annoyance that we did not even glance at the guava trees along the way. We knew from experience though that trees lining “traces” never kept their fruits.

We bigger ones walked so briskly that the smaller ones were soon out of breath behind us, just as they had trailed along behind the cart earlier on.

“The overseer!” Orélie shouted.

Everyone ground to a halt. Barely time to catch the white parasol just visible at the crook in the road before we dove into the ditches. And with a loud crackling of grass and scratching straw raking my head, I tried crawling on all fours to reach the deepest part of the cane field.

And such a noise rumbling all around as if the overseer’s mule were galloping toward me scared me so much that my heart was about to burst.

And I rolled into a furrow, completely exhausted, lost.

Unable to move, I remained with my head buried in the undergrowth.

Gradually, my heart beat less quickly and I listened.

No further rustling of straw.

Faintly, the trot of the disappearing mule on the parched, porous earth of the road reached me. The last noise subsided. Nothing further. Nothing, but my heart still beating so loudly that it could give me away.

“Ay! Gesner, Romane, Ay!” I called quietly.

A slight rumble reached me.

“Can you still see him?”

“You can barely see his parasol.”

It was Paul talking.

Then with eyes filled with wonder, I discovered the countryside. I had just lost all notion of where I was. My impression was that I had covered on all fours an infinite distance and I expected as I emerged from the brushwood to find myself in a faraway and unknown place.

Gesner and Romane were already on their feet and announced that the danger was over.

“Where is Tortilla, and Casimir?”

In vain we shouted in all directions, there were some who did not reply.

This was always the case when our outings underwent alarms of this nature! In the ensuing panic, some spurted off in the wrong direction.

In that case, too bad for them.

We returned to the crossroad to set off from there.

“But this time,” Gesner proposed, “we’re not following the road.”

Instead we crossed a cane field lying fallow.

“I’m sure there are manger-coulies.”

And, of course, in such an abandoned field we always would find bits of shriveled up sugarcane, good enough to be appreciated so late in the season.

But this hike, no manger-coulies, no canes. Nothing but weeds and wild flowers.

What of our missing friends? We now caught sight of four or five of them straggling toward Shack Alley.

As for us, all the obstacles cluttering up our plans could not keep us from pursuing our adventure to its end.

We were already far away when the lunch bell sounded at “the house.” It was so far off that it was only faintly that we heard its announcement.

“They’re going to devour their lunch,” said Paul, alluding to those who had returned. “Perhaps they’ll even go and steal ours.”

“Makes no difference,” said Romane, “they’ll not have tasted all those lovely mangoes we’re going to feast ourselves on. And we’re not going to bring any back for them. Not one; not even the skin.”

In the blazing sun, our rags flapping in the breeze, we crossed the field. We followed another trace, chattering away, stopping now at every shrub to raid its fruits—ripe as well as green—to quell a hunger that was awakening in us and which we were scarcely aware of, spellbound as we were by the perils we had so valiantly faced since our departure, and stimulated by the daring of our initiative.

We roamed idly about a great deal, then remembering what our aim was, we hurried on, resolutely taking one path to the right or another to the left as we came upon it.

It was a place where the road is nestled deeply between two red humid plots of land, with tall ferns rising very high above our heads, leaving just a crack to allow one a glimpse of the sky. It was so strange that we spoke in hushed voices, trying to walk side by side.

We had never seen a road like that!

Always, when one least expected it, small balls of earth would detach themselves from above and come tumbling down at our feet, taking our breath away.

We advanced slowly, not speaking, and couldn’t help glancing back over our shoulders every two or three steps.

Wasn’t it as if this half-tunnel threatened to come thundering down on us, or seemed to close up as we passed? Our march was more and more halting and unassured. As for me, I was choking from not daring to speak.

We were afraid.

Suddenly, a shout of terror, then every man for himself! Turning back we shot off using all the strength in our legs and multiplied the shouts of panic from our rest of the group with our own.

Long after coming out of the tunnel, we kept on running without once looking back, charging on straight ahead of us until we ran out of breath. But it was impossible to stop. We trotted, exhausted but urged on by fear. Our fright was so violent that we could not pull ourselves together. Fear had so shaken us that we were drained of all adventure, of any pride.

And running desperately we circled back toward Shack Alley. Once there, what heroism dominated the account of our exploits in the eyes of all those who had not gone along with us! Even our state of panic was proof of our bravery, for:

“We ran! Oh, how we ran! Look, feel my heart.”

Wide-eyed, they admired us. It was we who had gone so far, who had come to know the terrible road they couldn’t even imagine, who had avoided danger thanks to our bravery and endurance!

To our prestige were added the little fruits we had sampled, the watercourse we had discovered, the pois-doux we had come across, to which we would pay a return visit when they were ripe.

And to crown our happiness our parents would be none the wiser. That night we would not be beaten.

The fear was gone, we were hungry now.

No, our friends had not eaten everything. So, we began with the rice from Paul, Tortilla, and Orélie.

We had invaded the shack. Tortilla began the distribution, surrounded by our out-stretched hands.

How pleasant it was to be all back in the shack, in the absence of our parents! Orélie, beside herself with joy, showed us the bedroom whose appearance was enhanced since Symphor and Mam’zelle Francette, her parents, had bought one by one four boxes and some lengths of wood with which they had built a frame onto which were piled rags covered with cretonne.

Children always slept on the “front room” floor, on old clothes used for bedding. There was nothing else in the bedroom, but we were content to remain there as it was quite a privilege for us to crowd into this room reserved for adults. It was so dark and gave off a strange, intimate odor, an odor of perspiration—the smell of plantation workers!

---

*  *  *  *  *

It was my turn now to share my lunch.

But I had no intention of eating the way M’man Tine had prescribed: soak cassava flour with water, stirring in oil, etc.

I did not like flour with water. In M’man Tine’s presence, I made an effort to overcome my repugnance, and that was all. Cassava flour was something I liked as a dessert. Either kneaded in a bowl with brown syrup until it formed a thick, delicious mass, or mixed up with granulated sugar in a paper cone from which you poured the stuff into your mouth. M’man Tine was not unaware of my predilection, even. And then, today, I felt some inexplicable urge to be part of some fantasy.

So, I invited the gang in to eat flour and sugar.

The sugar was in a tin; but where to find that box, that was the problem! M’man Tine was a genius at finding hiding places and at stashing away her sugar tin without my seeing.

It was true that I too had the cleverness to ferret out a hiding place. But it wasn’t easy since she constantly changed it.

For instance, just day before yesterday the sugar tin was there on that shelf. I had only to take a chair, climb onto the table and reach out my arm.

Today it was no longer there.

At my feet the entire gang, puzzled, looked at me and waited.

“My m’man doesn’t have a sugar tin,” said Gesner. “It’s only on Sundays that she buys two cents’ worth of sugar to make coffee. But if she had one, I don’t think she’d succeed in hiding it from me.”

And, resolved to take an active part in the search, he shouted to me:

“Look on all the girders, and around. Mothers love to hide things on girders. They imagine we can’t climb.”

But I didn’t find anything and, discouraged, came down from atop the table.

Thereupon, everybody launched into a frenzied search for that sugar tin in every nook and cranny of the hut. The entire bedroom underwent such upheaval, M’man Tine’s humble bed so disrespectfully handled, the utensils banged against each other and resounded so violently that I was seized with fright, incapable of any initiative, powerless to control the violent search by my friends.

“Stop, get out!” I felt like shouting.

But I was afraid.

Heavens above! I had felt it in my bones: a sound of broken dishes.

The blue and yellow bowl!

The bowl in which M’man eats her food!

“Is you who pushed my arm.”

“Is you who made me do it. You did so, like that, with your hand.”

Romane was after Paul. Paul accused Gesner.

The others were dumb with stupefaction.

I burst out sobbing.

“Your maman going to beat you?” Romane asked me.

“I’ll say that it was you who came here to steal,” I said angrily.

“You mustn’t,” said Tortilla. “You’ll say it was a hen; a frizzle hen that came in, jumped up on the table and broke the bowl when you chased it outside.”

Everybody claimed that this explanation was valid. But for all that I could not be consoled.

I was so angry that I wanted to give them a good pummeling, to chase them from M’man Tine’s shack which they had dared rummage through so wildly.

Nevertheless, I did nothing of the sort. I controlled myself.

“Friends,” I said to them. “I think that M’man Tine took her sugar tin to the field with her; she mentioned that the other day.”

“Well, we’ll eat the flour as it is, with codfish,” cried Tortilla.

On afternoons, from a certain hour, we hardly left Shack Alley. Everyone knew that when our parents were doing task-work they could arrive at the moment they were least expected.

Thus we devoted our time to the innocent game of chasing dragonflies, for example. For on afternoons there were many of them about and in all colors. They alighted on the dry bushes, on the dead branches of the old cotton trees, on the stalks of bamboo planted behind the shacks for the yam and bean shoots.

As for me, I knew all the dragonflies that haunted the sun-filled afternoons of the habitation: the big ones as red as berries, or light maroon, with lovely transparent, straight wings, just right for one to squeeze delicately between two fingers. The smaller ones, brown with wings that were short and yellowish or with a black stripe across; very agile, these were, sensitive to the approach of our hands, wild! Finally, more aristocratic and of rarer stock, the “needles,” so slender and light that one could scarcely make out the little ball of fine gold that formed the head and the periwinkle gauze that sustained their flight.

We knew that the large ones were easy to catch and that all we had to do was to allow them to settle and wait for them to fold the wings ever so slightly. Easy for me who knew how to walk on the tips of my toes without making any false moves and who possessed the art of muffling the crunch of dried leaves under my feet. Me who could judge without error the distance and time to stop, to reach out my hand and stretch my body flexibly, to close my thumb and index finger on the wings of the little creature at rest. Easy for me who could, on a well-endowed branch, catch a dragonfly in each hand, almost at the same time.

Be that as it may, those were the first ones the novices managed to catch. Whereas one needed expert fingers and great experience to catch the short-wings which, agile, mistrustful, remained in a nearly raised position, ready to fly off at the slightest rustle, at the most cautious of approaches. All the same, one succeeded every now and then.

But nobody, not Gesner, not Romane, not even I myself, nobody had ever caught a “needle”!

Thus we considered them a species not meant to be touched.

In the afternoon we amused ourselves by surprising these dragonflies by taking them for a run, their wings imprisoned between our fingers. Then we released them when they could no longer fly, for the mere pleasure of recapturing them, mutilating them and giving their bodies to the ants.

At last came the moment when, tired of everything, we did not dare undertake any new games; as if the disproportionately lengthening shadows that blended into the ground also penetrated our hearts with all their melancholy.

Tortilla left us to go and wash the canari from which we had eaten the rice with her, and Romane, whose tattered rags were once more in shreds, made little knots here and there so they could hold up around her.

It was only then that I became aware of the state of disorder M’man Tine’s shack was in.

On the table, I had placed the pieces of the broken bowl.

Everything had been turned upside down and I couldn’t even put the objects back in their proper place.

On the ground, cassava flour and dust were mixed into one and I swept in vain. It remained encrusted in the cracks in the smooth earth floor.

I wouldn’t have the courage to say that it was a hen that broke the bowl. M’man Tine wouldn’t believe a word. Everything betrayed me.

Ah, yes, that evening, misfortune would be my lot.

And there were Gesner and Soumane coming back, visibly tortured by anxiety.

“They’re going to beat us, friends; our clothes got torn,” said Gesner.

“That’s how it was this morning,” Tortilla told him after looking at Gesner’s rags.

