House of Rougeaux
Jenny Jaeckel
Book I
1
Abeje
French West Indies, Island of Martinique
1860
Sitting here under this grand old tree, her skirts spread about her in a wheel. The blue cloth carries up the earth in light red dust and so the earth is part of her cloth. The children come. They lay their cheeks against it, now that they’ve had their midday maize. They cast their eyes up at her, waiting for a story.
A hot breeze stirs the long grasses and the broad leaves that shade them. It makes a whistling noise in the high arc of branches and hushes for a moment the whirring of the insects. She brushes those tender plump cheeks with her rough old fingers. She tells them of the one-eyed dog and the three-legged cat. The gourd that ate a man and kept him prisoner, until it rolled into the ocean and was broken by a sea-goddess. Of the sugar estate that grew people, the cloud boats, the toads that wore clothing, and many other things.
She has more than eighty years, she knows. Among her people few live even half as long as she. These little children are among the first born out of bondage. But as their mamans must work the fields, they still need Mémé Abeje, and so she goes on living.
* * *
1785-1858
Darkness lay close around the child, save for the light of the cooking fire and the canopy of stars.
“Abeje!” called Iya, stepping out of the hut and closer to the firelight. “Where is your brother?”
The little girl had been charged, for the moment, with looking after the cooking pot, but had become distracted, playing at throwing twigs into the embers. She stood up and pointed at the foliage that edged the Quarters.
“To-to, Ma’a,” she said. Iya laughed, scooping up the child and setting her on her lap as she sat down at the fire. The boy had gone to pass water.
The boy returned and crouched beside Iya. He smiled up at her, showing the gaps where his milk teeth had newly fallen out.
To Abeje, Iya’s face was the most beautiful thing. She and her brother Adunbi hardly saw her in daylight. Iya’s arms wound around them and Abeje soaked up the humming her voice made, and her dry-grass smell every night before sleeping. When the fire was out and it was too dark to see, she reached up and touched Iya’s face. Her fingers traced the two grooves on her broad cheeks. Each had two shorter grooves springing off to the side, like the sticks for threshing grain. The grooves were smooth, like river water carved into stone. These were the marks of her people.
Iya’s voice was high and sweet like a bird. Every night she named the fire, and the children said after her, “Fire!” She named the cooking pot, and they cried, “Pot!” Iya named their feet, the ground, the food, and she named her two children, Adunbi and Abeje.
Adunbi already knew Iya’s counting song, the one they sang with dancing fingers. Abeje followed the movements with her hands, stumbling over the words she longed to master. Each finger had a name in the song. The thumb was a fat man with a big belly. Iya said Adunbi had six threshing seasons and Abeje had four. Then Iya held the children on her lap, as she always did, and sang their other songs, quietly, to make them go to sleep.
* * *
This night, after they had eaten, Iya untied a corner of her sash and brought out a handful of colored stones and seashells. She got them while at the bay by the sugar estate when she and other women were helping bring in the shrimp and the conch. It was for Young Monsieur’s wedding party, the conches for the feast. It was rare that any hands were spared from the cane fields, and even rarer for Iya to touch the Sea, or have anything pretty to bring them.
Abeje was entranced at once with the treasure hunt, and from then on searched for little stones all across the sugar estate. The older people laughed and said that she scratched and pecked like a hen. Now and then one of them would say, “Come, ptit,” and slip into her palm a little gem that they themselves had found. Some stones were black, some yellow or white. Once Abeje found a shell in the dust of wagon tracks, far from its salt-bed of the Sea. She rubbed it against her dress, and under the red dust it was pink and smooth, with a blue line that spun a tight spiral on the top. Iya made small holes in the ground by the fire and showed the children a game with the stones, scooping them up and dropping them round and round, one by one like single drops of rain. They dropped Abeje’s new shell there. They sang the words that were the names of numbers.
Abeje learned more than numbers. She learned that Iya was also once a child, and that when she was a girl, they stole her away from the Old Land, a place far away. Iya was carried over the Big Sea all the way to the Island, and so she was called a saltwater slave. There were other saltwater slaves on the sugar estate, but none spoke the tongue of Iya, and so she spoke it only to her two children. These were their first words, their language before they learned Creole.
Abeje loved Iya’s stories about her village. It was not like the sugar estate. There Iya had her Iya and Baba and brothers and sisters, and though there were chiefs and elders, none were Monsieur nor slave. Abeje understood that in the village there were also a great many animals. There were plants and spirits. The animals spoke as people, and tricked or aided one another. Some were very silly and some very shrewd, some were brave and some too proud. Abeje supposed that it was a pack of wild dogs that had captured Iya near her village, and carried her off to their cruel béké King, and took her so far away from her home that she could never go back again.