Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [106]
11
In the fresh damp cool of morning, Elise walked from the rear of the grand’case of Habitation Thibodet, following the shallow canal her brother had designed to the peak of a low rise, then diverging from it, moving downhill again, through the small mud-walled cases and their patchy gardens. Her daughter, Sophie, and her brother’s wife, Nanon, accompanied her, but they did not converse. Nanon seemed abstracted (perhaps she was merely sleepy) and Sophie was busy running after butterflies, laughing and swinging her empty basket round her head.
Elise watched her, reserving judgment. When they left the house this morning, she’d been unable to influence Sophie to put on shoes. The black women who were just coming out of the little cases, waisting the cotton door-curtains with string to admit light and air, smiled at the flashing of the girl’s dusty heels, then turned on Elise just slightly more fixed smiles. Even now she must still be the white mistress to them, after so much upheaval and change.
The day seemed ordinary, tranquil as any. If these black women had breathed any rumor of the trouble fermenting at Le Cap, they gave no sign of it . . . and Elise knew them well enough to sense when some such knowledge was quietly shared among them. She herself knew little more than they. No news had come, since their departure, of the impasse between Christophe and the French fleet. No word from the doctor either, and of course Nanon’s slight aloofness might be explained by her concern for him. It was like her not to speak of it.
Now they had come to the border of Habitation Thibodet with Habitation Sancey, a citrus hedge on the near side and a cactus fence on the other, punctured by gaps through which spotted goats came wandering. Here was a crossroads, at the meeting of a path which crossed the stream between the two properties with another trail running parallel to the tumbling water. In the dark green shade of an old manguier there was a little market; women had come down from the heights of the surrounding mornes with baskets of oranges, limes, papaya, and corrosol, stalks of bananas and plantain, bunches of manioc root still crusted with black earth. Today Elise had come for mangoes. There were several different sorts: mangues fils rouges, mangues baptistes, and the small sweet rosy mangoes, no bigger than a peach, for which the region of Ennery was known.
Elise negotiated, while Nanon, once a price had been agreed, packed the purchases into one of their baskets. Elise bargained with determination, sometimes miming a flat departure if the price would not come down. She was thinking as she often did that many of these mangoes must have been harvested from her own fruit trees on Habitation Thibodet. In the end the baskets were full and Elise added a couple of avocados and two pineapples to the store. Reaching into the pocket tied below the slit of her skirt, she withdrew a small bag of soft Spanish leather and shook out a few coins to pay.
“Be so good as to carry these baskets back to the house,” she said. “I have an errand in this direction.” She glanced across the stream toward the gap in the cactus, through which the path wound on through Habitation Sancey.
Nanon simply nodded to this announcement, leaving her eyes lowered, but Sophie shook her head. She could not speak immediately, because one of the market women had given her a mangue fils rouges and she was busy sucking the pulpy seed, unconscious as any bossale fresh off the coast of Africa.
“I want to go with you, Maman.”
“You may not,” Elise said, and then more mildly, “Not today.”
Sophie flung the seed into the stream and stamped her foot. Her full lips parted, but Elise cut in before she could pronounce a word.
“You are impertinent,” she said. “If you persist, I may as well send you to Madame Arnaud to be