18

WHEN WOULD WE MEET? When would I see him again? How should I behave when we were together? Questions whirled through my eager, worried mind. Was he married? Was there a woman in his life? A Selene, perhaps? What did he know of me? Of my years in France, and my difficulties and disappointments? Did he care?

I slept that night, but Donovan’s face and lithe body wove themselves through my troubled dreams. And when the following day dawned I swore that I would seek him out. I would place myself in his path somehow, to give him the chance to approach me.

But I did not see him that day, or the next. Protecting my complexion with a large umbrella, I strolled along the margins of the cane fields, watching for his tall figure amid the stalks of ripening cane. In the past he had been elusive, playful. We had been involved in an ongoing game of hide and seek. Now that we were adults, would that game continue? Or was I foolish to imagine that the pleasures of the past might go on?

When three days had gone by and I had seen nothing of the dark man I asked my father about him.

“I’ve sent Donovan to Les Plages. It’s a small estate on the slopes of Morne des Larmes. Your Uncle Robert bought it last year. He’ll be back in a week or two.”

“Why has he gone there? What have you sent him to do?”

My father sighed. “I may as well tell you, Rose, that we believe a slave insurrection is being planned. All the Grands Blancs are taking what measures we can to protect ourselves and our properties. The Grands Blancs are at war. Donovan is organizing a militia at Les Plages, and gathering firearms, and making certain everyone knows what to do and where to go when the emergency comes.”

“Surely you mean if an emergency comes.”

“Oh, it will come, Rose. And before long. But we can endure it, just as we endure the great wind storms and the terrible floods. We are Creoles. We are made of strong stuff.”

One night my Uncle Robert and a number of other plantation owners came to Les Trois-Ilets and assembled in the largest room of the converted mill. Donovan was among them, as were several militia officers and the head of the police force in Fort-Royal. Rum and coffee were served, and there were plates full of sweet cakes and ripe fruit. But the food, I noticed, was barely tasted. The men were intent on the business at hand.

“The Vengeur is due to arrive this week, from Brest,” my uncle told the others. “She brings another hundred muskets, plus powder and spare stocks.”

“If only it were five hundred,” another man said. “Nothing but massive firepower will stop them, if they come in force.”

An assessment was made of each militia on the island, how many men it had enrolled, how many weapons were in its cache.

“All the women and children must share a single dormitory, heavily guarded at night, and the men must take turns at the watch, sleeping in shifts.”

“When you hear your neighbor’s alarm bell ringing, ring your own at once.”

“Listen for any change in the sound of the drums. We know the drums are a code. But it is constantly changing. Only the rebels can understand it.”

“Why not just lock up all the slaves until the army can come from France and deal with them?” one plantation owner asked.

“Because there are far too many of them,” came the curt reply. “For every Grand Blanc there are a hundred Africans. And France, as you may have noticed, is not overly concerned with the fate of her colonies.”

“She will be concerned when no more cane is shipped. When no more taxes are paid.”

The men wrangled and argued, and I sat listening, my presence largely overlooked except by Donovan, whose eyes sought my face and body several times.

“There is one thing we must always keep in mind,” my Uncle Robert was saying. “This is no ordinary warfare we face. Potent African forces are being set loose. Orgulon, the mighty quimboiseur, is said to be prophesying a bloodbath.”

Dismissive remarks greeted this pronouncement.

“Scoff if you like, but he commands obedience from many of our own Africans. He has been holding meetings at the Sacred Crossroads on Morne Gantheaume. Our people go there to pay tribute. Unspeakable things go on there, I am told. Human sacrifices. Dead bodies reanimated. Orgies with spirits of the dead.”

Yes, I wanted to say. Powerful things go on where Orgulon is. I have seen them. And he saved my life, when the fer-de-lance was about to strike.

“Orgulon is coming down from Morne Gantheaume,” said Uncle Robert, “and we all had better watch for him. One word from him and our plantations will go up in smoke.”

“We are not children,” Donovan said, standing as he spoke. “We do not fear the bogeyman. We know that this Orgulon is nothing more than flesh and blood, an old man with a weak old man’s body and a wily brain. What we must respect, I suggest, is the fear Orgulon creates in others.”

Grunts of assent greeted this statement.

