Eden Burning (2 page)

Tee looked around the room. Really, she had never noticed that the plaster garlands were falling from the ceiling. Books were heaped on chairs. A small coiled snake lay preserved in a jar on the windowsill. Père studied snakes.

“I’ll be glad to leave,” Agnes said. “I should think you would be, too.”

There are dozens of photographs of Drummond Hall. At the end of a lane it stands, between a row of royal palms.
Twin staircases join at the top on a veranda, from which one enters into the gloss of parquet and dark mahogany.

The house was Mama’s pride. But Uncle Herbert’s thoughts moved out beyond the house.

“We shall need new rollers in the mill. And I’m thinking about turning the east hundred into bananas.”

Mama said doubtfully, “I don’t know why, I still think of bananas as a kind of Negro peasant crop.”

“Where’ve you been these last twenty years? Have you any idea how many tons the Geest ships carry back to England from Jamaica alone?”

“But the old sugar families here—”

“Julia, I am not from an aristocratic sugar family, you forget. I’m a middle-class merchant.” Uncle Herbert was not indignant, merely amused. “We’re way behind the times on St. Felice and I mean to catch up. There’s relatively no care with bananas. You plant the rootstock and in twelve months you’re ready to harvest. There’s no processing, nothing to do but pick, grade, and ship.”

“It’ll throw a lot of people out of work, cutting down on sugar,” Père told Tee privately. “He doesn’t care, though. A new main come to run things.”

“Don’t you like Uncle Herbert?”

“I like him well enough. He’s a worker and he’s honest. It’s just that I’m too old to learn new ways. They don’t agree with me.”

But they agreed with Mama. Here in one deckle-edged snapshot after the other stands Julia Tarbox, gay and charming as Tee will never be: ruffled and flounced for a ball at Government House or smiling on the veranda with her two new babies, Lionel and little Julia, born only a year apart.

Tee knew, of course, that the babies had come from inside her mother, just as puppies and colts came out of their mothers. The question was, How did they get there? It was frustrating that there was absolutely no way to find out.
Nothing was written anywhere and no one would talk about it.

“We don’t discuss things like that.” Mama’s rebuke was gentle and firm. “You will find out when the right time comes.”

No one at school knew, either. Vaguely it was understood that men had something to do with it. But what? Some of the girls used to gather around a daring, arrogant girl named Justine who could whisper odd things, but one morning the nuns caught her and after that she wouldn’t tell anything. So Tee was troubled by unanswered questions. Of course, as Mama said, she would have the answers sometime, just as sometime she would wear high heels, or be invited to Government House. Until then she must simply try not to think about it too much….

Meanwhile, here she stands with Mama and the two little ones. Père has taken the picture with his box camera; she is about to spend the summer of her fifteenth year at Eleuthera.

“The whole summer!” Mama objected. “Why on earth do you want to do that?”

Mama wanted her to go to the club, to be among girls from the right families, to be popular. Mama didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, that you couldn’t make yourself be like that if you hadn’t been born like that.

“But I love Eleuthera,” Tee said. You could ride bareback into the hills; you could float on the river, just float and think; you could read all afternoon with no one to interrupt you.

“Well, you may go on one condition. Agnes will have to go along. You’re too old to be without a chaperone.”

“My books are getting mildewed,” Père complained on the day he came for Tee. “I’ve got a cabinetmaker coming to build cases for them.”

“Buckley doing it?” Uncle Herbert asked. “He repaired a settee for us. Did a splendid job.”

“His apprentice is better than he is. A colored boy, no
more than nineteen, I should think. Clyde Reed. He’ll stay at Eleuthera. It’ll take him most of the summer, I expect.”

“All summer!”

“Yes, I shall want dentil moldings. And glass doors to keep the damp out.”

“Still, the whole summer!” Julia repeated idly.

“Why not?” Père stirred his coffee. It was a way of ignoring Julia. “A most unusual boy, actually. I caught him reading my
Iliad.
I don’t suppose he understood it. A pity, he wants to learn. Of course, there’s a lot of white in him.” He leaned toward Uncle Herbert. “Some of the best blood on the island, very likely.”

Tee caught the whisper, caught Julia’s frown. So there was something hidden here, something ugly?

