Then, the Terror began. It proved the commoners were a separate race from the nobility: while they claimed to worship Reason,they acted as savage as Africans. They rid Marguerite of her husband and parents, when it hardly mattered anymore. “Let us go to the foot of the great altar,” one of the revolutionaries declared, “and attend the celebration of the red Mass” at the “holy guillotine.” They sacrificed nuns to their machine and cried: “Let us strangle the last King with the entrails of the last Priest!”
Still Marguerite urged her brother to swear allegiance to the new republic. Would taking a wife really be so terrible? Denis would be excommunicated—but that was reversible. Death was forever. Even after the September Massacres, the fool did not have the sense to flee. Denis chose martyrdom instead.
How could Marguerite return to such a country? The France she had known was as dead as her brother. The National Assembly abolished slavery itself, though even this did not appease the negroes on Saint-Domingue. They slaughtered planters and soldiers till they claimed the island for themselves. They renamed it Haïti, as iftheywere the Indians’ rightful successors.
Thousands of refugees from France and Saint-Domingue sought asylum in the former British colonies. After all, Frenchmen had helped these United States win their independence. Now, the fledgling country could repay its debt. Many of the Saint-Domingue émigrés brought their slaves with them. Apparently their property was more precious to them than their lives. If crocodiles devour your neighbors, Marguerite thought, you do not leave the swamp and take the crocodiles with you!
The whites from Saint-Domingue made her anxious too. Someone might know Gabriel had no legitimate heirs. The refugees sought her out to commiserate. Marguerite always turned the conversation to France. They consoled her with platitudes like:“We would find the winters there difficult, after so many years in the tropics.” They rejoiced in Charleston’s similarities to their lost island: “The architecture! The flora!” She would counter: “The hurricanes! The earthquakes! The mosquitos!”
Worst of all were South Carolina’s mulattos, so like Saint-Domingue’s: the vain descendants of black whores and soft-hearted white fathers, some of them appallingly wealthy. The island’smulatto émigrés joined Charleston’s Brown Fellowship Society, where they congratulated each other on the number of slaves they owned and on the complexion of their daughters’ fiancés. They shunned anyone who looked more African than themselves.
Some of these mulattos would have rejected René. Marguerite’s regimen of milk baths did nothing to lighten her grandson’s skin. His nose remained wide in spite of the clothespin she kept on it whenever they were alone. At least it had a bridge. She could do nothing about his lips. Wigs and even powder fell out of fashion before he was old enough to wear them. She hated his obstinate black hair. But Charleston inundated René with English, while Marguerite and Thierry spoke French to him. So her grandson soon lost his Creole, and surely he forgot all about being colored.
Thierry suggested that the boy have a “mammy,” but Marguerite would not hear of it. The last thing her grandson needed was another negress encouraging his bad habits. Marguerite kept him away from Thierry’s slaves as much as she could. Mightn’t they recognize one of their own kind?
No one white read the truth in his features. The word “Spanish” covered a multitude of doubts, as did René’s disposition. Far from lazy or violent, the boy was industrious and reserved, if independent. Perhaps that was the Indian strain. His African blood had certainly not dulled his mind: he was brighter than she could have hoped.
Often René reminded her so much of Matthieu, Gabriel, or Étienne, her heart literally ached. In those moments, she knew she had made the right choice. Her grandson belonged here with her, not amongst savages. But after all she had done for him, the boy never warmed to her.
For years, he pestered her with questions about his mother. Questions meant he did not remember, Marguerite assured herself. She would repeat her story about the tragic young Spanish woman, or she would change the subject. If her grandson pressed her for details, Marguerite would begin weeping and berate him for asking her, when the thought of Saint-Domingue was so painful. Finally he stopped asking.
Instead, René grew fond of Thierry and their neighbors, and they of him. One by one, houses began to sprout up in the surrounding fields. On the very next lot lived the Saint-Clairs: good Catholics who had fled the revolution in France. Gérard Saint-Clair merely sold and repaired clocks—he was of no consequence—but he had a boy René’s age, Sébastien. If her grandson went missing, Marguerite usually found him with Bastien, and often with Bastien’s little sister, Anne.
The girl was certainly pretty, fair as sunlight—such a contrast to René. The way Anne followed him around, the way he doted on her, her family teased that a wedding was inevitable. Then, when Anne was four, scarlet fever took her hearing. She forgot how to speak properly, so René and the Saint-Clairs amused themselves by teaching Anne hand shapes from books.
René also endeared himself to Thierry, and the boy seemed to act from genuine affection. He helped the old man capture and catalog his butterflies. In Thierry’s final illness, her grandson proved a tireless nurse. René hardly left the man’s side, when the slaves could have done all of it.
“I’ve already written my will, you know,” Thierry wheezed. “You won’t persuade me to change it.” But the old man was smiling. He’d left René everything—except his books and specimens, which went to the Charleston Library Society.
A boy of fourteen needed an executor. The old man named not Marguerite but Gérard Saint-Clair. In the end, René required little guidance. He wanted to attend medical school. So the year Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor, Marguerite ventured back to her homeland with her grandson.
Despite the revolution, Paris still had the best schools. There was even a place for Anne Saint-Clair. Her family’s pantomime was not sufficient to communicate why they were sending her away. When Marguerite and her grandson left Anne at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, Marguerite was relieved, the girl was terrified, and René was as miserable as if he’d betrayed her.
In a flurry of panic, Marguerite embarked on the quest that had truly brought her back to France: for the copy of their parishregister from Saint-Domingue. The record of her grandson’s Baptism would note his mother’s color and status. Marguerite saw them in her head, those cold terrible words that would change everything:
mulâtresse
quarteron
esclaves
She must find that page and destroy it. She would tear it into pieces and devour it if she had to.
The fawning little Priest apologized, but the volume covering 1789 was missing entirely. Perhaps it had been misplaced during the revolution, or perhaps the ship carrying it to France had sunk.Sans doute, the original in Le Cap had been lost one of the times the city burned.
The missing register meant she had no proof of her grandson’s valid Baptism. So René was baptized again conditionally just before his Confirmation, his mother’s name now officially recorded as Maria Dolores, deceased.Librewas not considered necessary. Of course she had been free.
René had studied his catechism without enthusiasm, though he spent nearly as much time at Anne’s school as his own. He learned all the signs and wrote her fretful parents of her progress. Before he began his doctorate, by flapping his hands at her, René asked Anne to marry him.
Her own teachers—the ones who could hear at least—worried she could not understand what he meant. Anne’s body might be seventeen, but her mind would always be a child’s; to make her a wife, a mother, when she could not truly give her consent… There were reasons the courts usually forbade such unnatural unions.
Marguerite herself was appalled. Why would someone so full of promise chain himself for life to a savage, as the Institute’s own director had called his charges? Did her grandson suspect what ran in his veins? Did he think no one else would have him? Or was love simply deaf as well as blind?
When Marguerite demanded an explanation, that was René’s answer: “I love her,grand-mère.”
“Youpityher,” Marguerite insisted.
“No,grand-mère.” Instead of the lechery of his mother’s race, the boy had inherited Matthieu’s inexplicable devotion to a woman unworthy of him. Marguerite could not let it destroy them both.
