Counternarratives (21 page)
Authors: John Keene
The voice that responded to her, in a hard, somewhat
stammering twang, in English, was not Fr. Malesvaux's, however, but another's.
“Just like you told me to I put enough of it in their food they ought not figure
I'm gone till midday.” It was Job White Jr. who spoke. I must admit that his
presence jarred me, at least momentarily, and I was determined to find out what
was going on. I commanded the lamps to come on, and they beamed with an
unearthly light. Eugénie and White, ready with sacks at their sides for flight,
both suppressed their urge to cry out, but did back away from me
immediately.
“What are you doing up here, you black witch?” she said
to me, her voice breaking just above a whisper. I was going to answer, but I
could hear the hubbub from outside growing louder and closer; with a clarity I
have never felt before or since I could see the crowns of the torches gathering
in the town square, before they made their way up the hill. I could see them, as
I looked at Eugénie and White, who both were so pale as to appear ill. Despite
this Eugénie repeated her question, and then said, “We are leaving, and you
cannot stop us. I've placed all your demonic writings, your hellish
illustrations, that diary full of gibberish and nonsense, in a flour sack just
inside Sr. Louis Marie's door. We also left a letter for Job's father, Rev.
White, and for others in the town to let him know that the nuns were harboring
you, and you won't be able to say a word in your defense. Rather than wondering
where I've gotten off to, where we are, they'llâ” I silenced her, and exited the
room. The door I made sure I sealed shut. Almost as soon as she began pulling on
the knob, as he began heaving his shoulder into the wood, their screams started.
Downstairs there was a shuffling of feet, and startled wailing. I got to
work.
The wall outside the room leading down a storey was an
expanse of paint the hue of buttermilk, but, I now knew, I no longer needed it,
nor the charcoal I kept in my pocket. Instead as I walked down the stairs I
urged Marinette, Rochelle, Hubert, and Moor, all asleep in their quarters out
back, to go immediately to the stables and ready horses and carts, which they
did, each dressing as quickly as possible, each baffled for a minute that they
had had the same aim until they realized its source. I thought about letting the
nuns counter the Reverend and the townspeople on their own, but it was not, it
seemed to me, the charitable thing to do, and although they had assisted in the
maintenance of my bondage, that would endure as a cross for their consciences to
bear. I roused each of them from their prayers, their default response in the
face of an approaching threat, as if they had lost all command of reason, and
set them to motion.
The only white girl other than Eugénieâwhose
screams, now echoing throughout the upstairs and building, had turned into
something almost animalâremaining, Annie Lawrie, had also never been a source of
torment, so I hoisted her as if she were a marionette from the corner of her
bedroom into which she had barricade herself, and spurred her to aid Marinette,
in the process muting her so that she could not give a single order. Not one of
the nuns, not the Mother Superior, not even Sr. François Agnès, in whom I had
had some semblance of confidence, had thought to ring a warning bell, so I had
her do so.
At another window that looked out onto the town below I
could see the flames, at the base of the hill, ascending, like a wave of gold,
towards the convent. Lamp and candlelight from the room seared through the dark.
It was as if I were painting and in the painting at the same time, as if the
inside and outside were fusing into one rich, polysensory perspective, and I
almost had to stop for a second to steady myself. The nuns, amongst whom I
passed though not a single one spotted me, were grabbing crucifixes from the
walls, stuffing books and papers into bags, and reciting snatches of Scripture,
in French. Their rosaries they did not think to look for, thankfully, since they
would not have found them; I had already collected and disassembled them over
the last week, so as to have the necessary tools at my disposal. I continued
forward, forcing Annie Lawrie, weeping uncontrollably, down the main stairwell,
where she had stalled, and outside to the stables, where Hubert and Marinette
had hitched several carts, into which Rochelle had packed enough bread, water
and dried food to keep everyone fed for at least a day or two.
When I reached the Mother Superior's room, the sack
containing all my handiwork was not where Eugénie had claimed, but sitting
beneath a desk. Whether she had put it there or the Mother Superior had moved it
was unclear, but no matter. It was heavier than I thought it would be, but once
I rifled through it I was sure that save for the maps everything I had
accomplished since arriving here filled it. I hefted it over my shoulder and
started to leave the room, when, glancing back, I saw Fr. Malesvaux, sitting on
the edge of the bed, immobile as if stricken. I thought to leave him there,
especially as in the blue of his irises and the sunburnt contours of his face I
could read the pilasters and eaves of Valdoré, the crop of Nicolas de L'Ãcart,
the fusillade of Napoléon, and L'Ouverture rotting in a forgotten cell, but I
thought better of it, and stirred him such that he barreled past me, wearing
only his dressing gown.
