The Marriage of Opposites Read online

  Sometimes I was forced to bring along my younger cousin Aaron Rodrigues, who lived with us. There were three years between us and he was nothing but an annoyance to me. I was told his parents had been lost in a storm when he was little more than a baby and afterward our family had taken him in. My mother preferred him, even though he wasn’t related to us by blood, perhaps because of the baby boy she lost. Girls were not worth very much in her eyes, especially a disobedient girl such as myself. Aaron was handsome, dark, with startlingly pale blue eyes. Even as he grew older, my mother still enjoyed showing him off to her friends, especially the formidable Madame Halevy, whose stern presence intimidated us all but who melted whenever she saw Aaron. Mon chouchou, she called him, even when he was a rowdy boy of nine. Mon petit canard. In return I pinched Aaron and called him a duck in English, not such a pretty word. He always gave me a wounded look, though he didn’t complain. I should have been guilt-ridden, but I suppose I was a brutal girl. I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

  On nights when I was forced to look after Aaron, I gave him over to Jestine, who was more kindhearted than I. Perhaps because he was an orphan and Jestine had no father, she could feel compassion for him, even though he was a wild boy, who delighted in leaping from cliffs. I took to scaring him to get him to behave. He was terrified of werewolves, half-human beasts that were said to reside on the old plantations. My father had assured me these were made-up stories, used by the plantation owners to frighten slaves from running away. There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

  By now my father had decided I’d had enough of fairy tales and was too old for such notions. Perhaps my mother had complained to him or perhaps he thought I should be more serious or maybe he simply longed for the son he’d lost and wished to educate me in the way he would have had I been a boy. Monsieur Pomié was a respected member of the Burghers’ Association, the businessmen’s society that one must join to be a merchant, in my father’s case, a shop owner who exported rum and sugar and molasses. Aaron was fated to take over his business, since girls and women could not inherit property, but perhaps my father hoped those laws would change. He began to teach me figures, so I would understand the ledgers in the store, and I was honored to be educated in a way few girls were.

  All the same, I wrote down the werewolf tale the way I’d heard it from our cook, Adelle. She had told us that the werewolves were members of the old Danish families who owned slaves. Their transformation was God’s punishment for their wrongdoings. You could spy their teeth and claws at night, even when they were in their human guise, so they often wore gloves and scarves, even in the hottest times of the year. If you see such a thing, Adelle told us, run.

  I read this story to Aaron on a nightly basis. Though it terrified him, he always wanted to hear it again and again. It came as no surprise that he began to imagine such beasts in every dark lane and alleyway. He stayed close to Jestine, trusting her as much as he mistrusted me. Sometimes I made a howling noise when I walked behind him and he’d jump as if he’d been bitten.

  “Must you frighten him?” Jestine would ask me.

  “Must you pity him?” I would say.

  Still, I admit that on certain nights I had my own fears, not of roaming half wolves, but of our own homeland. It seemed there was an inescapable loneliness here. The bats above us, the wind from Africa, the roar of the waves. It was as if we were on the edge of the known world and could drop off into the darkness at any time. When the three of us were out together, no one knew where we were. If anything happened, we would have to save each other.

  PEOPLE WHO CAME HERE from Europe often claimed they couldn’t tell the difference between winter and summer on an island as mild as ours. They clearly didn’t know this island. We had times of rain and wind, blue nights when a cold thread coiled through all the houses, pinching the babies and making them cry. On such nights the fish in the ponds turned black and floated to the surface. The leaves of the jasmine curled up like little frogs. But in summer, everything turned white-hot and bright in an instant, with sparks in the air that were as hot as flames. The heat stunned people who weren’t used to it. Women who accompanied their husbands here from France on business often fainted moments after disembarking from their ships. They were given a drink made of palm bark and sugar water, yet many could never abide the bright light, not if they stayed here for years, not if they spent their whole lives here. They shrank into darkened rooms, keeping their window shades closed against the fierce light, not venturing out until dusk. We would see them sometimes, crying in courtyards.

  “Werewolves,” my cousin Aaron would declare when we passed by these houses, for their weeping sounded like howling. “No, they’re not beasts,” Jestine assured him. “Just lonely women from France, longing for home.” But whenever we came near the old Danish estates, where there were still slaves living in shacks, we ran as fast as we could, with Aaron trailing behind us, until he grew so tall he could outrun us. Then we had to use all our strength just to keep up with him. By the age of twelve he was six feet tall, so handsome that grown women stopped on the street to call to him. Jestine made certain he didn’t go to investigate when the women made clucking noises aimed at him, as if they were hens and he was a fox. I knew then, she wanted him for herself.

  EACH YEAR I HAD more stories to write down. The women at the market waited for me whenever they had a new one to tell. There was the story in which a hundred butterflies arose from a single tree all at once to form a second yellow moon, and one about a fish with the face of a horse who came galloping into the city one night, and another about a bird that flew halfway around the world for love, and was flying above us still.

