Six #2
Five generations of Honorés in Louisiana.
Five generations of summer heat and magnolias and thunderstorms, of bright colors, of courtyard gardens, of zydeco and dancing the second line and warming spices over the stove.
On my fifteenth birthday, Papa took me aside when the party was over, handed me a yellowed page.
His great-grandmother’s free papers. He told me her history.
Born into slavery. Taken as a child from a plantation in Virginia, chained to a ship and delivered to the New Orleans port, sold to the Honoré plantation.
Freed by the head of the family and made to be his lover.
“She was fifteen years old when she gave birth to my grandmother,” Papa told me.
“All of her children born free.” I felt that other fifteen-year-old alive and present.
Felt her fear and her effort and how she made a home here.
And now we’re leaving.
I cut through Washington Square and cross into the garden. The iron gate, the ferns, the bench under the Angel’s trumpet. It’s smaller now, colder, the buildings on either side closing in. I clip some flowers with a pair of Hattie’s sewing scissors, tie them into a small bouquet.
At two o’clock, I find Lionel waiting in a car parked outside the blue house, a map unfolded across his lap. “You mind driving on the way there?” he asks. “My head’s killing me.”
“Sure,” I say. Throat thick. I keep swallowing. It doesn’t help. I start the car, pull onto the road. Lionel checks the rearview every few seconds. His face looks worse than it did yesterday. “It looks so painful.”
“I’ll heal.”
It’s the same route I drove with Cyril. Same trees, same mansions and river bends. But we reach Baton Rouge and go through it, farther. The bouquet from the garden rests between us on the seat, the petals already fading.
I ask Lionel how he feels about leaving.
“I’ve given New Orleans all my love,” he says, “but I can’t say I’ve received much in return. Honestly, I wish you could keep driving us right now. Tomorrow morning feels a long time away.”
A sign tells us that we’ve crossed into Jackson. Upon seeing it, a heaviness. “Have you been here?” I ask.
“Never. You?”
“Once,” I say. “With Delphine. My sisters don’t know.”
The gate looms ahead of us now. We slow to a stop and I’m relieved when Lionel leans over to give the guard our names and tells him why we’re here.
I roll the car through the gate and the memory rushes back to me: Papa, seeing Delphine and me from across the room, rising, astonished.
Pulling chairs out at his table for us to sit.
“Look at you. My daughter. My niece. How are you both so beautiful?” Filling the hour with polite questions and conversation.
Thanking us for coming when the bell sounded.
“You came such a long way. Such a long way, just to see me.” A gentle hug when we left, his hands on our shoulder blades.
Not a word about when we might come back, as though to spare us from worrying that he might wish for more.
“I’ll wait here,” Lionel says. “My face isn’t fit for public viewing.”
I’m already crying, fumbling for the handle, can’t seem to grip it.
“It’s busted,” he says, leaning over me, shoving it open, and then I’m walking past the grand white columns and through the doors of the East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane, making my voice steady as I tell the woman at the counter that I’m here to visit my father’s grave.
“Is he in the cemetery, or the sanctuary?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Did someone from your family claim the body? Have a tombstone made?”
“My mother did.”
“All right. The cemetery, then. What’s the deceased’s name?”
“Louis Honoré,” I say.
A beat of quiet. “Louis Honoré. I remember him.” For the first time, I look at her closely.
She’s about ten years older than I am, white, dressed in a neat jacket.
A long, thin nose, gold spheres clipped to her ears.
She frowns. “I’m sorry. But I’m actually certain that he’s in the sanctuary.
We were all so sad that no one claimed him once he was gone. You’re his daughter?”
I nod, shame washing over me. But there’s compassion in her voice when she says, “Wait just a minute.” She lifts the receiver, dials a number. “Hi, it’s Terry. I have a visitor here to see the sanctuary. Will you come take my spot at the desk?”
Terry leads me out through the front again.
We round the building, walk through cemetery gates, past the tombstones and farther, to a different place.
It has an arch with the words Rugged Cross Sanctuary spelled in iron, a marble statue of a saint, her arms lifted toward the sky.
