THE TRUTH WAS, I was happy not to be at the school at the synagogue because I could escape the extra work of learning Hebrew and studying the Torah. At the Moravian School we learned Bible stories as well, but they were about Jesus, whom I had not heard of before, and of the possibilities of salvation, despite our sins on earth. Such stories were interesting to me, and over the years I was in school I paid careful attention to them. The idea that God would have a son on earth was particularly fascinating. It made God seem closer to humanity, more involved with our daily trials. I had struggled with the concept of a God that would let his people suffer, and make the world we lived in so unequal, especially when I passed the shantytowns on my way to school, for it was a long walk and I dawdled behind my brothers so I might take it all in. Was it fair that some people on this island should live in huge houses surrounded by courtyards filled with fruit trees while others lived in shacks? In the stories we were told, Jesus was an outcast and a rebel. He was a Jew who would not bow down to the Romans or to any authority other than God. I grew to admire him, something I would not have dared mention to my mother. I was not a believer in the Christian faith, merely an interested observer. I said amen at the end of their prayers, then had pangs of guilt.
I asked Marianna about this one day, and she shrugged. She told me her family practiced the old religion from Africa. “At school you have to pretend you accept their faith. My family doesn’t believe in such things. I just go along with these stories.”
In that instant I saw that we were the same—disbelievers surrounded by believers. Outcasts on an island where we were not equals, she less equal than I because of her color and sex. I felt a tightness in my throat due to this bond, and an understanding of the world that would stay with me all the rest of my life. I was eight or nine at the time, but later, I came to feel that this was my first moment of true love: to know and be known by someone. It did not hurt that Marianna was beautiful, more so as we got older. She had high cheekbones and was very dark, with light-filled eyes flecked with green. When she smiled, the world was something new to me. This is what I wished for, even as a boy: to see what was there, but also what was underneath flesh and blood, core and pit, leaf and stem. Above all else, despite my mother’s warnings, I wished to see.
I began to draw in class. I had no idea that I had any particular talent until people told me so. Other children gathered around and asked me to draw this or that. They flattered me and begged me for my art. Sometimes I complied, drawing their faces or the form of a donkey, but mostly I did as I pleased. I had always looked at the world as if it were a puzzle—whether it was a scene, a landscape, or a person—the pieces dissolved inside my mind so that I then could put them back together to form a whole. This made sense when I began to draw, creating the elements one image at a time until the world appeared on the paper. Instead of going directly home, as my brothers did, I went to the beach and drew Marianna, using a bit of charcoal and some heavy paper I took from the storeroom at school. I drew Marianna so many times I knew her face better than my own. I felt I had come upon the core of the meaning of life, to discover and re-create beauty. We spent hours together, but after a while this stopped. Marianna’s mother caught us together. She grabbed me and told me that if I bothered her daughter again she would have me beaten. I doubted this, but Marianna was too afraid of misbehaving to see me anymore. We were only children and Marianna was respectful; in many ways she was more grown up than I. She told me she could no longer be my friend. I understood. My sisters were the same when it came to our mother’s demands. They did as she said. They didn’t want trouble.
When Marianna could no longer spend time with me after school, I did not give up art. I drew the island around me, beginning with a palm tree. I sketched it section by section, leaf by leaf. I became the palm tree as I did this, knowing it inside out. The undersides of the leaves, which I did not draw, I still knew inside my head. I dreamed of whatever I drew: the palm fronds, a bat hanging from a tamarind tree, a woman walking down the street with a basket of laundry under her arm. I did not have much to do with my brothers and sisters. They were busy, the older ones working in the store, the younger ones interested in their studies. Sometimes I caught my mother studying me. She had a cautious expression at these times, as if I were a specimen she was studying under glass.
When I was a young boy they called me Marmotte, sleepyhead. I could nap under the table with ease. My parents said they often found me dozing on a bench in the garden, or on the beach while the other children played and swam. Now that I was older I didn’t sleep much. When I did, I dreamed of color. Of blue, mostly, in every shade, for our island is made up of the many delicate hues of that color. In the hottest months I dreamed also of green. On those occasions I awoke dizzy, as if I had slept in a field. I smelled wet grass, snarls of berries on vines, honey-scented flowers. And so it came to be that I carried these colors with me, awake or asleep. It didn’t matter if I was in the classroom or in my parents’ house; I was somewhere else as well. Inside blue, inside green, inside a palm tree, inside Marianna’s light-flecked eyes.
Being an outcast meant I possessed a sort of freedom I wouldn’t have had otherwise, and that was what I wanted from the time I could crawl. As a boy I was a loner. There were days when no one knew where I was. I pinched paper and brushes from my father’s store, then went into the hills and soon learned to make my own pigments from nature: red petals, mud, clamshells, nut shells. I often used planks of wood as my canvases. I used a knife and created my images in slices. I learned much about dyes for my paints from Jestine. As close as my mother was to Rosalie, Jestine was the only person my mother truly confided in, though their relationship was a rocky one, with ups and downs I didn’t understand. Sometimes when my mother came to visit, Jestine would act as if she couldn’t hear her at the door. This could go on for months, and then one day Jestine would embrace my mother as if she were a sister.
