Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice Page A

slowly over Marcel’s face. “But he went on, and with that small force met the French and the French defeated them like that.
    “But by the time it was all over, by the time your good aunts had left with your mamma and come here…why, thirteen years had passed, and white had fought colored, and colored had fought black, and black had fought white. And black and colored had finally joined together to drive out the French…those French officers your aunts have told you about…and that famous Madame Pauline, Napoleon’s sister…they drove them out.
    “I wonder if there was an acre of farmland left…of coffee or sugar or anything a man can grow…I wonder if there was an acre of it on that island that hadn’t been burned ten times over before it was finished. I don’t know. It was in the very beginning that I left, set sail from Cap François during the first days of the black revolt.”
    He sat still. His eyes left Marcel and he stared forward as if seeing those times.
    Marcel was speechless. And when Jean Jacques looked at him again, his dark eyes appeared to search Marcel’s face for some glimmer of response, some little indication that he had understood. But Marcel had never heard a word of this before, he had believed his people to have been one with the whites, to have been driven out along with the whites, and he had that overwhelming sense which had come over him of late of all that he did not know or comprehend.
    Jean Jacques glanced at the open door. “Do you feel that breeze?” he asked. “Winter’s over, and none too soon.” He rose and stretched as he had done before. “That’s the Angelus,
mon fils
,” he said.
    Marcel had heard it, the dull clanking of the Cathedral bell. “But Monsieur,” he began, “it went on for thirteen years, this war, this revolution?”
    “You’ve got to get on home,
mon fils,”
Jean Jacques said. “You’re usually gone by this time.” Marcel did not move.
    All the while he had imagined it so simply. One night the slaves had risen, and burned it all. “White, colored, it didn’t make any difference,” Tante Colette so often said with a weary wave of her fan. “They burned everything that we had.”
    He was excited. And yet he was frightened at the same time. It seemed he hovered on the edge of an awful, dismal feeling as he sat there, conjured by this vision of men of color in arms, and black men fighting with them. He barely heard Jean Jacques’ voice:
    “Go on,
mon fils
, your mother will be one angry woman if you don’t go on.”
    “But will you tell me tomorrow?” Marcel asked. He got to his feet but stood there looking intently at Jean Jacques.
    Jean Jacques was thinking. And that dismal feeling in Marcel deepened, something akin to the dusk in the street and the fading light around them within the shop. He watched Jean Jacques’ dark face and regretted that he had asked with such feeling. Marcel had made it seem too important by asking, and as so often happened when you wanted something desperately, then you couldn’t have it.
    “I don’t know,
mon fils,”
Jean Jacques said. “Maybe that’s enough history for a while. Maybe I’ve said too much as it is.” He was looking at Marcel. He appeared to wait and then Marcel said, “But Monsieur…”
    “No,
mon fils
, one day you can read all of that in books on your own. It seems you ought to know something about it. Those were your people.” He shook his head. “But you read it in books on your own.”
    “But Monsieur, I have no such books, I’ve never even seen them,” Marcel said. “I could go into the bookstores and ask them…”
    “Oh no, no,
mon fils
. Don’t do that, you mustn’t do that, don’t you ever go into bookstores and ask,” Jean Jacques said. His face had settled into that brooding frown of his that Marcel had known so often in years before. “Some day I’ll give you those to read.” He gestured to the diaries on the shelf. “When I die, I’ll leave those