Chapter 5
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Marguerite had plenty of time to construct her grandson’s new past, on the long journey by land to Le Cap and by sea to Charleston.
Even her fellow refugees pitied her: to have lost all her family but this one grandchild, and him so ill-behaved.
René had had a colored nurse, Marguerite explained, and he’d learned Creole from her.
Before they reached South Carolina, he stopped speaking altogether. He even stopped throwing tantrums and settled into mere sullenness. Marguerite was relieved.
She considered making him Delphine’s son, then rejected the idea.
If they survived the revolt, Guillaume’s family must have no claims on René, no questions; the boy must be Marguerite’s alone.
His mother had been a senorita whom Gabriel had met at Fort Dauphin when he went to buy a horse.
She was the daughter of a Spanish officer, a beautiful, pious, aristocratic, headstrong young woman who had died in childbirth but left behind this little angel…
Marguerite chose the name Maria Dolores, after Our Lady of Sorrows.
She and Gabriel were far too young to wed, but they’d done it anyway, in secret, and her family had disowned her.
Marguerite made their tale into a romantic tragedy.
Matthieu’s uncle, Thierry Lazare, knew no better; he’d communicated only fitfully with his nephew. Marguerite knocked on the door of Thierry’s brick house on Archdale Street with considerable trepidation.
The old bachelor greeted them coolly—until René looked up at him.
Then, Thierry smiled. “You have her eyes,” he declared, referring to his late sister, Matthieu’s mother.
“The very color of a blue Morpho!” This was, apparently, a butterfly from South America.
Thierry showed them a specimen of the creature, for which he’d paid a ridiculous sum.
If he could afford to throw away money on something like that…
“Aren’t those wings the prettiest blue you’ve ever seen?” Thierry asked the child.
“Blue,” René agreed solemnly. It was only a murmur—but it was the first word he’d spoken in weeks.
The old man was obsessed with butterflies—and their “caterpillars.” They looked like worms to Marguerite.
No wonder Thierry had never married. The reason he lived on the outskirts of Charleston was insects.
Day in and day out, Thierry went traipsing about the nearby fields to collect his worms, which he brought home alive.
Outside his house, the society was hardly better.
Directly across Archdale Street: not one but two Protestant churches.
Directly behind them: a brewery, a poor house, and a jail, in that order.
This was hardly the return to civilization Marguerite had hoped for.
But as these English-Americans put it: “Beggars must not be choosers.”
Besides, Charleston was only a sojourn before Marguerite and René returned to France. She wrote to her brother Denis, who was relieved Marguerite was alive and delighted to learn he had a grand-nephew. They were welcome to join him in his presbytery—as soon as France was safe again.
Then, the Terror began. It proved the commoners were a separate race from the nobility: while they claimed to worship Reason, they acted as savage as Africans.
They rid Marguerite of her husband and parents, when it hardly mattered anymore.
“Let us go to the foot of the great altar,” one of the revolutionaries declared, “and attend the celebration of the red Mass” at the “holy guillotine.” They sacrificed nuns to their machine and cried: “Let us strangle the last King with the entrails of the last Priest!”
Still Marguerite urged her brother to swear allegiance to the new republic.
Would taking a wife really be so terrible?
Denis would be excommunicated—but that was reversible.
Death was forever. Even after the September Massacres, the fool did not have the sense to flee. Denis chose martyrdom instead.
How could Marguerite return to such a country?
The France she had known was as dead as her brother.
The National Assembly abolished slavery itself, though even this did not appease the negroes on Saint-Domingue.
They slaughtered planters and soldiers till they claimed the island for themselves.
They renamed it Ha?ti, as if they were the Indians’ rightful successors.
Thousands of refugees from France and Saint-Domingue sought asylum in the former British colonies.
After all, Frenchmen had helped these United States win their independence.
Now, the fledgling country could repay its debt.
Many of the Saint-Domingue émigrés brought their slaves with them.
Apparently their property was more precious to them than their lives.