Jestine was a dressmaker, the best there was. I often went to her house at the harbor, where she had vats of dye set out on the porch in a line of brilliant color. When one of the dresses she made was particularly beautiful she would say, “This still isn’t worthy of my daughter.” She had no daughter, so I assumed that she hoped to have one someday, or perhaps it was just a saying.
“Yes, it’s beautiful enough,” I would tell her, but she would always shake her head.
“You don’t know,” she’d say. “You’re too young.”
I found it much easier to talk to Jestine than to my mother. I was closer to her and could talk to her about things my mother would never have understood. It was in our conversations that I first learned about color, how tint laid upon tint created a mist of a certain shade. Jestine had told me never to rush something I was creating, but instead to let it come into being as if it had a soul of its own. It was so pleasant to be at Jestine’s house. My mother watched me like a hawk, as if waiting for bad traits to surface. She kept that hawk eye on me in a manner that made me want to run away from her. But Jestine let me be.
I loved my homeland, yet I wanted to leave. I walked alleyways lined with warehouses that led down to the harbor. The desire to travel was in my blood. I watched the boats depart from the wharves and wished I were on one. I didn’t care what the destination was: South America, New York, Europe. I was willing to go anywhere, greedy for all the color in the world. I watched the reflections of clouds disappearing into the water and thought that in another harbor the water might be an entirely different color, the sky a soft dove gray, the mountains forest green, the ice-cold waves a deep and endless indigo.
Jestine allowed me a glimpse of the person my mother once had been. I made a remark about how my mother understood nothing about the beauty of our world, that she was focused only on household chores and on my father. Jestine told me I was wrong. She took me to a field where she said she and my mother used to go whenever they could run off from their chores. She said the only task my mother enjoyed was killing chickens for
the Friday night dinner, a fact that made me laugh. There were blue snails climbing up the tamarind trees, and seawater cut through the field in a crisscross of salty, shallow pools. It was here, Jestine said, they would lie in the grass without moving, except for breathing out and in, which moved the grass in waves, like the sea. I couldn’t imagine my mother as a girl, but I painted the grass and the red flowering trees and the gleam of the water in my next painting. I did my best to show the wind in blues and overlapping grays.
Jestine next took me to a stretch of beach where she said turtles came once a year to lay their eggs. It was the place where she and my mother would hide in the dark. They would pretend they were girls who were half turtle and imagine that they would swim away and never look back. The sky was midnight blue, one of the colors I loved to paint with, a shade I often dreamed of. I painted the beach and a palm tree that unfolded like a flower. In the shadows there were turtles, their shells a green-black from the depths of the sea.
Then we went to stand outside the shop, beneath my mother’s window. Jestine said, She fell in love looking outside onto this street. The street was yellow, with rose-colored blooms in the hedges. We went on through our section of town, to the big house where my grandparents had lived, where the oldest lizard on the island hid in the courtyard.
I remembered Rosalie’s wedding and the garden aglow that night. My mother had come looking for me. She thought I’d disappeared to sleep in a quiet place, but I was crouched beside the bushes, looking for the lizard. “My cousin used to do what you’re doing. He could call the iguana to him. He was such a handsome boy.”
Perhaps my mother forgot she was speaking to me. She let slip that when she had come to her first husband’s house, Rosalie had been a slave. She hadn’t been aware of this until Monsieur Petit died and the will was read. The first thing my mother had done as a widow was to have papers drawn up for Rosalie’s emancipation. But she had to wait for my father to come from France to sign those papers, because a woman hadn’t the legal right to do so. At Rosalie’s wedding a hundred candles had been lit, and it seemed as if the stars had fallen from the sky. In bringing me back to that house, Jestine reminded me of the moment when my mother and I stood in the garden. When I went home, I took out my paint and brushes and did my best to create the rooms inside my grandfather’s house without ever having seen them. The walls were in tints of pistachio and salmon and pale gold.
I practiced my art until I was ready to complete a real portrait. I chose to sketch Jestine as she worked dyeing clothes, and then to paint that image. When I sketched her I saw something in her face I hadn’t noticed before. All at once I saw that the color of grief was blue and that it radiated from her. I painted her in that shade. Flesh tones didn’t show the real substance of people, neither their physical aspects nor their souls.
Since I’d begun the painting I found I had difficulty sleeping. I thought about Jestine’s mention of a dress for her daughter, and the color of sorrow, and my mother standing in the garden watching me, suspicious, as if I was her cousin from long ago. I thought of things I had overheard when my mother and Jestine had no idea I was listening. I wasn’t really paying attention, yet still I heard bits of conversation. How could a person be so selfish? How could love turn to ash? Why would God allow cruelty in the world if he truly were watching over his sons and his daughters?
The next day I worked up enough courage to question my mother. I found her in the kitchen with Rosalie. They were discussing dinner, something they did nearly every day, and yet they seemed to find the subject endlessly fascinating. Would we have chicken or fish? Would the sauce be sweet or sour?
“Does Jestine have a daughter?” I asked.
