Read an Excerpt

ONE
 
Teresa Francis, called Tee, was six years old when first she learned that St. Felice was not the world—and fifteen when she fled from it in fear and shame, for reasons that the most flamboyant imagination could not have foretold.
 
“The world is enormous, child,” Père said. “It’s a great ball spinning around the sun, and St. Felice is only a fleck of dust on the ball.”
 
Père was her grandfather and her friend, more so than ever in that winter of 1928 when her father, he who was Père’s son, had died. She understood Père’s sadness, feeling it as a graver pain than Mama’s was, in spite of the black dress and the tears.
 
“Look carefully, there—those two dark curves like clouds, you see? Those are St. Lucia’s peaks. That way, there’s St. Vincent. And Dominica, and Grenada—”
 
The child had a sudden image of these islands, drawn out of who knew what remembered words, an image of green turtles, mottled and domed, like turtles dozing by the little river where black women were even now beating clothes clean on the rocks.
 
“And down there’s Covetown, follow my finger—you can see the careenage, and I think I can just make out a liner coming into the roadstead.”
 
A liner. A great ship with smoke twirling from the funnels and a lovely name like Marina or Southern Star. When the ships came they brought good things: bisque dolls with real hair, Mama’s beautiful hats and her kid gloves (“Unbearable in this climate,” Mama said, “but a lady can’t go very far without them, can she?”), and the glittery things in the Da Cunha shop on Wharf Street, and Père’s books and Papa’s suits from England—only there would be no more of those; his suits had been given to the servants.
 
She stood there thinking about all that, stood in a silence of wondering and trance, in a remote and midday silence, until a woman far below at the river broke it with a whooping laugh and Père spoke again.
 
“‘Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made.’ Our first ancestor here became a pirate. He came as an indentured servant and ran away from a cruel master to join the buccaneers. Have I ever told you that, Tee?”
 
“Yes, but Mama said it wasn’t true.”
 
“Your mama doesn’t want to believe it. His name was Eleuthère François. When the English took the island the name was changed to Francis…. It was my great-grandfather who called this house Eleuthera, after a city in ancient Greece. He was an educated man, the first in our family to study at Cambridge…. I love this place. Your father loved it. It’s in our blood. Two hundred years of it and more.”
 
Père was tall. A child had to crane her head to see his prominent, thin nose. He carried a gold-knobbed cane, not to lean on, but to flourish. His name was Virgil Francis. He was master of the rising hills that mounted in tiers of jungle and cane toward the summit of Morne Bleue; master of all the looping fields that swept to the shore. Lands and houses miles away across the island were his also: Drummond Hall, Georgia’s Fancy, Hope Great House, and Florissant.
 
For all this ownership, Tee knew, he was respected. In later life she was to wonder how she, a child kept in an unworldly ignorance so profound that it nearly destroyed her, could have known that ownership commands the most respect of all.
 
“But why ever he chooses to stay in this shabby, far-off hill place,” Mama complained, “I will never understand.” Her earrings sparked. Now that she was in mourning she wore jet instead of pearls or gold, but still they sparked. “Drummond Hall would be so much nicer, even though it’s run-down, too. A pity, he’s no manager.”
 
Tee defended him. “He speaks Latin and Greek.”
 
“Much good that does when it comes to running a sugar estate!”
 
But Mama would never have dared say that to Père. In all the pictures taken during those slow, long days it is he who sits in the fan chair on the veranda, Mama and the others who stand around him. Looking backward with these photographs (mounted in a black imitation-leather album with frayed corners), Tee, in another country where snow falls through gray afternoons, strains to recall the faces and the place which after so many years have grown unreal, yet which at moments can still be as painful and sensitive as fingertips.
 
Here she is herself in a dark skirt and a sailor blouse, the uniform of the convent school in Covetown.
 
“We are not Catholic, of course,” Mama said. “But the nuns have the best school here, and as long as you go to the Anglican church on Sundays, it doesn’t matter.”
 
The twelve-year-old face is earnest, timid, and plain. She has inherited Père’s proud peaked nose. Only her lavish hair is beautiful, lying dark on her shoulders. Later she will be told that this hair is aphrodisiac; certainly she would not have understood that then.
 
