Chapter 12 #2
At last they halted. Frederic and his friends began peeling off their clothing, tossing pieces at the negro, who caught most of them.
Joseph shrugged his braces from his shoulders and unbuttoned his trousers.
But the other boys did not stop undressing when they got to their shirts.
They did not even stop when they got to their drawers. Joseph averted his eyes at once.
Frederic noticed his hesitation. “You can swim, can’t you?”
Joseph nodded without looking up. He was quite fond of it, the freedom he felt as he floated in the water. But he never swam naked.
“Come on, then!” Frederic encouraged as he threw his drawers at his slave.
“What’s the matter, kid?” one of his cousin’s friends laughed. “Afraid a fish might emasculate you?”
“I bet he’s still hairless as a baby!” teased the other boy.
Joseph made the mistake of raising his eyes.
Whooping like wild Indians, the naked trio dashed into the breaking waves—but not before Joseph caught a glimpse of their own hairy genitals.
What startled him was not the hair but the color of their skin there.
Very like the color of his mother’s nipples, or the Blessed Virgin’s.
Joseph felt as if there were sand in his throat.
It was true—what the negress and his father had said, what they had implied.
Even if he had wanted to, Joseph could not disrobe like Frederic and his friends.
They would see him and know. Where the sun should never reach, in the most private part of themselves, the other boys were pink. Joseph was brown.
He was colored. Just like his monstrous father, and his grandmother the slave. Just like those hanging negroes who had plotted to burn the city, the naked mulatto in the pen on State Street, and that nodding clock in Grandpapa’s shop.
You couldn’t be part African. You were either pure white or incurably colored. Joseph had wanted to be Charleston’s first native Priest. He had wanted to be a black swan. Instead, he was just black.
When Mama had called mulattos “unnatural,” this was why his father had defended them—why he was friends with Noisette and their own slaves. This was why his father abused his mother, and why Joseph struggled so often with his own lusts. Negroes couldn’t control themselves—everyone knew that.
Their black blood explained everything. Il porte le vice dans le sang, the French would say.
Great-Grandmother Marguerite had used that expression when a bastard became debauched like his father.
Of course he had: He carries vice in his blood.
But vice meant other things in French, too: defect, flaw, blemish, viciousness.
Joseph tried to tell himself that the water in his eyes was because of the sun.
He sat half-dressed on the sand while his cousin’s slave folded the three sets of clothing and finally settled beside him, at a respectful distance.
Eventually Joseph realized that the longer he stayed there under the sun without his hat, the more he would resemble the negro.
Unsteadily, he rose, re-dressed himself, and followed his footprints back toward his family. Four white boys and one black had left these tracks, he thought. Three white boys and two blacks would retrace them.
“There you are, Joseph!” Cathy cried, startling him. He was only halfway back to the cottage. “Mama didn’t want to start our picnic without you, so Papa made me come looking for you. We found your hat.”
He pulled it back on, hard.
Cathy turned on her heel to walk beside Joseph. She kicked at a piece of driftwood and muttered, “I hate Papa.”
“Why?” Joseph asked cautiously.
“He says I can’t attend Madame Talvande’s, that it’s too expensive! That’s because she teaches girls how to be ladies! If I don’t go to Madame Talvande’s,” Cathy wailed, “I’ll never attract a good husband!”
His sister was eleven; he did not think she should be despairing about her prospects just yet.
At least, not because she lacked feminine accomplishments.
Cathy lacked breeding. Should he tell her about their grandmother?
If their places were reversed, wouldn’t he want her to warn him?
Joseph began walking more slowly. “I think…it might be dangerous for you to attend Madame Talvande’s, Cathy. ”
“What?”
“Aren’t most of her teachers from Saint-Domingue?”
“Yes! They’re French! The best in the city!”
“But one of them might have known Father there.”
“How could that be dangerous?”
“I overheard him talking to one of Madame Talvande’s slaves—a midwife. She witnessed his birth.”