“You must be mad! This big hole wasn’t there this morning, nor this piece hanging here. And the shoulders didn’t fall like that.”

“And look at me,” Soumane added, “look how my clothes are torn in the back. Was Mamzé Romane who did that while running on the road to Trénelle. She wanted to get in front of me, and she held me like that, she pulled and rip!”

And myself!

All worked up over the broken bowl, I hadn’t looked at myself as yet. I hadn’t yet noticed that rip behind my overall, from the hem, all along my legs. And those two spots of mud in front, no doubt left from the impression of my knees on the damp ground under the straw when I had fallen in the field.

“That’s nothing,” Tortilla cried. “What if you were like me . . . Look, in the cane field, all that burst open. Well, I’ve already tied it up.”

Indeed, the dingy jacket clothing Tortilla’s body had shrunk, and if I couldn’t see that the number of knots that made up the texture of it had increased, I was nonetheless aware that my good friend was all the more naked for it.

I would have wished to do something for my part. Wash out the two spots of mud for example.

“But it won’t have time to dry,” Tortilla explained to me. “Your maman will find you all wet.”

And that would be even more serious.

Make a knot to patch the tear in the overall. I mustn’t think about it either; that’ll only make it show more.

What to do?

“Well, all you have to do is use the old nika charm. You take all the fingers on one hand and put them one over the other . . .”

“I know, I know.”

But I had done it once so M’man Tine wouldn’t see a wound I had on my knee; well, she had seen it all the same, and had washed my sore in salt water to boot.

“Well, you have no luck with nika,” Tortilla concluded. “You should try to tie your maman. You take a handful of hay from over there, in the savannah, and you make as many knots as the length of the blades of grass allows, and you hold that tightly in your hand. Then, when your maman arrives, you walk toward her to say good evening, and before saying a word, you drop the hay behind you. I assure you that you’ll never be beaten. Your maman may quarrel with you, she may swear, but she’ll never lay hands on you. She’ll quite simply be tied.”

We were together once more, united in fear at present.

“Your dress is not torn like my jacket,” Paul said to me. “And then, tomorrow, your maman will give you another so she can sew this one. Whereas with me, my papa said that when I finish this one, I’ll go about naked.”

Indeed, what Paul called his jacket was nothing more than a coarse, grimy lacework whose usefulness escaped me completely. I’d have found him better off and much cleaner entirely naked. Furthermore, I too would have loved to run about in the nude. For I was fed up being flogged for getting my clothes torn. They would burst in the sleeves and elbows while we played and rip in the back as we passed under the barbed wire fences, and the hem would come apart as we ran in the bushes.

Oh, for all of us to be naked!

“Me too, I prefer to be naked . . .”

“Me too!”

Who wouldn’t have been thrilled to run about completely naked in the sun!

“Well,” Romane ventured, “this very evening, we’re going to ask our parents to allow us to run about naked.”

Not feeling I was brave enough to make such a request as far as M’man Tine was concerned, I proposed:

“All we have to do is take off our clothes as soon as our parents set off on mornings and put them on again when they’re about to return.”

“That’s not possible,” Tortilla interjected. “We mustn’t remain naked. We’re too big. Our Good Angel will fall off.”

“What’s this about our Good Angel?”

“Oh, you don’t know your Good Angel?”

Tortilla’s tone of mockery confounded me even more in my ignorance.

“Well,” she cried, throwing back her shoulders suddenly and placing her hand under her belly, “your Good Angel is down there. That’s why we do not run about naked!”

By this time there was not a speck of sunlight in the trees nor on the ground.

Night had fallen. Our parents would soon be arriving. We would be beaten. We could sense that from the very manner in which our anxiety increased, in which we were incapable of being talkative and happy. And, in actual fact, I had no confidence in that patch of hay held snug in the palm of my hand, to which I added another knot every now and then.

Oh! If only it were possible not to feel those lashes on my legs! Those switches on the skin of my behind!

We had already given deep thought to the matter. But we only ended up with a few maneuvers to avoid the onslaught being too long.

“At the first blow,” said Orélie, “I begin to bawl. Bawling as if I’m dying. Then, Maman herself gets bewildered. She only gives me one other blow: wap! and she shouts: ‘Quiet, quiet, now.’ I tone down the bawling a bit, keep whimpering for some time while Maman is there grumbling, and when her anger subsides, I shut up.”

“With me,” Romane added, beating her chest, “I’m a black girl with a stout heart. My papa uses a switch on me—not a sound. Maman says I get that from my grandmother who was stone and iron.”

Mr. Gabriel, the overseer, passed by on his mule. The daily workers had finished their task. M’man Tine wouldn’t be long now.

I wouldn’t go to meet her. None of us, I thought, would be going to meet his parents. We were afraid.

We separated, each one returning near to his dwelling place. And we waited.

Already there passed mules upon which sat brutal mule drivers who whipped them on their rumps and swore to high heavens.

Stooping on the step of the shack, I curled up more and more, consumed as I was by anguish.

How mournful the night seemed, with paths absorbed by the darkness, the galvanized roofs of the shacks assuming a bluish hue, the coconut trees whose branches grew heavy rustling in the gusts of breeze, and that huge flock of men and women drained of all strength wending their way out of the cane fields like ghosts coming out of the darkness for some unknown gruesome ritual!

And soon there would appear before me one of those ghosts, particularly familiar, whose return I feared and which I awaited, and whose voice jolted me out of my sad reverie:

“What’s wrong? You’re tired from playing on the béké’s plantation?” M’man Tine asked.

I knew that whenever she began by this sort of questioning, everything ended up badly for me.

Already I was losing countenance and, without realizing it, forgetting Tortilla’s recommendations, I limply dropped my knots of hay at my feet.

“Eh! What were you doing at 12 o’clock on the road to Trénelle?” M’man Tine pursued.

I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t prepared a reply to that.

Furthermore, I had in no way anticipated she would have known.

With my head bowed, I played awkwardly with my fingers.

With her usual gesture, M’man Tine placed the handle of her hoe against the shack and put down her bamboo basket.

“Stand up a bit, let’s have a look at you!” she said to me.

Slowly, a crestfallen look in my eyes, I stood up and remained motionless before her, my toes riveted to the ground, not knowing what to do with my hands.

“Wow!” M’man Tine cried. “So this is the state of the clothes I put on you this morning! And your knees have fresh bruises like the backs of pack mules, and there’s more straw on your head than any shack in Morne-Mango-Zo!”

Already I couldn’t feel the ground under my feet. I was so stiff in my position that my joints hurt.

“So you were part of that convoy that followed the cart in the Grand Etang trace? And you were happy cursing the oxen, spitting out foul words to your heart’s content?”

I did not say a word. Besides, the truth of the matter was, those were not questions. They were accusations.

“Well, tomorrow,” she declared, “you’ll remain as you are, for I’ll not have time to sew your clothes.”

But far from being relieved, my heart felt a sudden twinge.

I wanted to be the first to broach the subject of the broken bowl, but my attempt to summon up enough courage to lie the way Tortilla had advised me was futile.

Now, instead of sitting outside to smoke her pipe, M’man Tine went inside the shack.

“And you broke the bowl!” she cried.

My head was spinning with fear. In order not to lose my balance, I stiffened my body to the point where my bones almost snapped.

“Eh?” M’man Tine exclaimed, coming toward me. “Come here and tell me what you were doing for the bowl to break,” she then said, grabbing me by the arm.

I remained dumb, looking at the two fragments of the bowl in a haze.

“What were you doing?”

It seemed that the moment was ripe to let out with what Tortilla had advised me to say, but I was stiff, right up to my jaw. It seemed to me that even if I were to be beaten with a stick I wouldn’t utter a sound.

“Lord,” M’man Tine exclaimed once more, “what on earth happened here?”

And turning to me once more:

“What happened to you? What were you looking for?”

My reaction was such that she dragged me from outside to deposit me in the middle of the room, transfixed in my dumb state, head bowed, my eyes glued to the ground.

“Well! Well!” M’man Tine proclaimed, shaking her head as her eyes ran over the interior of the hut.

“Well! Well!” she exclaimed once more in the bedroom. “My bed has been turned over like a yam patch. An earthquake couldn’t do all that!”

Then leaving the bedroom suddenly, she shouted to me:

“Go into punishment!”

Automatically, I fell on my knees.

M’man Tine entered her bedroom once more, fuming and grumbling in anger.

“What the devil was this little ragamuffin looking for in my things, eh?”

The roughness of the ground began to bite cruelly into the open bruises on my knees. But I followed closely the evolution of M’man Tine’s fury. I fearfully awaited the moment when she was going to fall upon me with blows from the first thing she could lay her hands on and I felt almost nothing, save a confusion which overpowered me despite the state of stoic stiffness I kept myself in, there in the center of the shack on my two knees.

All of a sudden M’man Tine fell silent and, as I could not see what she was doing, as I could no longer follow her, I suddenly felt myself losing my balance. I didn’t know what was happening.

That awful silence isolated me in my confusion, clearing everything around me, like at times when M’man Tine looked for a broomstick, a lélé or a piece of rope to beat me.

I felt like bawling from in front.

From the back of the bedroom the angered voice asked me:

“Ah, you were looking for the sugar? It’s the sugar you were looking for!”

I barely had the time to see M’man Tine come from the bedroom before her hand, hard as a clod of earth in the dry season, came into contact with my face.

“O.K., that’s the sugar you were looking for!”

And I remained sprawled on the ground, dumbfounded, hearing the thundering of her voice and resigned to receiving a shower of blows.

“Back on your knees!”

Painfully I got back on my knees, glancing sideways at M’man Tine who, with the sugar tin in her hand, uncovered it and examined it.

“The li’l scamp!” she said, “He turned the whole place upside down and couldn’t find the sugar; and in all this moving about, he broke the bowl. That’s it . . . I mean, my God, I can’t even leave the béké’s canes without having my blood boil when I return to this old shack. Oh, no! I can’t take any more!”

Thereupon she decided once again to send me to Délia, my mother.

For, she said, the Good Lord couldn’t thus tolerate my mother enjoying herself in town, behind the chairs of the békés she served, while she was drying up in the sun like tobacco, unable to go to bed in peace for the weighty tiredness in her body.

Then began the endless unfolding of what I had already heard over and over again, every time I made her angry, every time she had just experienced some suffering.

“As for me, when I was small I wasn’t a bother to anybody. Far from it. When my mother died nobody wanted me, except Uncle Gilbert. Well, what did Uncle Gilbert do with me? He enlisted me in the petites bandes, to uproot weeds from the young canes so I could bring him a few cents on Saturday nights. During this time the plots of land my mother had received from the old béké who was my grandfather were tended by him and he planted whatever he wanted, harvested it, rented a plot here, a half-plot there. From morning to night I remained bent over in the furrow, my head lower than my behind, until the commander, Mr. Valbrum, seeing how I was built, held, rolled me over on the ground and drove a child into my belly. Well, I didn’t want to have your mother join the petites bandes. I couldn’t send her to school because there weren’t any schools in the village as yet, but I looked after her till she was twelve, as if I’d been a rich woman. Then I put her au pair with Mme Léonce in the village. She didn’t turn out bad; she learned to wash, iron, and cook.

“Well, Mr. Léonce, the foreman at the factory, when asked by his boss to find him a young person to do the housework, well, he sent your mother, because he was aware that she was a girl capable of working as a servant for a béké, and that his boss was going to reward him himself.

