The Eden Hunter (14 page)

She changed back into her slave-clothes and then turned to leave. The long feather dangled from her fingers, and she let it trail along the floor as she walked toward the door. She was smiling, seemed to wink at nothing as she left the room. It was only later, much later, that Gustave realized she had been well aware of his presence, that she had known he was there but simply did not care.

Within the week Simone was given her freedom. A room was prepared for her in the house, a bedroom that connected to that of Trépagnier. On cool and breezy evenings she would stroll with a parasol through the oaks. Gustave would see her preparing to leave the house and rush to throw open the door. They had been childhood playmates, were in fact cousins of some degree. He was very much in love with her and she knew this. She would sneer as she sent him on some small task or errand. “Fetch me a glass of water,” she would tell him. “Find me my comb at once.” After he brought her one comb she would send him for another. “No,” she would say. “The pretty one made of tortoise.”

To these humiliations Gustave would only dip his head and say,
Oui, Mademoiselle
—thinking all the while that soon, very soon, they would be equals again. He would be free and he would go to New Orleans and he would send for her. One, two, three went this plan of his.

 

KAU LISTENED TO Beah and realized that she was having her fun with this story of Garçon’s, embellishing the details, manipulating the facts. So it is with all storytellers everywhere, he figured. And then he closed his eyes as she continued.

 

THE BIRTHDAY. IN the morning Gustave takes breakfast to Trépagnier on the back of the veranda that belts the big house. It is March and the weather is pleasant still. Sugarcane runs for a green half mile before giving way to marsh, and slaves are toiling in the fields. Gustave places a silver tray gently on a wrought-iron table and then grins at his master. He thinks he can smell the linger of Simone’s perfume on Trépagnier’s pale skin. The planter thanks him, and then he opens his linen napkin with a violent snap.

Gustave grins wider. “Is there anything else I might bring you, Maître?”

The planter appears to think for a moment. He shakes his head. “No,” he says finally.

Trépagnier finishes his breakfast and then dawdles in his library until the early afternoon, writing letters to family in France. At two o’clock he takes a nap in his room until three o’clock. At three fifteen the stable boy has his horse saddled and waiting
exactly twenty paces from the front steps of the house. Gustave watches from the window as his master rides out to survey the fields. He hears footsteps behind him and turns. It is Simone and she is smiling.

“Happy birthday, my sweet cousin,” she tells him.

Gustave nods and then thanks her.

Simone stands there, expressionless and silent, volunteering nothing. She is waiting for him to ask his question. He yields to her. “Does he remember, Simone?”

“Mademoiselle.”

“Mademoiselle.”

She smiles again, licks her lips, pouts and then laughs. It is all too much for him. He takes her and he shakes her. She keeps on with her laughing and plays a child’s game, letting her giggles rise and fall with the rhythm of his thrusts. She goes
uh
and
uh
and
uh
like a little girl amused, until at last he turns her loose and hurries outside.

Gustave stands alone on the veranda. He can see Trépagnier silhouetted atop the distant levee. The planter has checked his horse and looks to be staring right back. The sky is darkening. Gustave grows bold and waves, but his master gives no reply. Trépagnier spurs his mount and pushes on along the river. The birthday slave remains on the veranda, watching horse and rider move farther and farther away.

A month passes. The field slaves have been at him, and Gustave thinks even his mother finds some entertainment in their taunts. Finally he cannot bear the waiting any longer. Trépagnier is reading
in the parlor when Gustave makes his shy approach. “Maître,” he asks, “may we speak?”

Trépagnier sighs and puts down one of the leather-bound books from his library—
Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes
. A book of ideas. Perhaps the first such book Gustave himself was ever allowed to read. “Certainly,” says Trépagnier. “What is it?”

Gustave stares at his feet. He has started to sob. “It was my twenty-first birthday,” he says. “Thirty-three days ago.”

“I see,” says Trépagnier.

“Yes.”

“This is not at all proper, Gustave. Not at all proper.”

“And I beg your pardon for that, Maître.”