There was nothing in my own room that I needed to
take with me beyond the pitcher of water and the washing bowl that sat beside
Eugénie's bed. I made my way back to the attic, stopping briefly to peer first
into the back grounds, where I could see everyone seated on horses or piled into
the carts, which began to take off toward the river's oxbow, Moor's knowledge of
the area enough to save them, and then out front, where a contingent of the
townspeople, their faces lit white with torchlights, were belling around in a
semicircle on the front drive, chanting for the nuns to open the door and show
their faces, and to bring Job White Jr., Eugénie, and me out. I thought to turn
them all into a giant, writhing pyre, but that time, I knew, would come.
The door opened with little effort, and I closed it tight
behind me. Eugénie and White had folded themselves into a tiny ball beside a
mountain of crates. Both had hollered and wept themselves dry, and neither moved
as I entered the room. I paid them no mind and, taking a silver flask, engraved
with the initials “
NDL
,” which I knew she had filled
with liquor from the cellar, I initiated my procedures, pouring a generous
libation accompanied by prayers, drawing a circle around me with the wine,
filling the washbasin with enough water that I could see my reflection. I sat
beside it, formed a filigreed vane with the beads and closed my eyes. Before I
could get too far into my imprecations, I heard a voice so tiny it almost
sounded as if it were coming from another world. I opened my eyes. Eugénie had
risen and planted herself right outside the circle.
“You spook,” her voice boomed, “I command you to get up
and let us out of here. And you're going to hitch up one of the horses right
after you open that door. Did you forget you still belong to me? Now be a good
heifer and do what I tell you!” I closed my eyes and continued my prayers,
opening them only to peer into the water, onto which a variety of images, first
two dimensional as in my drawings and then, as if looking into a magical screen
in which life itself could be projected, took shape, color and form.
Nisi audiam no te exaudiam. The fragrance of fire taking
wing through the bowers of trees fused with voices thundering just beyond the
nearby pane to generate an effect not unlike a nervous system subjected to an
intense and continuous shock. I trembled but pressed onward with my chant.
“Ma négresse,” the girl said firmly, though no longer
screaming, and still outside the circle, “ouvre la porte maintenant.” White was
yanking on the doorknob, but it would not budge. “Have you forgotten how close
we once were? How you were ma pétite poupée? Ma chère, open that door.” On the
screen before me I could see those days, she in her pastel lawn following me
from room to room, interrupting my tasks with questions, demands, how she kept
me up late and woke me before dawn, how she would extend her thin pink ankle
just before I took a step, her chamberpot in tow, sending it and me spilling
down the stairs, how she placed the knife to the small of my back and ordered me
to prepare the wagon and stallion to carry her and her barely breathing mother
to the port.
Build a castle on sand, even with lime, and it will
eventually be a gift to the sea. I did not even have to raise my hand to drive
the pictures from the water's surface. Battering on the main door below began to
resound all the way up to the ceiling above us.
“Carmel,” the child said, almost softly, though I could
feel the blade in every word, “let us go. You can join us if you want to. Once
we get to the Northwest Territory I might even set you free. Don't you want to
save yourself, don't you want to be free?”
I thought about her offer for a secondâseeing the three
of us, they on the one aged gelding still on the grounds, and I on foot chasing
behind them as they galloped off into the dark, then me helping her across the
Tennessee as White and the sack of coins he had emptied from his father's safes
sank to its brown depths, and then me foraging on her behalf for something to
sustain us as we proceeded through the land the Chickasaws still tenaciously had
held onto, where she nevertheless would encounter her own people as well, as
they had seeped like an underground leak from one end of this region to the
otherâbut no longer. Instead, I rose and answered her, “Fòk mwen te manke w pou
m te kap apresye w.” The door swung open, sweeping her and White out. I resumed
my position and continued searching in the watery mirror, until I finally found
my mother's face.
A dialogue
Are you going to waste yet another opportunity to
save yourself?
Didn't I already tell you I refused to think of them
as wasted opportunities to save myself, but rather as stages in my careful
process of preparation.
So you are ready to take action?
Have you been so busy you weren't paying
attention?
Don't forget who you are speaking to.
