Victoire (16 page)

In fact, the holidays ended unpleasantly for everyone. It was the very height of the rainy season. That year there were no hurricanes
or gales, but the rain intensified. Torrents of water poured monotonously from the sky. The gutters overflowed. The garden was transformed into a muddy lake. The rain put an end to the walks through the forest or swimming at Prise d’Eau. They would drink grogs with heavy doses of Féneteau
les grappes blanches
rum. As a distraction, relatively speaking, on Sundays, braving the bad weather, the family would drive down to the church in Petit-Bourg where Boniface had negotiated the hire of a pew in the center aisle. The Walbergs huddled together on the bench under the inquisitive looks of the natives: Anne-Marie and the two Bonifaces displaying their ostentatious devotion as notables and declaiming in a loud voice the words in Latin; Valérie-Anne, bored to death; Victoire, crushed by the silent hostility of her daughter, barely containing her tears; Jeanne having no time for the Confiteor, the Agnus Dei, or the Sanctus, but beating her breast instead and repeating:

“I hate them! I hate them!”

The only distraction.

Because they kept on meeting them in front of the church, before or after mass, the Walbergs discovered they were related to the Rueil-Bonfils, owners of the Roujol factory on the outskirts of Petit-Bourg. This factory is now defunct. When I was a child it still existed but already looked a ruin. I often cycled over there. I can remember its blackened, dilapidated silhouette, a wreck washed up in the midst of an ocean of cane fields.

One Sunday, the Rueil-Bonfils invited the Walbergs for lunch in their opulent house beside the factory, and it soon became a ritual. The Rueil-Bonfils tribe could easily have figured in a French sitcom: the mustached grandfather in a wheelchair; the grandmother, hale and hearty, also with a mustache; an aunt, an old maid, with dangling ringlets held in place by a black velvet ribbon; a libidinous uncle, mentally handicapped, who exposed himself to little boys; the dignified father; the mother, a platinum blonde; a dozen children, including a little blind girl who played the piano four-handed with her twin brother. They would all sit down together after mass.
As soon as Victoire arrived, she would docilely tie on an apron and join the other servants around the charcoal burners in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Jeanne would go and sit with the visitors in the drawing room or in the garden, weather permitting. With her black skin, she was looked upon as a curiosity by the Rueil-Bonfils, who practically blamed the Walbergs for treating her as an equal. She had to confront a barrage of questions that were a mixture of paternalism, hypocrisy, and racism.

So she was at boarding school at Versailles! And studying for her elementary school certificate?

No! Studying for the
superior
school certificate!

And she studied Latin as well?

Yes, she knew a little Latin.

So she was counting on becoming an elementary school teacher? What a wonderful profession!

Good Lord, the Negroes have come a long way since they arrived from Africa, beasts of burden under the whip! We may very well ask ourselves, however, whether they have really evolved. Still as lazy, depraved, and calculating. On this subject, the Rueil-Bonfils kept reeling off a never-ending stock of stories about the behavior of their factory workers.

One day, Félicité, who liked to think she knew a thing or two about literature, with a spiteful smile offered Jeanne a short novel by Anaïs Ségalas, her idol, called
Tales of the Antilles: The Forest of La Soufrière
. Since by an amusing coincidence I had been awarded the Anaïs Ségalas Prize by the Académie Française for one of my books,
Tree of Life,
I made inquiries about this writer and discovered she was a Creole from Saint-Domingue who in her time had enjoyed a certain reputation. I even read her book reedited by
L’Harmattan
. It’s a worthless pack of racist ideas of that time, curiously combined with an abolitionist rehash. Here is an extract: “Jupiter must have been about thirty; he was a Negro of African race of the finest black or rather the ugliest. He was of average height, strong and energetic. Like all Negroes his feet were deformed and extended behind
and in front of his shinbone. His hair was woolly. The bottom of his face stretched out like a muzzle.”

Did Félicité intend to hurt Jeanne, whose intelligence we would have thought was above such stupidity? In any case, she hit her mark and my mother suffered enormously. In fact, she never stopped suffering. At mealtimes, when Victoire served up culinary delights of her invention, a capon with breadnuts, for example, she received an ovation and a heap of praise that implied she at least knew her place. Not like some people. Jeanne never stopped asking herself whether she ought not to make a scene, stand up, and leave. I do believe that what consequently came to be known as her “impossible nature” was born from having suffered her humiliation in silence out of respect for her mother. The worst of it all, however, was that Aymeric Rueil-Bonfils was competing with Boniface Jr. He insisted on openly courting her, encouraged by the entire family, according to him. She in fact sensed that the family would have applauded if she had been generous with her favors, just as Victoire had been generous with Boniface, thus regaining her true vocation.

