NO OTHER WORLD
Chapter 8
1762
Chapter 8
1762
Pierre Metoyer, along with the growing number of slaves he was slowly acquiring, worked on his house each day until sunset and rode in an hour later, weary from laboring in the heat since dawn. He had long ago cut his hair to a practical length for the Louisiana climate and stored his continental attire in a cedar chest until a more leisurely time when he would resurrect the fashionable clothing for one of the local soirées. As the sun dropped farther south and the days grew shorter and cooler, Metoyer had more energy in the evening and was able to spend time with Coincoin. He was surprised to discover that she not only could read and write, but could also quote numerous passages from the Bible, the Iliad, and the Odyssey.
Coincoin rarely saw Étienne Pavie. Younger than Metoyer, he looked much older, and because he was morosely silent Coincoin never knew whether she liked him or not. His face was pocked, his teeth were bad, he was short, and he had what Coincoin referred to as shifty eyes. When Coincoin asked Metoyer about his cousin’s gloomy disposition, he said Étienne missed his wife, who was in France awaiting word that her husband had made enough money to keep a gentle-woman happy in the wilderness. Étienne worked doggedly and long, Metoyer explained, not only because he missed his wife and wished to amass a fortune, but to work out his frustration for being led to believe that pearls could be plucked from the white sands of Louisiana’s beaches and that gold nuggets were strewn like pecans across the surface of its northern hills.
Already attracted to the way Coincoin carried herself physically, Metoyer became attached to her in deeper ways—in the manner masters sometimes grow fond of their slaves, and in the manner men often grow fond of women. That is, Metoyer soon found that he was in love with Coincoin. Her humor delighted him, her teeth fascinated him, and the outline of her breasts greatly disturbed him.
Perhaps the only thing that vexed him more was the occasional visit that was Mulkkat’s due. Étienne Pavie’s house was small, and during Mulkkat’s first visits, Metoyer busied himself with some trifling task such as sharpening a knife, but his activity was constantly interrupted by his imagination, which made him hear sounds he did not wish to hear. When his nerves could no longer stand the pressure of his imaginings, he ran out of the house and flew on his horse into town.
“Black jewel, indeed,” Metoyer more than once muttered as he angrily threw a saddle onto his horse. “What good is a jewel if it’s not in your own crown,” he said, driving his knee into the horse’s belly to tighten the girth.
At Free-john’s tavern, Metoyer lost himself in drink and money-talk and salacious boasting contests that focused on female conquests back in France. As the evenings wore on, the voices told loud jokes about the private parts of men and women doing impossible things in unlikely places. The frenzy often built to a crescendo that culminated in brawls that took teeth and occasionally an eye, but never a life. For Metoyer, the ritual was a way to quell the demon inside him that wanted most surely to possess what it most certainly could not have. For the others, Saturday nights were not a cathartic distraction, but the final movement in a weekly dance that gave their lives shape and meaning. The man they fought with in the smoky dark, they hailed by daylight as a friend well-met. In short, Saturday night was what they called passing a good time. Metoyer himself occasionally joined in a friendly fight and came to be known for what his confrères called his eloquent fists.
Metoyer quickly learned to absent himself from his cousin’s house before Mulkkat’s arrival. Even so, it took days of testy reticence and tentative approaches for his relationship with Coincoin to reach a truce and return to normal. Jealousy was a wolf that took its time devouring Metoyer’s heart. Coincoin, too, guiltily avoided Metoyer’s eyes, feeling, after each conjugal visit, as if she had voluntarily engaged in an adulterous treachery. It was a war neither party wished and neither party could stop.
During one of these cold spells, Metoyer invoked the warming winds of flattery to thaw the chilly silence. As Coincoin was sewing a shirt by candlelight one evening, Metoyer said to her, “You are black but comely, O daughter of Jerusalem. Your teeth are as a flock of sheep that go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them.”
Coincoin looked up. The pained expression on Metoyer’s face evoked more compassionate tenderness than her heart could endure.
“That’s from The Song of Solomon,” Metoyer said.
“Oh,” Coincoin said. “It’s lovely.”
“Yes,” Metoyer said. “It reminds me of you.” He looked at her looking at him. “Your teeth. Your skin.”
“Monsieur,” Coincoin said, looking down at her work. “Please understand my situation.” She looked up at him. “If I could be with you–. If it were my choice–.” Coincoin stumbled to a halt and looked away. “I just don’t know what to tell you.”
“Tell me you will have my children.”
“Monsieur, please.”
“You will,” Metoyer said, and it did not sound like a command.