Don't forget who you are speaking to.
I think I have finally come to appreciate your
logic.
Perhaps, I find myself recounting to Phedra,
Marinette and others, it will be left to the patience of someone more devoted to
the genre of literature than I to record the noises that filled that hot and
moonless night in Kentucky, or the taste that lingered on the tongues of the few
survivors after the gunpowder stored beneath the printing press caught fire, or
the particular stench of burning brick and plaster and ink fused with flesh and
hair, or the feeling of being thrown far, far into the black air with nothing to
halt your eventual fall back to the parched, grassless soil . . .
I personally shall never forget how that sceneâso distant from where I was then
that it required all my powers to concentrateâreminded me of nothing less than a
forget-me-not, white with bright scars of crimson and azure, holding fast like a
last memory or reliquary of sorrows against the bluffs above a small, almost
forgotten provincial island or inland colonial town.
II
ENCOUNTER
NARRATIVES
Knowledge is submarine.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
I believe that if we have any notion at all of what has generally
been called human nature, it is because History, like a mirror,
holds up for our contemplation, an image of ourselves.
Edgardo RodrÃguez Juliá
He never tires of the journey, he who is the darkest one,
the darkest one of them all.
Adrienne Kennedy
Â
THE AERONAUTS
S
cream
I
holler to Horatio's, Nimrod's and Rosaline's laughter, then they're asking me to
tell it to them again, though I plead how at this age I can't hardly even remember
my name. Horatio says, “Red, come on, just one more time cause you ain't fooling
us,” and I start with how it began six months before all that happened, round the
middle of May, 1861, when I showed up for my job as a steward at the final Saturday
of the spring lecture series at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. I
had spent that morning toiling under my regular boss, Dameron, helping prepare for a
grand dinner party he was catering for a Mr. Albert Linde, president of the
Philadelphia Equitable Mutual Insurance Company, and was glancing up at the wall
clock so often I nearly cut my thumbs off dicing rhubarbs. Dameron couldn't afford
an accident so he switched me over to kneading the bread and pie doughs, then had me
stir the turtle soup stock. Finally he released me a little early with the promise
that I'd be back promptly, at four o'clock. Dameron didn't gainsay me earning a
little extra from my side job, but he also had warned me more than once about my
tardiness. Although I was no great cook, hated being in kitchens and hated even more
ordering anyone around, catering was going be my profession, cause as my daddy used
to say, “Anybody can cook a bad meal for theyself but rich folks always welcome help
to eat well.”
I ran the eight blocks from Dameron's to Orators Hall on Broad, where
the Academy held its Saturday talks, and almost as soon as I slipped in the back
door, I heard Kerney, the head of stewards, ringing his bell, calling us to order
because the lecture was about to begin. I was completely out of breath but I
immediately shucked off my dingy gingham trousers and brown cooking smock, and
crammed myself into my uniform, which had belonged to Old Gabriel Tinsley till he
came down stricken on Christmas the year before. The Prussian blue kersey waistcoat
and trousers, still carrying his regular scent of wet cinders, were almost too tight
on my thighs and backside. I mopped the sweat off my brow, knotted my gray cravat
from memory, cause there wasn't a mirror in the stewards' dressing room, and hurried
out to the main hall.
All of the other stewards, including my older brother Jonathan, were
already finishing up their tasks, gliding between the reception room and the main
hall. They had emptied and polished the brass bowls of the standing ashtrays,
transferred the Amontillado sherry from the glass decanters into the miniature
crystal glasses, and brushed the last specks of lint from the main serving table's
emerald baize cover. Jonathan nodded to me as several of the stewards began ushering
the guests from the alcove to their seats, but I didn't see Kerney though I had
certainly heard that bell. Several gentlemen, members of the Academy and their
guests, entered the hall and as I attempted to head over to guide each to one of the
other stewards who would be seating them, I felt fingers winching round my forearm,
like the claws of an ancient bird the Academy would probably exhibit, and sour
breath warming my ear: “Boy, if you had walked through that door there even a second
later I would thrown you out in the street myself! Late one more time and there
won't be no damn next time.”