“Reed,” Uncle Herbert reflected. “Weren’t there some Reeds who owned Estate Miranda for a short space? Gambled it away at cards in London. No scholars in that lot, I should think.”

“Well, this Reed is, or could be, if the world were different. But it isn’t. At least I can lend him some books, though.”

Uncle Herbert said carefully, “If you’ll allow me an opinion, with all respect, Père, I always feel that sort of thing’s a kind of teasing. Offering an equality that you’ll have to withdraw the moment it seems the offer might be taken up.”

“Well,” Virgil said vaguely, “we’ll see.” He stood up, ready to go. “Anyway, Tee and I will have a time for ourselves. It’s a lot cooler in our hills than it is here, I can tell you.”

“See that she invites some friends, do, please,” Julia urged as they drove away. “I don’t want her spending the whole time with horses and dogs. Or reading on the veranda. She is so like—”

Like my father, Tee thought defiantly. But I shall just read all day long if I want to. Or spend it with the dogs if I want to.

She knew nothing, nothing at all, that summer.

In the blue shade of the late afternoon Père spread a large notebook on his lap.

“Quitting time, Clyde! You’ve been hammering and chiseling since breakfast. Would you like to listen to what I’ve got here?”

The boy Clyde came and sat down on the steps. It was odd that one called him “boy” in one’s mind, for certainly he was a full-grown man. Tee thought, It is because he is colored, which seemed answer enough. Still, she mused, he is not very colored, is he? He was a shade or two lighter than Agnes, and like Agnes, quite clean. He wore a freshly washed shirt every morning and carried with him a pleasant scent of the wood on which he worked; sometimes a papery curl of wood shaving caught in his hair, which was thick and straight. White man’s hair, it was. His narrow lips were the white man’s. Only his eyes were Negro. White people’s brown eyes were never that dark. It occurred to her that Clyde’s had a wise look to them. Or perhaps a mocking look? As if even when he was being most respectful—and he was always respectful, Père would not have allowed him to stay if he had not been—as if his eyes were saying,
I know what you are thinking.
But then, she thought, that’s probably silly; I am given to silly observations, Mama always says.

“This is a translation I made,” Père explained. “From the French, naturally. The original is in my vault in town. It’s crumbling, ought to be in a museum. Well, I’ll get to that one of these days. Here it is: ‘Diary of the First François.’

“‘We sailed from Havre de Grace on the English ship
Pennington
in the year of our Lord 1673, I being fifteen years of age and indentured for seven years to a Mr. Raoul D’Arcy on the island of St. Felice in the West Indies; he to pay my passage and clothe me, he to pay me three hundred pounds of tobacco at the end of my service.’”

Père turned some pages. “Fascinating. Here, listen to this. ‘We labor from a quarter of an hour after sunrise to a quarter of an hour after sunset. I share a cabin with two black slaves.
They are pleasant enough, poor creatures. They suffer, but I suffer worse than they do. My master admits to working the white man harder because after seven years he will part with him; but the Negro is his for life and must therefore be kept in health.’”

“I thought,” Tee remarked, “our ancestor was a buccaneer.”

“Oh, yes! He ran away to join the buccaneers. You can hardly blame him. And yet—what a devilish thing is human nature!—he became more savage than the master whom he had escaped. Listen to this. ‘We came alongside the
Garza Blanca,
a merchantman sailing for Spain, sometime before moonrise. We boarded without a sound, surprising the watch, whom we threw overboard into a heavy sea. We bayonetted the captain, seized the guns, and put to shore, there to dispose of a goodly cargo: gold, tobacco, hides, and a great prize in pearls.’”

“I don’t think,” Tee shuddered, “I want to know any more about this François.” She stretched out her arm, turning it over to regard the small cluster of blue veining at the elbow. “I can’t believe his blood runs in my veins…. A savage like him!”

