The Salt Roads Read online

  For all the sweet warmth inside the apartment, I had the small, constant feeling that I wanted to get out, out. Didn’t know what I wanted. Surely not out into that leaking wet in my beautiful new green silk? Tramping through the sticky ordure of Paris’s mud streets; where would I go?

  I wanted to be out, I wanted to go. Go down to the docks and stare at the greasy sea. Or not down; up. I wanted to rise into the air and fly free. I thought awhile on flying, then started to giggle at the ridiculous view the people down below me on the earth would have, of my hoopskirt and my gaping pantalettes. I would shock proper ladies. They would faint delicately into their gentlemen’s arms.

  “What is it, Jeanne?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing is what amuses you so?”

  “Yes.” I leaned my head against the window again and waited for Charles’s friends to arrive, all pomp and bombast.

  And now here came my Charles, dour again, even after all our play, smelling of scent. My skirt billowed out for metres, so he could not approach me directly; had to come from the side. He slipped his arms over my shoulders, pulled me to him. I leaned into his warmth, marked the pallour of his skin against mine. That excited him too. But I cared not for it. Oh, for the porcelain skin of a rich lady!

  He reached down and squeezed my breasts. I felt my nipples swelling against the corsetting. I pulled back his cuffs. “What, no marks?”

  He slapped my hand away and chuckled. “Hush. Naughty Jeanne.”

  “‘Naughty’ was not what you called me some hours since . . .”

  “Shh . . .”

  “. . . when you were straining to break free of your bonds.” I summoned the image of him as I seen him just a little while ago.

  “Ah Jeanne, you devil.” He kneaded my breasts harder, ran his thumbs cruelly over the place where he judged my nipples to be.

  “Yes,” I answered, adjusting my body so his hands touched in the right places, “you said all that, and more too.” He had writhed and moaned, called me she-dog, called me goddess. And when I slicked two of my fingers with macassar oil and slid them up his nether passage, he’d howled and begged me not to stop, never to stop, to plumb him till he bled, if need be, but to continue.

  I sighed and put my face up for a kiss. “Carefully now. Don’t smear my powder.” Of course he did, and I would have to do it over. But I would find a way to punish him for that. He would like that, beg as he might for surcease. “Laisse, chéri,” I told him, putting his hot hands and mouth from me. “Nadar and the others will be here soon. You’ll want me beautiful as roses for them.”

  “I would wish you bruised as rose petals,” he breathed into my hair, “and smelling as musky. Then they would know what we’ve been about.”

  I leaned against him and inhaled his cologne.

  This congress that they make so often, this mock-violence of limbs twisting around each other for purchase and bodies flailing toward and against—it raises a heat in the ginger woman, in the core of her. Ginger is hot in its roots, after all, with a beautiful, lush red flower above. And ginger has a bite, as she does. She loves Lise with a deep, helpless adoration. Charles she loves, when things are well between them, with a sly, mischievous air. When it is poorly with her and with him, her love is sullen, resentful. She must play the wanton for him, and withstand the way he belittles her to his friends. He mocks her speech to them, and her poor skills with a pen. He tells them that he endures her ignorance for the sake of her beauty. And she knows what a scandalous black feather she makes in the cap of this bohemian who revels in drawing shocked gazes from the burghers of his city. So yes, she loves, but her love is bought, and Charles must pay. Her love buys silks, watered as though they’d been retrieved from locked chests in sunken ships; gold, that streams and flows around her neck and wrists in chains of liquid light; jewels that trickle and tripple from her ears. She’s covered in the stuff, she soaks in it and it buoys her up when Charles is cruel; is it any wonder we both dream of drowning?

  This solid flux, this gold that is all wealth and bread to her; I want it too. It comes from ships. It smells of seas. I was born in brackish water, salty as tears. Jeanne cries often. We have salt in common.

  I twist and tug at the ginger woman Jeanne, but though I make her restless and fractious, she does not release me.

  That woman, that white woman from Saint Domingue a century ago who let me into her head; she wanted for no material thing. Perhaps if I help Jeanne to a happier life, a life of plenty, I can be freer in the prison of her.