“Listen,” says Trépagnier. “Circumstances have changed. I need you here. You are just too important to this house.”

“Maître?”

“I think you understand.”

Gustave begins to speak but his master stops him.

“No,” says Trépagnier. “We are finished.”

Gustave leaves the parlor and Simone is there in the great hall. She has been listening through the door, that much is clear. She brushes the back of her small hand across his wet face. “I am so sorry, my cousin,” she coos. He takes hold of her wrist, and she ticks a finger in the space between them. “Do not make me scream for your
maître
,” she tells him.

That night Gustave packs his few things into a pillowslip, and he is almost to the door when Simone catches him. He looks at her
and sees her soften. They go together onto the veranda and she kisses his cheek. She promises that she will say nothing to Trépagnier, that she will distract him for as long as she is able. Even as Gustave runs he imagines her in the planter’s room. It is morning, yet still their master’s head moves between her sleek legs. By the time Trépagnier notices that his favorite slave has gone missing, the trail will be long past cold.

The outlier years. Gustave steals a pirogue from a trapper cabin, then takes to the brackish marsh that separates the river from Lake Pontchartrain. As a house slave he knows nothing of nature, and he spends several days lost in the tangle of marsh channels. Finally two negro men out gigging flounder happen upon him. Too weak to stand, he is sprawled in the pirogue catching raindrops in his mouth. These maroons tie his pirogue to their own, then tow him south into the cypress swamp that borders the hourglass marsh.

There are ten of them in the maroon community, seven men and three women. A runaway named Melissa nurses Gustave back to health, wetting his sun-cracked lips with a damp rag, chewing his food even. In a week he is at near-full strength. They ask him his name but he keeps that for himself. Their leader shrugs. Jacques is a veteran of Saint-Domingue. He served under Toussaint. He was captured on the southern slope of Pic la Selle, placed on a slave ship that brought him to New Orleans. His French remains that of the islands. Jacques spits and says, As you wish, young man. We will call you what I have been calling you. We will call you the boy. We will all call you Garçon.

He and Melissa are married. They have a son born dead. Melissa is lost to yellow fever. He has a new name, and this Garçon remains for five years with the maroons. It is a hard life, an Indian life, and he has learned to live wild. There are thirty of them now—men, women and children—but at night he still dreams of Simone and her feathers. In his mind he has killed Trépagnier a hundred different times in a hundred different ways.

The slave revolt of 1811. A mulatto slave named Charles Deslondes lives upriver from Trépagnier, and in the fall of 1810 he is hired out by Madam Deslondes to the plantation of Colonel André for the sugar harvest. Charles is a slave driver—a slave himself, but also an overseer of slaves. The fields have been burned and are ready to strip. Every morning Charles takes his tired slaves to the black and smoking fields.

In December a messenger finds his way to the maroon leader Jacques, and he learns that this Charles Deslondes is planning an insurrection. Many slaves are eager to follow. They will overthrow the masters of the river plantations and then march on New Orleans. They will form a free negro republic at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Follow me. Follow me. Follow me.

Garçon listens as Jacques makes his presentation to the maroons, and then a vote is taken among the men. They will all throw in their lot with Charles Deslondes. New Orleans will be theirs.

January 8, 1811. At first it is raining but then it is clear. The big moon is only a day away from full. The maroons have moved inland and are hiding in a thicket that runs along the river road. They hear scattered gunfire in the direction of the André plantation to the
north, and then at midnight the revolutionaries appear on the shell road. Jacques gives a cry popular during the island war. Deslondes is on horseback, and at least fifty men follow him already. They come armed with cane knives and clubs and axes, a few stolen muskets. The bloodied shirt of André’s dead son hangs from a pike of red maple, and the maroons fall in behind this banner. Soon others come. Their numbers swell.
Sur la Orleans
, they chant over and again.
Sur la Orleans
.

