I’ve lived here now in Rivière au Sel for sixty-three years. It’s here I was born. It’s here I shall end my days. But it’s not here I shall be laid to rest, because there’s no graveyard in Rivière au Sel. You have to go and rest in peace at the cemetery in Petit-Bourg among strangers, men and women you don’t know from Adam and who died from God knows what.
I would like to be buried right here behind the wooden cabin that Siméon, my late husband, put up with his own two hands; a staunch nigger he was, the likes of which have disappeared from the surface of the earth and you won’t find his sort again, however hard you look; I’d like it to be under the grafted mango tree that I planted one September morning, when the moon was on the rise, in this place that I’ve never left, even when my second son, Robert, got married over there in France to a white woman he met in the post office where he works. A white woman! I cried all the tears out of my body. We’re not any old sort of nigger, you know. The white man’s eyes have never burned us out. Siméon, my late husband, used to tell how, shortly after abolition, his grandfather Léopold had been whipped to death by a white man for not giving way to him. The region was up in arms about it and Léopold’s friends had wanted to avenge him. There was bloodshed. There were deaths. The cane fields had gone up in smoke that climbed high into the sky. A white woman in our family!
I told him:
“Thank goodness your papa’s no longer on this earth to see that! The whites put us in slavery. The whites put us in shackles. And you go and marry a white woman!”
He laughed.
“Maman, all that about slavery and shackles, that’s ancient history. You’ve got to live with your times.”
Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps we should weed out from our heads the Guinea grass and quitch grass of our old grudges. Perhaps we should teach our hearts a new beat. Perhaps those words, black and white, no longer mean anything! That’s what I tell myself as I sit rocking back and forth, warming my heart with a drop of rum mixed with honey.
Look at them all around me!
They’re pretending to pray to the Good Lord for the unfortunate Francis Sancher and putting on funeral faces as if grief was stifling them.
Yet if I drew up a list for you of all those who trod my floor to ask me to do him harm or even rid the earth of his being, you wouldn’t believe me!
I know that not one ray of goodwill ever shines on the heart of niggers. Even so! What could they have against Francis Sancher, who had a heart of gold?
There were those who couldn’t stand the din his dogs made when they scoured the night, sinking their fangs into soft, defenseless flesh. There were those who couldn’t stand to see him sit and drink rum and the wind on his veranda while they themselves sweated it out under the Good Lord’s hot sun. And then there were those who had never forgiven him for taking Mira whom they had lusted after for years. The women were the worst. They hated Mira like salt hates water. To tell the truth, they were jealous of her and unrelenting.
“Who does she think she is? Yes, who does she think she is? Is she forgetting she came out of a woman’s belly as black as you and me? Is she forgetting she’s a bastard child as well?”
In the secret of my heart I took pity on Mira because I saw misfortune hovering over her. A black cloud over her head. It’s not fair skin that is the key to happiness!
Maman, in her time, saw things. She saw the hurricane of 1928. One morning, day broke, black with anger, with wrinkles on its brow.
“Dear, oh, dear! Guadeloupe’s in for it today!” she said.
She foresaw the Second World War and that two of her own sons would meet their death in a far-off land. She saw the great fire in La Pointe when the flames in their anger started with the Rialto cinema and only calmed down once they had devoured all the houses of the Carénage district. As a child, thank goodness, I didn’t have that gift. My eyes could only see the visible, the familiar. The hopscotch drawn in chalk in the schoolyard, the marbles my brothers used to roll on the sand, and the ragged pages of the storybooks I used to read in the evening. You see, I wasn’t a good pupil. I didn’t like school, where the mistresses ignored me and coddled the teacher’s pet, who brought them bunches of flowers, freshly laid eggs and cuddly white rabbits. But I loved to read! Read! My only regret was that the books never talked about who I was, me, a little black-skinned girl, born in Rivière au Sel. So I made up and imagined my stories in the back of my head. It was only after I had met Siméon, once we were married in church, me in a veil and crown, him in a black suit, that I finished with all that. My children replaced my dreams.
Yes, to start off with, I was spared.
Then one night, right in the very middle, Siméon was sleeping beside me after having given me what he gave me every evening, when something woke me up. Eyes wide open in the dark, I saw as plain as I can see the bed over there surrounded with candles and the picture of Our Lord Jesus Christ that Rosa must have brought because there was nothing that speaks of religion in this house. I saw my oldest brother, Samuel, who was all my mother had left and the apple of her eye, lying in his blood between the roots of a tree. Two days later he was to kill himself as he climbed to pole down a breadfruit for his lunch pot.
That’s how it all began!
