Chapter 7 #2
Chactas was supposed to be a pure-blooded Indian, yet on this clock, his skin was as black as a negro’s.
Often Joseph couldn’t tell which figures were Indians and which were Africans, since they all had headdresses and skirts made of feathers and the same black patina for skin.
Grandpapa said the French artists had probably never seen Africans or Indians.
But they made all the savages and animals a solid gleaming black on purpose, because of how strikingly it contrasted with the white of the clock-face and the gold of the rest of the piece.
These black-and-gold clocks had been popular for decades.
They sold better than the time-pieces with figures of Frenchmen, Greeks, or angels, because those were entirely golden.
One jet-black man toted a clock on his back, while another pushed his in a wheelbarrow.
Four wooly-headed boys carried a clock on poles.
Their lips nearly touching, a black-skinned couple draped over another time-piece in an embrace that always made Joseph avert his eyes.
One of the man’s hands cupped the woman’s bare breast.
Hélène pulled Grandpapa over to a new sculpture.
Standing on a golden pedestal and flanked by two cherubs, it was the bust of a black girl with a feathered turban on her head.
Below her broad nose, her lips were slightly open in an eternal smile.
“They sent you the wrong thing, Grandpapa!” Joseph’s sister scowled. “There isn’t a clock in this one.”
“But there is, ma petite,” he smiled. “Queen Marie Antoinette herself had a clock like this. Watch closely now.” Grandpapa pulled on the left earring of the negress, and her eyes rotated in her head.
Hélène shrieked in delight. She stood on her toes to see better. The right eye of the negress now contained an X, her left eye a 13. Her turban must be full of clockwork.
Some of the other clocks were simple automatons: as the gears kept time, hidden mechanisms would cause parts to move. The arms of little musicians pulled bows across their instruments. A ship bobbed on the waves.
Beside Joseph, a fat negro nodded his head over and over, his wide red lips dipping toward his long-stemmed pipe. The clock-face sat inside his round belly, surrounded by his golden robes. Joseph half expected his huge eyes to blink, but the negro just kept nodding.
“That’s supposed to be Toussaint Louverture,” Grandpapa said behind him. “Do you know who he was?”
“The leader of the slave revolt on Saint-Domingue.” Joseph imagined the finely dressed, grinning negro drenched in blood and shuddered.
“I put that model away, after…Vesey,” Grandpapa told him. “But then someone asked for it. I sold another one last week.” He shrugged. “Maybe people find it comforting.”
The wide-eyed negro with the clock in his belly did look harmless, his head nodding and nodding as if he would agree to any command. “They do that to fool you,” Joseph’s Great-Grandmother Marguerite had said.
But she’d been wrong about so much. She’d been wrong to take them to the hanging.
Mama, Papa, and the Grands all said so. Hélène had slept in Joseph’s bed that night, because Cathy refused to share hers.
Joseph couldn’t say no when Hélène started sobbing.
He’d prayed with her, and she’d fallen asleep clinging to him.
In the morning, Hélène had beamed at him as if he’d performed a miracle. “I didn’t dream about them at all, Joseph! God listens to you! You’re as good as a Priest!”
But Joseph himself had dreamed about the hanging men, that night and many nights after.
More than the sight of their kicking bodies, it was their sounds that came back to him, their last desperate struggles for breath.
Sometimes, Joseph would feel the terror burning his own throat, and only an ejaculatory prayer would allow him to breathe again.
When Joseph and his sister returned from Grandpapa’s shop, they found Mama in her bedchamber, kneeling on her prie-Dieu. Before she could rise, Hélène threw her plump arms around Mama’s neck. Mama disentangled her gently but immediately.
‘Joseph kept me safe!’ his sister signed.
‘I am so glad.’ Mama rose. ‘But you know what I’ve told you about embraces, sweetheart.’
Hélène frowned. ‘But I love you, Mama!’
‘And I love you.’ Again and again, Mama pressed her hands to her heart: ‘I love you and your brother’—she smiled at Joseph—‘and your sister and your father… But we must not forget that someone else deserves our love first.’ Mama cast her eyes to the portrait on the wall, where Christ held His own shining heart.
‘He is the one who truly kept you safe today.’
‘I do love Our Lord, Mama—but I can’t hug Him!’ Hélène pouted. ‘Why can’t I hug you? Don’t you like it?’
Mama grimaced as if she were in pain. She reached toward Hélène, then withdrew her hand and closed her eyes for a moment.
‘I like it too much. I think you are old enough to understand now. It is very hard, so we must help each other to be good.’ Mama looked at Joseph to make sure he was watching her hands too.
She made the signs slowly and deliberately, first striking her chest with her fist: ‘It is a sin to take pleasure in anything except Our Lord.’
Hélène kept frowning. She did not look like she understood at all.