  I tied my notebook with ribbon and kept it beneath my pillow, far from the grasp of my mother. “Don’t tell,” I warned the laundry women who came to change the sheets. They understood why I would keep a secret from my mother. She had little tolerance for what she considered to be nonsense, and that included most things in this world, even the history of our people, and how we had come to be so far away from our rightful home. I knew if she found my notebook she would toss it onto the trash heap at the back of the yard. Everything I knew of our island I had learned in my father’s library. It was a complicated history, for St. Thomas had traded hands many times, belonging to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and finally, the Danes, who sent the Danish West India Company to begin a society that was mostly concerned with trade. In 1688, of the 739 people who lived here, 317 were Europeans from eleven nations and 422 were African people, who were brought here against their will. The wretched slavers’ ships docked across from schooners belonging to the relations of royalty, many of whom had been cast out from their own kingdoms and had no inheritance other than tracts of land in the mountains beside the dormant volcano known as the Quill. Pirates from all nations camped in the coves, hidden from the authorities.

  Captain Kidd had roamed the shore, along with a fierce and pitiless man known as Blackbeard, who attacked ships in the harbor, kidnapping wealthy residents, taking dozens of local women as wives, and forcing women en route to America to wed him as well. He was voracious, hungry for more despite all he had. There were people who claimed he’d had twenty wives; others insisted it was more than thirty. Some he kept, some he passed on to marry his sailors.

  The grass grew tall in the fields, and wild donkeys roamed freely, left behind by the pirate wives who had begun farms in an attempt to civilize their husbands. Trees from Madagascar had been brought here on their lawless ships, and after the pirate wives had been abandoned by their men, they’d sown the seeds from their homeland as if they were blood-red tears. Even now as the graves of these women went untended, and their passings unmourned, the seeds they had scattered turned the hillsides red and orange from May to September. Some called the pirates’ bounty flame
trees, but to us they were known as flamboyant trees, for no one could ignore their glorious blooms, with flowers that were larger than a man’s open hand.

  Every time I saw them I thought of these lost women.

  That was what happened if you waited for love.

  ON NIGHTS WHEN I couldn’t sleep, I took a candle and sneaked into my father’s library so that I might look at his maps of Paris. I was especially entranced by the garden of the Tuileries, for my father had recently told me the King had wanted the park for himself until Monsieur Perrault roused the crowd, insisting that each common person had a right to Paris and to that garden. From my father’s books about ornithology and botanicals, I turned to François-Nicolas Martinet’s illustrations for Histoire naturelle des oiseaux to learn about kingfishers and swans and nightingales. My father loved books of landscapes and architecture with huge hand-colored plates illustrating the gardens, and he particularly valued roses, which were not natural to our shores. White Alba roses, tea-scented roses in shades of apricot and yellow, China roses with blooms as big as plates, and Bourbon roses, which had been developed in a prince’s greenhouse. In these books I discovered winter fruits most people on our island had never seen, apples and pears and blackberries and then, in the spring, raspberries and strawberries the color of gems.

  I stood before the bookcases in my bare feet while outside the wind from Africa came across the sea. I was somewhere else completely, inside a story where I shivered in the snow and drew my fox cloak around me. I stepped over the ice in my fine leather boots. Once there had been a girl who slept for over a hundred years. There was a daughter who protected herself by wearing the skin of a donkey. A cat that was wiser than the men around him and earned such a huge treasure it never had to chase mice again. I kept the book of fairy tales close to my heart, the cover flaming blue. That would keep me warm, until at last I reached the place where I belonged.

  AT FIRST THERE WERE six families of our faith here who said prayers around a dining room table and formed a burial society in 1750 so they might begin a cemetery in an area that was then a wasteland called the Savan. The year after I was born the synagogue was founded, with the right to do so granted by the Danish King, Christian VII. It was called Kahal Kadosh Beracha VeShalom, the Holy Congregation Blessing and Peace, and our burial society was named Deeds of Lovingkindness, named for those who cared for the dead. There was a doctor employed by the congregation, and the poor were cared for. The council safeguarded our civil rights as best they could in a world where people of our faith must always be cautious, ready to swim away when need be. In return for all the synagogue did for us, decency and decorum must be observed and unity preserved at all costs. Fines were levied upon anyone who disagreed with the Reverend. Troublesome congregants would be dealt with by the committee chosen to do so. The Danish government tolerated our congregation, but any incident or infighting could bring attention to us now, and the government’s acceptance of us could always change, with people executed and jailed, vanishing as if they had been enchanted and turned into stalks of grass.

  By the time I was a young woman there were eighty families in our congregation. At Friday night services my mother and I sat behind a sheet of white muslin that separated the women and children from the men. My mother always sat beside Madame Halevy. Together they were a powerful force. The Sisterhood of Blessings and Peace and Loving Deeds monitored themselves and us; they were judge and jury in all social matters and on occasion were far harsher than the Danes might have been. It was their world, after all.

  THE SYNAGOGUE WAS A small wooden building, lit by candles that flickered in heavy silver candlesticks brought from Spain a century ago. Someday our prayers would be recited in an elegant building made of stone, but even then, we would keep the floor as it was, made of sand, as it had been in Europe for the duration of the terrible years when we had to hide who we were, when footsteps on marble or stone might give away our place of worship to those who wished to cause us harm. The inside story of our people’s lives had been kept secret for hundreds of years, a stone inside a fruit, the truth of who we were.

