Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [36]
‘White people?’
‘Oh no, coloured.’
‘But he told me in his first letter that his father was a white man.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘All that too long ago for me.’ It was easy to see her contempt for long ago. ‘I tell him what you say, master.’ Then she added, ‘Why you don’t go and see him? It is much better. Daniel is a bad man and he will come here and make trouble for you. It’s better he don’t come. They say one time he was a preacher in Barbados, he talk like a preacher, and he have a brother in Jamaica in Spanish Town, Mr Alexander. Very wealthy man. He own three rum shops and two dry good stores.’ She flicked a look at me as sharp as a knife. ‘I hear one time that Miss Antoinette and his son Mr Sandi get married, but that all foolishness. Miss Antoinette a white girl with a lot of money, she won’t marry with a coloured man even though he don’t look like a coloured man. You ask Miss Antoinette, she tell you.’
Like Hilda she put her hand over her mouth as though she could not stop herself from laughing and walked away.
Then turned and said in a very low voice, ‘I am sorry for you.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I don’t say nothing, master.’
A large table covered with a red fringed cloth made the small room seem hotter; the only window was shut.
‘I put your chair near the door,’ Daniel said, ‘a breeze come in from underneath.’ But there is no breeze, not a breath of air, this place was lower down the mountain almost at sea-level.
‘When I hear you coming I take a good shot of rum, and then I take a glass of water to cool me down, but it don’t cool me down, it run out of my eyes in tears and lamentations. Why don’t you give me an answer when I write to you the first time?’ He went on talking, his eyes fixed on a framed text hanging on the dirty white wall, ‘Vengeance is Mine’.
‘You take too long, Lord,’ he told it. ‘I hurry you up a bit.’ Then he wiped his thin yellow face and blew his nose on a corner of the tablecloth.
‘They call me Daniel,’ he said, still not looking at me, ‘but my name is Esau. All I get is curses and get-outs from that damn devil my father. My father old Cosway, with his white marble tablet in the English church at Spanish Town for all to see. It have a crest on it and a motto in Latin and word in big black letters. I never know such lies. I hope that tie round his neck and drag him down to Hell in the end, “Pious”, they write up. “Beloved by all”. Not a word about the people he buy and sell like cattle. “Merciful to the weak”, they write up. Mercy! The man have a heart like stone. Sometimes when he get sick of a woman which is quickly, he free her like he free my mother, even he give her a hut and a bit of land for herself (a garden some call that), but it is no mercy, it’s for wicked pride he do it. I never put my eyes on a man haughty and proud like that – he walk like he own the earth. “I don’t give a damn,” he says. Let him wait … I can till see that tablet before my eyes because I go to look at it often. I know by heart all the lies they tell – no one to stand up and say, Why you write lies in the church?... I tell you this so you can know what sort of people you mix up with. The heart know its own bitterness but to keep it lock up all the time, that is hard. I remember it like yesterday the morning he put a curse on me. Sixteen years old I was and anxious. I start very early. I walk all the way to Coulibri – five six hours it take. He don’t refuse to see me; he receive me very cool and calm and first thing he tell me is I’m always pestering him for money. This because sometimes I ask help to buy a pair of shoes and such. Not to go barefoot like a nigger. Which I am not. He look at me like I was dirt and I get angry too “I have my rights after all.” I tell him and you know what he do? He laugh in my face. When he finished laughing he call me what’s-your name. “I can’t remember all their names – it’s too much to expect