Once a month during the warm part of the year, just as she had done since the death of her parents six years previously, Coincoin went into town to tend the cemetery. She had made it her duty to keep the grounds, and when she decided to buy herself, Mme. de Soto had been able to secure from Father Joubert the handsome sum of fifty cents a month for her work. People too busy with their own lives, the priest explained, are always happy to pay someone else to care for their dead. She thus became a well-known figure in the graveyard and was admired by the Commandant and citizens for her care of the final resting-place of their ancestors.
In November, Coincoin asked Metoyer if she could make a final trip into town the next Sunday to tend the cemetery before winter set in.
“Under one condition,” he said.
“Yes sir?”
“That you let me go with you.”
“Yes sir,” she said. “Of course. You order me, not the other way around. But I thought–.”
“And that you quit calling me sir.”
“Yes,” she said, finding it difficult not to say sir. “Yes, fine,” she attempted, trying to fill in the gap left by sir and thinking she managed only to sound foolish. “But I thought you’d be working on–.”
“Almost finished,” he interrupted. “Besides, I need a rest and I can see if the blacksmith, what’s his name–?”
“LaBoeuve.”
“LaBoeuve has finished the hoes I ordered.”
On the cemetery grounds outside the walls of Fort St. Jean Baptiste, Metoyer watched Coincoin pull weeds from around the red-brick tombs. The bricks, she explained, had been used as ballast in some of the ships coming from France to load up with tobacco grown in the colony. As she worked and talked, he held Françoise and sometimes idly picked at a few blades of dying grass at the base of the iron crosses that stood in exact lines, like sentinels on review. When she moved on to one of the whitewashed tombs of a wealthier citizen, Metoyer herded Louise and little Thérèze before him.
At the back of the cemetery, Coincoin was working around one of the few headstones when suddenly she stopped, rested her hands on her thighs, and let out an exasperated sigh.
“What’s that?” Metoyer asked, thinking she had said something to him he had missed.
“Look how this branch has destroyed Monsieur Triche’s headstone.”
Metoyer looked at the stone. A crepe myrtle branch broken in a storm had fallen against the inscription, Tempus edax rerum.
“Tempus edax rerum,” Coincoin said. “Time, the devourer of all things.”
Still attached to the trunk by a few splinters, the branch had blown for a month against the stone slab and scratched away most of the man’s name.
Coincoin tugged angrily at the limb, trying to free it from the trunk.
“Here,” Metoyer said, pulling his knife from its scabbard. “Use this.”
As Coincoin sawed away at the tree, she launched into a tirade against time.
“If it’s not tree limbs, it’s ice. Ice will creep into a name and chip it away to nothing in five years. That’s why it’s best to have your tombstone sitting up rather than lying flat on the ground. That way, most of the water runs out of the crevices before it has a chance to freeze and break the letters apart.”
Metoyer laughed. “You seem to know a lot about time for such a young girl. How old are you, anyway?”
“I feel like I’ve lived a long time,” she said, grunting as she tugged at the stubborn limb, “even though I’m only twenty.” She yanked at the branch again. “Of course, I know my life’s been easy compared to some slave women my age.” Metoyer could not help but notice the lively movements of Coincoin’s breasts as they responded to her struggle with the branch. Finally, she tore the branch from the tree and slung it into the undergrowth that bordered the cemetery. Metoyer admired the way her sweat painted her skin a glistening black.
After catching her breath, she said, “You see, that’s where my parents are buried.” Metoyer looked at the flat parcel of ground where Coincoin was pointing. “If I hadn’t seen them put in the ground myself, I’d never know someone was buried there. I made them a pair of crosses out of sticks. But they crumbled long ago. I always leave their plot for last because it’s the easiest. It doesn’t have any stones or bricks for weeds to grow around.”
Coincoin stopped for a moment to compose herself. She brushed dry grass and leaf flakes and small pieces of bark from her dress. “It would be nice when I die to have an iron cross or at least a stone over my grave so my children can have a place to go to and say ‘There,’ to my grandchildren. ‘There, that’s where your grandmère is buried.’”
Metoyer felt like saying, “A lot of good that will do you.” Instead, he thought for a while and said, “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.”
Coincoin looked at him suspiciously and after some reflection said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s Rousseau,” Metoyer said. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A philosopher everyone’s talking about back in France. He knows that everyone is a slave of one kind or another.” Metoyer paused for a moment to let his words sink in. “A slave to tradition. A slave to custom. A slave to religion. A slave to the State. In brief, every person is a slave to everything his parents were slaves to—plus some.”
Coincoin reached out to take Françoise from Metoyer. She thoughtfully bounced her on her knee. “‘Man is born free–’ and how does the rest of that go?”
“Yet everywhere he is in chains.”
“Yes, and everywhere he is in chains,” Coincoin said. “Born free. True,” she said contemplatively, “but not free to be born. Françoise, she wasn’t free to be born, and it doesn’t look like she was born to be free, either. I’m sure you’ve noticed that some people have more chains than others.”