Beyond it are rows and rows of simple wooden crosses, painted white.
On the last row, closest to the grass border, Terry stops.
“Where are the names?” I ask.
“There aren’t any.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This is where the hospital puts our unclaimed patients to rest when they pass. We do our best to contact the families, but sometimes we can’t reach them, or they don’t wish to pay for a burial.
Or they do wish to but can’t afford it. A few of us always try to attend the burial to pay our respects. Several of us came for your father.”
A white cross, stuck in the ground. “Is he in a casket?”
She hesitates. “There’s a charity nearby. They make simple cedar caskets for our patients who go unclaimed.”
“A box, you mean.” My chest is heaving, I can’t breathe.
For months, Bernard and Al and Lionel have made beautiful things out of wood.
Tables for a restaurant for rich people to go to dinner.
While my father lies buried in a plain cedar box.
“She said there wasn’t a funeral. Said she took care of everything. ”
“Oh gosh,” Terry’s saying. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. You dropped your flowers. They’re for him, right? They’re lovely. We all just loved him.”
“I loved him.”
“Of course,” she says. “Not like you did. Will you be all right? Spend as long as you need to. Well, until it gets dark. Then we lock the gates. I need to go back to the desk.” I’m bent over, my cheek against the grass, won’t answer her.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she says, and leaves me.
I lie all the way down, curl my body around the cross, sob until I’m limp and spent, my breath rasping, blades of grass so close to my eyes that all I can see is green.
Sunset now. My dress covered in dirt. I count the rows from his to the first. Thirty-four. I count again, the other way, to be sure. The first grave of row thirty-four. I go back to Lionel. He’s moved to the driver’s seat. Says nothing about the dirt on my face, my hands, my dress.
“My mother lied,” I tell him. I thought the emotion had left me but it comes back different, making me tremble. “She told us the hospital didn’t allow funerals, but they do. She told us she handled everything, but she didn’t claim him.”
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t have a headstone made. She had him buried in an unmarked grave.”
Even swollen and bruised, Lionel’s whole face changes. Horror in it. I’m still trembling, can’t make myself stop, teeth chattering now. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “You gotta let it out,” he says.
“How?”
He roars, a tremendous noise, and now I’m opening my mouth, filling the car, matching him.
Overpowering him. He stops for a breath and starts again but I keep screaming and screaming, I don’t even need to breathe.
Everything awful inside of me, turning into sound.
Delphine leaving me, Hattie giving me away, Cyril, whom I’ll never love.
My father, gone forever. The regret I’ll carry for the rest of my life.
Visiting only once. Not insisting. Trusting my mother even when I knew she was not to be trusted.
Going along with everything, just going along with it all.
Lionel’s finished now. A trickle of blood runs down his cheek, the exertion reopening a wound.
I’m panting, crying, he’s starting the car.
We’re back on the road and he rolls down the windows.
“Louisiana, you heartbreaker,” he says. “Goodbye and good fucking riddance.”
I close my eyes, the wind on my face all the way home.
It’s past dinnertime when we get back to the blue house. Stillness on my sisters’ side. A familiar scent. “Did someone make gumbo?” I ask.
“Claire was planning to. Said she always pictured serving gumbo on the last night.”
The kitchen’s empty of people, voices coming from the other side of the wall.
We go out our back door and through to Maman’s side.
They’re all seated around the dining room table, the meal underway.
Maman and Jean Pierre at the heads, Claire on one side next to Bernard, Adele on the other next to Al, with Rudy on his knee.
Two empty places are set, facing each other.
Maman’s candelabra glows at the table’s center.
I expect them to scold us for being late, for the state we’re in, but instead Claire jumps up, eager to serve us.
She carries our bowls to the table. She had told me that there was too much to do, that she couldn’t make the drive to Jackson.
She made gumbo instead, an all-day affair.
It’s good, though. Claire’s gumbo is the best in the family.
I take another bite, look at Maman. She’s rigid, not meeting my eye.
“Maman,” I say. “Did they tell you that we went to the hospital?”