“And?”
Joseph realized they’d nearly reached Uncle’s cottage. He could see their father, Mama, and Hélène seated at the table on the back porch. From here, you couldn’t tell anything was wrong. Joseph stopped. “His mother wasn’t Spanish, Cathy. She was a slave.”
“A-An Indian?”
Joseph shook his head.
His sister’s eyes widened, then slitted in indignation. “That’s impossible. The midwife was lying.”
“She had no reason to. Great-Grandmother Marguerite did.” The woman made a little more sense to him now. “The slaves killed her husband and all their children. Our father was the only family she had left.”
Cathy gaped at him.
“The way Father talked to the midwife—he already knew.”
“But—” Cathy turned her attention to their father. Her hand went to her hair. “You mean—when Theodosia said I looked like a… She was right?”
Joseph nodded.
“What are you two doing?” Hélène ran out to them and yanked on their arms to pull them after her. “I’m starving!”
At the table on the porch, Mama chided them for their long faces and the fact that they weren’t eating. ‘I know Cathy is upset about Madame Talvande’s,’ Mama prompted. ‘Is Frederic neglecting you, Joseph? Is that what’s bothering you?’
Joseph could only nod. He certainly couldn’t meet his father’s eyes.
Instead, Joseph studied him when his father’s attention was elsewhere.
He saw the truth written in every line of his father’s face—in the broadness of his nose, the thickness of his lips, and the dense coils of his hair.
Why have I never noticed this before? This man was born a slave. He should still be a slave.
He had no right to a woman like Mama. When he bound her wrists to his bed, did his father laugh?
Did he congratulate himself because he had made a white woman his slave?
Joseph stared at his father’s hand against Mama’s on the tabletop: at the difference in their skin, at his fingers trapping hers any time she was not signing. Joseph shivered in spite of the heat.
After luncheon, Joseph wanted to escape again, but he got no farther than the porch steps.
He felt as if he’d never leave this island, or at least that a different boy would leave it.
Before Sullivan’s Island became a summer resort, he remembered, it had served a different purpose: as a quarantine site for Africans.
His father found him on the steps. Joseph sprang up immediately and strode toward the ocean. “Joseph!” his father called behind him. “Come back, please!”
Joseph ignored him. He did not slow down till he felt wet sand beneath his bare feet. He did not stop till the tide washed up and splashed against his thighs. He was still in his trousers, but he didn’t care.
His father followed him, relentless, wading out to him through the next crest. “You understood my conversation with Ninon, didn’t you?”
Above the snap of the wind and the churning of the waves, Joseph was practically shouting. “How long have you known?”
“I didn’t, till today,” his father yelled in return.
Joseph glared at him over his shoulder.
He heard his father’s sigh of acknowledgement only because the man was so close. “I have suspected for a long time. Since I was a child.”
“Then how could you do this to us?” Again and again the ocean smashed into them, but Joseph refused to retreat. If only that foam could wash him white.
At the corner of his vision, he saw his father narrow his eyes. “What exactly have I done?”
You “suspected” what you were, and you violated Mama anyway! Even now, Joseph could not say it aloud. “You took advantage of the Grands! They didn’t know, did they?” Every wave sucked at the sand around his feet, burying him deeper. “If I hadn’t overheard, would you ever have told me?”
His father hesitated before he replied. “No.”
“Why not?!”
“Because of the way you’re acting right now!” Joseph’s father spread his hands as if the answer were obvious. “For Heaven’s sake, son, I haven’t given you syphilis! Everyone acts as though African blood is some kind of curse.”
It was. It even had a name: the Curse of Ham.
Ham had seen his father Noah naked and mocked him, so Noah cursed Ham and his descendants with black skin.
The curse followed all of them, no matter how distant the connection: Joseph had heard that black skin could show up in children whose parents looked white.
“It’s a lie, but it is so deep…” his father continued with all the passion of his race. “I think some of the slaves believe it—that they are worthless, that they are less.”