  To outsiders, people of our faith were considered mysterious beings. There were Christians who whispered that we were like shadows, able to slip through a net like fish. If we were shadows, then our history had made us so. We went through life underwater, unseen by those in power who might turn on us. My people accounted for nearly half the European population of the island. We were called Creoles, Europeans who had never been in Europe, Jews who hadn’t stopped running from persecution until we came here. Yet we still cooked our food in the French way; we added olives and chives and caperberries, in the old Spanish style. We carried our pasts with us. Perhaps that was what made us appear to be shadows, the burden we carried with us, the other lives we might have led.

  My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us.

  I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined. I gazed at myself in the silvered mirror in our parlor and I knew I would do as I pleased, no matter the consequences.

  I rarely helped to make the Sabbath meal, as such duties did not suit my nature. I was not a cook but a huntress. Because of this, I was often sent to find a chicken in the yard behind the kitchen house, a small building made of white stucco, separate from the main house to ensure that the heat of our cookery wouldn’t enter the rooms where we lived. I wore a black apron so that any blood I spilled wouldn’t show. With the heat of the day rich and hot on my skin, I looked forward to Friday afternoons, when I became a killer of chickens. I listened to the thrum of the bird’s heart and the beat of mine quicken together. I always said a prayer and called upon God’s grace, and then I was not afraid. I was practical, and I thought it important to teach myself to face whatever other girls feared most. I stared at the clucking birds until they quieted, for they were easily calmed. Then I chose one, wrapped it in a cloth, and took its life before bringing it into the kitchen so that Adelle could pluck its feathers. In return I was given a plate of ripe sapodilla fruits, which tasted like caramel. These small egg-shaped fruits were my favorite treats; as I ate I imagined they were sweets from a shop in Paris rather than hard-shelled fruits fallen from a tree.

  I couldn’t remember a time when Adelle didn’t work for us and I did not spend my days with her daughter. Jestine had her mother’s brown skin but gray, nearly silver eyes, as if she were related to those incandescent first people who had come here to bring light from the moon. She and I did everything together. We often helped Adelle, who was the best cook on the island. Other than the library, the outdoor kitchen where Adelle worked was my favorite place. Our dinners contained my family’s recipes for stews and soups from the old world, but Adelle added lime juice, papaya, banana, rosemary, all ingredients from our garden. When my mother was not at home Adelle often made us a supper of rice and beans and fried conch meat that we first had to pound tender with a hammer. At lunch we had the local cornmeal porridge called fongee, which my family thought of as food for the poor. Best were the snacks Adelle made, a most delicious mixture of mango, tamarind, gooseberries, and sugar. Jestine and I ate this with our fingers, in heaven to have something my mother would never have allowed to be served at our table, eating in a way that would have made her call us pigs.

  Some people suggested that Jestine’s father was a man in our congregation. No one would say who he might be, but I thought he must be rich. Adelle was a servant, but she had money enough to live in her own house near the harbor. Jestine’s father had not made him
self present. Jestine had never met him and didn’t know his name. “It’s better that way,” Adelle had told her. “You can’t betray what you don’t know.”

  Jestine accepted her mother’s advice, but I was too curious to be satisfied. I peered into the faces of men in our congregation, looking for features that resembled Jestine’s. I was certain that she belonged to my people, and was therefore my sister, as I was hers.

  The cottage where Jestine and Adelle lived was set on stilts; even if the floodwater was high enough to surround it, the house and its contents and those who lived inside would be safe. You had to jump puddles on the path if you wanted to pay a visit, and sometimes there were starfish in those puddles, stranded until the next high tide. The wide porch was constructed from wooden slats, and it was possible to look right through into the blue sea. Some of Adelle’s furniture was fashioned of local mahogany, upholstered with leather and mohair seats; other pieces, a carved bureau for instance, had been imported from France. There was a lace runner on the tabletop, and kerosene lamps lit the sitting room; at night her whole house was like a lantern, a beacon on the shore.

  As far as I knew, no one thought worse of Jestine because she had only a mother. Many people didn’t have fathers, or at least not ones they knew. Those of mixed blood who had white fathers were given their freedom, even when a man was not cited by name, and people of mixed race accounted for more than half the population of color. Still, I was glad that I did have a father and proud that he was Moses Monsanto Pomié, a man well thought of by his neighbors, a businessman favored in all his endeavors. I was happy that I didn’t have to look into men’s faces, searching for a part of me, some feature that connected us by bond and blood.

  Jestine never looked, no matter how I urged her to do so. She shrugged and said a mother was enough and she didn’t need more. She was cautious when I was curious, kind when I was arrogant. She was far too gentle to kill a chicken, so whenever Adelle sent her to do this, I always took her place. We laughed and spoke of exchanging lives. I would have liked to live in a house where I could hear the sea in my dreams. Jestine wanted to be within the garden walls where the light had a gold tint in the evenings and bees gathered in the blooms. We would dress in each other’s clothes, say good night to each other’s mothers, dream each other’s dreams.