as Agnes; at the twentieth, I passed out. The next day, I had such a high fever that my mother sent for Dr. Audier.
“I must say! I must say!” he said, shaking his big head, as I saw him staring at my father reproachfully under his glasses.
“What do you expect, my friend, I am instilling values and I mean for them to be respected,” he said to him. “Ours is a race lacking discipline and our old slave blood requires the lash, as my late father used to say.”
“Is that the slaveholder I hear in you?” the doctor gently asked him.
“Maybe! We mulattoes have a little of everything in us, as you know. Tell me, if you hadn’t known me for so long, would you have believed that I have black blood in my veins? This means that my own black blood has been reabsorbed and that I inherited certain traits that will blemish her unless I correct her.”
At that moment, I noticed the milky whiteness of his skin, hardly more tanned than my mother’s. I stared with astonishment at my dark arms resting on the sheets. Was I really their daughter? No, it did not seem possible. How could I be the daughter of two whites? My mother wept quietly and I saw Dr. Audier give her arm a gentle squeeze before leaving.
We lived surrounded by servants my father worked with an iron rod. Some were hired like that young boy a scapegoat my father took in after his parents’ death and brought home one evening from Lion Mountain. He turned out to be insubordinate and insolent.
“Black, you’re black like me,” he once said to me, pulling my hair, “and when I am bigger I will marry you.”
I repeated those words to my father, who beat him so badly he ran away. We never saw him again. He was replaced with Augustine, whose parents themselves brought her to us from Lion Mountain, and from the abuse we heaped upon her, I learned to give thanks for my social position and to appreciate my father despite the beatings he continued to visit upon me. We were about the same age, Augustine and I, and I would have loved to share my games with her, but my mother flatly refused to permit this.
“She’s just a servant,” she said, “a black girl from the hills we don’t even pay! Your father would be furious if you played with her. Invite Jane, Dora and Eugenie, and leave that girl to her work.”
Dodging my parents’ surveillance, I sometimes went to meet an old stable hand, a jack-of-all-trades they called a “groom” in Parisian fashion. He slept on a mat in the stable near the horses. I took out the sugar cubes I had stolen for him.
“Thank you, Miss Claire,” he would say. “A good person, you are.”
Then I went to hug Bon Ami, who would wrinkle his nose to eat the sugar out of my hand.
Felicia was four years old at the time. My mother, who didn’t trust the servants, forced me to help look after her. I had no time to myself. After learning my lessons and doing my chores I had to look after my sister without a break. I took revenge on the sly by leaving her to her own devices as much as possible. Once I let her take a tumble down the stairs on purpose and this got me another thrashing. Yet another comment by Augustine about the color difference between my sister and me prevented me from loving her, and gradually I began to envy her.
The day I turned thirteen, my father ordered Demosthenes to saddle our horses and we galloped to his plantation. I was in a riding habit he had ordered from France, and he was in riding breeches, pith helmet on his head. In my long skirt, frilly white blouse, goose-feather hat, I had the pretentious air of a snob aristocrat of the eighteenth century. I had begged them to take out the feather, pointing out my youth and the embarrassment I would feel exhibiting myself in such a getup.
“Allow me to introduce you to the finer things,” my father said angrily. “You will soon know why.”
The coffee was in bloom. Thinking back, I can still smell the bitter-sweetness of the coffee cherries wet with dew, of mango and quenepa branches like open parasols over the fields; the smell of birds frolicking in the leaves, flying low enough to brush past us; the smell of fresh resin warming in the sun along the coarse trunks of oak and logwood trees. Caw, caw, the seahawks screamed, as the peasants chased them away waving their arms and shouting. I hadn’t seen the farmhands for some time and they were amazed to see a young woman before them. They shook my hand limply in the peasant manner, and one of them scratched his head and said:
“By God, that’s one beautiful black girl you got there, Agronomist.”
My father’s laughter seemed forced. He replied in a pretentious Creole:
“Our race has surprises in store for us yet, Louisor; no one here can predict what type of child will come from his mother’s womb.”
“Except for the real blacks, Agronomist,” retorted Alcius, the oldest of the farmers. “They know they can’t be fooled. A black man and a black woman will give you naught but little black babies. And that’s the truth.”
My father changed the subject, crushed a coffee cherry between his fingers and breathed it in:
“My coffee is the best in the region,” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “Listen, farmers, I know what’s happening on the other plantations: it’s a mess out there. The big planters are abandoning their coffee to dishonest people who steal from them. You know I trust you, but twice a week during harvest I come to check on your work. You can see the result…”
He gestured at the immense verdant expanse, where cherries gleamed between the leaves like rubies.
“Even if I should disappear,” he continued, “you must faithfully keep your commitments. God declined to give me a son, but my eldest daughter will see to the proper upkeep of my business. Such is my will.”
The peasants turned to me and stared with curiosity.
Were they reassured that this very young girl, inoffensive and incapable, would replace my father in the event of his death? They fixed their amused and scornful eyes on me, and I bravely returned their stares.
“But,” my father added, thumping his chest in a highly theatrical gesture, “I am solid as a rock and I will die when I’m a hundred. I am the lion who watches over this mountain, and even when I sit in the president’s chair, I will still make sure everything is in good working order here.”
“God is good,” Alcius responded calmly.
He gestured to his daughter-in-law, and she ran to the hut and returned with coffee steaming on a tray.
“Sit down, Mademoiselle,” she said to me, pointing to a wicker chair.
“So, will you be chief of state soon, Agronomist?” Alcius asked my father.
“God willing.”
“Agronomist,” said Louisor, Alcius’s son, walking toward my father and standing before him, arms crossed, locking eyes. “We have been working for you for a number of years now, but what you pay us isn’t enough to feed our children.”
“Louisor!” Alcius exclaimed.
And his fearful look was fixed farther away, at a hut whose door was closed.
“Look elsewhere, black man,” my father answered Louisor simply, “and if you find better, you have my permission to leave.”
“I built my hut on this land,” Louisor replied. “Might as well stay.”
My father quickly gestured to Alcius and they walked to the hut with the closed door and knocked three times. An old man with a white beard came out, gave my father a military salute and made him come in, putting a familiar hand on his shoulder. Louisor’s wife squatted at my feet, knees at her chin, skirt gathered between her thighs. Her six children were playing under the mango tree, screaming and chasing each other. The oldest child, who looked about ten, was gathering palm seeds to grind and eat. They were dressed in short red jerseys that came to their navels. Even the oldest was not dressed more decently, and I tried hard not to look at what I called his immodest outfit. The youngest began to sulk and ask for bread. The wife gazed at me silently. Her long face stared at my own, and I could find nothing in it but a kind of stupid astonishment. As the child cried harder, I told her to make him be quiet.
“Quiet, quiet,” she screamed at him, “enough.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
“He’s hungry.”
“Let him eat.”
“It’s not mango season yet,” she said. “There’s nothing in the house; he’ll have to wait until tonight.”
“Why?”
“That’s when Louisor will come back with the money he gets from selling the two bundles of herbs he takes to town.”
“What do you do with the money my father pays you?”
“Money!”
