Love, Anger, Madness_ A Haitian Trilogy - Marie Chauvet [49]
“He lives in sin,” my mother explained to me, “and sin is contagious.”
Despite my precautions, once in a while I caught a glimpse of the man sitting in a wicker chair hidden behind a bush a few paces away from his gate. Once, coming home from school, I found myself face-to-face with him and stood there mesmerized, staring at his enormous eyebrows and his good-natured black face, his wide innocent mouth grinning ear to ear. I spit at his feet and made a sign of the cross.
“Heh heh!” he said. “Do you think I’m Satan in the flesh?”
I fled when I heard him say that, and the next day sought comfort in confession with Father Paul for the vile sin I had committed. In return, each time Tonton saw me he’d thumb his nose at me or show me his fist.
The Grandupré house was next to his. Poor Agnès reminded me of Sophie Fichini,19 gaunt and weepy-eyed, shrieking every day under the blows she received. She too was pilloried. One day, my mother said:
“You are not to play with Agnès Grandupré anymore, neither in school nor at her house. You’ve got that? She’s a nasty little girl who goes to old Mathurin’s house behind her parents’ back.”
Agnès’s vice intrigued me. I thought about it so intensely that I began to spy on her from my house. One day, I saw her weeping on her veranda after a thrashing. I called her over. She showed me her legs and arms covered with scratches and, turning a distraught eye toward her house:
“They’ve beaten me again, Claire,” she said to me. “They won’t let me see Tonton Mathurin, but he’s the only one who’s good to me.”
“What does he do to you? What does he say to you?”
“He strokes my hair and tells me about Suzette, the daughter he lost. I look like her.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, I swear.”
I heard my mother scream. My father rushed up and when he saw us together turned pale with anger.
“Come here, Claire.”
Agnès leaped to the street and ran home.
“Come here,” my father repeated.
And when I was before him:
“Who gave you permission to play with the little Grandupré girl?” he yelled, smacking my back with such force that it knocked the wind out of me. “Who? How many times have you seen her? What did she tell you? What have you done together?”
Each question was reinforced with a terrible blow from his belt. At the third lash, I started screaming as loud as Agnès; at the twentieth, I passed out. The next day, I had such a high fever that my mother sent for Dr. Audier.
“I must say! I must say!” he said, shaking his big head, as I saw him staring at my father reproachfully under his glasses.
“What do you expect, my friend, I am instilling values and I mean for them to be respected,” he said to him. “Ours is a race lacking discipline and our old slave blood requires the lash, as my late father used to say.”
“Is that the slaveholder I hear in you?” the doctor gently asked him.
“Maybe! We mulattoes have a little of everything in us, as you know. Tell me, if you hadn’t known me for so long, would you have believed that I have black blood in my veins? This means that my own black blood has been reabsorbed and that I inherited certain traits that will blemish her unless I correct her.”
At that moment, I noticed the milky whiteness of his skin, hardly more tanned than my mother’s. I stared with astonishment at my dark arms resting on the sheets. Was I really their daughter? No, it did not seem possible. How could I be the daughter of two whites? My mother wept quietly and I saw Dr. Audier give her arm a gentle squeeze before leaving.
We lived surrounded by servants my father worked with an iron rod. Some were hired like that young boy a scapegoat my father took in after his parents’ death and brought home one evening from Lion Mountain. He turned out to be insubordinate and insolent.
“Black, you’re black like me,