If crocodiles devour your neighbors, Marguerite thought, you do not leave the swamp and take the crocodiles with you!
The whites from Saint-Domingue made her anxious too.
Someone might know Gabriel had no legitimate heirs.
The refugees sought her out to commiserate.
Marguerite always turned the conversation to France.
They consoled her with platitudes like: “We would find the winters there difficult, after so many years in the tropics.” They rejoiced in Charleston’s similarities to their lost island: “The architecture! The flora!” She would counter: “The hurricanes! The earthquakes! The mosquitos!”
Worst of all were South Carolina’s mulattos, so like Saint-Domingue’s: the vain descendants of black whores and soft-hearted white fathers, some of them appallingly wealthy.
The island’s mulatto émigrés joined Charleston’s Brown Fellowship Society, where they congratulated each other on the number of slaves they owned and on the complexion of their daughters’ fiancés.
They shunned anyone who looked more African than themselves.
Some of these mulattos would have rejected René.
Marguerite’s regimen of milk baths did nothing to lighten her grandson’s skin.
His nose remained wide in spite of the clothespin she kept on it whenever they were alone.
At least it had a bridge. She could do nothing about his lips.
Wigs and even powder fell out of fashion before he was old enough to wear them.
She hated his obstinate black hair. But Charleston inundated René with English, while Marguerite and Thierry spoke French to him.
So her grandson soon lost his Creole, and surely he forgot all about being colored.
Thierry suggested that the boy have a “mammy,” but Marguerite would not hear of it. The last thing her grandson needed was another negress encouraging his bad habits. Marguerite kept him away from Thierry’s slaves as much as she could. Mightn’t they recognize one of their own kind?
No one white read the truth in his features.
The word “Spanish” covered a multitude of doubts, as did René’s disposition.
Far from lazy or violent, the boy was industrious and reserved, if independent.
Perhaps that was the Indian strain. His African blood had certainly not dulled his mind: he was brighter than she could have hoped.
Often René reminded her so much of Matthieu, Gabriel, or étienne, her heart literally ached. In those moments, she knew she had made the right choice. Her grandson belonged here with her, not amongst savages. But after all she had done for him, the boy never warmed to her.
For years, he pestered her with questions about his mother.
Questions meant he did not remember, Marguerite assured herself.
She would repeat her story about the tragic young Spanish woman, or she would change the subject.
If her grandson pressed her for details, Marguerite would begin weeping and berate him for asking her, when the thought of Saint-Domingue was so painful. Finally he stopped asking.
Instead, René grew fond of Thierry and their neighbors, and they of him.
One by one, houses began to sprout up in the surrounding fields.
On the very next lot lived the Saint-Clairs: good Catholics who had fled the revolution in France.
Gérard Saint-Clair merely sold and repaired clocks—he was of no consequence—but he had a boy René’s age, Sébastien.
If her grandson went missing, Marguerite usually found him with Bastien, and often with Bastien’s little sister, Anne.
The girl was certainly pretty, fair as sunlight—such a contrast to René.
The way Anne followed him around, the way he doted on her, her family teased that a wedding was inevitable.
Then, when Anne was four, scarlet fever took her hearing.
She forgot how to speak properly, so René and the Saint-Clairs amused themselves by teaching Anne hand shapes from books.
René also endeared himself to Thierry, and the boy seemed to act from genuine affection. He helped the old man capture and catalog his butterflies. In Thierry’s final illness, her grandson proved a tireless nurse. René hardly left the man’s side, when the slaves could have done all of it.
“I’ve already written my will, you know,” Thierry wheezed. “You won’t persuade me to change it.” But the old man was smiling. He’d left René everything—except his books and specimens, which went to the Charleston Library Society.
A boy of fourteen needed an executor. The old man named not Marguerite but Gérard Saint-Clair. In the end, René required little guidance. He wanted to attend medical school. So the year Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor, Marguerite ventured back to her homeland with her grandson.