Chapter 3
Everything is disastrous under slavery; it renders the master cruel, vindictive, proud; it renders the slave sluggish, deceitful, hypocritical; sometimes it brings man to atrocities which, without it, he would never have been capable.
In the humid oppression of August, sleep was a welcome release. Naturally, as soon as Marguerite achieved it, she felt a familiar hand on her shoulder and heard Matthieu’s voice in her ear. Their year of continence had certainly fed the flames of his desire.
“It’s too hot, Matthieu…” she moaned.
“Please, Marguerite.” For heaven’s sake, he sounded as frantic as he’d been at nineteen.
Something assaulted her nostrils then, at once pleasant and acrid, and she squinted open her eyes. “Do I smell…smoke?”
“The cane is on fire.”
She still didn’t understand why Matthieu was waking her. He had planned the plantation to protect them from such danger. Even in this drought, the flames shouldn’t jump across the irrigation ditches. She rubbed her eyes. “A lightning strike?”
“I don’t think so.”
The silence began to worry her—not a single tree frog or insect drumming.
Marguerite’s bleary vision focused slowly on a pattern of blue and ivory stripes: Matthieu’s banyan.
He had said he wanted to finish reading the latest Affiches Américaines before retiring—yet beneath the robe, he still wore his breeches, as if he had never intended to come to bed.
When he turned his attention from her, Marguerite followed his gaze through the mosquito netting. étienne stood in the doorway holding a rifle as tall as he was. She sat up at once.
“Pellé rode to warn us,” Matthieu explained. For the first time, she saw the pistol butt sticking out of his banyan pocket. “There’s a band of negroes coming up the road. They’ve got hoes and cane knives.”
“What?” She stared at the window as though she could see them. Through the slats seeped only a strange orange glow. It couldn’t be any of their slaves rebelling. Perhaps their family was not as lenient as the Gallifets, but neither were they like “Caradeux le cruel,” burying negroes alive in the—
“You have to hide yourself, Maman.” étienne was offering her a pair of his own leather boots.
Matthieu caressed her cheek, but only for a moment. “You are still a beautiful woman, Marguerite.”
What use did flattery have— Then she realized what he meant: Forty-nine years and eight childbirths would not deter the lusts of black men.
Marguerite grabbed the boots from her son and did not bother with stockings, though she glanced longingly toward her wig.
Somewhere on the lower floor, Gabriel’s monkey began screeching.
“Pellé and the boys and I will try to scare them off,” Matthieu promised. “But if we can’t… You have to hide.”
In nothing else but her chemise, she stood, and found that étienne’s boots almost fit her. “Hide where?” Apart from that road, beyond the outbuildings, they were surrounded by cane fields, and if those were on fire…
“étienne suggested the new latrine. I can’t think of a safer place.”
“It hasn’t been used yet, Maman,” their son put in before she could protest. “It’s not even finished.” Fluidly he passed the rifle’s sling over his head and under his right arm, then took the lantern from his father. In that moment, he looked so much older than thirteen.
Matthieu pressed the foreign weight of the pistol into her palm. “I’ve loaded it and put it at half-cock. Remember: you have only one shot.” She opened her mouth to object, but he silenced it with his own, kissing her quickly—yet so fiercely it frightened her even more than the gun.
“Come on, Maman.” étienne seized her hand.
Marguerite had only a moment to glance back at Matthieu, who tried to smile.
Their son towed her past the other bedchambers and down the staircase without stopping.
At the bottom, she tried to pull against him, to catch a glimpse of Narcisse and Gabriel; but étienne was surprisingly strong. “There’s no time, Maman.”
She surrendered to his momentum. Through the back gallery and down the steps they raced, out into the night glaring orange and furious. They did not need the lantern. From the cane, knives of flame slashed at the sky. Black plumes of smoke surged all the way to the stars.
To the right, she was sure she heard the shrieking of their horses in the stable, and passing far above their heads, the angry hum of Matthieu’s bees.
Behind them, she thought Gabriel yelled a question and his father answered.
Then the snap and roar of the fire in the cane filled her ears as the ghastly light filled her vision.
étienne pulled her closer and closer to the flames, to the heat, until at last he halted at the edge of the new latrine. Marguerite doubled over, but she could not catch her breath; she inhaled only burning air.
Her son set the lantern near the pit and tapped the top rung of the ladder. “You go first, Maman.”
She hesitated, still gasping, looking over her shoulder past the plumeria trees to the house. She heard a gunshot.
“We have to hurry,” étienne urged, taking the pistol from her.
She had no choice. She descended cautiously, keenly aware that she was nearly naked, with nothing beneath her chemise but étienne’s boots, without even a cap.
At least the half-dug latrine was not as deep as she’d feared—not quite six feet.
Inside, she could breathe more easily. Her son knelt at the edge and handed her back the pistol as well as the lantern.
In the candlelight, she scanned the small floor of the pit for a flat spot.
When she’d set down the lantern and the pistol, she looked up to find her son still above ground.
He was pushing the ladder at an angle into the latrine, till its top sank below the surface of the earth.
“étienne, what are you doing?”
He checked the flintlock mechanism of his rifle. “I have to help Papa.”
From the direction of the house, shouts now—and more shots.
étienne turned toward them as well. “I have to help Gabriel and Narcisse.”