I turned to see Kerney fixing me with his red-eyed stare. I could smell
he had been tasting, or how he liked to say testing, the sherry, and probably had
been tallying every second on the main hall clock's little hand past the time I was
supposed to walk through that door. I eased myself out his grip, his crisped apple
face tracking me across the room, and took care not to look in his direction. Soon
as I reached my assigned spot Dr. Cassin, the president of the Academy, Dr. Cresson,
who ran the Franklin Institute, and the afternoon's speaker, another professor I
recalled from a prior lecture, took their seats, the customary hush settled over the
room, and the five other stewards and I assumed our places. Shoulder to shoulder we
lined up, erect as a row of tin soldiers, facing the lecture hall's high,
windowless, crimson wall. Stock still, thighs against the table edge, chins up, our
white cotton-gloved right hands palm-down over the lowest button of our waistcoats,
we were so quiet you could forget we were there.
In the front row next to Dr. Cassin, Dr. Cresson, the speaker, and the
other Academy dignitaries sat as always almost completely out of my sight.
Th
e most recently hired of the crew, I had started only
at the beginning of this year's spring series, in February, through Jonathan's
intercession on my behalf with Kerney, and so I stood last in the row and farthest
from the front of the room, though I could spot the dais and lectern.
Th
is month's crowd was noticeably larger than in April.
Thirty-six white gentlemen in the room I calculated, from the furthestmost chair in
the front row to the nearest one in the last, whereas at the meeting the month
before, which had unfortunately fallen on the same weekend as the attack on the
South Carolina fort, starting the war, only twenty members and their guests showed
up to hear the speaker, Professor Benjamin Peirce of Harvard. He had delivered a
talk on his discovery that the rings of Saturn were not solid and how he had proved
the other researchers wrong, and even if I had not learned enough mathematics or
natural science at the Institute to follow him, I enjoyed his lecture, despite his
talking so fast that he lullabied most of the audience to sleep.
Afterward as I brought my sherry tray around I passed by Professor
Peirce talking to City Councilor Mr. Trego and Dr. Leidy, both members of the
Academy; a guest I didn't know; and Mr. Peter Robins, the son, not his father who
ran the bank. As soon as he saw me young Mr. Robins started up the same “game” he
had initiated every month since I had worked there, saying to his party, “I think
Theodore here pays as much attention as we do,” as if he was expecting me to say
something in reply, but I smiled and instead lifted the tray of sherry glasses
higher. Mr. Councilor Trego looked around the room, Dr. Leidy whispered something to
his guest, while the Harvard professor was looking at me all quizzically, then Mr.
Peter Robins again said, “
Th
eodore always pays close
attention, don't you, he's a
very
sharp boy,” and I responded with another
smile since I noted Kerney's glares. Professor Peirce turned to the three white men
and said very rapidly as he combed his fingers through his gray beard, “Certainly my
lectures can be a bit dense even for those who have had the benefit of reading them
in advance, and my astronomical work and other proofs provoke particular
challenges,” to which Mr. Robins said, “Theodore, tell our distinguished guest one
of the things you heard him speak about today.” At that moment Kerney I could see
was turning red as tenderloin and looking like he was about to come slap me if I
opened my mouth.
Before Mr. Robins, also reddening in the cheeks, could repeat his
request I said, “Well, Sir, the professor was talking about the universality of
physical laws and the uniformity with spiritual law too, and said at one point that
every part of the universe haveâhasâthe same laws of mechanical action as you find
in the human mind.” Mr. Robins grinned and patted me on the head, and Mr. Councilor
Trego and Dr. Leidy nodded approvingly, though Professor Peirce continued to stare
at me like I was a puzzle. To break the silence I said, “May I take you gentlemen's
glasses?” After they turned to walk away young Mr. Robins pulled out some coins and
placed them in my hand, saying, “A special tip for your
far more amusing
contribution to our series.” When he caught up to Professor Peirce, who had
joined another nearby group, the Professor once again spoke, his words gushing
forth, “Isn't that an articulate and clever little. . . .”
Not that I can truly recall
everything
unless I am paying
attention, and my mother was always warning me about allowing my memory or the past
to overmaster me, let things go she would say, just like she would admonish me not
to let my mind fly too far, too fast into such things, lest I couldn't bring it back
down to earth, because, as she was fond of saying and my father was too, “Outside
the most exalted leaders of our race what sort of life you think there is for us if
our heads stay too far up in them clouds?” and if anything has to do with the clouds
it's mathematics and astronomy and so forth, which unlike history or literature I
had never disliked, and I wasn't too bad at figures, plus if you think about it,
even I could see from all the preaching I had to sit through that the cloud talk
also had to do with religion, which is what I also think Professor Peirce was saying
but I couldn't tell nobody there that, all they all were trying to do at those
lectures was figure out how things of this world and the next one worked but also to
see if, outside of a church, they could reason Him out, and thinking about that
reminded me of how when I was little I used to like to spend my Saturday afternoons
reading about science and strange places and looking at the maps at the Free
Library, which we too were allowed to visit, and I will never forget seeing a book
on display there by Mr. Audubon, about whom Dr. Cassin, who was also a famous
ornithologist, gave the lecture the month before Professor Pierce's.
