Denise and the seamstress retreated to a corner and curled up on the floor, awaiting death, but Tete, who knew less than they about her mistress, had the bad idea of suggesting she fasten the dress with pins hidden beneath the bow of the sash. Hortense answered with another strident screech, picked up the whip, which she always had near, and threw herself upon Tete, spitting out sailors' curses and lashing her with all the resentment she had accumulated against her, the concubine, as well as irritation she had for herself for having gained the five pounds.
Tete fell to her knees, bent over, covering her head with her arms. Ssssh, crack! sang the whip, and every moan from the slave inflamed her mistress further. Eight, nine, ten lashes fell, resounding like powder kegs, and Hortense, red and sweating, her tower of hair collapsed into pathetic hanks, showed no signs of being satisfied.
At that instant Maurice charged into the room like a bull, scattering the paralyzed onlookers, and with one great shove, totally unexpected in a boy who had spent the eleven years of his life trying to avoid violence, he pushed his stepmother to the floor. He grabbed the whip and delivered a blow meant to mark her face, but it landed on her neck, cutting off both her breath and the scream in her throat. He lifted his arm to strike again, as beyond himself as a second before she had been, but somehow Tete got to him, caught hold of his breeches, and pulled him back. The second lash fell on the pleats of Hortense's dress.
The Slave Village
Maurice was sent to a boarding school in Boston, something his father had so often threatened, where strict American teachers would make him a man using didactic and disciplinary methods of military inspiration. Maurice went off with his few belongings in a trunk, accompanied by a chaperon hired for the purpose, who left him at the doors of the establishment with a pat of consolation. The boy had not been able to say good-bye to Tete, because the morning after the incident of the whip she was sent without discussion to the plantation, with instructions to Owen Murphy to put her immediately to cutting cane. The manager saw her arrive covered with welts, each the width of a rope for driving oxen, but fortunately none on her face, and sent her to his wife's hospital. Leanne, occupied with a complicated birth, pointed to an aloe pomade Tete should apply, as she was concentrating on a screaming girl terrified by the torment that had been shaking her body for many hours.
Leanne, who had quickly and without much ado given birth to seven sons that were spit out from her chicken frame between two Our Fathers, realized she had a calamity on her hands. She took Tete aside and explained in a low voice, so the girl wouldn't hear, that the baby was lying crossways in the womb, and there was no way for it to get out. "I have never lost a woman in birth, this will be the first," she whispered. "Let me see her, madame," Tete replied. She convinced the girl to let her examine her, oiled her hand, and with her fine and expert fingers found that the mother was dilated and that Leanne's diagnosis was accurate. Through the tight skin of the belly she followed the baby's form as well as if she could see it. She had the girl get on her knees with her head on the floor and rear in the air to relieve pressure on the pelvis as she massaged her belly, pressing with both hands to turn the baby from outside. She had never performed that maneuver but she had watched Tante Rose do it and had not forgotten. At that instant Leanne cried out: a tiny fist had appeared from the birth canal. Tete delicately pushed it back inside to keep from dislocating the arm, until it disappeared inside the mother, and then continued her task with patience, talking with the woman to calm her. At the end of a time that seemed very long, she felt the little creature move, slowly turning to finally slip its head into the birth canal. She could not contain a sob of gratitude, and seemed to see Tante Rose smiling at her side.
Leanne and she each took one arm of the mother, who had realized what was happening and was helping instead of madly resisting, and they walked her in circles, talking to her and stroking her. Outdoors the sun had set, and they realized that they were in the dark. Leanne lighted an oil lamp and they continued until the moment came to receive the baby. "Erzulie, mother loa, help it be born," Tete prayed aloud. "Saint Raymond Nonatus, pay attention, do not let an African saint get ahead of you," Leanne answered in the same tone, and they both burst out laughing. They had the mother crouch over a clean cloth, holding her under her armpits, and ten minutes later Tete held a purplish baby in her hands that, as Leanne cut the cord, she forced to breathe with a slap on the backside.
Once the mother was clean and had the baby on her chest, they cleaned up the bloody rags and remnants from the birth and went to sit on a bench at the door, resting beneath a black, star-filled sky. That was how Owen Murphy found them when he arrived swinging a lantern in one hand and a jug of hot coffee in the other.
"How are things going?" the burly man asked, passing them coffee without coming too close-he was intimidated by female mysteries.
"Your employer has another slave and I have a helper," his wife answered, pointing to Tete.
"Don't complicate my life, Leanne. I have an order to put her in a crew in the cane fields," Murphy mumbled.
"Since when do you obey someone else's orders over mine?" She smiled, standing on tiptoes to kiss him on the neck where the black beard ended.
So that is how it was, and no one asked because Valmorain did not want to know and Hortense had dealt with the irritating matter of the concubine and cleared it from her mind.
On the plantation, Tete shared a cabin with three women and two children. She got up like all the rest with the morning bells and spent the day working in the hospital, the kitchen, with domestic animals, the thousand chores assigned to her by the manager and Leanne. The work seemed light compared with Hortense's whims. Tete had always served in a house, and when she'd been ordered to the field, she believed she was sentenced to the slow death she'd seen in Saint-Domingue. She had never imagined she would find anything resembling happiness.
There were nearly two hundred slaves, some from Africa or the Antilles, but most born in Louisiana, all joined together by the need to support each other and the misfortune of belonging to another human. After the evening bell, when the crews returned from the fields, real life in the community began. Families got together and while there was light stayed outdoors, because there was no space or air in the cabins. From the kitchen in the plantation they were sent soup, which was shared from a cart, and people brought vegetables and eggs and, if there was something to celebrate, hens or hares. There were always chores waiting: cooking, sewing, watering the garden, repairing a roof. Unless it was raining or very cold, the women took time to talk and the men to play the banjo or a game with little stones on a design drawn on the ground. The girls combed each other, the children raced around, groups formed to listen to a story. The favorites about Bras Coupe terrorized both children and adults; he was a gigantic man with one arm who wandered the swamps and had escaped death more than a hundred times.