Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Condé Page A

unusual, murderous act, simply followed her instructions. It was also obvious that Celanire was the less infatuated of the two. Tanella looked up to Celanire as if she were the holy of holies or the Eucharist, and Celanire was overjoyed to be the object of such boundless admiration.
    The ceremony opened with the Home’s choir singing Vivaldi’s Gloria a cappella. Then the governor gave his speech and pinned the medal on the oblate’s breast, followed by the official embrace in the name of France. The pupils bellowed out “La Marseillaise.” There was a ripple of applause, and the celebrations began. The nurses, dressed in yellow-patterned blue wrappers, handed around petits fours, salted almonds, and Job cigarettes.
    It was only once the sun began to bleed over the lagoon that the guests, stuffed to bursting, made up their minds to set off home. The inhabitants of Bingerville had scarcely finished grinding, chewing, and masticating the pittance of the memory of that lovely afternoon when two Ebriés, out fishing one night, hauled up the body of Madame Desrussie. They first thought a cayman, a sacred animal, had got tangled in their nets and were already thanking Heibonsha, the water god, for their miraculous catch, promising prosperity for many years to come, when they recognized the unfortunate widow. Her face had been beaten to a pulp. In fact they could only identify her officially from her dentition, a masterpiece fashioned by the colony’s only dentist, a soldier stationed at Assinie. This event caused quite a stir.
    The widow was born Azilin Dossou. The Dossous, however, a well-known family in Adjame-Santey, had converted to Catholicism very early on, given two catechists to the mission, and changed the pagan name of their daughter to Rose. Rose, the jewel of the mission, had been one of the first to learn how to sew, read, and write. She had also been one of the first to enter the bed of a Frenchman. He had never taken the trouble to “regularize” her situation, even though everyone called her Madame Desrussie. Yet there was scarcely time to wonder whether it had been a suicide or an accidental drowning before another event followed almost immediately afterward that fired people’s imagination. They learned that Thomas de Brabant was to slip a wedding ring on Celanire Pinceau’s finger. Notified by his services, the governor-general of French West Africa cabled the Ministry for the Colonies in Paris. At that time, marital union between colonial civil servants and “native” women was frankly never heard of. What complicated matters was that Celanire was not a “native.” She was a French citizen from Guadeloupe who spoke French French and rendered remarkable services to her metropole in its civilizing mission. Moreover, she took good care of the unfortunate widowed governor’s child. After much debating, the ministry cabled its approval to the governor-general. In Bingerville itself, public opinion was divided: some of the French demanded the “nigger-loving” governor be replaced. Because of the controversy, Thomas’s wedding took place in the strictest privacy. Two witnesses: Tanella and Cyrille Sérignac de Pompigny, his right-hand man, an energetic recruiting agent for the new wharfs in Grand-Bassam. A carefully handpicked congregation: four or five district commissioners from the vicinity, all respectably married with their wives. These ladies of noble birth, more often or not with a title, eyed Celanire scornfully, this negress who was marrying their husbands’ hierarchical superior and consequently was going to have precedence over them. It was not only her color that infuriated them, but her impudent freshness. Whereas they wilted and yellowed from the heat, the humidity, the fevers and biliousness, she positively glowed. On her wedding day Celanire ignored the tradition of a white bridal gown and dressed all in pink, a pink as pale