“Orgulon has convinced his weak, foolish followers that he can kill a man with a glance, or stop the wind from blowing, or converse with the old gods of Africa through some pagan rituals. It is belief we must be concerned about. Belief in magic. Belief in the occult.”

“Yes, that’s the real enemy. Pagan belief. False belief,” said another of the planters, and there were murmurs of assent.

Or was the real enemy the force of change, I wondered. The power of an idea—the idea that the day of the Grands Blancs is over.

The following morning I went to the wind-house where my mother and Aunt Rosette spent their lonely days. I needed to tell them about the emergency plans being made, about the insurrection that was expected and the safety precautions they needed to take.

“It would be best if you came back to the mill for awhile, maman,” I told my mother. “You and Aunt Rosette can be protected there.”

“There is nothing for me in that place but humiliation,” she replied angrily. “Until that woman is gone, I will not set foot in the mill.”

I soon saw that my mother had grown more stubborn. Living in her self-imposed exile had become the rock on which she built her pride, her self-respect. To leave the wind-house, I knew, would mean abandoning the most precious part of herself and acknowledging defeat.

“He always used to keep his whores in Fort-Royal, you know,” she remarked after a time. “He kept them in their place.” Hearing my mother allude to my father’s perennial infidelity so casually was painful; she had never discussed it before in my presence. “I hated them all,” she went on, “but I couldn’t touch them there. So I let them have their town, and my husband, and I kept order here at Les Trois-Ilets.”

She smoothed her skirt, running her thumbnail down a crease along one seam. She had never been a pretty woman, but there had always been an abundance of youthful color in her cheeks, and her eyes were an attractive shade of blue, lighter than my own. Now, however, she looked washed-out and pale, her hair a faded shade of grey, her skin ashen, her eyes ice-blue and ringed with dark circles. She would never admit her true age but I guessed that she was past forty-five.

“I kept order here,” she repeated, “until six months ago. Then your father chose this girl to be his next mistress—this girl who had been our own house slave!—and began living with her, right alongside the rest of us. I tried to turn her out but he defended her.

“‘I’m dying, old woman,’ he said to me. ‘Can’t you see I’m dying? Can’t you let me enjoy my last months?’“

She made a scornful sound, and brushed her hand across her skirt as if to clear away an offending bug or bit of lint.

“Of course he’s no more dying than I am, or you are, Yeyette. He’ll live for years, just to spite me.”

“But you can’t go on staying out here in the wind-house, mother. It’s miles away from everything. You must come back to the mill, where you can be protected. What if you should get sick, or have an accident?”

“I have Rosette, and three of the slave girls, and Jules-sans-nez who brings us food from the mill kitchen nearly every day.” Jules-sans-nez, or Noseless Jules, had been a cart driver at Les Trois-Ilets for many years. He was a mellow old African man with long grey hair worn in thin braids and a sunburned skull, always singing as he drove, his voice with an odd whistle to it because of his disfigurement. It was said his nose had been cut off when he was only a child, by a cruel overseer. I had known Jules all my life.

My Aunt Rosette had been sitting in a corner of the cavelike room, eyes downcast, hands folded in her lap. I now saw that her cheeks were wet with tears. She looked over at me.

“Can’t you see, Yeyette, that we cannot go back while Selene is there?”

“I will not have that girl’s name spoken in my presence!” my mother barked.

Aunt Rosette went on, unfazed by my mother’s reproach. “Moving here to the wind-house is the only protest we can make against what Joseph is doing. But you, Yeyette, you can make him get rid of Selene.”

“Quiet, I say! Not that name again!” My mother glared at Rosette, trembling with rage.

“Joseph respects you,” Rosette was saying. “You stood up to Alexandre. You had the strength to leave your marriage. He could never admit to you that he admired you for it, but I know he does. And he admires you for being able to make money, which he cannot. Make Joseph see reason and move that girl to Fort-Royal!”

Seeing the two of them, my mother and aunt, there in the wind-house on the side of the hill filled me with sorrow and vexation. My mother’s pride, and Aunt Rosette’s loyalty to her, kept them in their isolation. But in their stubbornness they could not appreciate the danger they were in. Somehow they had to be made to realize, in the days ahead, that they must come home.