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By Root 422 0

returning from France, where he had been studying for several years. Our mothers had been friends and were seeing each other again for the first time in six years. He would visit us on Sundays with his mother, who would stroke my hair and who kept saying that I was the prettiest girl she had ever seen. She repeated this so often that I began to doubt her sincerity. My parents welcomed them warmly and went through a great deal of trouble to host them. Frantz was handsome and I began to think about him. I whispered his name in bed at night, my heart full of a delicious feeling, but I remained petrified in his presence.

“The Camuse boy seems interested in our daughter,” my father said one evening to my mother. “Let’s give her a good dowry to encourage him. I am not able to get anything out of this stubborn mule, might as well marry her off. The Camuses are nearly ruined, they will be happy to dust off their coat of arms for us.”

“They think they’ve sprung from the loins of Jupiter,” was my mother’s response.

“I have money enough to make them stuff their prejudices, and after all, I haven’t given up my candidacy.”

“Henri!” my mother implored with a look of despair.

“This marriage will happen,” my father continued. “My money will help them forget certain things.”

“Alas,” my mother sighed, stealing a worried glance at me.

Félicia innocently took my hand.

“Why is Claire black, Mama?” she asked.

“But she is not black,” my mother answered, lowering her eyes.

I abruptly pulled my hand away.

“The sun burned her a little,” my mother added. “It’s a pretty brown.”

“No, she’s black and we’re white.”

“Enough, Félicia,” my father yelled.

Félicia cried and my mother took her in her arms as I ran up to my room. I spent a long time alone there looking at myself in the mirror of my dressing table.

“Why? Why? Why?” I sobbed while banging my fists on the mirror.

And I began to loathe the forebear whose black blood had slyly flowed into my veins after so many generations.

The days that followed were torture. Long family discussions that included Mme Bavière and Mme Soubiran had given me such a complex that I no longer dared look into the blond pink face of Frantz Camuse. I obeyed my mother and wore the new dresses she had made me try on while raving about their “flattering” color. I played the Chopin waltzes that my piano teacher Mlle Verduré had taught me, served drinks and cake to our friends, but my heart was heavy. “Never will he love me, never,” I kept saying to myself. I could see Dora and Eugénie circling around Frantz, clucking like turkeys. I felt the weight of his gaze upon me. But I was too young to realize the sincere interest I had aroused in him.

One evening, he came around without his mother and asked me to walk him to the gate.

“I am leaving for Port-au-Prince next week,” he said. “I would like to write to you.”

“No, don’t ever write to me,” I answered.

“Why?”

I began trembling so badly that he looked at me with astonishment. He grabbed my hand and I jumped as if he had stung me. The contrast between our joined hands had overwhelmed me. I shoved him so hard that he exclaimed:

“Do I disgust you that much?”

“Don’t mock me,” I shouted. “I’m warning you, don’t mock me.”

I made a run for my room and watched him from behind my window blinds. Tears of rage and bitterness ran down my cheeks, and when my mother came into my room, I cried out:

“Why am I black? Why?”

“Your father will make a rich heiress of you.”

“I don’t want anyone to marry me for my money. I will never get married, never.”

“Claire!”

The next day, my father left for Port-au-Prince, accompanied by Laurent. I had seen my mother hand him a bag of money and I heard her cry and reproach him for wasting everything we had to satisfy his vain political passions.

“You are ruining your children, Henri,” she was saying. “You have already sold almost two hundred acres. You have to stop.”

“Let me try my luck one last time,” my father answered. “Over a thousand men are with me. The best families in Port-au-Prince have called for me, all I need to do is