All this suddenly came to an end.

One day out of the blue, Anne-Marie declared she didn’t like Félicité Rueil-Bonfils, who knew nothing about music. In fact, all she talked about were her books and her simple or double flowering gardenias. Valérie-Anne whimpered because the children of her own age poked fun at her pilosity and called her Red Head. Since Boniface Jr. mistakenly imagined that Jeanne preferred Aymeric, he decided Aymeric was one hell of a joker. Aymeric boasted that his mare Torride always came first at the races and won him sums obviously multiplied by ten. Only Boniface Sr. could possibly like the company of Amédée Sr. Knowing he was in desperate straits, riddled with debts and vainly seeking a buyer for the factory, reassured him in his conviction that trade was a better choice than sugar.

Finally, the loathsome holidays drew to an end. The Walbergs left for La Pointe. Jeanne for Versailles. This time she did exactly as she
pleased and chose the steamer that only took six and a half hours, stopping at Sainte-Rose, Deshaies, and Pointe-Noire.

For two years Victoire didn’t visit her. Only their letters provided a semblance of communication between them. During those years Jeanne worked herself to death and passed her school certificate with the grade “Very Good” plus “Congratulations from the Jury,” which opened the doors to the teaching profession. But that wasn’t enough for her. In a long, detailed epistle she explained that she would have to continue studying at Versailles for another year. This long separation without the holidays in Vernou, since Jeanne regularly taught remedial classes during the long vacation, was extremely damaging for the relations between mother and daughter. Victoire, feeling abandoned, withdrew further into herself, cooking to excess. At that time when refrigeration did not exist, you couldn’t keep food for more than a day or two. Délia and Maby distributed the leftovers to the families of the needy
maléré,
carefully selected for their good behavior and their devotion to God. Boniface, so particular about waste, did not protest. Everything his Victoire did was right. She drew even closer to Anne-Marie, who had no need for an explanation, since she could read her like an open book, and thus played certain pieces especially for her. The afternoon sessions therefore changed. Victoire no longer fiddled on her guitar or practiced on her flute. With eyes closed, sitting in her rocking chair, she listened. At times, painful sighs welled up in her breast and tears rolled down her cheeks. Yet Anne-Marie never intervened with questions or words of consolation. She left it up to the music to do its work.

T
WELVE
 

The newspaper
Le Nouvelliste
celebrated Jeanne’s success at passing her final, superior school diploma with a vibrant article headline “Onward, Negress! Forge ahead!”

Beneath the headline was a photo, alas not a very attractive one. My mother, as lovely as she was, never was photogenic. In front of the lens, she would tense up, become stressed, and in the end look like a hunted animal. In addition, the newspaper listed with satisfaction the names of the four young black girls, including her, who had received their final diploma. They were the first of their race. The pictures of these pioneers appeared in
Femmes en devenir,
a journal we might label as feminist, as well as in the monthly magazine
La Guadeloupe de demain
. Ever since Marie de la Redemption, the Mother Superior of the convent school at Versailles, had declared in
Diocèses de France
that in all her career she had never come across such a brilliant mind, from one day to the next Jeanne became a kind of star, public opinion crediting her with a superior intelligence. In reality, the Mother Superior and her pupil had never got on together, the former constantly reproaching the latter for her arrogance, susceptibility, and impertinence. The latter reproaching the former for her racism. Jeanne did not keep happy memories of
Versailles. I admire her courage and determination to spend three years there. Three years of her youth when she could have been laughing, dancing, and flirting. In light of the Walbergs’ recommendation, the convent, which admitted only legitimate children, made an exception for Jeanne, whereas the other pupils had never tolerated her and at the slightest opportunity reminded her who she was.

