Wild, Beautiful, and Free
Sophfronia Scott
Prologue
My papa, Jean Bébinn, the owner of fifty thousand acres of the finest land in Louisiana, used to say a man falling down stairs was one of the saddest sights you could ever behold. Not only could you be certain the one falling would feel his body battered like the devil having his day on your behind, but there was also the fact that the person was surely humbled because he’d been unable to master this simple creation man made to overcome the ups and downs of the earth.
Mr. Christian Robichaud Colchester looked like that when I first saw him in the winter of 1860. He tumbled and spun like a hay rake falling down the front stairs inside Fortitude Mansion. His eyes caught me in one hot moment as he whirled. Black marbles they were, and they flashed with shock like everything he believed about the world had betrayed him with a snap of a twig—eyes that looked like they had been somewhere and had returned to find me and were asking, Would I help? Now I know I couldn’t have seen his plea in that quick of time, but that was how it seemed. Papa’s words came to me, and I felt sorry for the man rolling down those stairs. I rushed to the staircase and stood there. Never mind I was probably two heads shorter than the huge beast falling. I was and still am nothing but a bit of a soul in slight packaging. My body didn’t have any sense of what my mind was making it do. I stood there and let him land on me.
Air fled my chest, and a tingling sensation sprang up and down my spine. I thought I’d never breathe again, but I heard him coughing like he was too full of air, like he had taken all my breath from me.
I think about that moment when I try to figure out when it all changed. When did he reach out like he was falling all over again and grab my heart with both hands and hold on like his life depended on it? When did I start holding on with him? He knows that I did, because that’s what’s making him so bold to ask what he’s asking of me now. He wouldn’t have done it otherwise. And by the same vein I wouldn’t be sitting here thinking about saying yes. Because that’s how much of me he has, and I’m thinking it wouldn’t be a great thing to let the rest of me go too. It’s just like standing in front of those stairs again. Can I break this fall? Inside that man is every notion of what I know about myself. He stands tall, like there’s a force inside him drawing him up to his full height, and that same force makes me feel large as well. Our eyes on the world are great and unyielding, like we’ve seen too much to close them now. We say the words we want to say and don’t care about the consequences. I know a bigger hell comes of keeping your mouth shut. We’re that much alike. And yet he doesn’t know what he’s asking of me. For what he wants, I’d have to deny myself in a way that would dismantle every aspect of my humanity. And his, too, but that doesn’t seem to concern him, perhaps because he’s already done it for so long. Maybe that’s why I’ve loved him—he’s burned himself down to this purity, and it’s all I can see of him. I can’t see anything else.
“Jeannette, the only people who would give a damn are the ones who give a damn for you,” he said. “You don’t have people like that in this world.”
No.
Not in this world.
Because I do think of Papa. That’s what gives me pause. That and the love of my Creator, my Alpha and my Omega. Anyone might look at me and wonder how, in all my strangeness, I could demand love of any human being. I know I’m unusual to look at, with pale skin telling one story about myself and tight coils of light-brown hair telling another. And I’m hard in ways most admired women are soft. I used to think my half sister, Calista, imprinted the world like a cloud. But my papa’s my excuse for everything I’m about to tell you. I was born of great love, and Papa bore me well in that love for as long as he could. I was a beloved child. I think I knew that before I knew anything else. So now I can’t settle for anything less than such love. That’s just the truth of who I am.
Chapter 1
Within minutes of my birth Madame Bébinn tried to burn the bed on which I’d come into the world. If her husband, Jean Bébinn, with me in his arms, had not stood between her and my poor mama, her body still warm and soaked in blood from where the life had drained out of her, Madame would have set fire to everything: woman, sheets, mattress, curtains. It didn’t matter to her the bed stood within the walls of her own home. What mattered was her husband loved a slave, loved her enough to bring her into his house, into a white person’s bed, to bear his child. Is it any wonder that whenever I crossed paths with this woman, I wanted to see her hands to make sure she wasn’t holding any matches? Forever I could sense her need to set my hair afire.
Madame Bébinn was the reason why, in the late afternoon of a late-spring day in 1851, I stood at the door inside my room, considering the wisdom of leaving it to go to the kitchen for some food. Dorinda knew I ate alone when Papa was away, but sometimes Madame kept her so busy with added chores—bleaching Calista’s sheets—she would forget to bring a meal to my room. I knew I could take the back stairs and easily avoid an encounter with Madame. The house slaves used this route when they moved from room to room to do their work. But I was twelve years old, and by then my feet instinctively obeyed Papa’s constant reminder that I tread the same floorboards as him, his wife, and their daughter. “This is your home, Jeannette,” he said. “You don’t need to hide your head here.”