“If she hadn’t met your papa who was the Administrator’s coachman, she would probably still be there up to now. But instead of coming and telling me that a man was interested in her, she came to me when she was good and pregnant. I never set eyes on that man called Eugène who is your father and he never set eyes on you either. You weren’t born yet when he was caught to go and fight in France. Since the war is reported to be over, no Eugène. All I know, wasn’t three months your mother had you there in my bedroom. Up! She left for Fort-de-France in search of a job.

“And I was left to start over with you. Your bouts of sickness, ’twas me. Your worm fits, ’twas me. To wash you, dry you, dress you! While all the livelong day, you invented all sorts of complications for me, as if I didn’t have enough with my sunstrokes, showers, thunderclaps, and the hoe with which I had to scratch the hard earth of the béké. And, instead of behaving yourself in order to conserve my energy so I can last a bit longer, so as to shelter you, as I did with your maman, you drive me to the stage where I feel like posting you into the petites bandes the way all the blacks do. Indeed, I can’t take any more.”

Thus, the following week she would go down to the village to ask a “learned” person to write a letter to my mother, telling the latter how impossible it was for her to keep me. If not, she would send me off to the petites bandes.

“Heavens! Take me away! Away from the plantation, from M’man Tine, from my friends, from the savannah!”

As she spoke, M’man Tine had warmed up and despite her utter tiredness, with witch-like zeal, she increased her movements to and fro, busying herself with the many small operations involved in the preparation of dinner.

I was still on my knees in the center of the dark shack.

Outside, the fire flickered madly up and down and from it, through the half-open door, an occasional glow reached me. My knees had grown numb and had no more feeling. I didn’t even think of myself anymore. My head was spinning as if from some beverage forbidden to children, from all the sad, bitter words murmured by my grandmother and I would have liked her not to stop talking, to relate indefinitely those things I didn’t fully understand, but which I felt so cruelly.

My somber reverie was suddenly broken by the angry voice of M’man Tine who shouted to me:

“Beg pardon, so you can come out and allow me to pass.”

“P’don, M’man,” I muttered.

“Get up, you li’l scamp.”

My wounded knees had bled and the clotted blood had welded them so steadfastly to the ground that it was with a muffled shout of pain that I unstuck them.

Hardly was I on my feet before M’man Tine gripped me by the arm and led me outside beside the fire where she had put an earthenware container full of water.

And still grumbling she took off my overall, put me in the container, and set about cleaning me up, which proved to be a veritable torture for, because of the grass where I had rolled earlier in the day and the scratches from the cane leaves, my entire body on contact with the water was aflame with burning, stinging, itching, which I translated into grimaces, contortions, and groans.

“That’ll teach you!” said M’man Tine.

And her rough hands, passing over my bruises like a plane, drew from me cries that evoked no pity since, continuing to rub me down as vigorously as she could, she pressed on my knees, saying:

“Say, look at this young man’s knees! . . . Oh no! I can’t take any more, I can’t take it. Mamzé Délia must come and fetch her child.”

After my nocturnal bath, after my late dinner, another torture awaited me: prayers.

“In the name of the Father . . .”

“In the name of the Father,” I repeated, making the sign.

“And of the Son . . .”

I knew that “and of the Son” was in the middle of the chest, on the hard bone concealed there, that M’man Tine had already made me touch in the beginning to cement it in my memory.

“And of the Holy Spirit.”

From that point on, I was all confused. My hand flew from one shoulder to the other, not daring to stop on any one.

I looked at M’man Tine, watching for her approval or a reflex of repulsion.

My hand once more started to shake with fear, faltered, touched one shoulder.

“And of the Son,” I said, not fully aware of what I was doing.

“Li’l devil!” cried M’man Tine. “You don’t find we’re wretched enough as it is without your making the sign of the cross wrongside! I told you already that ‘And of the Holy Spirit’ is on the left shoulder, this one, this one here!” she said tapping my shoulder with my hand held in hers.

That night M’man Tine did not shorten my prayer as she did on some occasions when she was tired or I was sleepy. On the contrary. She started from the “Let us be in the presence of God!,” continued with the “Our Father,” the “I salute thee,” the “I believe in God.” She refused to prompt me, crying “come on, come on!” every time I stopped.

I felt as though I was reeling, scraping my toes and knees in endless tortuous, stony, and thorny paths. The “I Believe in God” in particular seemed to me like a narrow path, curving its way like a snake up a hill whose summit touched the sky.

When at last I reached “ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right . . . ” it seemed as if I was then at the very top, standing in the breeze. I then took a deep breath and with the “from whence he shall come to judge . . . ” I descended the other side of the hill. But, alas!, only to become hopelessly lost in the maze of all the “acts” of faith, contrition, and hope from which I could see no way out; for every time, according to her inspiration, M’man Tine made me go back to the “Oh Virgin of Virgins” and ended the prayer on an improvised note—either an “invocation,” a long litany, or a prayer for “the dead, friends and enemies” . . .

After that, I had, on my own improvisation, to ask God for “the strength, the courage, and the grace not to pee the bed, not to pinch any sugar, to remain in the shack the whole day and not to tear my clothes.”

Some nights I made it to the end, somehow or other. But that evening I failed. My knees hurt too much. I was too tired, overwhelmed by my emotions. I was too sleepy. I mumbled for as long as I could, then I collapsed.

Sprawled in my rags which still retained the warmth of the daylong sun, I could make out vague wailings: Gesner or Tortilla, not yet finished atoning for their crimes.

---

*  *  *  *  *

Adults formed a world that impressed us above all by its mystery. A mysterious world indeed, where one procured one’s own food, where one was not beaten (it was true that Mr. Donatien used to beat Mam’zelle Horacia, his wife, every night; but the latter wasn’t backward either when it came to biting), a world where one did not fall as one walked nor as one ran, where one did not shed tears. A strange world! Hence our profound admiration for the men and women from Black Shack Alley. I was particularly fond of those who had no children. I feared my friends’ parents even more than M’man Tine. People who beat their children. People who were always blaming us children. Whereas the workers who did not have children would send us on little errands to “the house” (a distraction that was very much sought after by us), and consequently were very kind to us, even spoiling us somewhat.

“The best man in the habitation,” Gesner affirmed, “is Mr. Saint-Louis.”

“Mr. Saint-Louis!” cried Soumane, “I don’t like him. The other day, I was passing near his garden. Well, because I pulled a li’l straw from his hedge, that’s all, he shouted at me (I hadn’t seen him there), shouted at me like a devil. And he sent and told my maman that I was the one who demolished his hedge in order to hunt birds.”

“I don’t like him very much either,” Victorine concurred. “One day, his plum tree was laden and I asked him for a small one and he said that it wasn’t ripe enough, that it was going to give me worm fits . . . Every time you ask him for something, it’s not ripe enough.”

“And he puts broken bottles all around his garden to make us lame.”

“Well! As for me,” Gesner interrupted, “Mr. Saint-Louis gives me everything. On Sundays, he asks me over to his place, tells me to have a seat on the ground in a little corner and when his food is cooked he gives me pieces of yam big like that, with codfish. He even promised to get me a bird’s nest with young birds from his garden.”

Mr. Saint-Louis was a tall black man whose shoulders moved gently up and down at each step like the back of a horse moving at a leisurely pace. At the bottom of his dark face, almost completely hidden by the rims of an old straw hat, he wore a grayish beard which, for nothing in the world, I would have dared to touch. To go with this straw hat went a pair of trousers rolled up to his calves and on which fell a loincloth made from an empty guano bag.

Mr. Saint-Louis’s shack was situated behind M’man Tine’s. As on one side he didn’t have any neighbors, he had enclosed with coconut branches a large plot of land where he would work on Sundays and Mondays.

But nobody among us knew for sure what Mr. Saint-Louis grew in his garden. So compact was the hedge that no one could see through it. One could see above it the tip of a plum tree and an avocado tree, but as for the rest, one didn’t know what it was, when it was ripe, when it was harvested.

On several occasions I had heard that it must be a garden where Mr. Saint-Louis grew plants to cure illnesses.

One can well imagine how this garden haunted our imagination and tortured our curiosity. We were afraid of it all the same. Since, in a certain season, the hedge was packed with birds’ nests, this garden, despite its aura of mystery and the scientific manner in which it was protected, remained for us an inviolable, but attractive objective.

---

*  *  *  *  *

Romane preferred Mam’zelle Appoline. An old woman who couldn’t see clearly and who would call us to take chiggers from her feet, something I detested doing. Her feet smelled like a rotten toad.

Tortilla’s favorite was Mr. Asselin, Asselin-bread. Someone who never lit a fire in his place. He did not have a wife and existed only on bread, salted codfish, and rum. He was the strongest black man in Shack Alley. When he ran, the earth shook. He was also the most naked. Even his loincloth was full of holes. He had huge, white, well-formed teeth. His laughter gave rise to the happiest moment one could ever enjoy. And when he danced the laghia on Saturday nights, one didn’t want the night to end nor the torches to go out.

My great friend didn’t give me anything. He was the oldest, most wretched, and most abandoned on the entire plantation. And I preferred being with him to running, frolicking, amusing myself or pinching sugar.

For someone like myself who couldn’t sit still one moment, I would remain for hours sitting quietly beside him. His hut was the emptiest and the dirtiest, but I preferred it to M’man Tine’s which was one of the finest and best kept in Shack Alley.

“Children must not always be in other people’s places,” my grandmother used to remind me. “It’s bad manners.”

But at nights, as I looked at M’man Tine smoking, I longed for only one thing, waited for only one thing: to have the voice of Mr. Médouze call me.

Outside the door that stood wide open to the darkness already accumulated in the shack, a shadow scarcely visible in the distance awaited me—to send me to beg for a pinch of salt from M’man Tine, or to buy two cents’ worth of kerosene in the shop.

Then in front of the shack we lit a fire between three stones. I was the one who went nearby in search of the twigs that the flame devoured so readily.

While in the canari a noisy bubbling converted the wild roots brought back from the cane field where he had worked, the ghostlike form sat on the front step on the shack, at the edge of that terrible rectangular mouth that drank in the night, and I went beside him. He filled his pipe when he was finished, and I went near the fireside to fetch him a flaming twig: as he bent his head over it to light his pipe, the glow cast on his face a hallucinating mask—the true face of Mr. Médouze—with his head streaked with reddish hair, his beard looking like brambles, his eyes, of which one could never see but a small slit, because his eyelids were almost always closed.

The glow from the fireside lit up the entire side of the shack; and Mr. Médouze’s body, covered with only a loincloth similar to Mr. Saint-Louis’s, with, around his neck, a tiny sack black with dirt and hanging from a string, looked like a handsome, masculine body that the fire had roasted for a long time and that it now delighted in enriching with all the shades of brown.

He finished smoking his pipe in silence, almost motionless. After a while, as if awaking from his inertia, he cleared his throat, spat and, in a voice that kept failing, he cried point-blank:

“Titim!”

Thereupon my attention was immediately revived and my joy exploded in my prompt reply:

“Dry wood!”

That was how our game of riddles began.

“I’m here, I’m in France!” Mr. Médouze proposed.

Pretending to be racking my brains, I merely looked at him. His steady, calm face once more assumed fantastic expressions in the glow of the flames flickering under the canari. He knew, moreover, that I would not find the answer to his riddle and that I was waiting.

“A letter,” he told me at last.

A letter? I didn’t know what that was; but that only made it seem all the more marvelous. In general, Mr. Médouze, as if to have a sort of revision, started with the most elementary “titims,” those to which I already had the key.

“When water climbed up a hill?”

“A coconut,” I replied in a flash.

“When water ran down a hill?”

“Sugarcane!”

“When Madame put on her apron back to front?”

“A fingernail.”

Then he moved on to the more difficult ones.

