The facts I managed to gather corroborate my mother’s fears. This journey and the distress it caused can be considered incendiary and excusable, when all is said and done, in a life that was routine to say the least. Victoire, who at the time was only twenty-eight, that age when body and heart are raging with desire, was tempted to rearrange her lifeline. I can equate her flight with one of those types of marooning of which Victor Schoelcher speaks when the African, tired of the rigors of slavery, dreams of freedom but lacks the determination needed to realize his plans.
Here are the facts.
Those who are called local whites in Guadeloupe and Békés in Martinique amount to one and the same creature. Since the sixteenth century identical names can be found on either side of the Caribbean Sea. In 1684, Donatien Walberg, having sliced up a rival with a machete — they were both sharing the same bed of a free colored woman without knowing it — fled Guadeloupe in a fishing boat. Quite by chance, he sailed up a river and settled in Le Francois in the south of Martinique. There he founded a family. One of his descendants, Philimond, a merchant at Saint-Pierre, married Amélie Desgranges in February 1901. Philimond had spent many of his childhood vacations with the branch of his family in Marie-Galante and was especially fond of his cousin Boniface, who, like him, had succeeded in business. He therefore invited Boniface together with his wife to his wedding, specifying that they should bring with them their cook, whose reputation had reached far beyond the shores of the island.
Leaving the household in charge of the servants, Boniface and Anne-Marie, flanked by Victoire, succumbing under the weight of the wicker baskets that supplemented three large trunks, settled into the first-class section of the Lusitania for an eight-hour crossing. The steamer had barely left the quai Foulon when Anne-Marie began to feel sick. A little later she began to vomit noisily into brown paper bags. The sight of this woman bent in two, a greenish bile around her lips, was not very inviting, so Boniface went and stretched his legs on the promenade deck.
Ever since Victoire had left Marie-Galante some ten years earlier with her infant in her arms, she had never crossed the high seas. The immensity of the voyage they were about to undertake frightened her. At the slightest noise or rolling movement she imagined the Lusitania swallowed up by the waves. More harrowing than this physical fear, though, were the thoughts that the wind on the open sea fanned like glowing embers. Jeanne had just been admitted to the Sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny day school, which had opened its doors right behind the church. This solid edifice built of gray stone still exists. It was not one of those schools founded strictly for the education of white girls. They accepted colored girls as well, most of them mulattoes from well-to-do families. According to some indiscreet revelations, Jeanne apparently was the class punching bag. Using little imagination, the pupils nicknamed her Little Whitey. One of their favorite ways of greeting her every morning was to dance round her, singing a nursery rhyme:
A little Negress who was drinking some milk
Said to herself, oh if only I could dip my head in a bowl of milk
I’d become whiter
Than all the French, my, my, my.
She herself never complained. She merely became increasingly remote, increasingly silent, a foreigner to all those around her. As if she came from elsewhere, as if she possessed her own untranslatable idiom and her own incommunicable ways. Anne-Marie shrugged her shoulders:
“Pooh! It will forge her character. Whoever we are, we all have to get over our childhood.”
Victoire did not contradict her. Yet a pa vré sa (that’s not true), she thought, head lowered over her tomato coulis. Her childhood had been her only moment of happiness. She felt terrible for Jeanne and tortured herself, realizing that perhaps she had made a huge mistake believing she had acted for her daughter’s good. Daughter of a servant to a white Creole family, wasn’t that a scar that would remain with her all life long? She wondered how else she could ensure her education and contribute to the blossoming of her intellectual gifts.
Around eleven, since Anne-Marie’s vomiting had subsided, she went and joined Boniface, who was calmly leaning against the ship’s rail, scanning the immense horizon. His serenity had a calming effect on her. Her fears appeared laughable to him. She convinced herself he was right. As long as he was alive, she possessed the security that Jeanne needed. Security, that’s the main thing.
At times, schools of flying fish sheathed in silver like shining commas leapt out of the water. At a respectful distance a procession of porpoises accompanied them. Apart from that, blue waves rippled as far as the eye could see. Apart from that, there was nothing else. Nothing.
Although they had left at dawn, when they arrived at Fort-de-France, night had fallen. They could not make out much of the bay, one of the most beautiful in the world, whatever Césaire might think. The town, which like La Pointe was a constant victim of conflagrations, hurricanes, and earthquakes, appeared sad and haggard. The unfortunate coaling girls, described with a dubious lyricism by Lafcadio Hearn, were bent double under their loads as they filed up the gangways of a steamer belonging to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique bound for Bordeaux. Women carrying water jars waddled along one behind another. Boniface, Anne-Marie, and Victoire ignored the line of carriages for hire and walked. Unlike La Pointe, where walking was a perilous exercise because of the pickpockets, beggars, piles of garbage, and all sorts of clutter, the streets of Fort-de-France were practically deserted. The municipality had just renamed them and they bore the names of contemporary writers: Victor Hugo, Schoelcher, Isambert, and Perrinon. To save money, Boniface took a room for three in the Hotel du Prince Alfred. The window opened onto the oasis of tamarind and mango trees on the Savane. According to a tradition recently revived, the oompah-oompah of a band could be heard. They were playing La Belle Hélène by Offenbach. For one moment Anne-Marie was tempted to look for a bench, sit down, and listen. But she was utterly worn-out, like Boniface and Victoire. The trio did not even have the strength to go and admire the statue of the Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais, which had just been erected and nobody had yet thought of slashing her neck. Cutthroat statue. They retired for the night.
In what manner of fashion?
The moon in her curiosity peeked through the persiennes, but there was nothing ambiguous to see, if only to reveal the social hierarchy of the time.
Out of respect for the two women, Boniface removed only his patent leather shoes and jacket. He lay down practically fully dressed on the bench, set beside the bow-fronted armoire, and immediately filled the room with his snores. Anne-Marie slipped on her batiste nightdress. Propped up against her pillows, she began to read L’Imitation de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. She had put on quite a bit of weight, a genuine Rubens, blonde and pink. She blamed her portliness on Victoire’s sumptuous cooking and her irrepressible sweet tooth, especially for the rahat-loukoum they sold at the patisserie Trébert. Victoire, sitting at the very edge of the bed, undid her headtie and removed one by one the pins that held her buns, releasing her long black hair. Then, in her burlap nightdress as rough as a flour sack from France, she flopped down onto the patch of carat palm mat between the bed and the bench. Around midnight Anne-Marie woke her for a body friction with camphorated alcohol. She wasn’t feeling too well.