“J’arrive, Madame,” the negress called back.
Before she left him, Joseph’s father caught her arm. “What was her name?”
“She didn’t tell me whathermother called her. But her slave name was Ève.” Without waiting for him to reply, the negress hurried to the schoolgirls.
Joseph’s father took a step toward the ocean. And then, he sank onto his knees in the sand.
Joseph kept scowling. His grandmother’s name had been Maria Dolores. What did the negress mean by her “slave name”? None of this made any sense. Joseph must have misunderstood again. Hadn’t he learned his lesson about eavesdropping?
Why was the thought of his grandmother being Spanish amusing? Why had his father assumed his mother hated him? Why was he acting as though all of this was very important?
The negress couldn’t have meant— She couldn’t?—
Joseph didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to understand. He wanted to be far away from it. He turned and fled from his father.
The wind snatched Joseph’s hat from his head, and the sun stung his eyes immediately. He did not stop, though the sand beneath his feet seemed determined to swallow him. Behind him, over the pounding of his heart in his ears, Joseph heard his father calling his name.
No sooner had Joseph arrived at the cottage and caught his breath than Frederic appeared on the back porch with his friends.His new valet accompanied them, a dark-skinned boy who could not be more than twenty.
“Joseph!” Frederic greeted him. “We were just going swimming. Would you care to join us?”
Joseph nodded fiercely. He trailed behind Frederic and his friends but kept ahead of the slave. His side ached from the effort. As they hurried along the beach, Joseph wondered why they had to go swimming at such a distance from the cottages.
At last they halted. Frederic and his friends began peeling off their clothing, tossing pieces at the negro, who caught most of them. Joseph shrugged his braces from his shoulders and unbuttoned his trousers. But the other boys did not stop undressing when they got to their shirts. They did not even stop when they got to their drawers. Joseph averted his eyes at once.
Frederic noticed his hesitation. “Youcanswim, can’t you?”
Joseph nodded without looking up. He was quite fond of it, the freedom he felt as he floated in the water. But heneverswam naked.
“Come on, then!” Frederic encouraged as he threw his drawers at his slave.
“What’s the matter, kid?” one of his cousin’s friends laughed. “Afraid a fish might emasculate you?”
“I bet he’s still hairless as a baby!” teased the other boy.
Joseph made the mistake of raising his eyes. Whooping like wild Indians, the naked trio dashed into the breaking waves—but not before Joseph caught a glimpse of their own hairy genitals. What startled him was not the hair but the color of their skin there. Very like the color of his mother’s nipples, or the Blessed Virgin’s.
Joseph felt as if there were sand in his throat. It was true—what the negress and his father had said, what they had implied. Even if he had wanted to, Joseph could not disrobe like Frederic and his friends. They would see him andknow. Where the sun should never reach, in the most private part of themselves, the other boys were pink. Joseph was brown.
He was colored. Just like his monstrous father, and his grandmother the slave. Just like those hanging negroes who had plotted toburn the city, the naked mulatto in the pen on State Street, and that nodding clock in Grandpapa’s shop.
You couldn’t bepartAfrican. You were either pure white or incurably colored. Joseph had wanted to be Charleston’s first native Priest. He had wanted to be a black swan. Instead, he was just black.
When Mama had called mulattos “unnatural,” this was why his father had defended them—why he was friends with Noisette and their own slaves. This was why his father abused his mother, and why Joseph struggled so often with his own lusts. Negroes couldn’t control themselves—everyone knew that.
Their black blood explained everything.Il porte le vice dans le sang, the French would say. Great-Grandmother Marguerite had used that expression when a bastard became debauched like his father. Of course he had:He carries vice in his blood. Butvicemeant other things in French, too:defect, flaw, blemish, viciousness.
Joseph tried to tell himself that the water in his eyes was because of the sun. He sat half-dressed on the sand while his cousin’s slave folded the three sets of clothing and finally settled beside him, at a respectful distance. Eventually Joseph realized that the longer he stayed there under the sun without his hat, the more he would resemble the negro.
Unsteadily, he rose, re-dressed himself, and followed his footprints back toward his family. Four white boys and one black had left these tracks, he thought. Three white boys and two blacks would retrace them.
“There you are, Joseph!” Cathy cried, startling him. He was only halfway back to the cottage. “Mama didn’t want to start our picnic without you, so Papa made me come looking for you. We found your hat.”
He pulled it back on, hard.
Cathy turned on her heel to walk beside Joseph. She kicked at a piece of driftwood and muttered, “I hate Papa.”
“Why?” Joseph asked cautiously.