“Madame is in her bedroom and her hair is floating outside.”

Silence. Prolonged silence. A few puffs slowly taken from the old pipe, and he himself supplied the answer:

“A yam.”

That seemed odd to me.

“Of course,” he explained, “the yam is in the ground which serves as a bedroom, and its tendrils, like curls of hair, climb on the sticks.”

The main attraction of these riddle sessions was to discover how a world of inanimate objects managed to resemble and be identified with a world of people and animals. How an earthenware water-bottle held by the neck became a servant who only served water to his master when the latter choked him. How the manager’s parasol looked like “a shack with only one post.”

Thus, at the mere intervention of Mr. Médouze, the world expanded, increased, teemed in a swirl around me.

When Mr. Médouze finished his pipe, he would spit violently, wipe his lips with the back of his hand, which he also passed over the prickly shagginess of his beard. Then came the most disturbing part of the evening.

“Eh cric!”

“Eh crac!”

My heart started beating wildly, my eyes were aflame.

“Thrice fines stories!”

“All stories are nice to hear!”

“Who is Dog’s mother?”

“Bitch.”

“Dog’s father?”

“Bull dog.”

“Abouhou!”

“Biah!”

I had answered the preamble properly.

Silence. I held my breath.

“Well, once upon a time,” Mr. Médouze started slowly, “when Rabbit used to walk around dressed in white calico suit and Panama hat; when all the traces on Petit-Morne were paved with diamonds, rubies, topaz (all the streams ran gold and Grand Etang was a pool of honey); when I, Médouze, was Médouze; there was at that time, an old man who lived all alone in a castle, far, far, far away.

“A liar would say far like from here to Grand-Rivière. My brother, who used to lie a bit, would have said like from here to St. Lucia. But I not being a liar, say that it was far like from here to Guinea . . . eh cric!”

“Eh crac!”

“That man used to live by himself and was middle-aged,” Médouze continued, “but he did not lack anything. One morning, he put on his boots, took his hat and, taking care not to eat or drink anything, mounted his white horse and set out.

“At first, the journey began in perfect silence. As if the horse were galloping on clouds. Then, as the sun came up, the man was himself surprised to hear music behind him. He slowed down; the music became slow and indistinct. He stopped. Silence. He spurred his mount, the music started up again.

“He then realized that it was the four horseshoes that were playing so harmoniously:

’Tis the queen’s ball,

Plakata, plakata

’Tis the queen’s ball,

Plakata, plakata.

“But what music!

’Tis the queen’s ball.”

Médouze sang. With his deep, grating voice, he imitated one hundred violins, twenty “mama-violins” (cellos), ten clarinets, and fifteen contrabasses.

Overcome by his fervor, I took up the magical song along with him:

Plakata, plakata.

---

*  *  *  *  *

But, alas!, the voice of M’man Tine rang out and came to break our duet. My heart heavy with regret, annoyed to tears, I had to give up the rest of the fairy tale, and to hastily abandon my old friend with a quick “good night.”

That was what transpired almost every night. I could never hear a story right through to the end. I didn’t know if it was M’man Tine who called me away too soon, although she always scolded me for staying too long, or if it was Médouze who did not tell the story quickly enough. At any rate, there was not a night when I didn’t leave with my heart and my curiosity unappeased.

In addition to Petit-Morne, to its workers and to ourselves, we knew that the world extended even further, beyond the factory whose chimneys we could see, and that on the other side of the hills surrounding the plantation, lay other similar plantations.

We also knew that there was the town, Fort-de-France, with many vehicles in the streets.

M’man Tine had already told me about a far-off country called France where people had white skins and spoke something called “French”; a country from which came the flour used to make bread and cakes, and where all sorts of beautiful things were made.

On some nights, either in his tales or in his talks, Mr. Médouze evoked another country even further away, even deeper than France, which was that of his father: Guinea. There, people were like him and me; but they did not die of tiredness nor of hunger.

There was no misery as there was here.

Nothing stranger than to see Mr. Médouze evoke Guinea, to hear the voice rising from his entrails when he spoke of slavery and related the horrible story his father had told him, of the rape of his family, of the disappearance of his nine uncles and aunts, of his grandfather and his grandmother.

“Every time my father tried to relate his life story,” he continued, “once he got to: ‘I had a big brother called Ousmane, a younger sister called Sonia, the last one,’ he would shut his eyes very tight and fall silent all of a sudden. And I, too, would bite my lips as if I had received a stab in my heart. ‘I was young,’ my father said, ‘when all the blacks fled from the plantations because it had been said that slavery was over.’ I, too, danced with joy and went running all over Martinique because, for a long time, I had so wanted to flee, to run away. But when the intoxication of my freedom was spent, I was forced to remark that nothing had changed for me nor for my comrades in chains. I hadn’t found my brothers and sisters, nor my father, nor my mother. I remained like all the blacks in this damned country: the békés kept the land, all the land in the country, and we continued working for them. The law forbade them from whipping us, but did not force them to pay us our due.

“Yes,” he added, “at any rate, we remained under the béké, attached to his land. And he remained our master.”

Naturally, Mr. Médouze was then angry and in vain I looked at him with a frown on my brow, in vain I had this maddening urge to hit the béké I set my eyes on. I could not make out all he was grumbling and, to console him, I said to him:

“If you were to go to Guinea, Monsieur Médouze, you know, I’d go with you. I think M’man Tine wouldn’t mind.”

“Alas!” he replied, with a sad smile, “Médouze won’t be seeing Guinea. Besides, I have no maman, no papa, no brothers or sisters in Guinea . . . Yes, when I’m dead, I’ll go to Guinea; but then, I won’t be able to take you. You’ll not be old enough; and then, I mustn’t.”

---

*  *  *  *  *

We were at that time familiar with a host of important things our parents had inculcated in us.

“Never say good evening to a person you meet on the road when it is beginning to get dark. Because if it’s a zombi, he’ll carry your voice to the devil who could then take you away at any time.”

“Always close the door when you’re inside the shack at night. Because evil spirits could pelt stones after you, leaving you in pain the rest of your life.”

“And when, at nights, you smell anything, don’t say a word, for your nose will rot like an old banana.”

“If you find a cent in the road, pee on it before picking it up, so your hand won’t swell like a frog.”

“Don’t let a dog stare at you while you eat. Give it a morsel and chase it away, so your eyelids won’t remain stuck down.”

I, who knew so many tales and titims, was careful not to tell them in broad daylight, for I knew that I’d then run the risk of being turned into a basket.

And we all were careful not to approach Mam’zelle Abizotye, the quimboiseuse, so as to avoid her evil touch.

Time was simply an alternating of days and nights punctuated by three special days whose names I knew:

Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

Saturday, that was the day M’man Tine left the shack very early so as to complete, at all cost, the week’s work; and it was the night the canaliers returned very early to Black Shack Alley.

The afternoon was still bright and these men lingered awhile in Shack Alley and gathered to talk in a loud voice. Then, increasing the noise from their palavers and their laughter, they set off once more toward “the house.”

There followed other strong men who would have been impressive but for the sorry rags that defiled their bodies. Women with supple, rhythmical carriage. Frolicking, laughing young girls, their breasts standing out through the slits in their bodices. And young, bare-backed mule drivers, astride their mounts trotting nervously between their legs, advancing like dauntless conquerors.

In a flash, the areas surrounding Shack Alley had taken on a new look.

Market women from Petit-Bourg, in long white flowing tunics, had placed their trays and baskets of sweets just about everywhere. Slowly there gathered that earth-stained bunch, tools on shoulders, going to stop in front of the manager’s office to await their pay.

Some had bright eyes, open eyes, and festive laughter; stocky fellows teasing the girls with smacks on their fleshy buttocks and their round legs and small girls from the petites bandes with budding breasts, whispering and giggling among themselves.

There were others who stood around, serious, speaking only to show their impatience to receive their money: it was getting late.

And there were also those who did not say a word and remained sitting on the ground, on the roots of trees lolling, hiding under dull bell-shaped hats full of holes, with eyes that seemed tired of looking at what they saw, but not betraying any sentiment; these limited their movements to an occasional gesture of chasing flies maddened by the running sores on a huge leg, or a swollen broken ankle oozing through a mud-stained bandage.

But what interested me were the trays of the women, which became more numerous and invaded the area surrounding the office and Shack Alley. Then followed the young women selling peanuts. And the women selling hot spicy black pudding. And a huge woman, the most familiar of all, Mam’zelle Zouzoune, who sold her wares from two trays—one with bread, one with fried fish—and from a coal pot on which she fried codfish akras.

Then, suddenly, as if triggered by some unknown force, the crowd in one movement drew close to the window that served as the pay window, behind which the manager—with the help of his overseer and a commander—was about to hand out the pay.

“Canaliers!” the commander announced.

Paying of wages had begun.

“Amédée!”

“Here!” the worker replied.

“Twenty-nine francs fifty.”

“Julien-twelve-toe!” the commander continued.

The workers were registered for work under their first names. So the habitation, in order to distinguish several bearers of the same first name, added to each person a picturesque or trivial epithet characteristic of the bodily peculiarities of the individual concerned; or the first name of his mother, of her husband, if it was a woman; or the district the worker came from.

And so—one ended up with: Maximilien-dog-teeth, and Maximilien-big-calves; Rose-full-cucumber and Rosa-Asson; Adrien-Lamberton and Adrien-Courbaril.

“Julien-Achoune!”

“’sent!”

“Twenty-one francs four centimes.”

Julien, having collected his pay, withdrew from the compact crowd, gesticulating like a man engaged in a fight, then angrily threw the money on the ground, stamped on it, swearing by the behind of the manager’s mother, insulting God and, mad with rage, picked up the money and moved away grumbling: “What’s keeping me from dying, God damn it!”

Then it was the turn of the male and female weeders, of the diggers, placed under the heading “task people,” of the grass cutters, called “gens z’Héb,” of the cart and mule drivers; and finally, the entire petites bandes, elder brothers and sisters of my friends who on Saturday nights seemed to us so worthy of envy when the overseer handed them rolls of nickel coins and once in a while paper notes like the adults received.

When the paying of wages was finished, the entire group, like water from a drain, moved toward Shack Alley. There were those who were not worried, even happy. But I noticed some who did not hide their disappointment and who paused to take a long look, in the palm of their hand, at what was to be left of their pay once one took out what had to be spent at the manager’s store. They shook their heads with a sigh: “Well! Good Lord! . . .” and set off once more at a faltering pace.

Then there were a few, like Asselin, who hardly received anything: a loaf of bread, a quarter pound of codfish, a nip of rum per day, and the rest of the week’s wages remained in the plantation store, for in the eyes of everyone Asselin was considered the most extravagant and licentious man in Petit-Mourne.

But once pay time was over, the festivity began for children. The market women lit torches under the coconut trees so here and there the night was decked with bouquets of light.

The men bought huge demi-pains stuffed with golden akras, and the shop had an unending stream of rum drinkers.

The women preferred cakes, and the kids from the petites bandes mostly went around munching peanuts.

This carnival went on far into the night, way beyond the time when M’man Tine, having managed to find me in the crowd, dragged me home to the shack.

But even in bed, I would remain awake for some time, for, in the midst of all that bustle, that noise, those bouquets of fire blooming in the night, of all that food, of the stench of feet swollen with elephantiasis, of those rags exuding the smell of old sweat, of that alchohol-drenched sadness, there arose, diabolical and irresistible, the deep, pulsating beat of the tom-tom.

Everything—the purulent feet, the quivering breasts, those male shoulders and frenzied hips, all those glassy eyes and rainbow smiles, all these people, satiated, drunk, and forgetting all cares, blended into one burning, invading babel, like a fire, flaring into dancing, dancing, dancing.

