“The leader of the slave revolt on Saint-Domingue.” Joseph imagined the finely dressed, grinning negro drenched in blood and shuddered.
“I put that model away, after…Vesey,” Grandpapa told him. “But then someone asked for it. I sold another one last week.” He shrugged. “Maybe people find it comforting.”
The wide-eyed negro with the clock in his belly did look harmless, his head nodding and nodding as if he would agree to any command.“They do that to fool you,”Joseph’s Great-Grandmother Marguerite had said.
But she’d been wrong about so much. She’d been wrong to take them to the hanging. Mama, Papa, and the Grands all said so. Hélène had slept in Joseph’s bed that night, because Cathy refused to share hers. Joseph couldn’t say no when Hélène started sobbing. He’d prayed with her, and she’d fallen asleep clinging to him.
In the morning, Hélène had beamed at him as if he’d performed a miracle. “I didn’t dream about them at all, Joseph! God listens toyou! You’re as good as a Priest!”
But Joseph himself had dreamed about the hanging men, that night and many nights after. More than the sight of their kicking bodies, it was theirsoundsthat came back to him, their last desperate struggles for breath. Sometimes, Joseph would feel the terrorburning his own throat, and only an ejaculatory prayer would allow him to breathe again.
When Joseph and his sisterreturned from Grandpapa’s shop, they found Mama in her bedchamber, kneeling on her prie-Dieu. Before she could rise, Hélène threw her plump arms around Mama’s neck. Mama disentangled her gently but immediately.
‘Joseph kept me safe!’ his sister signed.
‘I am so glad.’ Mama rose. ‘But you know what I’ve told you about embraces, sweetheart.’
Hélène frowned. ‘But Iloveyou, Mama!’
‘And I love you.’ Again and again, Mama pressed her hands to her heart: ‘I love you and your brother’—she smiled at Joseph—‘and your sister and your father… But we must not forget that someone else deserves our love first.’ Mama cast her eyes to the portrait on the wall, where Christ held His own shining heart. ‘He is the one who truly kept you safe today.’
‘I do love Our Lord, Mama—but I can’t hug Him!’ Hélène pouted. ‘Why can’t I hug you? Don’t you like it?’
Mama grimaced as if she were in pain. She reached toward Hélène, then withdrew her hand and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I like ittoo much. I think you are old enough to understand now. It is very hard, so we must help each other to be good.’ Mama looked at Joseph to make sure he was watching her hands too. She made the signs slowly and deliberately, first striking her chest with her fist: ‘It is a sin to take pleasure in anything except Our Lord.’
Hélène kept frowning. She did not look like she understood at all.
CHAPTER 8
What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears. The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.
— Victor Hugo, 1845 letter
Joseph had been sitting on the piazza with his book for only a few minutes when he heard Henry’s voice from the garden:
“What you reading today, Master Joseph?”
Henry was always interested in his books. Joseph knew negroes weren’t allowed to read for a reason. Denmark Vesey had been able to read, and he’d twisted verses from Scripture to suit him. But the thought of opening a book and seeing meaningless black marks… “It’s part of a set Mama bought about the lives of the saints. It’s by feast day.”
Henry was using a garden syringe to spray tobacco-water on Mama’s roses and kill the insects. “Whose day is today?”
“Saint Calixtus. He was a Pope.” Joseph scanned for more details, and his eyes widened. “But he was born a slave!”
Joseph tried to imagine Henry being elected the next Holy Father. He would have to become a proper Christian first—like most of the negroes Joseph knew, Henry was aMethodist. He was also married to May, at least as married as slaves and Methodists could be. But as far as Joseph could tell, Henry was a kind man, even a wise one.
“I don’t suppose Calixtus was an African, though,” Henry commented.
Joseph shook his head. “He was a Roman. But thereareAfrican saints.” Maybe he could save Henry yet. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?
Beneath the brim of his straw hat, Henry wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “That right?”
Joseph nodded. “I know there’s Saint Moses the Black, and Saint Benedict the Moor. Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, were both from Africa, too.” Joseph didn’t know what color they had been. Negro blood would explain how wicked and lazy Saint Augustine had been in his youth. But Saint Monica was so virtuous.
There must be other African saints. Joseph would find them. He would ask Bishop England. Maybe Joseph could talk to His Lordship tonight—surely he would be at the party.
Joseph had intended to skim the rest of October for African saints, but he stopped at Saint Teresa of Ávila, who had been Spanish like his grandmother. When she was seven years old, Teresa and her little brother ran away, because they had “resolved to go into the country of the Moors, in hopes of dying for their faith.” Their martyrdom was thwarted by their uncle, who brought them home almost immediately.
Papa’s voice interrupted Joseph’s reading: “Henry, your mother says she needs about ten more okra pods.” Papa must have been in the kitchen talking to Agathe again. Because Henry’s mother was from Saint-Domingue, she spoke a Creole dialect, and Papa seemed determined to learn it. He spent an odd amount of time talking to their slaves, and not about anything important like their souls.
