Ceremony Officiant
The drastic measure of keeping Eugenia sedated had a better result than Parmentier himself had hoped. During the following months, her belly swelled normally as she passed her days lying beneath mosquito netting on a divan on the gallery, sleeping or distracted by the passing clouds, completely disconnected from the miracle occurring inside her. "If she was always this tranquil, it would be perfect," Tete heard her master say. Eugenia was fed sugar and a concentrated soup of chicken and vegetables that had been ground in a mortar, a soup invented by the cook, Tante Mathilde, capable of reviving a dead-for-three-days corpse. Tete carried out her tasks in the house and then sat in the gallery to sew the baby's layette and sing in her deep voice the religious hymns Eugenia loved. Sometimes when they were alone, Prosper Cambray would come to visit, using the pretext of asking for a glass of lemonade, which he drank with astonishing slowness, sitting with a leg over the railing and striking his boots with his rolled up whip. The overseer's always red-rimmed eyes would run up and down Tete's body.
"Are you calculating her price, Cambray? She isn't for sale," Toulouse Valmorain said one afternoon when he surprised his overseer by suddenly appearing on the gallery.
"What did you say, monsieur?" the mulatto answered in a defiant tone, not changing his position.
Valmorain motioned to him, and the head overseer unwillingly followed him to the office. Tete did not know what they talked about; her master told her only that he did not want anyone wandering through the house without his authorization, not even the overseer. Cambray's insolence did not change after that run-in with his employer, and his only precaution before coming to the gallery to ask for a drink and unclothe Tete with his eyes was to make sure Valmorain wasn't nearby. He had lost respect for him some time ago, but he didn't dare push too hard because he was still nursing the ambition to become manager.
When December arrived, Valmorain summoned Dr. Parmentier to stay at the plantation for as long as necessary, until Eugenia gave birth; he did not want to leave the matter in Tante Rose's hands. "She knows more about these things than I do," the physician argued, but he accepted the invitation because it would give him time to rest, read, and annotate the healer's new remedies for his book. Tante Rose was often consulted by people from other plantations, and she treated both slaves and animals, fighting infections, stitching wounds, relieving fevers and injuries, helping at births, and trying to save the lives of punished blacks. She was permitted to travel over large areas while searching for her plants, and she was often taken to buy ingredients in Le Cap, where she was left with money, then picked up in a couple of days to return to the plantation. She was the mambo, officiating at the kalendas attended by Negroes from other plantations, something Valmorain did not object to even though his head overseer had warned him they ended in sexual orgies or with dozens of possessed writhing on the ground with their eyes rolled back in their heads. "Do not be so strict, Cambray. Let them unwind, it makes them more docile at work," the master had replied with good humor. Tante Rose would disappear for days, and when the head overseer was proclaiming that the woman had run away to the Maroons, or crossed the river into Spanish territory, she would return, limping, exhausted, with her herbal pouch filled. Tante Rose and Tete escaped Cambray's authority because he believed that the healer would turn him into a zombie, and Tete was the personal slave of the mistress, indispensable in the big house. "No one watches you, marraine," Tete commented one day. "Why don't you run away?" "How would I run with my bad leg? And what would become of the people who need my care? Besides, it doesn't mean anything for me to be free and everyone else slaves," the healer answered. Tete hadn't thought of that, and it kept buzzing around her brain like a bottlefly. She talked about it with her godmother many times, but she was never able to accept the idea that her freedom was irreparably bound to that of the other slaves. If she could escape she would do it without a thought for those left behind, she was sure of that. After her searches, Tante Rose would call her to her cabin, and they would close the door and make the remedies that required precise preparation, proper rituals, and nature's fresh greenery. Witchcraft, Cambray said, that's what those two women are up to; nothing he couldn't resolve with a good lashing. But he didn't dare touch them.
One day Dr. Parmentier spent the hottest hours of the afternoon sunk in the lethargy of the siesta, and then went to visit Tante Rose to find out if she had a cure for a centipede bite. As Eugenia was tranquil and watched by another slave, he asked Tete to go with him. They found the healer sitting in a wicker chair before the door of her cabin, which had been slightly damaged by recent storms, singing in some African tongue as she removed the leaves from a dried branch and placed them on a cloth, so absorbed in the task that she did not see them until they were right before her. She started to get up, but Parmentier stopped her. As he wiped the sweat from his forehead and neck with a handkerchief the healer offered him water he would find inside. Her cabin was larger than it looked from outside, very orderly, everything in a specific place, dark and cool. The furniture was splendid compared with that of other slaves: a board table, a badly chipped Dutch armoire, a rusted tin trunk, several boxes Valmorain had provided her to keep remedies in, and a collection of little clay pots for preparing her brews. A pile of dried leaves and straw covered with a checked cloth and thin coverlet, served her as bed. From the palm ceiling hung branches, bunches of herbs, dried reptiles, feathers, strings of beads, seeds, shells, and other things needed for her science. The doctor swallowed two long drinks from a gourd, waited a couple of minutes to catch his breath, and when he felt better went to take a closer look at the altar, where there were offerings for the loas: paper flowers, slices of sweet potato, a thimble of water, and tobacco. He knew that the cross was not Christian, it represented crossroads, but he had no doubt that the painted plaster statue was the Virgin Mary. Tete explained to him that she herself had given it to her godmother, it was a gift from the mistress. "But I like Erzulie best, and my Tante Rose does too," she added. The physician started to pick up the sacred voodoo asson, a gourd painted with symbols, mounted on a stick, decorated with beads and filled with the little bones of a newborn child, but he stopped in time. No one should touch it without its owner's permission. "This confirms what I have heard. Tante Rose is a priestess, a mambo," he commented. The asson is usually in the power of the houngan, but in Saint-Lazare there was no houngan, and it was Tante Rose who conducted the ceremonies. The physician drank more water and dampened his handkerchief and tied it around his neck before he stepped back out into the heat. Tante Rose did not look up from her meticulous labors, and neither did she offer them a seat, because she had only the one chair. It was difficult to calculate her age; her face was young but her body was mangled. Her arms were slim and strong, her breasts hung like papayas beneath her shift, her skin was very dark, her nose straight and broad at the base, her lips well delineated, and her gaze intense. The kerchief around her head covered an abundant mass of hair that had never been cut and was divided into hard, crimped curls like sisal rope. A cart had run over one of her legs when she was fourteen, breaking several bones that healed badly; that was what caused her to walk with such difficulty, supporting herself on the walking stick a grateful slave had carved for her. Tante Rose considered the accident a stroke of luck, for it freed her from the cane fields. Another injured slave would have ended up stirring boiling molasses or washing clothes in the river, she was the exception, for from the time she was very young the loas had chosen her to be a mambo. Parmentier had never seen her in a ceremony, but he could imagine her in a trance, transformed. In voodoo all were officiants and could experience the divinity of being mounted by the loas; the role of the houngan or the mambo consisted solely of preparing the hounfor for the ceremony. Valmorain had expressed to Parmentier his worry that Tante Rose was a charlatan who took advantage of her patients' ignorance. "What's important are the results. She is more successful with her methods than I am with mine," the physician responded.