---

*  *  *  *  *

Sundays were easily recognized as being the day after the night wages were paid, and the day when all the inhabitants of Shack Alley remained at home, of course cutting down our chances to do what we liked.

Then, over the entire habitation there reigned a silence that almost made us sick, condemned as we were to playing the part of “well behaved” children, condemned to avoid any noise or foul language.

Our parents busied themselves inside and outside their shacks, cleaning, sweeping, uprooting weeds from the front steps, taking down their beds, putting the boards and rags out to sun so as to kill the bugs, and, inevitably, making us help.

Nevertheless, there was one advantage that, in a way, made up for all the other inconveniences. After lunch, M’man Tine opened the outer door and window to her bedroom to take a little siesta, and no sooner was she asleep than I would dash off to Médouze’s place.

I might find my old friend sitting below a mango tree near his shack, or at other times, sleeping inside with the door half-open in the dark, despite the daylight that streamed in through the little hole in the one partition opposite the door.

For furniture the shack had a boulder, the height of a stool, sticking out of the ground, which nobody had bothered to dig out, for luckily, on this stone Médouze had only to place the end of a plank and with the other end resting on the ground, he had made himself a bed.

Lying on this dingy, bare plank, polished by the contact with his skin, the old man would snore away. Too low to receive what little light that there was in the shack, his body formed, along with his loincloth, the plank, the stone, and the ground, one unified mass, without any protruding detail save the soap-like patch of his beard from which uttered intermittent snores. I would sneak up in silence. But, immediately, he would stir and begin to mutter in a voice that seemed to me impossibly old and rusty:

“It’s you . . . I’m not asleep, you know . . . Just trying to rest my old body awhile.”

Then, reaching to light his pipe he had placed in a hollow part of his bed-stone, he would rise slowly and painfully, his bones cracking over and over, and we would go outside under the mango tree.

Our conversations consisted of a long series of questions on my part, to which he replied scrupulously.

I asked him, for instance, if the sky and the earth met somewhere.

I was also very interested in finding out where the békés found all the money they were alleged to possess. Médouze then explained that it was the devil who brought it for them.

As it turned out, I already knew by intuition that the devil, misery, and death were more or less the same evil individual, who persecuted the blacks above all. And I wondered in vain what blacks could have done to the devil and to the béké to be so oppressed by both.

Sometimes also, with strings and bits of wood he picked up here and there Médouze would make me a toy, a man or an animal with which I would have fun playing until the time came for him to tell me a story.

---

*  *  *  *  *

Sunday . . . Monday.

On Mondays, M’man Tine went to the river and took me with her.

The river was far from the plantation, and we had to walk a long way to reach it.

We left home early, for M’man Tine tried to be the first to arrive so she could choose her favorite spot and settle down at the place where a huge stone hollowed out in the shape of an earthenware bowl could hold the dirty clothes she soaked in it.

On arriving, the washerwomen would string themselves along the shallow parts of the stream and there, singing and chatting, they would scrub away at their patched and tattered clothes.

M’man Tine preferred to be alone because she did not trust those women whose tongues were, it seemed, as clacking as bell clappers.

I spent my time looking for guavas in the woods; or as the months passed, learning how to catch small shrimp by hand in the river.

At midday, a great expanse of linen flittered over with small yellow butterflies shone in the sunlight. After eating my lunch on the grass, I went to a spot where the river was full and slow, forming a curve like a turn in a road, and I amused myself throwing in pebbles which fell into the water with a gentle plop, like big raindrops falling out of a musical sky.

When the sun went out, exhausted, so to speak, after drying so much linen, M’man Tine gathered everything into a small bundle and called me to have a bath. The banks of the river were then too shady and I did not at all enjoy my bath, especially since M’man Tine did not allow me to splash about to my heart’s content; instead, she hoisted me onto a stone, scrubbing me vigorously with guava tree sprouts and rinsing me down with a few stinging bowlfuls of water.

In compensation, she would plunge her hands into the water, turning over some stones and surprising a few crayfish which I could roast myself that very night over our charcoal fire.

---

*  *  *  *  *

But, despite all that, Sundays and Mondays were, for us children, tough days to get through. To a man, we all preferred Saturdays and the others days when, from morning to night (never mind the showers of blows to which we exposed ourselves!) we were free, responsible only for ourselves, and masters of Shack Alley.

---

*  *  *  *  *

“Eggs! Hens’ eggs!” Gesner shouted.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Imagine finding so easily in the bushes a nest of grass and straw, and filled with hens’ eggs!

I had often heard people complain about hens that made their nests outside. I had even seen one that, after a long disappearance which Mam’zelle attributed to theft, had come back one fine day trailing behind her a brood of chickens. But what a far cry from that to be lucky enough actually to discover the hiding place where a hen had laid her eggs! . . .

The trick was to avoid thinking about whose hen’s treasure had fallen into our hands. We counted the eggs: there was one for each of us—except for those who were considered as altogether negligible. The small fries were not to be left out really; we were going to cook our eggs and everybody would get some.

Never had fate so generously spoiled us. Oh, what a marvelous afternoon! And the entire band returned to Shack Alley.

Eggs that we hadn’t stolen, that we had found, which had fallen out of the blue, so to speak!

Tortilla put them in a canari full of water with a pinch of salt. I was the one who had suggested that she proceed in that way.

I had never eaten eggs. Furthermore, none of us had ever eaten any. Our parents’ eggs were for hatching. And the hens were to be exchanged at the store of “the house” for rice, kerosene, and codfish; or sold to the békés at the factory.

But I felt that they had to be cooked in a canari of water over fire.

At present, the fire was to be lit. Impossible to find matches. Our parents were all smokers and carried away their boxes of matches with them.

But at last everything was ready. A pile of wood was gathered in a flash. Paul had cleaned the fireplace of its ashes and heaped up the small bits of wood in it. Oh for a match to strike, just one match for our joy to be complete.

Soumane, impatient, suddenly took it into his head to do without any fire and, in spite of Tortilla, snatched back his egg. In his grip it cracked and oozed out—the sight of all that egg white lying on the ground filled him with pain and did not entice anyone else to imitate his haste.

What to do? On that entire plantation, whose every nook and cranny we knew, it was impossible to find a single match!

“I know where you can find some!” Tortilla cried. “But ’must be someone who’s not afraid to go and get it.”

Everyone then felt himself capable of reaching beyond the stars to steal the sun’s fire.

“Well!” said Tortilla.“One of you has only to go up to the ‘house’ and say that his maman has sent for a box of matches on credit.”

“But they’re not going to believe us. They’re going to say that our maman hasn’t come back as yet. They’re not going to give us a thing.”

Who would be bold enough to try such a stunt? I’ll admit, shamefully, that I was scared. Even Gesner was scared.

So Tortilla, beside herself, threatened the smaller ones with not a crumb to eat if one of them didn’t volunteer to go.

In the end, Maximilienne did.

“You will say: ‘Morning messieurs-dames,’ Tortilla coached, ‘my maman asks if you’d be so kind as to send her a box of matches, please.’ And if they ask you: ‘Wait a minute, your maman is back already?’ you will say: ‘Was since this morning, before she left, she asked me to buy some matches, so she could have them tonight when she gets home, to cook her canari.’ Don’t be afraid, O.K.!” “And don’t forget to say thank you!”

After the fashion of the big people, Tortilla had Maximilienne repeat the correct replies.

Maximilienne was already on her way when Tortilla, changing strategy a bit, called her back.

“Wait, listen! To really make them believe it’s your mother who sent you. Ask them for a nip of rum as well.”

In the twinkling of an eye, she had found a bottle and Maximilienne set off to Tortilla’s repeated recommendations.

Dumbfounded, breathless, almost motionless, we watched her climb the slope. Then, suddenly overcome by panic, at the instant when she came into view of “the house,” we darted off into the shack. There we waited, no one daring utter a word.

When Maximilienne returned, out of breath from having run, with the box of matches and the bottle of rum, I felt as if I were transported into a world where children’s desires finally came true without the intervention or the censureship of parents. It was as if something unnoticed had just taken place; as if, by the appearance of our messenger, we were going to lead a free, exalted life.

Rum! Matches! In our hands, the very hands of those who were said to be too small to use them! To be able to light a fire and partake of that drink we knew only by its smell. Matches! Above all . . . rum! Thus, putting off the preparation of the eggs, Tortilla snatched the bottle and began to share the rum.

“Makes you drunk,” she warned, “I’m not going to give you a lot.”

With scrupulous stinginess, she poured a few drops in the palm of our hands.

It burned the throat like an ember, but it made you feel like drinking more.

Tortilla, Gesner, Soumane took long drafts from the bottle held above their open mouths. Besides, those three, when it came to sharing, always got twice what the others did.

On that occasion, it didn’t enter anyone’s mind to protest; our joy was so well shared that everyone had a good laugh. We couldn’t stop giggling.

Tortilla struck the sticks of matches one after the other and threw them among us, and we each ran helter-skelter, shouting and laughing.

“You’re wasting all the matches,” Gesner cried. “Let me have some too.”

Having pushed Tortilla to the ground, he grabbed the box of matches from her hand. Tortilla, in her desire to recapture it, darted after him and Gesner fled, making us all run in his pursuit.

And everybody sprawled and rolled in the grass, getting up and falling over again, clinging to one another.

Crushed in the melée, the smaller ones cried out, but their cries only evoked laughter and incited battles.

As for Tortilla, now, she only raised herself up halfway and slumped back down, gripping anybody nearby and making him roll over with her. Then the others would run from her and, stark naked on the ground, she would shout and shout, stretching out her arms, trying to stand up, and would roll over bellowing as if calling for help: “Maman, Maman!”

And we laughed at this so much. We really did.

Gesner was another one who couldn’t remain on his feet and, furious because we laughed at him, he swore like a cowherd, and peppered everyone he could lay his hands on. He would look for stones to throw at us, and we ran off; but he would slump down in the dust and the entire band would gather to dance in triumph around him. Then his threats scattered us once more.

In this way, we roamed from shack to shack, abandoning one by one and without any remorse, without giving it the slightest thought, those who could no longer walk or maintain their balance and who were reduced to crawling, a cry of despair on their lips, or who grew weary from incoercible laughter.

And the box of matches, hotly disputed, passed from hand to hand, so much so that there was a veritable game of hide-and-seek among us as we tried to discover who had it, as we ran here and there about the huts. A few even had had to give up and, stupefied, amused themselves with any little thing.

Consumed by our delirium, evening was approaching and we were not even concerned with our parents’ return. The fact that our clothes were now reduced to shreds was the furthest thing from our minds.

Suddenly, I found myself alone after darting away, but I heard such shouting in various places around me that I didn’t know where to go to rejoin my mates.

A loud, overpowering din indicated a larger group so I dashed off toward it.

“Fire! Fire!” Paul shouted to me as he saw me come up. “We have set fire to Mr. Saint-Louis’s garden! No more fence, we’re going to see what’s inside!”

Already, a huge cloud of smoke rose above the hedge of branches. Everybody was jumping about and frolicking, and that newfound joy also got me to dancing and shouting.

When, through the smoke, the first flame shot skyward, we were overcome with real madness and, had it not been for the heat which kept us away, we would have thrown ourselves body and soul into the glowing fire.

---

*  *  *  *  *

The emotion, the confusion, the tears, the anger, and the consternation that rocked Shack Alley that night and the following day all over again, had shaken me twenty times more than the whippings, the beatings, the clouts M’man Tine had rained on me.

