Uncle Eustis was sitting on his porch when we saw him. The late afternoon sun lighted his ebony skin a curious orange, the color of the wind-whispering sand. Jet and I sat with the motor idling within a few yards of Uncle Eustis' point of salt marsh. Another channel had cut across his rut-scarred road. Here the marsh was always changing, the probing currents eroding and building by creeping fingers of brackish water.
"Are you sure this is worth it?" Jet asked. His full name was James Eloi Trosclair. He would walk up to a new chick at LSU upriver in Baton Rouge and lay it on her. 'My name's Jet. James Eloi Trosclair. J. E. T. Jet. Fast by name and fast by nature.' We were all like that in those days. We avoided things.
"Yeah. He's a funny old nigger, you'll get a kick."
So we got out and finally I got him to wade with me across that new channel in the road. 'Come on, you not a baby,' I said, and, 'You not made out of sugar.' He was funny. He was a clown. He said, 'They might be some crabs down there.'
The water was clear. And it was cool against our feet and tickling where the surface edge of it tinkle-pushed against our legs. We splashed and yelled at each other, the droplets catching that peculiar light not exactly sparkling. Like a button lighting up on some control panel, a button that flashed for attention. Old Uncle Eustis, though, he never paid us any mind. Even when we were up against the porch and talking, we never really felt like he paid us any mind.
"De bell wind, oui," Uncle Eustis said like a warning. Then he came out with that hee-hee-hee. An old man's cackle but a commentary on the human condition, too. "She was as lovely as an angel descending golden stairs."
When the old black man spoke that Creole French in that lovely, deep organ tone, it was the purest sound I ever heard.
"Churches and angels," Jet said.
"You understand French?" I asked.
"Little bit," he said.
"He didn't say churches, though."
"Yes he did, that's what he said first."
"No he didn't. This is the story of the bell wind. I know it by heart. He never changes it, never one word. It's the only one he never changes. The church doesn't come until later."
"He better tell it in English, then," Jet said.
So when I finally got Uncle Eustis to talking in that broken English, it was the same story but sort of violated, raped almost. I shouldn't have allowed it. Even by then I didn't know the stories for what they really were, windows.
Jet was constantly interrupting with questions like, 'He means pretty wind, doesn't he, like bell with the E on the end, ainh?"
"No," I said. "Like the bell in the church. English."
"You see? He did talk about a church, didn't he?"
"No. The church comes later. First there was the little girl."
"The pretty one?"
"That's right," I said. All this time Uncle Eustis was going on with the story. Staring out to sea across that piece of sand. Mouth opening and closing on the hollow words. Yellowed molars and incisors moving with almost mechanical precision, an ancient cavern opening and closing; a cycle of the rejuvenating, devouring earth. They saw her at the church ....
"Yes, there is a church," I told Jet.
"See, I told you," Jet said.
She was about ten years old, but it was ten years of feminine fineness. That little girl was finery from the soles of her stiff, white shoes to the lace ribbons plaited into her wavy hair. In the bright sunlight she seemed to shimmer in an almost hazy aura.
Her mother and her father's money brought her to Grand Isle. The islanders didn't lay eyes on the father for at least two years. She came in sparkling in lace and pearls, enticing, enchanting. Next to her, the mother was like the tree in bloom at the behest of the blossom.
Of course, Uncle Eustis was not in church that day. They never let blacks into white churches in those days. He went to work as a house servant and gardener in their big house on the sound.
That morning the islanders figured this angel and her mother were from some cold country. They weren't Catholics. They didn't know when to stand, sit or kneel. Angelique … that's what the islanders named her. Everybody had nicknames back then …. Angelique didn't mind. She seemed so perfectly happy to be in that Catholic house of God. She didn't play or whisper or fidget like most other kids. She kept looking from that incense-flavored, smoke-anointed altar to the people around her. Every time somebody's eyes met hers, they had to smile. She looked that happy.
Outside, the church was just a white wooden structure. A white frame church in an old grove of oak trees. Only one oak tree left, now. After what happened, the land lost value. The water changed it. Uncle Eustis was able to get a piece of land and build his shack nearby.
The church had a tiny little belfry and one bell. But it was a wonderful, clear bell. Angelique loved the bell better than the incense and the statues and paintings of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother. The priest – his name was Father Beauchamp, he was from France – he let her ring it that first day. The two of them in the sunlight streaming through the two big doors.
The bell was also the islanders' signal for many things. There was a signal for fire. And others for the location of the fire, too. Back during the Lafitte days there were signals for invaders, too, so Paul Revere had nothing on us.
And there was the signal for a hurricane. That one was bong-bong … bong. It meant everyone had to get to the mainland. There wasn't a road in those days and it took a long time to get to safety by boat, and by boat, too, on water that would soon be angry enough to kill.
Those hurricanes, even the edges of them, they almost always swept water right over the island. Grand Isle is just a spit of sand and trees against a sometimes cantankerous Gulf, after all. But the priest holding Angelique up to the bell rope, and the happy voice of the bell after the last mass of the morning seemed perfectly right. It was later when she rang the bell that she got the whipping. That was after her father came, after everything changed.