“Rousseau says all that will change in the next hundred years or so. The person who can throw off the chains of society will be what he calls the novus homo, the new man. See, you’re not the only one who can turn a Latin phrase to his advantage. Anyway, that’s why I came to Louisiana, to get away from all the artificial manners and arts and sciences that have caused man to degenerate from his natural state of goodness. “I,” Metoyer said as he stood and bowed before Coincoin, “am one of Rousseau’s new men.”
Coincoin was unimpressed by the gesture. “Life sure is a funny thing,” she said.
Metoyer raised his eyebrow as if to say, “Is that right? How so?”
“Master de Soto sent his only daughter, who happened to be the only friend I had in this world, off to France for just the opposite reason—‘To get away from this god-forsaken wilderness and get a little civilized refinement.’”
Metoyer laughed heartily at his servant’s cynical wit and spunky anger. She had none of the encumbering gentility that protected French noble women from their own desire, and his desire for them.
“Well, if she’s as good a person as you say, she’ll grow tired of all that frivolity in a year or two, mark my word.”
“When she left, she promised me she’d be back in two years. That was three years ago. In her most recent letter, she said she’d finished her schooling, but now thinks of France as her home. She promised and promised to come for a visit, but I don’t think that will ever happen. Besides, I’m not sure what good her return would do me by then. If I were free, I could see her anytime I wanted. By the time she makes the crossing. There’s no telling where I’ll be.” For a long while, Metoyer watched Coincoin handling Françoise.
“You’re right, of course. There are degrees and types of freedom just as there are of pain. But–.” Metoyer paused to formulate his thoughts. “Take Moses, for instance. That crazy bird in Free-john’s tavern. He’s a captive, but he has the freedom to eat whenever he wants. And he’s free from predators. If he were turned loose, he’d get eaten inside of a week. On the other hand, at the tavern, tethered to his perch, he doesn’t have the freedom to fly. So you see, it’s a trade off. That’s what Rousseau calls the Social Contract. We give up certain freedoms to gain certain benefits.”
“I’d rather fly,” Coincoin said. “It seems like there’s just so much freedom to go around. Like not everybody can be free at the same time.” Coincoin paused. “I’ll chance the predators if someone will just cut the strap holding me down.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying. If you were freed, you’d have to provide for yourself and your children. Do you have any idea how difficult that would be? It would be impossible. With freedom, you don’t have the freedom to do nothing. Unless you want to starve. That’s one of the questionable privileges of freedom—the possibility of starvation.”
Coincoin grew irritated when she noticed how closely Metoyer’s words resembled Mme. de Soto’s argument. She thought, That parrot Moses could say the same things if you taught him.
During the silence, Metoyer saw the chance to broach the topic he had come to the cemetery in hopes of discussing. “But I could help you if you’d let me. I could change your life if that’s what you really want.”
Without turning her attention from the baby, Coincoin said, “How? You can’t give me my freedom. Monsieur de Soto’s the one who owns me.”
“I could marry you.”
For a split second, hope flashed through Coincoin’s mind. She shot Metoyer a startled look and then broke into frustrated laughter.
“You can’t marry me,” she said caustically. “Even if the Black Code allowed it. I’m married to Mulkkat.”
Metoyer stood up and growled and little Thérèze began to cry.
“I can buy you, then,” he said.
“A lot of good that will do me. Then I’ll be owned by you instead of Monsieur de Soto.”
“It would do you a lot of good!” Metoyer shouted. “I’d let you do anything you wanted, see Louise anytime you wanted. I could give you anything you wanted.”
“Except freedom,” Coincoin said. “And the past twenty years of my life. You—.”
“Quit being so damned smart and allow me to finish! I was going to say that I could buy you and set you free. Your tongue is already free enough. God knows what kind of havoc would result if the rest of you were set free.” Metoyer paused. “But I’d be willing to do it if you’d live with me as my wife.”
Coincoin was startled by this outburst from the man who had spoken only kindly to her before then. Having grown up in a wealthy household with a loving friend, she was not used to verbal assaults. She sulked for several moments.
“As your wife,” she said, standing up. “As your wife. You would set me free if I lived as your wife.” She walked, with Françoise in her arms, over to the grassy area that was her parents’ grave site, thinking what this proposal might mean to hers and her children. Impulsively, she turned toward him. “I still wouldn’t be free. I’d be obligated to you for setting me free. And my children would still be owned by Monsieur de Soto.”
“Mon Dieu! woman, I’m a man, not a miracle-worker. Those things take money, years of hard work, lots of luck, and–.”
“And you yourself are everywhere in chains. But you’re also one of those New Men, remember? Isn’t that what you bragged about? Well, if you want me so badly,” Coincoin challenged as she gathered her children together to leave, “you’ll think of a way to keep me . . . and set me free.”