However, I was so severely beaten, ill-treated, bruised; I saw so many frightened people talking about us, reprimanding us, this bunch of ragamuffins, and repeating in tones that still showed their alarm: “If Good Lord hadn’t put a helping hand!” that I was to reach a stage where I couldn’t understand a thing that was going on.

For just when the flames were at their highest and reddest, the adults had rushed up to put out the blaze with pails of water. Then everyone had swooped down on us, carrying us off, threatening us with our separate punishments.

That night, M’man Tine had done nothing but beat me, bawl me out, and weep. She hadn’t prepared anything to eat and, I believe, she wept and grumbled the entire night long.

“’Twas God,” she said, “who was good enough to show Horace the smoke rising in the sky.”

Horace it was who had sounded the alarm to all the workers.

“As if it wasn’t enough to toil and moil from morning to night in the béké’s canes, these little wretches now bringing more misery on our heads. What am I going to say if the béké calls me?”

Then M’man Tine turned to talking about my mother, Délia, who had never had so much trouble with me, who was living her life in Fort-de-France, protected from the sun and the rain, “behind the chairs of the béké” she served, and who was the furthest thing in the world from imagining the catastrophe I had just caused along with the other little blacks on the plantation.

“Oh! Only misfortune dogs poor people!”

I was no longer crying.

My bruises gradually produced a stiffness that slowly took over the rest of my body, erasing from my brain all memory, stealing me blissfully from reality.

I remained several days without leaving bed, without seeing my friends. I couldn’t get up nor could I even move an arm or a leg. M’man Tine had put me to lie on her bed; on mornings, before setting off for the fields, she would make me a huge cup of tisane with just a tip of sugar and a large bowl of toloman and I remained lying there for the whole day. I slept out of sheer boredom or tried to chase it with the tisane and the toloman. During this time, I thought about Gesner, Tortilla and Soumane whom I had left in a ditch with his hands and feet all running blood, and wondered whether he wasn’t still there. I tried to catch the faintest sound in the hope of hearing one of them and guessing what he was up to.

At times, I felt as though I were no longer in Black Shack Alley, as though I could just as well be in one of those countries which were the scene of the tales Médouze would tell. Or, all of a sudden, there would come over me a sort of apprehension that, because of what had happened, the extent and consequences of which I couldn’t even measure, Shack Alley had undergone horrible changes.

---

*  *  *  *  *

On evenings M’man Tine made me eat vegetables crushed into pap and gave me warm, brackish tisane in case I had been “injured.” She then placed in a saucer some rum, salt, and a piece of candle, struck a match, and after allowing a beautiful little blue flame to catch, blew it out and rubbed me with the sort of warm ointment she had made.

The first time I went outside to have a fresh look at Shack Alley was both a relief and a great disappointment.

Happy at the fact that my familiar haunt was just as I had left it, I expected all the same, as a result of all I had suffered, to find the landscape in complete disarray and unrecognizable.

Yes, there was a strange impression of emptiness around me. Where were my friends? Gesner, Soumane? Perhaps they too were sick and still confined to the bedroom.

This thought only made me more worried and puzzled.

That very night. M’man Tine said to me:

“I had a letter sent to your maman telling her to come for you; meanwhile, you’ll go to work with me . . . , for Mr. Gabriel is no longer allowing us to leave the children alone in Shack Alley during the day.”

Then it was that I understood why I hadn’t seen my friends; they must have gone to the fields with their parents.

This perspective did not displease me at all. Quite the contrary. It corresponded perhaps to the desire for change that this crisis had sparked in me.

Thus, the following morning, I accompanied M’man Tine to her work. I figured that all the people worked at the same place and that we children would be able to meet and play together. But M’man Tine and I were immersed in sugarcane leaves which the wind made rustle all the day long; for the entire day, we were alone at that spot, not seeing anything outside the field, and I had no idea where I was.

M’man Tine would scratch the ground with her hoe and gather the weeds and fine dirt at the foot of each clump of canes. But the grass seemed hard to cut with the hoe. My grandmother struck hard with the edge of the tool, letting out “umh! umh!” and from time to time straightened up, placing her hand behind her as if to help the pain in her back. And she had a horrible grimace on her face.

I remained sitting beside her bamboo basket, between two clumps of cane she had joined by a knot in the ends of the leaves so we could have more shade. When, having progressed in her work, she could no longer see me behind her she would come back to fetch me and would make me another shelter.

I tried to amuse myself—with the earthworms dug up by the hoe, with snails I chanced upon, or collecting wild grass and spinach for the evening meal.

But, on the whole, I was restricted to a muteness, to a silence, even to a state of immobility that coiled about my body and made me sleep for hours, curled up between my two clumps of sugarcane.

---

*  *  *  *  *

I saw my friends only fleetingly on evenings when Mr. Médouze had called me; and every time I met Soumane, Tortilla or Orélie, I had the undefinable impression that neither they nor I were the same as before. There was no friendship in our conversations, only gloom, as we kept constantly looking toward our parents’ shacks, for fear of being surprised.

Naturally, the memory of the outrage we had been party to instilled in us a spontaneous mistrust of one another. The floggings we had received, I believed, had broken the ties between us, and we needed a few days to be ourselves once more, to re-establish the friendship and trust that held us together.

But something remained irreparable—we could hardly play; we no longer had time to play.

---

*  *  *  *  *

The first week went by in the following manner:

Each child would leave in the morning with his mother, would return at night with his mother, would run errands at the store for his mother, would return to his mother’s place, eat, go to bed, till the following morning.

We never had the joy of meeting in the fields. Our parents worked in areas that were very far from one another. M’man Tine was at Grand Etang. “My maman too,” Victorine told me. Yet, at no time in the day did I have the impression that M’man Tine was not alone in that vast expanse of sugarcane.

On evenings, on returning from the field, we would come across workers moving through the “traces” and we would go up to Shack Alley together. But I hardly ever saw among them Gesner, or Victorine, or any one of the others.

Indeed, this new mode of living which I accepted, alas!, in all submission, was an awful burden to bear at certain times.

It was with relief that I saw the arrival of the first Saturday following this new state, and like each Saturday, I went to witness the payment of wages.

I was to experience a surprise that left me with an inferiority complex that would long affect me.

When the overseer reached the category “petites bandes,” what a shock it was for me to hear:

“Tortilla . . . eight francs. Victorine . . . six francs. Gesner . . .”

I wasn’t aware that we were to be given money because we went with our parents to work. I was so puzzled I could not distinguish anything around me. I was confused at the presentiment that my name would be called and . . . But after Gesner, after Orélie, after all of them, the overseer did not shout my name.

Stunned by disappointment, I did not dare raise my head. Then, indignant, I ran to find M’man Tine to tell her that the overseer had given piles of money to all the others who went to work with their parents and that I hadn’t been given anything. Why?

Here again, I was in for a stinging retort.

“Li’l wretch!” cried my grandmother, “you want me to put you’ tail in the petites bandes, eh! That’s what you were after when you caused me all that trouble in the habitation? Well, I should’ve really sent you to collect Guinea grass or spread guano, the way the others did! That’s what you need to make you know what real misery is and to make you learn how to behave yourself.”

And she kept on and on, talking, fretting, grumbling! I heard her pour scorn on the parents of my friends who had sent their children into the petites bandes, calling them shameless niggers who did not know how to do anything properly.

“Tell me! How will it all end if the blasted fathers place their sons in those things, in the same misfortune? Well! If I didn’t put your mother in one, I’m not going to put you.”

She cursed Mr. Gabriel who, according to her, had forbidden children from running about Shack Alley, so they could swell the ranks of the petites bandes. I heard her utter words of anger against mulattoes (Mr. Gabriel was one) who, as she would repeat at the slightest opportunity, were always quick to flatter the békés and betray the blacks.

Then, talking, fretting, grumbling, she brought up the question of my mother once again; she gave her two weeks to come for me, otherwise . . .

I ended up having a vague hunch that it was for my own good that M’man Tine did not send me into the petites bandes, but I wasn’t altogether proud of this because of my mates.

Every week, at pay time, I had the distinct impression that the latter were separated from me, that they had grown up; at any rate, they were on the road to becoming adults, whereas I lagged behind. But the way they looked at me, even when they had collected their pay, did not seem to betray any superiority, any pride on their part.

We therefore no longer saw one another as often and in total freedom. But we were not of the age when one complained of one’s lot. And then, what was there to complain about? Weren’t we equal to one another and to all those around us?

Did we not represent, our parents and ourselves, in our own eyes, a beginning and an end?

In the long run I enjoyed my new mode of living.

I found it advantageous and occasionally charming. In the mango season, M’man Tine had shaken a few branches of a mango tree that grew in a small valley near to the field and stored a certain number of green mangoes in the cane straw. The result was that, for quite a while, every midday a copious and succulent dessert rounded off our lunch. Similarly, some evenings after her work, she would go down into the small valley to fetch a breadfruit; and I enjoyed it all the more since I could be of some use. For example, I helped M’man Tine pick out the breadfruits that were already full; and while she knocked them down with a rod she would say to me: “Make sure you see where they fall.” For, the bushes being thick and intertwined under the trees, the breadfruit, having fallen, would at times roll very far, right to the furthest reaches of the bushes. But my instinct for finding it was keen, a fact that always surprised M’man Tine.

Then there was the harvest. That period had always seemed to us one of festivity.

We children could then suck pieces of sugarcane for the whole day. We would go looking for them in the fields. Our parents brought some back for us. We would suck so many that the juice would be running down from our mouths, soaking our clothes and leaving a glaze on the naked bellies of my friends.

But on that occasion I didn’t have to bother to go anywhere to look for sugarcanes. I didn’t even have to ask permission to take any. I was with my grandmother in the field itself.

From early morning I partook of the first canes cut and without uttering a word—for I was a quiet, sly child—and while I played with a bit of straw, a piece of the cane peeling, lacquered and gaily painted, or anything at all, I listened to the songs by which the cutters and reapers gave vigor and grace to their movements.

I followed them, got to the depths of their every movement. Everything was admirable: their black or tanned half-nakedness, their grimy rags, revived by the light, the sweat that bathed them from head to foot, leaving along their backs and on their chests reflections mirroring the flash of the cutlasses each time they brandished their arms; the kind of background music built up by the straw being trampled, the “tying lines” thrown backward and caught by the women to tie the ten canes that formed one bundle, the stowing of ten bundles into a pile; those endless songs, punctuated every now and then by a grunt or a shrill whistle escaping from a chest in the throes of effort.

That vast music that thus engulfed the screeching of the carts, the trot of the mules, the swearing of the mule—and cart drivers; those complicated songs, those unending, monotonous chants cast a spell over me, overpowering me so much that, in order not to stifle, I too joined in the singing:

Last bag a man will pack

is to go to work

on Ti-Mo’ne.

But the entire field continued to work diligently and to go over, in quickened rhythm, the same words, following the same tune.

The workers seemed to like harvest time. They said that they earned more money during that period. I too liked the harvest, because on Saturday nights there would be more people selling things near the office and on Shack Alley, and the festivity went further into the night.

There were also dice and card games out in the open around a tray and a torch. These often degenerated into frightening battles: laghias of death.

In point of fact, apart from that, nothing would change during harvest. And nothing was changed afterward . . .

In the off-season my greatest joy was to be with M’man Tine in a field crossed by a river. It was rather a quiet stream, growing wider and deeper at intervals, almost disappearing at times under the tall grass that grew on its edges. I didn’t know where it came from nor where it went; furthermore, I’d never known that a river came from somewhere and went somewhere, like someone on a trip. For me, a river had neither beginning nor end. It was just something that flowed.