Perhaps out of respect for Victoire, Anne-Marie wanted Jeanne to celebrate her success at rue de Nassau. They would invite Monsieur Roumegoux and Father Moulinet, who taught the children catechism and gave Jeanne her first communion. Jeanne refused, with the excuse that she was obliged to attend a teaching course in Basse-Terre. I don’t know whether it is possible to imagine exactly how Victoire felt as she contemplated the picture of her daughter in the newspapers. Even if she could not read the accompanying articles brimming with praise, her heart was no doubt bursting with pride. What a revenge she had taken on Dernier! Without his help, she had prized open heavily padlocked doors for her daughter. Without his help, she was offering her a radiant future. I believe, however, that these feelings were mixed with a great deal of sadness. She was fully aware that this success had been paid for dearly, too dearly, acquired at the price of too much humiliation. She was making her child inaccessible, locked in a prison where the air was rarefied. My mother was of the same opinion. I constantly heard her exclaim in a tone of voice that was unmistakably ambiguous: “My mother could neither read nor write, but without her I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Where was she? Those who had eyes understood full well that she did not see herself in paradise.

In October, she was assigned her first teaching position. Then as now, it was the custom to assign beginners to the most thankless schools. But her results were so exceptional that instead of sending her off to La Désirade, Terre-de-Haut in Les Saintes, or some other godforsaken hole, the Ministry of Education appointed her to Le
Moule, the second largest town on the island, with more inhabitants than Basse-Terre.

I don’t know what the monthly salary of a young female elementary school teacher was in 1909, but I do know it was one-fifth below that of a man’s. Such as it was, it allowed her no doubt to support her mother. Jeanne hastened to ask Victoire to come and live with her. Ill-informed and bad-mouthing are those who claim that once she had assured her daughter’s education, Victoire rushed to drop the Walbergs like a crab drops its claw, as the saying goes. For two months she turned a deaf ear to her daughter’s pleas. To the point that in November, Jeanne, stung to the quick, had to come and fetch her herself in La Pointe.

What was Victoire afraid of? Did she think this invitation was dictated by propriety? Couldn’t she resign herself to leave Boniface and especially Anne-Marie?

We do not know the details of the separation and if it really was surrounded in drama. We do know, however, that at six thirty one morning, when it was raining cats and dogs, Jeanne and Victoire climbed aboard a carriage that in four hours drove them to Le Moule. Throughout the journey they did not say a word to each other, each locked in her gloomy thoughts. On arrival, Jeanne hired the services of a street porter who wheeled her mother’s trunk through the streets on a barrow.

“Le Moule has a melancholy air about it,” someone wrote at the time, “and its wide streets are empty. A devastating fire has swept through the town! The town is dead, the port abandoned, the only edifice standing, the church, the only walk, the graveyard.” The town was not only melancholy. It was overpopulated and wretched. Although in this sugar-producing region the factories at Zevallos, Gardel, and Blanchet procured a seasonal employment for the workers from the former plantations, they did not provide any
kaz-nèg,
in other words any lodging. The workers were forced to crowd into an ever-growing number of shacks surrounding the center of town. Jeanne had rented a two-room cabin, tiny but prettily
painted in light gray with green persienne shutters, just two steps from the rue Saint-Jean, a flourishing neighborhood lined with the shops and warehouses of the white Creole merchants. The interior was sparingly furnished, for she had refused the slightest gift from Anne-Marie, whose house on the rue de Nassau was crammed with furniture: low tables, high tables, square or oval, chairs, sleigh beds, canopy beds, four-poster beds, all locked away in the attic. She would have liked Victoire to share her bed—a so-called bed
à boules,
padded with two mattresses, a bolster, and two pillows—in which she saw a symbol of her new station. But Victoire remained intransigent. A straw mattress thrown on the floor would be quite sufficient for her. Up at four in the morning, they would walk to mass, Victoire trotting behind as she always did. Back home, they would drink their coffee in silence. Scalding hot, black, and heaped with sugar. Then Jeanne would leave for the elementary school for girls, which used to be where the present technical lycée stands. Left on her own, Victoire had plenty to do. She would dust the furniture, air the straw mattress, beat the others, sweep the floor, scrub it three times a week, wash her daughter’s clothes, whiten and starch them, then iron them. Since she was a real workaholic, the housework was finished around eleven. Her day was then over. Since Jeanne ate nothing or very little, there was no cooking to be done. I wonder what it meant for Victoire never to set foot in the kitchen. Never to match savors and colors. Never to breathe in the smell of spices. No longer to be God.