  I’m learning fast. Can’t make Jeanne do what she doesn’t want to, but sometimes I can prompt her, prod her. I can make her mind have visions. Tonight I will fill her dreaming nostrils with the sea again, push her to move beyond this place.

  Sorrow

  When Tipingee got like this, I knew to stay out her way. She was swinging that machète at the cane as though it’s Simenon’s head she was chopping. Sugar stalks were flying everywhere, and barely did she chop one row but she stepped over it and on to the next. Patrice and Oreste loading the cane onto the wain carts were running to keep up with her.

  Last night she was with Patrice, not me. Perhaps Patrice did something to vex her? Her eyes were hard like stones and her jaws looked like she was biting down hard.

  What could I say to ease her? What was wrong?

  There. She stopped for a while and uncrooked her spine; pressed her hands against it and leaned back. She was blowing air, panting from the labour. I chopped cane as fast as I might to catch up with her. But there came Patrice. He got to her before me and looked around. The book-keeper’s eyes had wandered off the field. He was propped against a wain cart, scratching the ox’s neck and staring off into the sky. Seeing the book-keeper inattentive, Patrice neglected to pick up the cane lying at Tipingee’s feet. He reached a hand out to Tipingee, slow like when you try to quiet a mad dog. She turned her head to him. Her heaving deepened into sobs. She made as if to touch Patrice, then sunk to the ground. I didn’t know when my feet carried me to her; I just knew that I was there, me and Patrice holding her as she wailed, “Marie-Claire, Marie-Claire.”

  “Hush, Tipingee,” Patrice answered her back. She was crying for her child, her child. My skin bristled on my flesh to hear her.

  “Something happened to Marie-Claire?” I asked her. She never answered me, just held on to us both like we were flotsam and she floating in a shipwrecked sea. I looked to Patrice for the answer.

  “Hush, Tipingee, hush.” He stroked her hair. He said to me, “Simenon is selling Marie-Claire away.”

  Tipingee’s body shook harder at his words. Patrice said, “He’s going to mate her to free-coloured Philomise.”

  Tipingee screamed, shouted Marie-Claire’s name into the air. And finally the book-keeper did notice. Came rushing at us, roaring for us to get back to work. We held each other. The whip landed on Patrice’s back, bit at my shoulder. We jerked and cried out, Patrice and me. A welt rose on my skin and I could see tears welling in Patrice’s eyes from the pain of the whip. But Tipingee was protected in our arms. For a little space, backra couldn’t get to her. “Sir,” I said to the book-keeper. I hauled Tipingee to her feet. “Sorry, sir. She’s just grieving. Master’s selling her child away.”

  Book-keeper’s face got a look. I didn’t know what that look signified. “Huh,” he said then. He lowered the whip. “I guess even a bitch may howl for her pups.”

  Tipingee threw her hands round my neck. “She’s too young to breed, Mer; too young! And that man; you heard about that man!”

  Yes, I remembered what Georgine had told us that day of her labour, about how Philomise would grope her, and mock her fear.

  “Don’t fret, Mother,” said the book-keeper sympathetically. “Your child has black wench’s blood. She’ll come to like the mating soon enough.”

  Mama, must my ears hear this? Tipingee’s body jerked at his words, but she only sobbed. Patrice’s face hardened.

  “Get back to work, y
ou three,” said the book-keeper. His voice was a little kind. “Mourn the whelp if you must, but do Simenon’s work. I won’t punish you if you keep working.”

  Patrice clambered to his feet, wincing from the whip cut he’d got. “Yes, sir.” He picked up Tipingee’s machète, and I knew the look on his face. I warned him with my eyes. If he only touched the book-keeper, it would be the hanging tree for him. “Don’t make Tipingee lose another one that she loves,” I said, low.

  My whisper made Tipingee know something was happening. She looked to Patrice. Saw the rage in him. Gently went and took away her machète from his hand. Meekly, he gave it to her. “Doucement, Patrice,” she said, gently. “I’m right here. I’m going back to work now, yes? You go, too.” She sniffed back tears and bent to her work again.

