Loving Women (51 page)

She and her children, with their brown hair and blue eyes, set about making something of the wild land along the Cane. They planted tobacco, and loaded it on the boats that would take it to New Orleans and then to Havana to be made into cigars. She raised chickens and turkeys, selling them in the market at Natchitoches, and then bought more land, and planted indigo, which made the dye used in the uniforms worn by the soldiers of Europe. In the early years, she and the children acted like they had no money, lived off the land, and with the money they made, bought more land. Coincoin found empty land along the river and asked for it from the King of Spain (who now owned it all) and got herself a deed written in the king’s name. Because the king’s deed said they had to, they cleared the land, hunted off the bears, built roads and bridges during those hot and endless days
.

Coincoin built two small houses, and saved her money and then went chasing through all the plantations until she found her lost black children, and she took her saved money to their masters and bought them back too. If she was free, she said, then her flesh and blood had to be free. And maybe, someday, they would all be free
.

And then came the part that was like a curse, certainly a sin, because more than anyone else in the region, Coincoin knew what she was doing
.

She began to buy slaves of her own
.

I think of her sometimes deciding to buy that first slave. She who had been the property of others. She who had seen her black children taken off like puppies from a litter. And I wonder what she was thinking and I can’t ever get it right. She was a woman alone except for her children, and maybe she thought the only safety was in land: If you owned the land, they couldn’t take it from you. But you had to work the land to make it valuable, to defend it, see? And she was getting older, and would never have another man, and maybe she thought, well, just for now I’ll play the white man’s game, cause eventually this crime will end. I live in the white man’s world. I got no momma, no daddy, no husband, and I have to live and build and grow
.

So she bought the slaves, and even had a jail built for slaves who didn’t do her bidding, she the queen bee now, the mother of the land. She lived on until 1816. It’s in the histories. You could look it up. But her slaves—well, when she died, they weren’t freed. And her children, held together so long by Coincoin, didn’t fall apart. They too wanted to grow and make themselves safe, and so they went down the river from Natchitoches and found the Isle Brevelle. It wasn’t really an island, just a giant hunk of land formed by the old and new channels of the Red River. The old channel was called the Cane. The children had been there with Coincoin (chasing bears through the unfenced wilderness) and she had showed them how deep and rich the soil was and how easy it would be to defend
.

So even before Coincoin died, The People had begun to buy the land on the Isle Brevelle. They built houses of mud held together with deer hair or Spanish moss. They turned their profits into more land and more slaves, always telling Coincoin what they were doing, and listening for her approval
.

And by the time Coincoin died, The People owned twelve thousand acres and more than a hundred slaves
.

They knew they couldn’t exist on their Isle without fresh blood. But that too brought them up against the sin of pride. You see, they wouldn’t mate with blacks: they didn’t want to darken their skins again. Blackness, nothing more, had made them the property of strangers. So they wanted to be lighter and lighter. That made it all right to mate with white men. Or with men and women like themselves, part African, part European. But never with pure blacks, for that would be to go back. So they had to go looking. The young men traveled into New Orleans and saw there the beautiful women at the octoroon balls, parading their beauty for the rich young whites in hopes of finding lifelong protection. But not many octoroon beauties came to Isle Brevelle, because they too were part of The People, and would only mate with whites. The young men of New Orleans were something else, those poor lost men with mixed blood; nobody would set them up in houses, as white men did for their quadroon beauties. So some of the men came upriver to marry the women of Isle Brevelle. They had no money, no property other than their bodies and blood. But they were needed, and they came
.

The Isle grew fat and rich. The land was turned to cotton and corn, the cotton sold in New Orleans, the corn for cash in Natchitoches. By 1840, The People owned the richest plantations in the parish, owned more slaves than the white men. King Cotton made The People rich. It allowed them to loan money to white planters, and invite them over to the mansions that had replaced the mud huts. It brought tutors from New Orleans to teach their children. It built a Catholic church where whites came to pray. It brought silk stockings and perfume and bands to play waltzes
.

But cotton also came from oxen and mules and niggers
.

I wonder now what happened sometimes in the evenings, when the masters walked out on their porches while the orchestras played. They could see in the distance the mud huts of the slave quarters. Did they hear forbidden drums playing? Did they hear Africa coming across the lawns?

You pay for your sins. You know that, child. You’re a Catholic too. Like The People were. Like me. Pride goeth before a fall. Right? And that’s what The People carry around with them to this day. The Story of the Fall
.

It came in waves. The first was natural: there was only so much land, and when people died, they divided it among their children so that all the plots got smaller and harder to make money from. The Americans came. All of them Protestants, bony men with cold eyes. At first The People tried to ignore them, sticking to the old ways, speaking French and Spanish (the old language gone now), remaining Catholics as the Protestant tide flowed around them. They couldn’t believe that these pitiful river rats would forever replace the men of Europe. Paris was a thousand years old and Madrid was older. Washington was a village
.

But the Americans kept filling the surrounding lands, then running the banks and businesses and imposing a harder, more heartless attitude about color. Some of The People tried to befriend the Americans. They invited them to their homes, they loaned them money
.