The slaves loot and burn three abandoned plantations before they at last reach that of Trépagnier. The planter is waiting for them on the veranda, armed with a two-barreled fowling piece. He fires twice and then takes up his sabre. Garçon raises his voice but the others pour forward. Trépagnier is dead before Garçon can kill him. The fieldhands give a cheer. Garçon calls out for his mother but is told by a celebrating uncle that she died that past spring.

A slave stands at the entrance to Simone’s bedroom. Garçon pushes him aside and then he sees her. She is crumbled on the hardwood floor, a smoking pistol in her hand, a hole in her head.

Outside they have cut Trépagnier’s body into pieces, and Garçon takes the only revenge he can think of on his old master. He collects the planter’s arms and legs and head and torso into a cane basket, then carries them down the long road that leads from the house to the river. He throws all of Trépagnier into the muddy water, hoping that with this done the man’s scattered soul will never know peace. And then Garçon looks back once at the slave army before he enters the powerful river himself. Even as he swims he thinks that he will drown, but somehow he does not.

Garçon spends two weeks creeping north through the high grass of the riverbank. One night he takes a forgotten newspaper from a plantation dock. When the militiamen came they came hard. In three days the rebellion was put down. Sixty-six slaves were killed in the fighting, another sixteen put on trial. Jacques and Charles were in that second number. They were executed and decapitated, their heads placed on poles along the river road.

The negro fort. Garçon hears a voice that sounds like Simone’s telling him to go east. He crosses the river a second time, then journeys for two hundred miles. He becomes an outlier again and is one day taken in by another colony of runaways. They are living atop a shellmound in the delta of the Alabama River when the war with England comes. In 1814 a rumor reaches these maroons. The British have landed in Spanish Florida and are building a fort on the Apalachicola River. They are recruiting negroes to fight the Americans. This is an opportunity for true freedom. This is a chance to be legitimate. The voice comes once more—Simone’s sweet voice—and Garçon again pushes east.

The commander of the British fort is a man named Nicholls, and he soon makes Garçon—the genius multilingual, a man with no real name—a sergeant in the Corps of Colonial Marines. Many more runaways arrive. American slaves and Spanish slaves both. Free negroes and Indians, too. Red Stick Creeks. Seminoles. Some Choctaws, even.

The war is over before the fort ever sees battle. Nicholls is ordered back to England, but he hesitates. He seems an honorable man. Again orders are issued, and in the summer of 1815 Nicholls
finally relents. There is a speech, a speech about loyalty and duty. Nicholls promises his recruits that he will return for them. Hold this fort for Britain, men.

A mixed-blood trader lives on the river. This man’s father was an Englishman. Nicholls commissions him a lieutenant, and the negro soldiers are all placed under his command. Nicholls is gone one week before the soldiers run this lieutenant off. Garçon is chosen as the man they will now follow. He is given the lieutenant’s sword, and soon they take to calling him General, their general.

I
T WAS THREE days of this parceled hearsay tale before Beah finally permitted him to speak. She sat on his bedside one morning and asked him his name. The camp bed bulged under her weight, and he rolled sideways against her. She put her hand on his chest, then twisted the front of his nightshirt into her fist. “And don be askin me to call you Garçon or nothin,” she said.

He hesitated. The infirmary was very hot and smelled of sweat. He tested his plugged voice. “Kau,” he whispered. His eyes remained closed as he spoke.

She repeated his name back to him. “So that be African?” she asked.

He nodded and she laughed.

“I bet you got a wild story too, Kau.”

He opened his eyes but said nothing.

“All right. So I see, quiet man. How’s that foot doin you?”

“Be doin good now.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

She pulled the thin sheet back and squeezed his sore ankle. He yelped in pain and kicked at her with his good foot—his left foot—but missed. “You lie.” She stood and slapped her side as she sang. “You lie, lie, lie.”

He tried to turn away from the big dancing nurse. “Lemme alone,” he said.

“Look here.” She dragged a pair of crutches over from the corner of the infirmary. “Sit up,” she told him.

He sighed but swiveled his legs around so that he was perched on the walnut frame of the camp bed. She passed him the wooden crutches, and he saw that both ends had been cut down to fit him.