If everyone treated you like you were less, then you were. Joseph stared down at the buried stumps where his feet had been. He wished the sand would cover him completely, or that the waves would carry him out to sea.
“I know what you’re feeling, Joseph, because I’ve felt it too.
I wanted to spare you that. I know what that feeling has done to your mother.
She despises herself. She thinks it’s a sin to be special.
She wants to disappear into God like a nun.
It doesn’t have to be like that. I hope someday you’ll meet the deaf men I knew in Paris.
They’re proud of who they are. Their deafness—something the rest of the world sees as a burden—it makes them stronger.
It makes their lives richer than you or I can imagine. ”
When his father gripped his shoulder, Joseph flinched but did not pull away. The sand held him fast.
“You must never, ever think there is anything wrong with you, Joseph. I’m the mistake. You were desired, anticipated, welcomed…”
Joseph closed his eyes against his father’s lies. If only he could close his ears too.
“Don’t ever be ashamed of who you are.”
In his mind’s eye, Joseph saw only Mama bound to her bedposts—all the proof he needed that there was something very, very wrong with his father, with him.
Over the churning of the waves, it took both of them a minute to realize that a new voice was crying out behind them: “Papa? Papa!”
Joseph opened his eyes and turned his head to see Cathy standing above the reach of the water. Even from this distance, tears glistened on her cheeks.
“I’m coming, ma minette!” Their father climbed the beach toward her.
Joseph dragged himself from the sand and followed.
Cathy didn’t move. “Joseph told me.”
Their father stopped just shy of her. “I wish he’d let me do that.”
I wish you weren’t our father, Joseph thought.
“Then it’s true?” Cathy peered up desperately at their father. “You’re really a… And I’m—a quadroon? An octoon?”
“You are the same beautiful girl you were this morning.”
“But I might have looked like…” She was trembling. “If I have babies, they might look like…”
“I don’t think that’s possible, unless you marry a colored man.”
“I don’t want to marry a colored man!”
“You can marry whomever you like, ma minette.”
“No I can’t! I’d have to tell him!”
“He hasn’t told Mama,” Joseph cut in.
Cathy gaped at their father. “Mama doesn’t know?”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “No, and you mustn’t tell her. Promise me.”
“How could you not tell her?”
“Your mother—” He couldn’t meet Cathy’s eyes. “Your mother has enough to worry her.”
“How could you ask her to marry you and not—”
Their father dropped his hands from Cathy’s shoulders.
He looked past her toward the cottage as if Mama might be standing there, but the porch was empty.
“When you fall in love yourself, ma minette, you’ll understand: how fragile it is—how terrifying.
” His voice grew quieter with every word.
“I’d hoped one day… But it’s too late now. ”
Cathy glared at him. “Are you going to tell Hélène?”
“Do you think I should? Joseph? We should decide this together.”
“She needs to know,” Cathy murmured.
Joseph nodded.
When they entered the cottage, Mama asked why Joseph and his father had gone swimming in their trousers. She was distracted by Cathy, who’d started crying again. She buried her face in Mama’s puffy sleeve like she hadn’t done in years. Mama thought it was still about Madame Talvande’s school.
Their father found Hélène reading in her bedchamber. Joseph hovered at the threshold to listen while their father told Hélène that everything she knew about her grandmother was a lie. “A fairy tale,” their father called it.
Hélène did not cry or run away from him, but she looked very serious. They should have waited to tell her. Eight was too young to understand. Her first question was: “Do you remember your real mama?”
“I don’t.” Their father shook his head. “I’ve tried.” He stroked Hélène’s hair. She had always been his favorite. “I have dreams sometimes…but they’re only dreams.”
“I bet she was nicer than Great-Grandmama.”
He smiled back. “I bet she was.”
“May is nice. So are Henry and Agathe. Am I related to them now?”
He kissed the top of her head as if she’d said everything right. “We are all related, ma poulette. God created every one of us. Remember that.”