“Many generations removed, my dear,” Père said complacently. “And anyway he became a gentleman before very long.” He flipped through a few more pages. “‘I have resolved to become provident, having seen my lads squander a year’s gain on brandy and’”—Père coughed—“other things. ‘I mean to buy land and live on my property like a gentleman, to marry well—’” He closed the notebook. “And so he did. He married Virginia Durand, daughter of a well-established planter who had apparently no qualms about giving her to a reformed buccaneer. He lived, incidentally, to make a fortune in sugar before he was forty. Sugar’s not a native plant; you did know that, didn’t you?” Père frowned. “Tee, I’m feeling the signs of age. I was about to tell you about sugar and all of a sudden the facts have fled. Would you believe it possible that I can’t name the place where it originated?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Francis, sir,” Clyde said. “It was the Canary Islands. Columbus brought the first cuttings from there.”

“Why, yes, you’re right; of course you are.”

“Yes, sir. I read it in the
National Geographic.”

“You read the
Geographic!”

“I’ve a friend. He was my teacher when I went to school. He keeps it for me.”

“I see.”

Clyde spoke eagerly. The words came out fast, as if he were afraid someone would stop him before he was finished. “I read a lot. I guess I’ve about read everything in the Covetown library. Well, not quite. I like history the best, how we all got to be what we are, you know—” He stopped, as if this time he feared having said too much.

He wants to show us how much he knows, Tee thought, sensing now not only the mocking pride which had been her first impression, but also something humble. It made her uncomfortable.

But Père appeared to be delighted. “Oh, I know you’re a reader, Clyde! And that’s wonderful! Reading is all there is to knowledge. Reading, not classrooms…. Oh, I’ve been collecting books all my life. I’ve got books from as far back as when the English took this island from the French in—”

“In 1782, when Admiral Rodney beat the French at the Battle of the Saints.”

“Listen to that, Tee! Listen to what the boy knows! Didn’t I tell you Clyde was smart?”

He is treating him like a performing monkey, Tee thought.

Père stood up. “Well, Clyde, you may borrow all the books you want from me. Any time. As long as your hands are clean when you touch them. Come, Tee, it’s time. We’re having guests at dinner.”

“Père,” Tee said when they were inside, “that was insulting. Telling him about clean hands.”

Père was astonished. She had never spoken to him that
way. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They don’t mind. They’re not as sensitive as you are.”

How could he know? How could he say such a thing? And yet he was so kind, Père was. Who else would invite a colored workman to sit down with them? Mama certainly would not, nor would Uncle Herbert.

“Bigotry, besides being stupid and cruel, stains the personality,” Père liked to say. Yet there was this contradiction in him.

Another thing to puzzle over! The world, as you grew older, kept presenting things to puzzle over. There were many vague thoughts in her head, circling there like bees: thoughts about places beyond the island and times before the island and how people came to be what they are …

“You are much too serious,” Mama complained, not unkindly. “I wish you could just learn to take pleasure out of life.”

And Tee would think, Your pleasures are not mine. I’m not pretty enough for your pleasures anyway, even if I wanted them. And if I had your beauty, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, how to laugh and touch Uncle Herbert on the cheek when he stands there adoring you in a room full of people. What I need is someone to talk to, really talk, without having to be afraid that I’m boring, or childish, or asking too many questions.

Père was growing too old for her. Suddenly that summer one saw that he was losing vigor and patience. Often he forgot what he was saying. He began to sleep away the afternoons. Eleuthera grew lonely.

So now, after the noon meal, Tee would wander into the coolness and sweet wood scent of the library to read or watch Clyde chisel a floral wreath on a cornice. There was something soothing in the tapping noises of the little hammer and in his soft whistle of concentration …

One day she read aloud from the ancient diary.

“‘July, seventeen hundred and three. Time of great woe.
My wife’s brother and four of his children dead of the fever. There is scarcely a family that has not suffered dreadful loss.’ Whatever made people come to this wilderness in the first place, Clyde? I can’t imagine myself doing it!”

“Poverty, Miss Tee. There was no work in Europe and what there was paid badly. These islands weren’t populated by the rich.”

He was reminding her that her ancestors hadn’t been aristocrats. She saw the humor in that and didn’t mind. Sometimes, lately, she surprised herself with her own insights.

“Also, a lot of convicts were sent here. It was called transport.” He put the chisel down. “But you didn’t have to be a criminal to be a convict. You could go to prison for stealing a few pennies, or for being in debt. You could be innocent, really. The innocent poor,” he said queerly.

In the pause that followed, the words repeated themselves in Tee’s head with a kind of grave dignity: the innocent poor.