  “Marie-Claire’s not ready for a husband,” was all that Patrice replied. “Not that husband, anyway.” His face was sad, so sad for his daughter, but he picked up the cane that Tipingee had cut and took it to the wain cart. His back was running blood. Maybe the book-keeper would let me see to him when we had our midday meal. I returned to my own chopping, and wondered, suppose I had just let Patrice do it? Sink the machète into the book-keeper’s chest? Once the backra was fallen, plenty of the Ginen would have seen their chance one time, to head for the maroons in the bush.

  And how many of them would even make it out of the cane field? Some of their own fellows would cut them down for the chance of reward from Simenon; some bettering of their stations. And the maroons don’t trust easy. Even did any of the Ginen make it through the bush to them, they might make the maroons suspicious. A maroon kills you, you’re just as dead as if a backra did it.

  And did Patrice only do it, cut the book-keeper down, there would have been no more Patrice; Simenon would have made sure of that. Oh, you gods. “Mama,” I whispered, “forgive so evil a wish.” I looked about me to see where aloe was growing that I might salve Patrice’s cuts and mine.

  Master must have changed his mind about Philomise. Before this, he never wanted to sell Georgine to a free-coloured man. True, Marie-Claire is darker than Georgine. So perhaps Master thinks her a meet woman for a coloured man. It must be that.

  Blood

  I dream Jeanne’s memories with her, of times before Charles:

  Paris, 1842

  I’ve had a letter from my mother, brought to the concert hall door by a bashful sailor whose ship had just put into port from Nantes. As she brings the letter to me, Lisette says, “He was handsome, too. Stared at me like I was cake. I asked him his name as he was leaving, but he just blushed and scurried away.” She handed me the envelope.

  I took it. I knew it couldn’t be good. Maman had to pay someone if she wanted a letter written. Lise sat on her bed and watched me. I opened it. The handwriting was awful. I had to hold it over the lamp to make the words out.

  Oh, you gods. “My grandmother is dead,” I told Lise. “Buried in a pauper’s grave.” The letter was dated a week ago.

  Lise came and sat by me and took my hand. “Oh, my heart, I’m sorry,” she said.

  I looked away from her pitying face, up into the ceiling. I blinked, and again. “No matter. It was a hard life, and she was ill. She’s happier so.”

  But I knew I lied. My grandmaman had had bitter times, yes, and sorrow and fear, but she had made the good times outweigh those. She had eaten life up, relished it like the marrow she sucked from chicken bones, days when we could afford meat for our supper. She talked about the streets of her girlhood, in Dahomey, and how fine her father would look, dressed up in his finest robe, waiting for his men friends to come and call, to share palm wine and talk politics. She had made fast friends of the women she whored with; not a one of them but would share their last sou with her. She laughed often. I knew she didn’t want to go from life. Even two years ago when I left Nantes, old Gilles was still coming to call on her regularly. Maybe he had been at her bedside when she died. I hadn’t.

  I stood and began pulling clothing on, anything. “I must tell Charles.”

  “Alas! And I cannot . . . in the inferno of your bed turn myself into Proserpine.”

  —Baudelaire, “Sed Non Satiata”

  Brown, brown skin,” he mumbled against my shoulders. “Dark as night.” He licked the flesh, descending down my body with an “ah,” and an “ah.” I wanted to talk with him about my grandmaman, gone from me, but he wished to rut.

  “Enough, Charles.” I pushed him away. He was milking at my paps like a thirsty calf.

  Nothing deterred, he peered up at me, grinning. His happy face between the pillows of my breasts looked so comical that I put my sorrow aside for a moment and laughed with him. “I do not do it well?” he asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “Show me how, then.”

  As though I had not showed him a thousand times, with a touch or a sigh or an arching of my back. My mother says that men do not like to be schooled in how to love. But then, this man is not like his fellows. “Very well.” I made myself more comfortable on the pillows. “Shift. Lie beside me. You get on top of me, I can’t breathe.”