I asked M’man Tine whether there weren’t any crayfish. She explained that there were some no doubt, but they couldn’t be caught by hand as was the case at the Gazelle, for the bottom of that stream was muddy. She then made me a fish-hook with a pin, took some sewing thread which she tied to a bamboo rod, added a round bit of dried cane to the thread, and I thus learned to catch shrimp by line.

It was splendid. The breathless attention with which I watched the line, the intense emotion in my heart when there was the faintest movement on the float. Then, the tug of the shrimp at the end of the line, at the end of my arm! The intoxicating effort to get it out of the water!

I would catch up to ten or twelve per day, and M’man Tine would say that I could catch even more with more patience and skill.

Even more splendid was the world of shrimps such as I pictured it in my mind’s eye: hills, pathways and “traces,” fields, shacks. All in clear water. Therein lived the translucent shrimps, the papa-shrimps, the mamans, the children, who spoke a water language. When I caught a big one, that was possibly a papa or a maman returning from work. And I would think of the pain this would cause their children who would cry uncontrollably, the tears possibly causing the river to swell. Whenever it was a little one I would conjure up the despair of the parents, a despair similar to that of the birds whose young ones we would pluck from their nests and who remained grief-stricken the entire day and even the following day. And I would regret all the more not catching those that got away, since I feared they would go and warn the others to beware my hook hanging there innocently, looking like an appetizing earthworm.

In short, thanks to all those amusements, I did not suffer at all.

One Sunday, M’man Tine donned a new dress, dressed me in a pair of breeches which were much too tight—it had been so long since I’d worn any—and decided we would go to Saint-Esprit.

“What for?”

“None of your business.”

But as she continued to rail at my indiscretion she could not prevent herself from indirectly supplying the explanation she’d refused to give me.

My mother had replied to her letter, informing her that she couldn’t come as yet, because “her business wasn’t straight as yet”; but she sent some money.

The rest had escaped me.

M’man Tine took her basket and we set off. She walked at a brisk pace and I followed trotting behind. The hem of her dress was starched, stiff and, at every step, her heels, coming into contact with it, made a dull drumming sound.

In this fashion, we made our way down the path that circled the hill from top to bottom; then we took the main road of white tuff filled with women in flowered dresses, men in white, neatly-ironed trousers, donkeys loaded with heavy-looking bags and baskets full of vegetables and fruits.

M’man Tine met some people she knew.

“Like you’re in a hurry?” they said.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, “I want to reach early so I can be in time for part of the mass.”

We left the main road. We walked for a long time along paths that went through stalks of sugarcane, then under tall trees; then along a railway and on bridges without parapets. But I ran as hard as I could, all to no avail for the distance between M’man Tine and myself kept getting greater and greater, and I even thought that she was going to leave me and that I’d be lost in the open country. There was no one else about, and M’man Tine just kept on walking and walking, apparently oblivious of my safety, talking to herself in a low voice, leaving behind her the tambourine-like music of her heels beating against her long dress.

I stopped, out of breath, and shouted: “M’man Tine!” and I burst into tears.

My grandmother turned around and came to a halt, surprised by my shout and my tears, as if it hadn’t even occurred to her that I was following her. Shamefaced, I rejoined her.

She then bent down and took me on her shoulders. In this way our journey continued and ended on a much more pleasant note.

---

*  *  *  *  *

The porch of the church was crowded with people who had come mostly from the country, like M’man Tine. They were most all barefooted. The women wore dresses similar to M’man Tine’s and had placed their baskets on the steps. I couldn’t see a thing inside the church. From inside came the ringing of bells and voices singing as if they were crying. At a certain time I heard quite nearby, in front of me, the soft sound of coins being thrown one by one. M’man Tine leaned toward me to tell me that it was the Abbot taking up the offering.

“He’ll come and present a small box for you to put a cent into,” she explained in a whisper, “but all you have to do is bow your head. And above all, don’t be afraid.”

When the full peal of bells was unleashed to let out all who had crammed inside the church, we went in, M’man Tine pulling me by the hand. My grandmother bent over and genuflected lightly on one knee, in front of each of the life-sized figures, sitting on some sort of shelf or table laden with flowers that looked as if they smelled good.

Sometimes she knelt down completely, whispered to me to do the same, and said her prayers, her lips moving in silence. She did this in front of three or four of those statues, no doubt those she preferred, but which were not exactly my taste. For the one that struck me most was the one nailed to a huge cross of hard wood, nailed hand and foot—the way we would transfix, on the fences to the shacks, the small lizards we caught—left there bleeding. He had a beard, lots of hair, and was almost naked; and you could see his ribs under his skin. He reminded me of Mr. Médouze, lying with his tattered loincloth on his hard plank in the center of his hut. And his tragic position there, on the cross, seemed to me as incomprehensible as Mr. Médouze’s. And yet, he wasn’t black . . .

M’man Tine went several times around the open market.

The entire area was congested with a helter-skelter array of bags, baskets, mountains of vegetables and fruits, and it was teeming and buzzing with people. She would take a pinch out of every bag of cassava flour, taste it, bargain, and would move on. She tasted quite a few before buying her two cups of flour. Then, continuing on her way, she would touch and weigh the yams, hesitate, ponder awhile, then finally buy one. The same procedure for the avocado pears. The same procedure for toloman starch, for cassava starch; the same, no doubt for the roots of choux caraibes.

But I no longer followed her. She had put her basket down under one of the trees lining the square and had made me sit beside it to watch it and to take a rest. She came with a bunch of onions, counted what money she had left, pondered a bit, and set off again. She returned with a hand of bananas, counted, pondered, and set off once more.

She finished her shopping with a quarter pound of meat and bones for the weekly soup, some salt codfish, sugar, and a “leaf” of three graisses.

Finally, she brought me a piece of hot pudding and a slice of bread. I was starved, and it was good. She didn’t eat anything although, as was her custom, she’d drunk only a cup of coffee since morning.

While I was having my meal, she went off again and after some time returned, carrying under her arm a parcel looking like a large piece of bread wrapped in paper. And she told me bluntly:

“You’re finished picking up bad habits on the plantation. You’re going to school to get some education in your head and learn to sign your name. For the Good Lord allowed me not to spend the few coins your maman sent for you; I’ve bought you a li’l suit.”

It was a clear, pleasant afternoon.

M’man Tine, basket on her head, walked slowly and, as always, spoke of all she had done and all she was going to do. The main concern was to place me in school. I followed her, sheltered from the sun by her shadow. My mind was on the horse-shaped candy bought for me which she carried, there, in a corner of her basket and which she’d promised to give me as soon as we reached the shack.

 . . . Oh! Yes, it was a beautiful day, and a fine journey!

Then there were Mondays at the river, the following days in the fields, Saturdays, Sundays at Saint-Esprit for quite some time still.

At times I would hear M’man Tine in her soliloquies complaining about a certain Mam’zelle Léonie from the village who was taking too long to finish my suit.

Certain days she would say that I was too much trouble for her in the sugarcane patches; for it was the period of continuous rains and she didn’t know where to put me. When we were in a field of tall canes, she made a sort of nest with her basket, some straw, intermingled with leaves, and that more or less sheltered me. But if we were in young canes, there was no way to protect me. At such times she would grow angry. She would stop working, turn the basket over her head like a big hat, cover it with leaves, and hold me close to her, murmuring in a voice that made me cry.

I believe I’d have preferred to remain in the rain, to play in the ditches, to mold the wet earth with my hands, as I used to in Shack Alley, there with all my friends. But M’man Tine was so bewildered, so unhappy on my account on rainy days that it was distressing for me as well.

She would never seek any shelter for herself and worked all the more quickly as a result. When night had fallen, her old straw hat looked like a cap made of manure, the ragged material covering it was soaked and stuck to her skull. And with her feet all muddy and swollen like stale bread in water, her veins oxidized, M’man Tine, the best and most beautiful of the grandmothers, suddenly became a frightful sight, who did not in any way resemble a maman, an old woman, a black woman, nor even a human being.

M’man Tine every night would talk about school and about that matter of the suit Mam’zelle Léonie was in no hurry to finish. That did not inspire in me any emotion, any dream. I hadn’t even asked her any questions on that score.

I’d talked to Mr. Médouze about it and he had explained that school was a place where intelligent children were sent. (What, pray tell, was an intelligent child?) At any rate, in order to go to school one had to be fully and properly dressed, and speak French there. These latter details had made a pleasant impression on me. But that was all.

During all those rainy spells, I could not go out at night. We would return, all soaked and shivering, to Shack Alley, nothing but a regular mud-hole, so much did the ground appear rotten to the core. This did not prevent my wanting to go round to Médouze’s shack, but M’man Tine always reminded me that “well-brought-up children stay in their parents’ house when it’s raining.”

But no sooner had good weather reappeared, I was once more a regular visitor to Médouze. Our evenings together were always the same—a few errands, the fire, the long preliminary bouts of silence, the riddles and tales interrupted, alas!, by M’man Tine’s voice calling me home.

---

*  *  *  *  *

One night, it was beginning to get late and Médouze hadn’t returned home. I had already made a couple of trips to his shack. The situation was tricky, for, most probably, M’man Tine wasn’t going to let me go yet another time, and her canari was bubbling with such effervescence that dinner could be ready in a short while.

I dashed off once more. Again I found Médouze’s hut closed—from the outside, with the hank of rope he used to roll and knot around two nails, one on the door, the other on the door frame. I then decided to wait, for if I returned to M’man Tine’s, it was no more coming out. I therefore sat right there, on the front step of the shack, not quite on the threshold, not in the spot where Médouze would sit. No, beside it, for children were not supposed to sit in seats regularly taken by adults, so as not to catch all their weariness and pain.

Time went by and then there came what I was afraid of: the call of M’man Tine—and Mr. Médouze was not yet back. But I did not reply and remained where I was. Shortly afterward, no doubt since she did not see me come running, M’man Tine called me again. Several times in succession and for a long time. Her voice trembled at the end as if she was becoming angry. Finally I gave in, and in order to calm her down and assure her that I was coming right away, I shouted: “M’man-an-an!” But in fact, I was moving slowly, closely peering toward the end of the road already engulfed in darkness, trying to discern any shadow that resembled Médouze’s body.

“So, when you’re enjoying yourself over there with Mr. Médouze, the conversation is so interesting you forget you have a maman? You even forget there’s a time to come for a bite to put in your stomach? It’s Mr. Médouze’s zombi stories that fill your belly? What was Mr. Médouze telling you that was so fascinating that I had to make myself hoarse calling you?”

“Mr. Médouze is not there, m’man.”

“So, what were you doing there? You weren’t at his place?”

“Yes, m’man, in front of his door.”

“So, you prefer to remain alone in front of Mr. Médouze’s door, in the darkness, rather than keep your maman’s company like a well-bred child?”

She practically threw my plate into my hands and, while eating, continued grumbling about the bad habits I was picking up in the habitation and called on God to be her witness, and asked Him when on earth Mam’zelle Léonie was going to make up her mind to deliver my little suit.

When our meal was finished and M’man Tine had stopped talking, I repeated, fearing that I would again be brushed off:

“Mr. Médouze hadn’t returned, M’man Tine.”

“And what you want me to do for that? Mr. Médouze is not the one who puts food in your mouth, is he?”

She was doing the dishes. Then, in my despair to make myself understood, I burst out sobbing.

“What’s wrong with you?” M’man Tine asked.

“Mr. Médouze wasn’t . . .”

“You’re going to leave me in peace, yes or no?”

