A few years ago I was invited by Tulane University and made the mandatory rounds of the plantation houses in Louisiana. However hard I pressed my guides with questions, nobody had ever heard of White Mango or of a family from Guadeloupe who was said to have settled there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wasn’t it rather a family of Haitians? There were plenty of those, especially in the region of Lafayette. I ended my stay no wiser.
Was the information I got from my mother pure fantasy?
Nobody knows what Victoire felt when the person who helped color the gray of her days left. She became neither more morose nor more withdrawn. Her daily routine set in once again.
Fortunately, at the end of December, her daughter gave her the most wonderful of gifts. She announced that she would not be able to travel to France during the long vacation. God had decided otherwise. He had blessed their union.
She was expecting a baby in July.
SIXTEEN
1911 began therefore as a year of grace.
The neighbors, watching Victoire come and go, noticed that she seemed less stressed, to use a current expression. With less reprimands, the servants played along. Tensions and resentment seemed forgotten.
In fact, under her impassive air, Victoire was overjoyed.
“Marvel of marvels! My daughter is pregnant! The woman I carried inside me is now carrying her own child. A little stranger has taken refuge inside her. It’s breathing and feeding thanks to her. In nine months we shall know its face. Marvel of marvels!”
This belly that was miraculously swelling was a bond of sweetness that tied her to her daughter.
Only spoiled women experience painful pregnancies. The others don’t have the time. From the very first months, Jeanne was tortured by nausea, vomiting, and dizzy spells. Once she even fainted in a store where she was ordering the lawn and lace of her layette. Victoire did not spare her efforts. Twenty times a day she ran to the Dubouchage school to take her all kinds of herb teas: greasy bush, couch grass, semicontract, worm grass, old maid, and rock balsam that ensure the equilibrium of the body. The most extraordinary thing was that Jeanne got her appetite back, possessed once again of those cravings she hadn’t had since the age of reason. Victoire responded with devotion, feeling at last avenged for so many years of indifference. She would lovingly prepare chicken breasts, veal cutlets, and fish fillets. She cooked up purees and breadfruit stews. She especially strived hard to make desserts, puddings, creams, and flans, since pregnant women need excess sugar to nourish the brain.
Despite her health, Jeanne refused any kind of sick leave and, pushing her belly in front of her, walked with difficulty to the Dubouchage school. She had too high an opinion of the importance of her job to pamper herself. For her it was more than a mission. It was a calling. She had suffered so much humiliation in the religious establishments where she had been educated that she was convinced of the need for a secular, republican education.
Seeing her walk past, elderly gossips who claimed to be clairvoyant announced she would have a daughter: her belly had the shape of a full moon. That would have pleased Auguste. But she would angrily hear nothing of the sort. Her child would be a boy. His name would be Auguste, like his father, and would lay the first stone of the “Boucolon dynasty.” One might argue that the Boucolon dynasty was already well established: Auguste’s first two sons already bore the name. But she attached no importance to them whatsoever — they complained bitterly about it later on — and considered them at best as two bastards. Despite the bush teas and baths, Jeanne was no better. Her legs were heavy and stiff with cramps at night. Nightmares would wake her up. One of them in particular: she was making her way through the roots and trees of a mangrove swamp. She did not know who was steering the boat and she was scared. The boatman’s face was hidden under a hood like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Suddenly the boat overturned and she was floundering in the mud.
So as not to disturb Auguste, she transferred her night things to a little room in the attic that Victoire came to share with her.
These were moments of intimacy that perhaps mother and daughter had previously never known and were never to know again. Jeanne had seldom seen her mother undressed, without her ungainly headtie, with her long, straight schoolgirl’s hair reaching down to her shoulders. Like a little kid, she got great fun passing a comb back and forth through Victoire’s hair. She became permeated with her subtle sensuality, vaguely envying her, for she had always been convinced she herself had no sex appeal. She all too often had been a wallflower at the afternoon dances in Basse-Terre, where they sometimes went, unbeknown to the nuns. No bashful lover, frantic with desire, had waited for her behind the boarding school wall. I am convinced that the only man she had made love to was my father. If she felt any passion, she controlled it very closely and let nothing show.
Victoire for her part only knew her daughter in her Sunday best, decked out, made up, and caparisoned. She now saw her without makeup, her hair disheveled, in a crumpled nightdress, and it was as if she had become a little girl again. She would bathe her, tenderly passing the sponge over the heavy fruit of her belly and massaging her with a glove soaked in a mixture of camphorated alcohol and turpentine. At the same time she would speak to her silently:
“I know you’re not happy, in spite of your upstairs-downstairs house, your diamond engagement ring, your torsade wedding band, and your jewel box, which keeps getting heavier thanks to Auguste. It’s my fault, my very own fault. As soon as you drank my milk, everything changed for the worse. Instead of breathing strength into you, it contaminated you with my malaise and my fears. And now I’m poisoning your life. Besides, haven’t I always poisoned it, thinking I was doing the right thing? You deserve another mother.”
To be sure, Dernier would win hands down in the game of who’s to blame. His absence had made Jeanne vulnerable, creating in her the urge for security and respectability, which was increasingly to govern her decisions and take away any spontaneity. Yet Victoire could never free herself from a violent feeling of guilt. Jeanne was what she was because Victoire was what she was.
Bringing a child into this world at the time was exclusively the business of women. A handful of midwives, whose services were much sought after, delivered women from the bourgeoisie at home. But as we have seen, Jeanne was not afraid to be daring. She therefore called on a man, Dr. Mélas. This Grand Nègre, first of all a general practitioner, had studied obstetrics at the University of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Given the ostracism that reigned in France at the time, Haiti fully enjoyed its role as cultural capital. The Guadeloupeans and Martinicans flocked there to obtain the diplomas they were barred from elsewhere. At the hospital in Jérémie his patients called him tenderly Papa Doc. His very simple techniques were nevertheless revolutionary. As soon as he took charge of Jeanne, she was transformed. He taught her to breathe. He initiated her into gymnastics and prescribed brisk walks; before its time, he was a firm believer in jogging.