  “When you get on top of me,” he corrected. But he shifted off my ribs. I ignored the shame rising in me at my brutish tongue.

  I circled the nipple closest him with my thumb and index finger. “Here,” I said. “With your mouth.”

  He bent and started sucking, like he would suck the nipple right off. It popped up, but it gave me no pleasure.

  “No! No. Lick. With your tongue. All around.”

  And so he did. Yes, he did. I lay back and closed my eyes; felt the skin wrinkle and the nipple swell. “Yes, like so. Do it more. Yes. Now, gently mind! With your teeth. Ah, yes. Cease with the teeth now.”

  He stopped. I opened my eyes. His face hovered over mine, pink lips wet, a disappointed look on his face that I had made him stop. I smiled. “With your fingers, Charles. Pull and tease it out.”

  And his face brightened again as he understood, and set about the motion that I liked. Yes, my poet man. Like that. “Firm at first,” I said. “Then firmer still. Oh. Good. Like so, like so. Now do the other one. Yes.”

  He straddled my belly and licked and teased and tugged until I was transported, arching under his hands and mouth. I urged him on, on, and I could hear myself slipping into the gutter dockside French, but I never minded it, and he didn’t mind it neither, for he never corrected me this time. Oh, it was glorious.

  “Lemer,” he whispered, while his hands worked at me.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this what you and Lisette do?”

  I looked at him, wary. But his face was still open, curious. His top lip was curling that way it does when his blood was running hot. Always he wanted to know about me and Lisette. I knew what to give. I knew how to feed his hunger, never sate it.

  “Is it?” he repeated.

  I only smiled, deliberately mysterious.

  He butted his face then against my belly; plunged his fingers scraping deep inside my cunt. I gasped and tried to remain open against the pain of it. “Oh, you whore,” he said gleefully. “You damned, indolent, black slattern. So cold you are to me, and I love you the more for it. Do you wish that these were Lisette’s fingers? Lisette’s teeth that bite at your breasts? And where is she now? Have you devoured her as you have me? Is this how the women of Africa love? Slut? Is it?”

  What did I know of what African women did? I closed my legs against his hand, tried to still it that way, but still he shoved at me. So I lay back and let him take his pleasure. The wallpaper was peeling in the corner there, by the ceiling. Must tell Charles to have someone fix it. And I must get some more money from him. My mother needed new boots.

  Paris, September 1844

  No! I cannot bear it! I will not!”

  Charles crumpled up the letter from his maman and flung it. It bounced off the new painting, the Marie Magdalène he had just bought from Arondel.

  “What is the matter, chéri?” I asked h
im. “What does she say?”

  “She cannot!” He flounced to his writing desk. “Where is my paper, Jeanne? Quick, I need a pen!”

  I fetched the pen from where he had left it beside the bed, and the ink. He snatched them from me, and huffing and whispering, set to composing a letter.

  “Will you not tell me the matter?” I asked again, stroking the back of his neck.

  He jerked his head away. “Laisse, Jeanne! This is more important than your wiles!”

  Oh, how vile he could be. “Well, certainly your maman is always more important than me,” I snapped back at him. “I shall take my leave, then.”

  I turned to go, but he grasped my hand and pulled me to him. “No, Jeanne, please. I am sorry.” He stood and pulled me into his arms, clutching at me fiercely. “It is so horrible! Please stay with me. You must help me write a response to her.”

  He was truly upset, if he wished me to help him compose words upon a page. “What does she say?” I asked.

  He cursed, threw himself back into the chair, and began to write once more. “They have taken my estate from me! Imagine the shame, Jeanne! They have given the management of it to some petit bourgeois named Ancelle, and he is to dole me out a pittance every month!”

  Oh! That poxy woman! Just as I come into some easement in my life! I looked to the painting, wondered what it might fetch. Charles believed it was a Fédèrico, or a Taddeo. I didn’t care, but the painting might bring a good profit, if he would sell it. If the dealer Arondel had told the truth. The last painting that Charles had bought from him turned out to be a daub by some unknown. And the one before that too. And still Charles trusted him. He was like that. “Tell her . . .”