Until then, she was Angelique. The islanders, white and black, loved her. And she loved them. It was as though she were just discovering people, outside the pages of the gilded books which were shipped to her regularly by her father. These were books of fairy tales from all over the world. She did not go to school in the one-room schoolhouse. She was tutored in the big house by the sound, where they lived. But she was ready every afternoon for play with the island's children.
In those days, children black and white played together. They were the same as one another until a certain age. That's the age when mixing of races becomes an issue. It's also the age when they first become aware of their place in society. Angelique and the others caught little crawfish on the landward side. They swam in the Gulf when the surf was not up. Sometimes they paddled pirogues in the coulees or the bayous. And they climbed in the trees and dug impossibly tiny holes in search of Lafitte's treasure.
After Angelique came, though, the children were never alone. Her mother had brought two coffee-colored black servants from the West Indies. One of them was nearly always nearby.
The man, you almost never saw. He would just suddenly appear among the palmettoes when one of the kids had cut himself or the squeals of play reached the same pitch as a scream of alarm. It was him that knocked down the priest.
But that was later. Until her father came, everything was fine. Angelique had begun to reach that certain age. She was changing. The islanders were looking forward to the sight of a grownup Angelique.
The old balance was still in order. The children had begun to separate. They divided into cliques by race and sex.
Then her father came home. He was a big man, imposing. He walked as though his head must touch the sky and his feet did not trod the same earth as the others. His head was high because he was a tall man but also because he held it so erect, his back so stiff and straight. He dressed impeccably, ate and drank voraciously without the slightest hint of obesity or drunkenness. And he was black.
Black as the ace of spades, they said he was. These days kids come down from the mainland for a cruise or some fishing or just to look around, and sometimes there's a white girl with a black boy or vice versa. Not in those days, though. It wasn't just the matter of one man and one woman. It was a matter of the balance of nature, or so they thought, the islanders.
There were laws against it, too, of course, but the Baratarians and the islanders had never been much for settling things that way. They mistrusted laws. They'd handle it themselves.
Angelique and her mother were barred from the church. It took two men standing in the door to bar them. And if it had not been for the soft words spoken by the mother, the West Indian would have killed them. They saw it in the fierceness of his face.
They went back to the sound and their big, fine house. Almost never again did the islanders lay eyes on them.
Some bad things happened on the island after that. We islanders had been surviving on folk medicine and superstition for a long time. It had been a bloody land, and they had ample opportunity for training in those things. We were less than a century removed from piracy.
There were threats. And there were some animals slaughtered ritualistically at the big house on the sound. There was some vandalism, too. That all stopped after one of the crab fishermen was found badly beaten, left on the steps of the church. He had made a foray to the sound the night before. Not everybody on the island approved that kind of thing, but everybody was against mixing the races.
The harassment, the nocturnal kind anyway, stopped. The other kind, the even harsher daytime version continued. It continued until it was more than a habit, it was part of the island way of life.
There were whispers, terrible whispers. Most of the whispers were fed by the sight of Angelique. They saw her sometimes on the beach, or through the windows of the big house. She was in that tender state of emerging womanhood, like a peach becoming soft, a butterfly pushing out of a cocoon. The things they said I would not repeat, but it had to do with sex and it had to do with her father.
No one would speak to her. The children ignored her, giggling. Uncle Eustis did not like her father very much, considering the man 'haut-negre,' his own French version of 'uppity nigger.' He said inside the house there was a terrible silence, a sadness that echoed in the corners of every room.
It was about that time, on a perfect day, in the evening when the wind was from the west as always in that time of year, that they heard the bong-bong … bong of the bell in hurricane alarm. They went into motion. Precious belongings rolled into blankets. Straw baskets hastily packed. Then, abruptly the signal stopped. The people paused, turned toward the little white church and the belfry with the tiny red roof. They heard the happy wedding-bell cadence signaling all-clear and they smiled, shook their heads in relief and went home.
At home they heard how Angelique had rung the bell, the only way she had ever learned to show alarm. To voice the hurricane inside her. Perhaps, mistakenly, she thought the people would gather at the church and she could somehow reason with them.
But the priest surprised her. He was not a bad man. We islanders all took responsibility for all the children in those days. He pulled her from the bell rope. It was when Father Beauchamp was administering the whacks to her derriere that the West Indian emerged. He dealt the priest a blow to the chest that sent him sprawling across the floor of the vestibule.
The priest, in shock, perhaps stunned, muttered something in Latin. The West Indian, holding Angelique protectively behind him, lifted his head, nostrils flaring, a horse finding something dangerous on the wind. His eyes grew wide, he blanched. He dragged Angelique home. She was hysterical, screaming. He carried her with tiny fists pounding, blood trickling from his nose and the corners of his mouth, showing no other sign that the tiny angel in his arms was beating him.
They never saw her in life again. Fishermen found her in the sound one day. Wearing the little pearl-studded lace dress she'd worn that first morning in the church. The seams had burst. First from the life-swelling of impending maturity then by the death-swelling of her corpse.