Here are the wedding pictures, the day Mama married again. Mama wore an enormous pink hat. There had been roast suckling pig and hearts of palm. A whole palm tree had been cut down to make the salads.
 
“A sin,” said Père, who would lay his hand on a tree as though it could speak to him.
 
Mama’s new husband was Mr. Tarbox—Uncle Herbert, Tee was to call him. He was a neat man who still spoke of England as home, although he had been living on St. Felice for twenty years. The servants said he was wealthy; he had been a commission merchant in Covetown, and now was to be a planter, which was a much more distinguished thing to be. He had money to invest in the Francis estates and perhaps he would make them pay more richly; he was known to be smart. They hoped he would get along with old Mr. Francis. Miss Julia was, after all, not a daughter, only a daughter-in-law. Still, there was the girl Tee to hold them all together. So they spoke.
 
Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox were to live at Drummond Hall. In loving memory of his son and to provide a home for Tee, Virgil had given a grand house to his daughter-in-law. But it was too echoing, too lofty for Tee.
 
“I don’t want to leave Eleuthera,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t ever see you, Père.”
 
“Of course you will! But you belong with your mother. And don’t forget, Agnes will be going with you.”
 
Agnes Courzon had come years before from Martinique, to work for the family. She had coffee-colored skin; her hair was fastened sleek-flat; she had gold hoops in her ears and on Sundays wore a flowered turban and a necklace of large gold beads. Tee supposed she was handsome.
 
She liked fine things. “When I worked in Martinique at the Mauriers’—oh, là! What a gorgeous house! Such damask and silver you never saw! But for the eruption I would never have gone away. Destroyed, that wicked Mount Pelée destroyed it all. It hurts my heart to think of it. But wait,” she said, “wait and see what your mama and Mr. Tarbox will do with Drummond Hall. It won’t be like this old place, tumbling down—”
 
Tee looked around the room. Really, she had never noticed that the plaster garlands were falling from the ceiling. Books were heaped on chairs. A small coiled snake lay preserved in a jar on the windowsill. Père studied snakes.
 
“I’ll be glad to leave,” Agnes said. “I should think you would be, too.”
 
There are dozens of photographs of Drummond Hall. At the end of a lane it stands, between a row of royal palms. Twin staircases join at the top on a veranda, from which one enters into the gloss of parquet and dark mahogany.
 
The house was Mama’s pride. But Uncle Herbert’s thoughts moved out beyond the house.
 
“We shall need new rollers in the mill. And I’m thinking about turning the east hundred into bananas.”
 
Mama said doubtfully, “I don’t know why, I still think of bananas as a kind of Negro peasant crop.”
 
“Where’ve you been these last twenty years? Have you any idea how many tons the Geest ships carry back to England from Jamaica alone?”
 
“But the old sugar families here—”
 
“Julia, I am not from an aristocratic sugar family, you forget. I’m a middle-class merchant.” Uncle Herbert was not indignant, merely amused. “We’re way behind the times on St. Felice and I mean to catch up. There’s relatively no care with bananas. You plant the rootstock and in twelve months you’re ready to harvest. There’s no processing, nothing to do but pick, grade, and ship.”
 
“It’ll throw a lot of people out of work, cutting down on sugar,” Père told Tee privately. “He doesn’t care, though. A new main come to run things.”
 
“Don’t you like Uncle Herbert?”
 
“I like him well enough. He’s a worker and he’s honest. It’s just that I’m too old to learn new ways. They don’t agree with me.”
 
But they agreed with Mama. Here in one deckle-edged snapshot after the other stands Julia Tarbox, gay and charming as Tee will never be: ruffled and flounced for a ball at Government House or smiling on the veranda with her two new babies, Lionel and little Julia, born only a year apart.
 
Tee knew, of course, that the babies had come from inside her mother, just as puppies and colts came out of their mothers. The question was, How did they get there? It was frustrating that there was absolutely no way to find out. Nothing was written anywhere and no one would talk about it.
 
“We don’t discuss things like that.” Mama’s rebuke was gentle and firm. “You will find out when the right time comes.”