Eden Burning Read Free

thought, It is because he is colored, which seemed answer enough. Still, she mused, he is not very colored, is he? He was a shade or two lighter than Agnes, and like Agnes, quite clean. He wore a freshly washed shirt every morning and carried with him a pleasant scent of the wood on which he worked; sometimes a papery curl of wood shaving caught in his hair, which was thick and straight. White man’s hair, it was. His narrow lips were the white man’s. Only his eyes were Negro. White people’s brown eyes were never that dark. It occurred to her that Clyde’s had a wise look to them. Or perhaps a mocking look? As if even when he was being most respectful—and he was always respectful, Père would not have allowed him to stay if he had not been—as if his eyes were saying,
I know what you are thinking.
But then, she thought, that’s probably silly; I am given to silly observations, Mama always says.
    “This is a translation I made,” Père explained. “From the French, naturally. The original is in my vault in town. It’s crumbling, ought to be in a museum. Well, I’ll get to that one of these days. Here it is: ‘Diary of the First François.’
    “‘We sailed from Havre de Grace on the English ship
Pennington
in the year of our Lord 1673, I being fifteen years of age and indentured for seven years to a Mr. Raoul D’Arcy on the island of St. Felice in the West Indies; he to pay my passage and clothe me, he to pay me three hundred pounds of tobacco at the end of my service.’”
    Père turned some pages. “Fascinating. Here, listen to this. ‘We labor from a quarter of an hour after sunrise to a quarter of an hour after sunset. I share a cabin with two black slaves.They are pleasant enough, poor creatures. They suffer, but I suffer worse than they do. My master admits to working the white man harder because after seven years he will part with him; but the Negro is his for life and must therefore be kept in health.’”
    “I thought,” Tee remarked, “our ancestor was a buccaneer.”
    “Oh, yes! He ran away to join the buccaneers. You can hardly blame him. And yet—what a devilish thing is human nature!—he became more savage than the master whom he had escaped. Listen to this. ‘We came alongside the
Garza Blanca,
a merchantman sailing for Spain, sometime before moonrise. We boarded without a sound, surprising the watch, whom we threw overboard into a heavy sea. We bayonetted the captain, seized the guns, and put to shore, there to dispose of a goodly cargo: gold, tobacco, hides, and a great prize in pearls.’”
    “I don’t think,” Tee shuddered, “I want to know any more about this François.” She stretched out her arm, turning it over to regard the small cluster of blue veining at the elbow. “I can’t believe his blood runs in my veins…. A savage like him!”
    “Many generations removed, my dear,” Père said complacently. “And anyway he became a gentleman before very long.” He flipped through a few more pages. “‘I have resolved to become provident, having seen my lads squander a year’s gain on brandy and’”—Père coughed—“other things. ‘I mean to buy land and live on my property like a gentleman, to marry well—’” He closed the notebook. “And so he did. He married Virginia Durand, daughter of a well-established planter who had apparently no qualms about giving her to a reformed buccaneer. He lived, incidentally, to make a fortune in sugar before he was forty. Sugar’s not a native plant; you did know that, didn’t you?” Père frowned. “Tee, I’m feeling the signs of age. I was about to tell you about sugar and all of a sudden the facts have fled. Would you believe it possible that I can’t name the place where it originated?”
    “Excuse me, Mr. Francis, sir,” Clyde said. “It was the Canary Islands. Columbus brought the first cuttings from there.”
    “Why, yes, you’re right; of course you are.”
    “Yes, sir. I read it in the
National