The others of the family left. No one ever saw them go, not even their islander servants. A crew from the mainland in a huge boat came later and took away everything in the house. What was left was only an untended shell with boarded windows and doors. The wind blew sand into every crag, eroded it, eventually brought it down.
Uncle Eustis was a full-grown man with his first wife and three children many years by Nineteen Ten when they were again reminded of Angelique. There had been a slight wind shift, hardly noticeable. There was the curious blend of sea and air over the Gulf, that misty opaqueness we all watch for signs. But the island went along at its usual slow pace until they heard the bell.
Bong-bong … bong. Bong-bong … bong. Urgent and incessant. They had all heard the hurricane alarm, but this time there was in it a note of emergency which had never been there before. They took to boat immediately, even though the weather signs did not yet warrant evacuation.
When they reached the mainland they gathered and counted, like quail. Every man, woman and child was accounted for, along with most of the chickens, goats and cows. Yet, from across the summer green of the marshes and the brown, black-brackish bayous they could still hear that bell.
Bong-bong … bong. Bong-bong … bong. Still with that peculiar note of urgency, alarm. And there was no one left behind to ring the bell.
They continued to hear it until the hurricane winds drowned it out. That hurricane swept upon them more swiftly than any they had ever known. The tidal surge sent them far up the ridge toward Raceland. When they returned, they found terrific damage. The worst was the church, destroyed. A scar of mud where the building with belfry had stood blocking the sunlight from the soil. Nothing left but mud for holy ground.
The old man ended the story with three words of French.
"Did you understand that?"
"The wind bell," Jet said.
"No," I said, "the bell wind."
"Another nigger story of haints and goblins," Jet said, so I didn't push it. I gave the old man some money and left him murmuring into the Gulf breeze about 'sky bayous' and 'white wind channels.' Jet and I rode around the island and drank beer and did the other things college kids do on vacation.
It wasn't until that Sunday when Jet was packing to leave that Dad came up to us with the news that the tropical storm had reached hurricane velocity. "It's in the funnel," he said. He meant the part of the Caribbean between Cuba and the Yucatan which almost always brings the storms through our front yard.
"You picked a good time to head for high ground, young man," he said to Jet. Jet made noises about staying behind to help out, and I knew he had with him that same thrill we all get out of the big storms. Like standing close to a fast-moving train. But he was scared, too, and I could tell he was glad to turn his sky blue Triumph onto Louisiana Highway One.
We started boarding and fixing. My mother and sisters in the kitchen drew water and made sure of batteries and fuel for the Coleman stoves, put kerosene in the lanterns and fresh candles in the old hurricane lamps.
Dad and I were lashing open a downstairs door so the change in atmospheric pressure wouldn't burst the seams of the house before I remembered Uncle Eustis. There was still some work to do and the water was rising pretty swiftly, but the most important part, the part I was really needed for, had been done. Dad was against it.
"Those people know how to take care of themselves," he said.
"Dad, the tidal wave will wash his whole shack, away, everything. He won't leave. I'll have to carry him out, drag him if I have to."
That's when Dad said what he said that made me mad.
"I'm not going to let you risk your life for some worn-out old nigger," he said. This was the sixties, remember. Civil Rights. Great society. And I was still fighting my dad like a wolf for control of the pack. At the car, he pulled at my sleeve but I drove off. I knew I was in trouble when I crossed the first new channel of water and felt the undermined pavement beneath the car. I tried turning around but I knew the car was lost. I could not drive out.
I started wading for Uncle Eustis' shack. If I could just reach him, get him up into an oak tree, lash us where we could ride it out like they used to do sometimes long years ago upon the island.
But the shack was already gone. Just the rickety little garden and chicken fences left.
I stood on the bare spot where his house had been, where I had talked to him just days before. Nothing to explain that shack and Uncle Eustis just lifting up before the eye-tornadoes hit, off into the air.
I was standing there when the sea crashed over the land up to my chest. The sea had me in her grip, a raging sea. Lifting me gently, though, almost lovingly but powerful. The wind was howling but the sea swept me uninjured then receded, leaving me to scramble to my feet in the grove of oaks where the church had been.
I got up into a tree, took off my trousers and used the pants legs to lash me into a stout fork. From there I saw it all. The tornadoes sucked up gasoline pumps and uprooted trees and graves, set long-dead cadavers to float upon the heaving waters or to sit in trees like me. The soaking slaughter of the wildlife. Huge boats crashed across the island into the bay, sailed by the rampant crew of the Flying Dutchman.
But in the eerie, quiet, pale-sky, balmy eye of the hurricane, the gnarled skin of the giant oak gritting, biting into my own … perhaps it was some reflection … some refraction of light in the bright, humid air … but I thought I saw the barest outline of the white frame church, the stubby belfry.
That sound, that whispered bong-bong … bong, it was just the remnants of plumbing colliding in the wind after the house had been lifted away. And that scratchy hee-hee-hee, it had to be just two limbs above me out of sight, chafing. It had to be. It just had to be. And yet, it haunts me still.