“No, étienne!” She reached for his ankle, but he had only to step away from the pit, and in an instant he was lost to her.
“étienne!” She sucked in a terrified breath and tried to hoist herself above the earth.
But the breath was all smoke; her lungs seized with coughing, and she collapsed into the latrine.
She did not know how much time passed before she recovered enough to move.
Her eyes tearing, she groped for the ladder and dragged herself upwards into a ceiling of heat.
She held her breath as best she could, but the stench of burning overwhelmed her and took on a new edge, harsher than the cane.
She supposed she was roasting now. She dared not open her eyes any farther, but—
Her left foot slipped between the rungs, and she fell hard against the ladder.
It wobbled sideways under her weight and dumped her back into the latrine.
She coughed and moaned and extracted her leg, pulling it protectively against her.
Bruised but not broken, she hoped. At least she could breathe again.
Still supine, she assessed her person. Her hands and forearms radiated heat, and the skin of her fingers was painfully stiff when she slid them into étienne’s boot to check her ankle.
Her hair—her natural hair, cut close to the skull—was strangest of all: unnatural now.
Clubbed. Brittle. Forlornly she stared upward through the rungs of the ladder.
What could she do for étienne that armed men could not do?
From this pit, she could see nothing but a few bright stars, and then smoke swallowed even those.
There was no moon. She worried that the negroes might see the candlelight.
Careful of her left ankle, she made herself sit up and crawl to the lantern.
She grabbed the pistol, then blew out the flame.
She heard no more gunshots, only cries that sounded like animals, or savages.
She retreated to a corner of the latrine, till something hard and bulbous jabbed her in the spine.
Terror twisted her stomach. She scrambled away in a crouch, gritting her teeth at the sudden pain in her ankle and aiming the pistol wildly.
She squinted hard but saw only shadows. She wished she had not extinguished the lantern. She had no way to relight it.
She backed away the few feet she could, under the ladder again. It must be Indian bones, she reasoned. She pulled her knees against her body, protected from the naked earth only by her son’s boots and the muslin of her chemise, nearly as thin as netting.
Was Delphine hiding somewhere like this? How many plantations would these negroes attack before they were crushed? Surely even savages would spare a woman eight months with child.
Marguerite clutched the pistol and stared up at the lurid firelight above the pit. She knew that if a black face appeared, she would have the strength to shoot. And then what? The explosion would only draw more of them.
Perhaps Matthieu had intended her to use the shot on herself. But suicide was sin, mortal sin, whatever the reason… Then again, she was already damned.
Not if she made an Act of Perfect Contrition.
God might still forgive her, if she was truly sorry, if she repented not from fear of Hell but love of Him.
She closed her aching eyes. Why hadn’t she remembered her rosary?
If only the bones in this pit belonged to saints and not savages.
She didn’t care what étienne said, they were all the same: red or black.
How she wished he were here to argue with her…
New, precise pain seared into the flesh of her knee.
Her eyes flew open to find an ember of cane perched on her chemise.
She smacked at it and only burned her palm.
She tossed aside the pistol and flipped the ember from her skirt, but the muslin had caught fire.
She grabbed one fistful of dirt after another and threw them at her legs until the flames died.
Beside her, the ember pulsed dimmer and dimmer like an injured insect.
“The Virgin’s chemise is full of fireflies.
” Her lungs convulsed in a mad, noiseless laugh, that the Creole expression should come to her now.
Marguerite had never understood it, but she knew it was some kind of blasphemy.
Not even the Mother of God was sacred on Saint-Domingue.
How could Marguerite expect her intercession?
She doubted Saint Dominic would listen either; the colony was an insult and not an honor to him.
She recovered the pistol. She thought it was still at half-cock, but she wasn’t sure. Gabriel had given her that shooting lesson almost a year ago, after the mulatto uprising. The danger had been over; she’d nodded indulgently, but she hadn’t really—
A sound speared through her, worse than her twisted ankle, worse than her burns.
She knew who made the sound, though there was no way she could know.
She had heard Matthieu howling with laughter; she had heard him bellowing with anger; she had heard him groaning with pleasure; but in their twenty-three years together, she had never heard him scream. Now, he would not stop.
She clenched her eyes shut and tried to cover her ears without letting go of the pistol. Her own whimpers became desperate whispers, a prayer to drown out those screams: “Pater noster, qui es in caelis…”
Perhaps the sweet stench of the cane would simply suffocate her. “Thy kingdom come.” She would welcome it, to be anywhere but this world where subjects imprisoned their King, where slaves raised their hands against their masters.
“Thy will be done…” The words choked her like the smoke. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those—who trespass…” She couldn’t say the rest, but in her head, she chanted: Deliver us from evil. Deliver us…
If the Lord turned His face from anywhere, she knew it would be from here.
Have pity on me, Saint Margaret… Huddled in the dark, waiting for death or delivery—was this how her patroness had felt, after she had been swallowed by the Devil in the form of a dragon?
Was it morning yet, in France? Her brother would be saying Mass. Offer it for us, Denis… Unless he was in prison, awaiting his own executioners. When she came out of this pit, would there be anything left?
She should have gone back with étienne. Why hadn’t she gone back? Saint Monica, Saint Anne, Blessed Mary, all you holy mothers—only spare my children; only spare my children…