Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice

good ladies ever talk about that, the battle at Grand Rivière?” Jean Jacques asked gently. There was no judgment in his voice, merely in the choice of his words. He lifted a tack from the box, fitted it between two fingers of his left hand which held the cloth in its place. “Do they ever speak of the mulatto, Ogé, and how he led themen of color in battle at Grand Rivière and how the French captured him and broke him on the wheel?”
    It seemed the shame Marcel was feeling was palpable and hot. It burned his cheeks. The palms of his hands were damp with it. What does it matter that Jean Jacques was a slave, what does it matter, he was struggling with it, hearing quite distinctly his mother’s tone at table, so
sans façon
, “I don’t want you with that old man.” He loathed himself at this moment. He would die before he let Jean Jacques know what he was feeling. He cast back though the confusion of his mind for the words Jean Jacques had only just spoken and said quickly, nervously, “No, Monsieur, they never spoke of Ogé.” He was afraid of the tremor in his voice.
    “No, I don’t suppose they would,” Jean Jacques said. “But it seems they might have. That a young man should know something of those times, of those men of color that died.”
    Only now was the meaning of the words penetrating to Marcel.
    “What does it mean, Monsieur, broken on the wheel?” Men of color fighting a battle with white men, he could not envision this. He knew nothing of it.
    Jean Jacques stopped. He held the hammer poised above the brass crown of the tack, and in a low voice said,
    “ ‘…while alive to have his arms, legs, thighs, and spine broken; and afterward to be placed on a wheel, his face toward Heaven and there to stay as long as it would please God to preserve his life.’ ” He paused. Without looking up, he went on. “I was in Cap François then, but I didn’t go to the Place d’Armes. There were too many white people in the Place d’Armes to see it happen. Planters drove in from the countryside to see it happen. I went later, after they’d hanged the other men of color they’d captured with him. But they didn’t capture my master. My master died on the battlefield, and no one got to hang him, nor break him on a wheel.”
    Marcel was stunned. His eyes were riveted to Jean Jacques.
    “But how did this happen?” Marcel whispered. “Colored men fighting white men?”
    Jean Jacques glanced at him, and slowly a smile broke over his wrinkled features. “Some historians those good aunts of yours,
mon fils,”
he said gently as before. “It was colored men fighting white men who commenced the revolution in Saint-Domingue
before
the slaves rose. You see, it really began in France. It began with
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
, those magic words. And this man, Ogé, quite an educated man, had been in Paris and wined and dined by those men who were the friends of the blacks in the colonies and believed in their protection and their rights.” Jean Jacques suddenly put the tack and the little hammer down. He closed the top of the box of tacks, and then risingslowly as if his knees ached, he turned the chair toward him and rested back on it, his hands on his thighs. He sighed heavily with a movement of his shoulders.
    “Well, it must have made a lot of sense in Paris, that Ogé should dome home to Saint-Domingue and demand the rights of his people, the
gens de couleur
. Mind you, nobody had said too much yet about freedom for the slaves. But I don’t have to tell you,
mon fils
, young as you are, that there was no way the white planters of Saint-Domingue were going to give the
gens de couleur
the same rights as they had themselves. So Ogé gathered a fighting force at Grand Rivière, and my master was there. Oh, I’d begged him not to go. I’d begged him not to be so foolish! And he wasn’t my master then anymore, I was free, and he respected me, he really did.” He looked at Marcel, his eyes moved