But I couldn’t stop myself from crying aloud. Suddenly, M’man Tine rushed outside. I immediately dried my tears, for no doubt she had gone for a branch off a tree behind the shack to beat me.

She took a long while to return. I was alone in the shack with the kerosene lamp which, humble and motionless on the table, lit up a part of the room. In the darkness outside, M’man Tine must be looking for a rather large one! At any rate, I thoroughly dried my tears and tried to choke off my crying.

As it turned out, M’man Tine was not behind the shack as I thought, but rather much further; for suddenly there came the sound of her voice:

“He’s not home.”

Whom was she telling that I was crying because Mr. Médouze hadn’t yet returned?

Then I heard Gesner’s father saying:

“I thought he was in bed. You’re quite sure he’s not lying there, in his shack?”

“No,” M’man Tine replied, “his door is closed from outside. And José, who was there since I came back, would have seen him.”

The voice of M’man Tine called Mam’zelle Valérine, and by now there were numerous voices talking in the night, saying to one another and repeating that Mr. Médouze had not returned from work, that nobody had seen him, that he was late and that that was strange.

I burned with contentment at having been responsible for alerting so many people and I felt like getting up from my little bench and dashing outside to tell everyone myself how I had come to notice Mr. Médouze’s absence. But at the same time, the concern the incident was apparently raising reached me in a hum which only increased the fear in my heart.

M’man Tine was still not back and I could feel the whole of Shack Alley already in the grips of excitement and anxiety!

Finally, I got up and ventured a few cautious steps toward the door which I pushed open lightly so I could take a quick look out.

Doors were opened, stabbing the darkness with violent rays of light. Voices called out to one another and spoke with such feverishness that I could hardly make out what they were saying.

I thought they had already been up to the “house” to inquire in what field Médouze was working. It seemed they were talking about going to see for themselves.

Someone said: “We can’t let the night go by without knowing.”

“If you’ve made up your mind, I’m ready,” someone else replied.

Then they remained quite some time without saying a word and all of a sudden I noticed, at the lower end of Shack Alley, torches that in the darkness made a large spot of light, filled with men bearing cutlasses and sticks and moving away.

By this time the great excitement seemed to have died down into a few, almost imperceptible, murmurs.

M’man Tine had returned. She asked me if I’d been afraid to remain all alone for so long. She was out of breath and appeared to have forgotten the little scene we had had.

“They’ve gone to see,” she told me.

Her voice was aquiver with her inner turmoil.

“Dear God!” she said, “don’t . . .”

She could barely keep still. She touched one thing, stopped, touched another, listened . . .

Outside, the talking had started up again.

“If I left you again for a while, you’ll be afraid?” she asked me.

Possibly not; but I preferred her to take me with her.

“Yes,” I said timidly.

“O.K., get your hat and come with me.”

---

*  *  *  *  *

At about the same spot from which men with the torches had just departed, stood Gesner holding aloft a piece of wood with its end aflame, lighting up, like a huge matchstick, a small group of men and women sitting on the ground, some in the full light, others scarcely touched by the glow.

I could make out Mr. Saint-Louis’s voice saying:

“Several times already, I’ve told Médouze that the work is too strenuous for him and that he should join the petites bandes. But he doesn’t want to, saying that those young ragamuffins wouldn’t show him any respect.”

Everyone said something about Mr. Médouze. Some even finished their piece in a burst of laughter and concluded:

“Poor devil!”

They remained a long time without speaking, then started up again. And this time everybody spoke, but it was no longer about Médouze. They spoke about everyday matters and things I didn’t understand very well.

Consequently, I much more enjoyed watching the torch that Gesner swished down once in a while to put new life in the flame; that flame which was blue at the base where it emanated from the bit of wood, and which turned yellow and red only to flicker away into a fugitive cloud of smoke that seemed to further blacken the darkness.

The light reached up to the branches and leaves of the trees above our heads. The brilliant resin oozed from the wood and sometimes dripped on the hand or feet of Gesner who, with a grimace, let out little cries.

I did not dare speak. I was anxious to hear all that was being said about Médouze, to know why he hadn’t returned, and I feared I knew not what for those men who had gone off to look for him, although they were armed as if on their way to battle. As for me, I had a vague feeling that Médouze had left for one of those countries he would talk about in his tales.

I would have been so happy if such were the case!

Why?

Perhaps through some indescribable desire to see Médouze become simply the hero of an adventure similar to those with which he had often captured my imagination.

I also thought that finding myself in the night in such a situation spurred my mind all the more into conceptions of the fantastic.

Suddenly, a shout.

“There they are!”

A muddle of voices echoed this shout and at the same time the whole group (Gesner in the lead), carrying me along with it, moved toward the road.

Far away in the depths of the night, a bright light, a group of advancing torches.

“My God, Lord, Virgin Mary!” the women whispered all about me.

My heart began to pound and I sought refuge near to M’man Tine who mechanically murmured imperceptible words.

“They wouldn’t be coming back if they hadn’t found Médouze,” replied M’man Tine.

“Médouze must be with them,” said another; “see how they keep stopping every now and then. You can’t see?”

“Yes, because of him no doubt,” Mr. Saint-Louis concluded.

Then the convoy came into view at the lower end of the road. We kept pressing forward and soon there were distinct silhouettes in the clear evening.

“They’re carrying something!”

“Good Lord!”

“Of course, look at the way they’re walking.”

Thereupon, a feverishness more intense than that which preceded the departure of the men pervaded the group and everybody began to talk at the same time. Some said that Médouze must have been stricken with epilepsy, others insinuated that he hadn’t eaten anything the night before and a worm had bitten him in the stomach. For some, he must have had too much water to drink, since he was covered with sweat. There followed a torrent of words that scared me and prevented me from realizing what was happening.

But in fact four or five men were carrying together a thing black, long, bony, and half-dressed in rags, something resembling Mr. Médouze.

And it was indeed Mr. Médouze.

“If we hadn’t gone to look for him the mongooses would’ve feasted on him!” Mr. Horace exclaimed.

They were all out of breath and dripping with perspiration. Some had walked so briskly that they stumbled under the weight of the old man, and as their voices were nothing more than a mere whisper one could hardly hear as they said:

“Had we known, we’d have carried a hammock; for when he was all alone, he looked like a bit of straw, but with death in his belly, he’s as heavy as misfortune.”

And it was amidst the loud burst of laughter set off by a quip from Carmélien that the body of Médouze arrived in Black Shack Alley and entered his hut.

So many people were around the body that it was in vain that I tried to see it. I did not pay any attention to the snatches of what those who discovered it were relating; but there was such a mixture of commiseration, lamentations, sighs, laughter, and jokes, that I couldn’t exactly tell whether it was a sad event or a mundane occurrence of little consequence. The whole scene vaguely resembled a fête, but a few persons, M’man Tine among them, had expressions on their faces that precluded my feeling in a gay mood.

People were coming and going. M’man Tine had told me not to move from where I was, then she went outside. Many women also went outside. I then slipped in among the few people who were gathered around Mr. Médouze.

He was lying on his back, dressed in his skin-colored loincloth and stretched out in a manner across the full length of his narrow black plank. His eyes were half-open as if he wasn’t sleeping; those very eyes that had reflected on other nights the flow of the fires that we used to light.

And in the middle of his scorched, woolly beard of grayish white, his mouth showed rust-colored teeth with large spaces between them and his stiff smile made him look as if he found it amusing that so many people were gathered around him. A smile that reminded one of a dead rat in the middle of a road.

At first I didn’t find anything odd, even in his features; but after contemplating them for a while, I felt my heart growing heavier and heavier in my chest and I felt like shouting, “Mr. Médouze,” the way I would sometimes do when he was asleep and hadn’t heard me enter his hut.

But the rigidity of his pose and the fixed nature of his expression somehow made me recognize the face of death.

---

*  *  *  *  *

Many things happened that night.

Women brought rum to the men who had brought back the body so as to quench their thirst.

M’man Tine returned with a small glass filled with water in which there was a small green branch, and placed it near Mr. Médouze’s head. Mam’zelle Valérine entered with a candle which she lit beside the small glass. Then other people arrived from Shack Alley who, till then, had not shown themselves.

“Well, Ole Médouze wanted to leave us just like that, eh!”

“Oh, yes, it’s because his bed was too narrow, he couldn’t die on it.”

“What d’you expect? It’s the canes that killed him, it’s in the canes he wanted to leave his skin and his bones.”

A heavy silence ensued, broken only by a murmur of compassion or a sudden quip. A little, discreet laughter, followed by a deep sigh . . .

Little by little, a new buzz of voices arose outside, and I was quite surprised to find, sitting on the ground in the darkness in front of the shack, some men whom I could scarcely make out and whose voices I couldn’t recognize.

Suddenly a slow, drawling song rose from the ground, from the spot where those invisible people were sitting, filling me straightaway with a violent fear.

But the song continued rising in a slow, enchanting fashion, calming my anxiety, carrying me off, so to speak, in its flight in the night, toward the summit of darkness. Without breaking off, it curved upward, continuing its mournful climb.

Then, having mysteriously wandered for a long time throughout the night, it slowly descended to the ground and made its way deep into the hearts of those present.

Thereupon a sharp voice launched into another monotonous song of harsh sonority and vigorous rhythm; and all the others responded to it by a brief lament, the bodies swaying heavily in the darkness.

When this was finished another man’s voice shouted:

“Eh, cric! . . .”

And the entire crowd replied in a loud voice:

“Eh, and so! . . .”

I found myself in the same preamble to the tales Mr. Médouze used to tell me.

Many a tale was told that night!

There was a man—the master storyteller—who told the tales standing, holding a stick with the help of which he mimed the stance of all the beasts, the carriage of all sorts of people: old women, hunchbacks, cripples. And his tales rolled along to the accompaniment of songs which, with great gestures of his stick, he had the audience sing until it was all out of breath.

From time to time, between two tales, someone would get up and say a few words about Médouze that made everyone fall into interminable laughter.

“Médouze is dead,” he said in a tone befitting the occasion. “That’s the painful bit of news it is my sad duty to inform you, messieurs-dames. As far as I can see, what is most distressing to us is the fact that Médouze died and did not want us present in his hour of agony. But do not feel sorry for Médouze, messieurs-dames; Médouze went to hide to die because . . . Imagine Médouze’s evil plan! Because Médouze didn’t want us, his brothers in drinking and in disappointment, to inherit his cane field in Grand-Etang.”

“His old cracked canari,” added one voice.

“His old baggy trousers,” came another voice.

“His old pipe and his broken coui.”

“And his sleeping plank planed smooth by his bones.”

“And the gold and silver the béké used to give him on Saturday evenings . . .”

And everybody repeated with a laugh:

“And, continuing the game in opposite fashion, a woman got up, praising Médouze’s generosity, and summoned each one present to declare one after the other what Médouze had left him. For this one, his old bakoua, for the other his loincloth full of holes and his worn-out hoe, and for everybody, all the gold and silver the béké used to give him on Saturday evenings . . .

“Eh, cric! . . .”

In the shack women, standing, were looking at the body without uttering a word, or were whispering.

M’man Tine was kneeling at Mr. Médouze’s feet.

Then she came and asked me if I still did not feel like going to bed. But despite its length and complicated nature, this wake kept me up so much that in the long run, even in the darkness, I could make out all the traits in the face and all the expressions of the master storyteller, carried away by his feelings into the magical domain to which he lifted up his enraptured audience.

And each time that he raised the hymns to their most intoxicating fullness, I expected to see the body of the old black man, lying stiff on its too-narrow plank, also rise up in the night and set off for Guinea.