Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [156]
“I can tell you something of such sons,” she said. “For example, there is my son Jean-Michel, whom you more probably know as Choufleur—this matter of naming is something to be discussed. His father is a blanc like you, the Sieur de Maltrot—perhaps you knew him also.”
“By reputation only,” the doctor said. “Well, by sight. He disappeared during the first months of the insurrection.”
“He is dead,” Madame Fortier said, still turning the snuffbox in her hands. “As you may be also, blanc, if you persist. I have for my son the feeling of any mother. I also recognize that he is vicious as a poisonous snake or a mad dog. He would certainly kill you, blanc, if you put yourself in his way, and perhaps he is even hoping you will do so. I tell you this for your own benefit—it is nothing to me if you live or die. I do not love you. Take more rum whenever you are ready.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said. He reached for the calabash. “Permettez-moi.”
“But you are too kind.” Madame Fortier dropped the snuffbox into the lap of her skirts and held out her glass for him to replenish. “Santé,” she said. They drank.
“You have not the manner of a colon,” she told him. “Perhaps you have not been long in Saint Domingue?”
“I came in the summer of ninety-one,” the doctor said. “About two months before the risings.”
“Ah,” she said. “You chose an interesting moment, no?” She took a moment to refill and light her pipe. “But let us consider this matter of names. Possibly you do not know that before the commissioners brought the new laws from France, we who are of mixed blood were not allowed the use of our own names—not if they derived from the names of white people. But no, it must be le-dit Maltrot, the so-called Fortier . . . Thus you may comprehend the sensitivity of my husband on this point.”
“It is very understandable,” the doctor said.
“For similar reasons, my son has seized the name of his white father and even his title and now calls himself the Sieur de Maltrot. Whereas his stable name Choufleur was first coined by his father, as a mockery of his freckled skin, as if the child were a speckled cauliflower. Maltrot invented it for spite, and still it was taken up by friends and family, and I used it myself with no thought of harm, and yet my son cannot hear this name without humiliation. Still, why must he rush to claim his father’s name? Maltrot was cruel, even for a white man.”
“That was an aspect of his reputation,” the doctor said. Madame Fortier had fallen silent. He heard the whistling of a night bird somewhere above the cliffs that embraced the valley.
“Of course, cruelty is the first quality of any and all blancs,” she said. “Cruelty and greed, no matter how you may hide it. The Church was the first and best disguise. But whatever God created white people must be sharp-beaked as a hawk, or better yet, a vulture. Now we see blancs coming out of France blathering of equality and brotherhood, but underneath it is the same, I tell you—cruelty and greed. I challenge you, find me one Indian on this island—here or on the Spanish side. Three hundred years ago Ayiti held five kingdoms under five caciques —there were half a million of them. One finds their tools and relics everywhere, but not an Indian, not one. All of them destroyed by the whites. And now the blancs are doing the same work in Africa. Will they rest until the last children of Guinée have been stamped out of existence altogether?”
As this question appeared to be rhetorical, the doctor kept his silence, reaching unobtrusively for the calabash of rum.
“Bien,” she said. “You may imagine the difficulty for those of us who have mixed blood. If one has a mind to think or a heart to feel. One is neither one thing nor the other. Well, should I wish myself out of existence? No, instead I wish the white people to the devil, while I myself remain at peace. My husband too has reached his own accommodation. But so we return to the subject of my son.”
Madame Fortier applied fire to the bowl of her little pipe. Discreetly, the doctor trickled