My mother and Rosalie exchanged a look. They kept cooking the Friday night meal, slamming around cast-iron pots. They had decided we would have chicken flavored with thyme and parsley and tomatoes, along with a cornmeal porridge and loaves of hot bread. My father would say the blessing over the meal, and then my brothers and I, starving by the end of the day, would grab for what we wanted until my mother clapped her hands and told us to be civilized. Usually I would have tried to sneak a bit of the food that was being prepared, but on this day I merely studied my mother, who was clearly upset by my question.
“You’re a busybody,” Rosalie told me in her matter-of-fact way. She was always protecting my mother, telling me to hush, saying I should keep my thoughts to myself.
I didn’t back down. “She mentioned a daughter.”
My mother shrugged. “She had one once,” she admitted.
I’d had my suspicions, yet was shocked to hear this news. “And? What happened to her?”
“Ask Jestine,” my mother suggested.
I knew my mother. That was it. She turned her back and would say no more.
The next time I saw Jestine I asked if it was true, if she’d had a daughter.
“It is true. Maybe you’re too young to know about such things.”
“I’m not,” I told her.
She fixed on me with her deep-set gray eyes as if searching for something. For a moment I thought she might tell me to leave, but she didn’t. She gestured to the sea. “My daughter was stolen.”
“Stolen? Who took her?” At that moment I envisioned myself a hero jumping up to track down her missing child. I would swoop in to thwart the abductors, and perhaps prove to my mother that I was worth more than she thought.
“Ask your mother who the thief is,” Jestine said with an odd sort of calm. “She knows well enough.”
I never liked to be between the two of them, and I had begun to realize whatever had happened was at the root of all their squabbles. I was afraid to say more to my mother. I feared she would clamp down on those few small freedoms I had. I secretly worked on my painting of Jestine, keeping it in the back room of the store where there were barrels of grain and rice. I thought it was the best work I had yet done, different than my other paintings, more layered and complicated, and yet simple in its emotion. One day I came for it and found it was gone. I was burning with rage. At least I knew who the thief was. There was only one person who continually told me that drawing and painting were a waste of my time. One person who shook her head as if I were doing something shameful when I leafed through illustrated books so that I might study the work of the great masters that I someday hoped to see for myself in the Louvre.
My mother was in the garden where we had fruit trees, including an old twisted apple tree. The bark was black as a snakeskin. Sometimes Rosalie made a cake from the apples, adding herbs and spices. No matter what she did, any recipe made from the fruit of this tree was bitter, though my mother seemed to enjoy it.
As I approached, my mother looked me up and down. “You should be concentrating on your studies,” she said before I had time to formulate a single word. Perhaps she had seen the stain of dye on my shirt. “I know what you’ve been doing,” she informed me.
“There’s nothing wrong in what I do.” I could feel some shackle being thrown off. I didn’t feel the fear I usually experienced when I talked back to her.
“In fact there is,” my mother said. “The way you paint doesn’t look anything like this world. I worry that you have something wrong with your vision.”
“You think this world is all there is?” I was both insulted and embarrassed. The colors I used might not have been of this world; instead they showed what lay below the surface of this world, the spark of color at the deepest core. “If your eyes see everything, did they see who stole Jestine’s daughter?”
My mother lowered the basket of apples. I think she took in who I was for the first time, a person who would not easily bow to someone’s command. Perhaps for the first time I allowed my real self to be seen. A pelican flew overhead, and cast its shadow upon us. All at once, my mother regained her composure.
“That is none of your business,” she said. “It’s Jestine’s affair. No one else’s.”
AFTER THAT MY FATHER told me I would work in the
store on Sundays. I was perhaps ten at the time and already knew I would rather be anywhere else. My older brothers all worked at the store, and I did the best I could, but I was easily bored by figures. When my inability to add was discovered, I was given the job of making certain the shelves were filled and dusted. Then I could easily take off into the storeroom. I pilfered a drawing pad, and though I felt guilty, I was delighted with my new possession, and used burned wood as charcoal for my sketches.
One of my duties was to carry packages home for the ladies who shopped with us, and I enjoyed this, for it gave me back a bit of my independence. Sometimes the ladies presented me with a coin, which I saved up, hoping for a box of pastel chalks. Once I carried the groceries of a Madame Halevy, a very old woman who barely looked at me. She was a bit terrifying, like the old lizard in the garden of my grandfather’s house. When we got to her home, a huge stucco mansion painted firefly yellow, she told me she wanted me to bring the packages inside. Then she demanded that I put the flour and molasses and ground sugar in the pantry, where such things were kept away from beetles and stinging ants. She had both an indoor and an outdoor kitchen, and I wondered if she was so rich she had two of everything. She sat at the table and studied me as I worked, calling out where the items should be placed. When I was done she told me to sit across from her.
I saw the folds in her skin, the white film over her pale eyes. I found all of this very interesting. One of her hands had a tremor she couldn’t control, and I had the notion she might grab me and shake the life out of me there in her kitchen if she disapproved of anything I did or said. Yet I was more curious than I was frightened. She took off her thick white gloves; they were an old-fashioned accessory that only the very old ladies on the island kept to anymore. It was far too hot for gloves. I would have loved a glass of limeade, but I didn’t ask for anything.