But the Americans saw The People in a different way. Instead of marveling at what we had made with sweat and sacrifice, they envied it. And after a while they wanted to take it from The People without working for it as Coincoin and her sons had, plows strapped to their shoulders, hunting bear in the dark woods. So the Americans began to challenge the land grants given by the kings of France and Spain, scheming and cheating and calling upon God as their primary witness. They exhausted us in courtrooms. They sat down to play cards with our men, not for a few reales as in the old days, but for entire plantations. And sometimes they won: leaving families without land, and more women and children to be taken in by The People, further dividing the limited acres
.

So when the cotton market collapsed, and the Depression came, and the banks failed and the whole country was full of starving people, the Americans were waiting like vultures. All the cotton planters, white and colored, lived on credit, taking money from the banks at the beginning of the season that was paid back at harvest time. But the Depression went on and on for almost ten years. Everywhere, land, slaves, and tools were taken away to pay the debts, everybody thinking: This is just for now, soon the Depression will end and we can go back and do what we always did. Our young men were still told to walk straight and proud. The People still worshiped each Sunday in the church on Isle Brevelle where half the parishioners were white. There were still parties and marriages and love affairs. But the Americans were chopping away at us
.

So was God
.

For then one spring the Cane flooded and destroyed half the crops and a horde of caterpillars came behind it and ate the rest. The budworms came the following year, and then the price of cotton collapsed again all over the world. The banks failed. Again the Americans grabbed what they could of the good land cleared and made abundant by The People. It was as if the great sin of pride had brought down the full punishing wrath of God
.

And so when the last act of the tragedy began, they didn’t see it for what it was. The Civil War. The War Between the States. That was it, the final blow. And The People showed that they were no different in the end from other human beings. It was simple. They owned slaves. So they sided with the Confederacy
.

And when the war bounced off the North and drove back deeper into the South and the Confederates retreated, The People helped. The Confederates destroyed much of what had been built by The People and their slaves. And then the Union army arrived, chasing the rebels, and destroying the rest. They raped our women. They tortured our men. For one long weekend there was no night in the land as everything from Natchitoches to Isle Brevelle was set to the Yankee torch. They called us niggers. And then they moved on. Talking about freedom
.

Isle Brevelle never recovered. The slaves were gone, looking for the Promised Land, and The People had no money to hire new help. Crops rotted. Land went fallow. Families moved into the slave quarters, squatting on dirt floors, sleeping against mud and deer-hair walls. Reconstruction ended and the Americans made clear that all their talk of freedom was a lie. And The People learned permanently what they should have known from the beginning: to the white man, they would always be niggers
.

Some stayed along the Cane. Most drifted moved on. My folks went to New Orleans. For a long time after the war, The People were still allowed to live there. I mean, really live. Not live the way the white man wanted you to live. But free. Marrying who you want. Eating where you want. That didn’t last long. The rednecks took the South. They used their damn Bible to keep people down, to make them feel inferior, denying them even simple education and honest work, denying them freedom. They made sure you knew that no damn Yankee ever won a war
.

So here I am, child. You sittin there with your eyes wide open and your chin droppin. Sittin here with me. How’s it feel to know the damn Klan could do to me any minute what it did to Bobby Bolden? More: How’s it feel to know you been in love for a long time now with a nigger?

Chapter

58

S
he drove away in the chilly morning fog. I stumbled through the woods, heading for the hole in the fence, my head full of pictures that weren’t there a few days before: Bobby Bolden’s ruined hands with the music beaten out of them; Coincoin hunting bears in the dark woods and punishing her slaves; the Klan lashing at Catty’s flesh, eyes red from white lightning and fear; the old black man with the shotgun warning me off the land. Rage was everywhere: my own and the rage of others.

But most of all I was full of Eden Santana and The Story. My own small tale seemed puny by comparison to her tapestry of history, myth, forgotten languages, old crimes. How could she care for my own small ambitions, my little fairy tales of Paris and art, when she was one of the secret bearers of The Story? A few hundred feet from the base, I sat down in the dark with my back to a tree and started to cry.

I felt like such a goddamned fool. Why
hadn’t
I seen it? The clues were there from the moment I met her on that New Year’s Eve bus: the frizzy hair and the dark skin and the way she slurred certain words. I had refused to notice the absent things: pictures of family and children and friends. Drawing from photographs late at night, I arrogantly thought I understood the lives of other men from the evidence of wrinkled snapshots slipped from wallets. But I never clearly saw the woman who was there before me in all her nakedness. She didn’t have the black skin, broad nose or thick lips of a cartoon Negro. But Bobby Bolden must’ve seen what she was that time we picked him up in the rain. Maybe the blacks out by the lake
always knew when one of their own kind was trying to pass in the white man’s world, and maybe they liked what they saw, knew she was making me hers as so many black women had done with so many white men across the centuries. But I would never know the answers to such questions and that’s what made me feel such a fool. I had made love to her and she to me; but James Robinson had gone there first. And I remembered Waleski’s maxim:
I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl
.

My body trembled, I shuddered, felt very hot, then cold. I tried to get angry, to use fury to force out the shame. Why didn’t she
tell
me? If she loved me, how could she keep such a secret from me? Was she waiting for some moment when she would sit me down and tell me and laugh at me, thus becoming my master, the owner of my broken pride? Did she make me love her as an act of revenge? But wait, I thought:
you
wanted
her to keep some secrets. You told her that her secrets would keep you loving her for the rest of your life. That’s what you kept
saying
to her, right? So how can you get
angry
for going along with your desire? You want secrets, and then you learn a
big
secret and first get sick and then get angry. Come on
.