At this month's talk Jonathan as usual was standing three places closer
to the dais, and I spied him once again trying not to fall asleep, since every one
of the lectures, no matter how interesting, he found boring. He clearly was also
tired, because he also worked most Saturday mornings, like this one, as he did all
week as a stockboy at Kahnweiler's dry goods store. Since our father had been taken
out by that gang on the West Side, all of us had shouldered extra jobs to add to
what my mother brought in from her sewing. Zenobia, who had just married, like
Zephira, worked in the houses, while Lucius, the oldest, was a janitor at the
Customs House, and he and Zephira already had their own households to support.
Before he died my father on his deathbed said to me, “
Th
eodore, promise me that you will have Christ in your heart, and take
up a trade, and not turn idle or fall into the arms of iniquity, and not truckle or
bow down to no white man, and whatever you do, do not be a burden to your mother,
your brothers or your sisters, and always help out another colored person if you can
do so, and keep your head, like your feet, on the ground.” Of course I assured him I
would do all that, and had already taken up a trade, and wouldn't bow down to white
people, though his failure to step to the side and not argue back with that pack of
Irish ruffians had consigned him to that very bed, and I especially stressed I would
not be a burden to nobody, though my mother, when she grew upset at one thing or
another, like my lateness or impetuousness or daydreaming or failure to join her for
church, predicted I was sinking into downfall's deep waters.
As I observed my brother I thought about how like our father, Jonathan
and Lucius were, tall, slender, almost military in bearing, charming but with God's
fury if you crossed them, and how while we three had gotten our mother's open face
and light brown eyes, I was the one, along with my sisters, who ended up with her
slight, diminutive stature, cloud of auburn hair, and freckles that turned the shade
of pumpkins soon as the summer sun rolled in. From the time I was ten or so I had
hoped and even beseeched Jesus I would gain a few more inches, because at 16 1/2,
despite my mustache and chin and chest hairs coming in, I always had to stand on my
tiptoes at public events, or people were mistaking me for a child. Worse, after my
best friend and former classmate Horatio, tall as Jonathan and twice as muscular,
now standing beside me and also almost slumbering, had left the Institute for
Colored Children six months before the end of the previous school year to start
working, I had had to fight my way past taunts and punches nearly every morning and
afternoon for weeks.
In the midst of my musings I heard Dr. Cassin clattering up to the
lectern, but I knew not to look at him because Kerney was on the other side of the
room watching me closely, and after the last lecture, by Professor Peirce, he had
warned me about acting like I was one of the guests. Instead I stared at a random
spot on the high red wall, well above the heads of Academy members and their guests,
moving my eye between it and the gentlemen I could identify, including Mr. Robins
and his friend, Mr. Linde, a scientist who also always attended the talks. When I
tired of that I mulled over my evening obligations. I had already washed and
hung-dry the white shirt and hose Dameron lent me, and scrubbed away the dirt and
stains from the black swallow coat and trousersâ
Dr. Cassin's voice rung out: “Gentlemen, scholars and fellow members of
the Academy, and to our distinguished guests and visitors to our beloved city and
lecture series, I say good afternoon and welcome. Although I am a man of science, I
am also, as they say,
un amateur du monde natural et scientifique
, and in
that capacity I beg your indulgence. I should begin by invoking the esteemed
philosopher Aristotle, as this Academy and the aims to which it and we are honorably
dedicated, are to that greatest of the effects of the mind at work dedicated, that
is to say, to the pursuit of the betterment of mankind through those means we yet
have and are still developing, by which I mean: science, in her many faces,
including the fields to which our most esteemed speaker today is
devoted. . . .” In this same way Dr. Cassin opened each introduction,
his voice a rake dragging across winter earth, which made me think about how my
sometime, Rosaline, little sister of Angelica, the girl who had candied Jonathan,
had sent back my most recent note unopened. Far as I knew nothing bad had transpired
between us, but something had caused her to cool.