Dernier had been so disfigured by his burns that out of respect for the family he had immediately been placed in a coffin away from the public gaze. In the only bedroom it was quite a crush. His family, a genuine tribe of picky head country bumpkins from Marie-Galante, was in tears. An aunt firmly held a bottle of volatile alcali under the nose of Dernier’s mother, who was on the verge of fainting. Since he had been a Freemason, members of the Egalitarians’ Masonic Lodge of Freethinkers complete with hats and black suits were swaggering next to the more slovenly looking representatives of the Republican Youth Committee and the Social Studies Club. There were a great many women. Uniformly dressed in garnet-colored dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, they belonged to the association of the True Daughters of Schoelcher. Numerous kids too, claiming to represent the association the Children of Marianne. Except for the latter, everyone was drinking heavily and the level of rum in the demijohns was getting dangerously low. Those who had had the most to drink were sobbing shamelessly.
At 2 p.m. the din of conch horns could be heard, belonging to the strapping Negroes over six feet tall from the Socialist Federation of the Grands-Fonds, whom everyone feared. They took charge of the coffin, shifting it from one shoulder to the other, then set off for the cemetery, for Dernier had never had time for the church’s holy sacraments. Like all the socialists at that time, he was violently anticlerical and wrote in Le Peuple that religion was man’s stupidity.
The funeral cortege was unending. The Workers’ Chorale, who opened the procession chanting socialist hymns, was threading its way between the graves, dug at ground level and marked out by the white rocks of the Bergevin graveyard, while the tail end of the cortege was still trailing along the rue des Abymes. Almost right up until evening, in front of the open grave, following the hymns, came a series of speeches that all expressed the same despair. Ah, the mold was broken. There wouldn’t be men of that caliber anymore.
Victoire listened. She wondered what her life would have been like if Dernier’s passion for the disinherited had materialized into an interest for her own destitution. If this vayan nèg, this valiant Negro, who had advocated free schooling for all, had taken her hand to decipher the letters of the alphabet. Does caring for the forest prevent you from looking after each and every one of its trees? What else does love for humanity signify if not love and respect for every human being? That is why deep down in her heart when she thought of Dernier she felt an immense bitterness. She couldn’t help thinking that it was the hand of justice that had lit the fire.
Night had fallen when she arrived back at the rue de Nassau.
It was an evening of entente cordiale. Boniface Jr. had joined in Jeanne and Valérie-Anne’s games. The three children were running after one another in the back garden, uttering Siouxlike shouts. Victoire drew her daughter against her and to Jeanne’s great surprise kissed her. Such a show of affection was rare. She was tempted to tell her:
“Papa w sòti mò.”
But had her father in fact just died? For her, hadn’t he died before she was born, nine years earlier, when, without bothering to tell a soul, he had boarded the steamship and put an ocean between himself and two women with whom he had gone through the gestures of lovemaking?
She kept silent. But from that moment on she took Jeanne to the cemetery at Bergevin every All Saints’ Day. The socialists had clubbed together to give Dernier the tomb he deserved: a ponderous monument of cement and freestone. There was always a crowd around it, praying, lighting candles, changing the water in the vases, and replacing the wilted wreaths and bouquets with fresh flowers; a crowd of inconsolable individuals uttering heartrending cries. Jeanne had no idea why she was there. While her mother knelt down on the cold stone and lost herself in prayer (what was she asking God for?), Jeanne told herself stories to kill time. All she had to do was look around her. Trees everywhere. Flamboyants of an indecent red. Casuarinas. Mango trees loaded with fruit that nobody dared fight over with the dead. The number of funeral processions entering the gates impressed her. It was as if the inhabitants of La Pointe were dying like flies. Here a well-dressed, even opulent-looking, light-skinned family was following a small white coffin. A child. Their child? A daughter? A son? Born into happiness and great expectations. A christening awash with chodo custard and gateau fouetté. Death does not spare the affluent.
A few alleys over, next to a grove of mango trees, a black family in tears was burying Linda, the apple of their eye: 1880–1899. Committed suicide out of love. The man she worshipped had abandoned her. So she gulped down a massive dose of tincture of laudanum. Commit suicide for a man? What stupidity! As for Death, she didn’t need much persuading; she’ll make do with any prey.
When the chicken hawks began to spread their wings in the night air, the tombs would be glowing from the candles lit by an infinity of devoted hands. Her mother stood up, dusted off her knees, and led her by the hand back to the rue de Nassau. This protective gesture no longer made much sense. The daughter had recently grown taller and bigger than her mother.
Jeanne ended up guessing why year after year Victoire took her to this grave, and she understood that Dernier Argilius must be her father. She took no pride in the fact. There is no reason why she should have. She mentioned it to nobody and never sought to make herself known to his family. The fact that he abandoned her mother, that he never for one moment bothered about the fruit of her womb, and let her, Jeanne, grow up in the charitable care of a family of white Creoles seemed to her the perfect illustration of this male tendency to maintain a heroic posture without assuming the real human duties that are often obscure and insignificant.
Dernier Argilius was nothing but a whited sepulcher.
Without seeking to excuse him, one question remains, however: Did he know about his daughter? Did Victoire have the courage to confess to him her condition? This presupposes an intimacy that perhaps never existed between them. He took her, withdrew, and went his way. He never asked questions, and not being very talkative, she never confided in him. However, even if he had been aware of her pregnancy, it is unlikely that Jeanne’s destiny would have changed. Up till very recently our men were like sowers, carelessly sowing the first field they came across. Sociology and literature are full of stories illustrating this machismo. “The condition of the Antillean woman” has become an indispensable topic of interviews, dissertations, and theses.
All that is in the process of changing, like Antillean society itself. What will our American students have to write about in the coming years?
NINE
I have described in Tales from the Heart: True Stories from my Childhood how nobody in my family told me anything about slavery or the slave trade, those initiatory voyages that founded our Caribbean destiny. I had to negotiate on my own the weight of this terrible past. On the other hand, since individual stories have replaced our collective history, my mother on several occasions alluded to a journey my grandmother (whom she seldom mentioned except for a few clichés) made to Martinique in the year 1901. I keep asking myself why she insisted. What did she want to tell me? Her watered-down version of this modest odyssey took up the home-sweet-home theme, so beloved of the English, illustrating the risks an honest woman ran by leaving the security of her own home; by having adventures with men who respect nothing and nobody; by undergoing physical ordeals and leaving herself vulnerable to suffering, degeneration, and death. When I think about it, I believe it was her way of exorcising a memory whose pain never subsided. In actual fact, as a result of this journey, her mother met a stranger and abandoned Guadeloupe and her daughter for him. It didn’t matter that she recovered her wits and returned home, the intention was there. It was proof that her daughter did not mean everything to her.