Ever since that moment, I haven’t had a minute’s peace from all the suffering, accidents, and deaths. Sometimes I shut my eyes ever so tight, so as not to see any more. But tomorrow is implacable and insists on showing me what it will bring, mercifully hiding it from the eyes of other humans. People think I can ward off all this suffering. Alas! I can but try with the help of God. That’s what I’m fighting for and that’s why my hair has turned gray before its time from all this weariness. Ever since I turned forty, and even before, I have worn this wig of steel wool that the comb’s teeth have a tough time getting through.
I liked Francis Sancher, I’m not afraid to say so, and I hope his soul finds the peace he was unable to find in his life among the living where he was so worried, anxious and agitated.
I used to say to him: “Calm down! Sit still! Ou kon pwa ka bouyi!”17
It was no use.
I don’t recall exactly how our paths crossed.
As I don’t sleep very much any longer, I’m up before the sun, who’s still sprawling somewhere behind the sea, leaving a trace of shadow reigning over the gardens and clinging to the branches while I’m already busy in my kitchen.
I grind my coffee and listen to the little grating song of my coffee mill that I haven’t changed for the electric version my son gave me. I let it drip, I pour a few drops onto the ground in memory of my Siméon, with whom I continue to share everything, and I drink it, sitting at my kitchen table, its bitter scent penetrating my nostrils. Then I go out for a walk amid the smell of morning rain in the country. I look in the direction of the sea to find out what color the day will be and then delve into the woods to look for plants to relieve the pain in my old bones. Night has entered my left eye but I can recognize them by their scents, peppery like the star anise, metallic, brackish or bittersweet.
I think that must have been how I came across him one morning. Instead of staying in bed in the warmth of a woman’s body he would be up with the sun roving through the woods. He greeted me very politely, for whatever they say about him he was a gentleman and had education. Then he asked me:
“What do they call this plant over here?”
“Let me smell it,” I answered. “That’s cattail grass.”
“I know it by the name of ‘diviri.’ It works like a charm for diarrhea.”
I was amazed.
“How do you know that?”
He laughed with all his fine thirty white teeth.
“Oh, I could tell you a tale or two! I was a doctor. Sometimes my patients were so poor they couldn’t afford an aspirin. And then we were far, so far away from the rest of the world. You had to make do. I did miracles with my magnifying glass, my little pestle and mortar. And that’s how I got the name ‘Curandero.’ Today I can say that those years were the best of my life. Out in the woods, with nothing to my name …”
Yes, that’s how we became friends.
From that time on, once the sun was abed, he would turn up, followed by his shadow, like a dog that never leaves its master, and say:
“How are you feeling in yourself, Mama Sonson?”
“Squeezed to the last drop, as slow as a cart pulled by two oxen tired of climbing the hill of life.”
“Come now!” he would protest. “Your eyes are sparkling with youth.”
The people who say he was a chatterbox are right. He was always telling you something. But I didn’t pay any attention. Except once. I’d heard what he’d just done to Mira and I looked at him and looked at him, and couldn’t believe that that face, those two eyes belonged to a scoundrel like so many of the rest of them, like all the rest of them.
“Marry her, marry her,” I couldn’t help saying. “She didn’t deserve this.”
He looked up and I saw all the suffering in the world in his eyes.
“I can’t, I can’t. She mustn’t keep the child even. I told her from the very start. But women never listen. I haven’t come here to plant children and watch them walk on this earth. I’ve come to put an end, yes, an end to a race that’s cursed. And he’s there watching me. You see, Mama Sonson, I told her all that. She’s the one to blame. Not me.”
I tried to understand what all these words meant and went on:
“Do you mean to say you’ve got a wife back in your country? Your country’s a long way away, Monsieur Francis. You won’t find anyone going to look for the other marriage license!”
He shook his head.
“How could I ever be married knowing what I know? I’ve always avoided women, living as I do on borrowed time.”
I burst out laughing.
“Living on borrowed time? I’d change places with you any day!”
He looked out through the window at the blackening square of night and murmured:
“Don’t say that, Mama Sonson, don’t say that!”
The sound of his voice made my blood run cold.
He didn’t deserve such a death. Dying like a dog right in the middle of the path!
People say it was the burden of his sins, known and unknown, that killed him. I don’t believe a word.
If only death would come for me too and cover my two eyes, red from sitting up with suffering and mourning, with a thick blanket of black velvet. My body is tired of tossing and turning like a pirogue on the high seas. My bones are cracking.
The night will be long. I’ve already dozed off in the middle of a Hail Mary, and Mama Rosa woke me up with a little dig in the ribs. She looks relieved, Rosa. Vilma will go back home and nobody will be surprised if Sylvestre, with all his money, manages to marry her off, despite her papaless child. Times have changed!
Poor Francis Sancher, there are not many who will shed a tear for him! Not many who will help him find the door to Eternal Life.
17 You’re like peas on the boil!