Charlotte seated me in the comfortable sea-blue parlor of her home. She set a tray of guava leaf tea and sliced mammee apples on the small bamboo table by my chair. These apples were the sweetest, silkiest things I’d ever tasted, better than what I remembered from Montserrat.
She opened her papers and mouthed the word manumit.
Her face eased; the tight grip on my heart did, too.
“Tell me now before your husband returns. Fédon . . . he good to you?”
My girl blinked with her fine dark eyes, a blush settled onto her cheeks. “Yes. Why would you think not?”
The outer door banged. My son-in-law popped his head inside. His brown skin held more of a tan than I recalled. He must be hands-on with his fields. Perhaps he was a “good” planter if that truly was a thing.
“Ma’am,” he said to me, but his gaze locked on Charlotte.
He went to her, the approach like a dance, slow, intense, then whirled her around like he hadn’t seen her in ages.
My fears about their marriage all but disappeared. “Why was your sister-in-law targeted, Fédon?”
Jean-Joseph sat in the chair beside me. “My brother and I are not silent. We want the right to participate in the governing body. It’s not permitted because we’re colored and Catholic.”
“Mama, we had to do another wedding, an Anglican service for the council to accept our marriage.”
This made no sense. Two weddings? Having to carry papers? “Why?”
“How do you explain a system that’s prejudiced against our worship? And I don’t need to say much about skin, do I, Miss Kirwan?”
He didn’t.
In London, Black and white freely worked the docks and the fields together. Many colored souls had jobs in Town and in the shops Mrs. Kitty and I visited.
Yet it was not hard to see the sneers, the fluttering of fans my dark flesh caused until my coins silenced them. Would there ever be a place where nothing but talents and love mattered?
Jean-Joseph heaved a heavy breath. “Because Julien had started to organize the Catholics, Rose was targeted. They’ll hurt our women if we do not stay lower than them. What better way to strike terror than to attack our hearts?”
He unclenched his hand and closed his eyes for a moment. “If not for Dr. Hay, Rose would have been sold into slavery. She’s a proud Carib. Never been a slave.”
The natural pink of Charlotte’s apple cheeks paled. “Mama, I don’t know how I’d survive being locked in a jail. Poor Rose.”
I stared at her. I hadn’t told her of the evils of what had been done to me or Kitty or the souls lost to boilers and the sick house of Pa’s plantation, none of the evil of the left side of his land. I’d stopped my mind from seeing it. I refused to speak of the horrors. I’d cleaned the sick house floor so often. Couldn’t smell peppermint without thinking of death.
Maybe I should’ve explained more, told more of my story.
Instead, I whispered dreams. I showed her stars, not the bits of broken glass behind my smile.
Now she might be too fragile to listen.
Jean-Joseph stood, slapped his palms to his tan breeches. “No more sadness in my house. Let me tell you of Belvedere’s harvests.”
The man smiled and began rattling off numbers of acres and seedlings. His conversation was easy. Seemed to me that Charlotte and this plantation were Fédon’s dream.
“Miss Dolly, you saw the fields. What did you think?”
“The fields. Seem . . . seem big. You’ll have a good haul of cane.”
“Julien will build our own boiler. Then we can process our sugar ourselves. We’ll be self-sufficient. This will keep my wife safe. She can depend on me.”
I nodded, hoping it would be this way, but I doubted if any man truly knew what it meant for a woman to depend upon them.
My decision was fixed. I’d stay in Grenada and make it safe. Charlotte would see Kirwan women could survive anything.