The ceremony opened with the Home’s choir singing Vivaldi’s Gloria a cappella. Then the governor gave his speech and pinned the medal on the oblate’s breast, followed by the official embrace in the name of France. The pupils bellowed out “La Marseillaise.” There was a ripple of applause, and the celebrations began. The nurses, dressed in yellow-patterned blue wrappers, handed around petits fours, salted almonds, and Job cigarettes.
It was only once the sun began to bleed over the lagoon that the guests, stuffed to bursting, made up their minds to set off home. The inhabitants of Bingerville had scarcely finished grinding, chewing, and masticating the pittance of the memory of that lovely afternoon when two Ebriés, out fishing one night, hauled up the body of Madame Desrussie. They first thought a cayman, a sacred animal, had got tangled in their nets and were already thanking Heibonsha, the water god, for their miraculous catch, promising prosperity for many years to come, when they recognized the unfortunate widow. Her face had been beaten to a pulp. In fact they could only identify her officially from her dentition, a masterpiece fashioned by the colony’s only dentist, a soldier stationed at Assinie. This event caused quite a stir.
The widow was born Azilin Dossou. The Dossous, however, a well-known family in Adjame-Santey, had converted to Catholicism very early on, given two catechists to the mission, and changed the pagan name of their daughter to Rose. Rose, the jewel of the mission, had been one of the first to learn how to sew, read, and write. She had also been one of the first to enter the bed of a Frenchman. He had never taken the trouble to “regularize” her situation, even though everyone called her Madame Desrussie. Yet there was scarcely time to wonder whether it had been a suicide or an accidental drowning before another event followed almost immediately afterward that fired people’s imagination. They learned that Thomas de Brabant was to slip a wedding ring on Celanire Pinceau’s finger. Notified by his services, the governor-general of French West Africa cabled the Ministry for the Colonies in Paris. At that time, marital union between colonial civil servants and “native” women was frankly never heard of. What complicated matters was that Celanire was not a “native.” She was a French citizen from Guadeloupe who spoke French French and rendered remarkable services to her metropole in its civilizing mission. Moreover, she took good care of the unfortunate widowed governor’s child. After much debating, the ministry cabled its approval to the governor-general. In Bingerville itself, public opinion was divided: some of the French demanded the “nigger-loving” governor be replaced. Because of the controversy, Thomas’s wedding took place in the strictest privacy. Two witnesses: Tanella and Cyrille Sérignac de Pompigny, his right-hand man, an energetic recruiting agent for the new wharfs in Grand-Bassam. A carefully handpicked congregation: four or five district commissioners from the vicinity, all respectably married with their wives. These ladies of noble birth, more often or not with a title, eyed Celanire scornfully, this negress who was marrying their husbands’ hierarchical superior and consequently was going to have precedence over them. It was not only her color that infuriated them, but her impudent freshness. Whereas they wilted and yellowed from the heat, the humidity, the fevers and biliousness, she positively glowed. On her wedding day Celanire ignored the tradition of a white bridal gown and dressed all in pink, a pink as pale as cherry blossom during springtime in Osaka. She replaced the traditional bridal veil with a hat veil. Around her neck she wore a wide moiré silk ribbon fastened by a cameo. She looked at Thomas and Tanella in turn as if to say they must love each other as she loved them. In the great drawing room of the governor’s palace the servants uncorked bottles of champagne that kindled few bubbles, and Cyrille Sérignac de Pompigny proposed a toast to the happiness of the newlyweds.
The real festivities, however, took place at the Home. After a festive dinner — including Celanire’s homemade coconut sorbet — the pupils went up to their dormitories. The nurses then slipped out of their uniforms and got themselves up as they saw fit. Well, almost. No European-style dresses, since Celanire had very set ideas on the matter. In her opinion, an African woman who dresses in the European fashion is like a dish without condiments. Then a gang of Ebriés on their corvée hung resin flares from the trees, and the night turned as bright as daylight. Muslim houseboys busied themselves roasting meat and grilling kebabs and legs of lamb. Cooks prepared fresh and saltwater fish, pepper and groundnut stew, and pounded mountains of yams and plantains. For once Christians and pagans alike had a whale of a time until four in the morning.
Ludivine did not attend her papa’s second wedding. Just before lights-out, Thomas and Celanire walked into the dormitory, holding hands. Celanire had pushed back her veil, and her eyes gleamed like carbuncles. They sat down beside her bed and informed her of her good fortune. She was going to leave the Home and come and live with them. She was no longer an orphan in this world: she had a new maman.
“I did it for you as well,” Thomas kept repeating. “I did it for you.”
8
People in Bingerville still remember Celanire after so many years as a kaleidoscope of negative facets, whereas as a rule time tends to soften any bitterness. For them there was no doubt she was the “horse” of an evil spirit who had brought nothing but death, mourning, and desolation. Paradoxically, they also judge her as someone who should have been bound by the rules of society. Men think of her as a dangerous feminist. Yet what exactly do they mean by this word, which has so many significations? They cannot forgive her stand against excision. They swear she made the women rebellious, demanding, and disrespectful of the male species. They are particularly outspoken about the center she created for sheltering women who wanted nothing more to do with suitors or husbands. But despite its grand-sounding name, the Refuge of the Good Shepherd, a rickety wattle hut under a straw roof, the center never filled its function. One year it sheltered a group of wives arbitrarily repudiated by their husbands. Another year, a group of battered women. Around 1905 the mission turned it into a native dispensary. Some men go even further and claim that Celanire was a corrupting influence. They expatiate on what went on at the Home but have nothing to prove it. The African woman, they say, must be the eternal keeper of traditions. If she prostitutes herself, society is shaken to its foundations. But was it really a question of prostitution? It seems that the nurses received gifts in exchange for the favors they freely consented to their partners. Some of the French clients were extremely generous. Captain Emile Dubertin, for instance, left his entire estate to Akissi Eboni, who bore him a son. She made the journey to Nantes to receive her inheritance and was very well treated by the Dubertin family, who kept the child. Generally speaking, the generosity of the colonial civil servants allowed the ex-nurses to live the rest of their lives free from financial worries. Relatively well off, therefore, knowing how to read and write, they married into good families and helped form a genuine aristocracy in the country. As for the orphans, they made up the first contingent of teachers in the Ivory Coast. Some of them dabbled in politics and sat on the benches of the National Assembly in Paris.
Above all, nobody would admit that Celanire gave the town a certain character that it has lost only recently in the name of development. Besides the Home for Half-Castes, she transformed the sumptuous Governor’s Palace, which was a constant reminder of Charlotte’s death. A mournful and morose building, it had become a warehouse for storing pell-mell the packages of medicines, books for the mission school, and spare parts shipped from France for the factories. Thomas only occupied a small part of it: four rooms on the second floor — a study, a real shambles, a bedroom, unfurnished except for a deathly pale bed under its mosquito net, and a washroom where, among the pitchers and basins, all sorts of creepy-crawlies reveled in the humidity. The houseboys regularly killed snakes there of the most dangerous sort, those they called “masters of the bush.” The only attractive feature was a small living room, pleasantly furnished, where he would read at night.