The Day the World Ended, page 13
We can only conclude that Louis Mouttet had so lost touch with reality that he really believed that Pelée was not a threat. He had sufficiently taken leave of his senses to believe that at least two hundred deaths, numerous casualties, and widespread alarm and destruction, of all of which he had personal knowledge, could really indicate that “the eruption appears to be on the wane.”
MONDAY
May 5, 1902
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Pavement Slaughterhouse
ALONG THE WATERFRONT a small army of women were assembling in the morning sunlight. The semi-nakedness of their figures, the powerful shapeliness of their torsos, the gathering and folding and falling of light robes oscillating over swaying hips, the sculptured symmetry of bare feet scuffing the dust—these were les porteuses. Descended from slave stock out of Africa, their ethnological characteristics had become blurred in two hundred years by all those indefinite powers that shape the mold of races—blending of blood, habits, soil, and sun. Now they were a race apart: light skinned, firmly built human thoroughbreds epitomizing grace, force, and economy of strength.
Not one of the women was fat or old. Theirs was a world of supple limbs and youth; at forty, youth and health spent, they would seek other work, unable to compete with a new generation of girls ready to tax their bodies to their utmost capacity of strength, endurance, and rapid motion. To achieve this they trained with the dedication of true professionals. At an early age, around five, they practiced carrying a dobanne full of water on their heads; hour after hour they would walk through the streets carrying the clay pitchers. Then, around the age of ten, they began carrying a trait, a heavy wooden tray with deep outward sloping sides filled with up to fifty pounds of fruit and vegetables. Finally, around sixteen—lithe, vigorous, all tendon and hard flesh—they became full-fledged porteuses. For four dollars a month they worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, supporting loads of up to 150 pounds in baskets on their heads.
The four hundred young girls who waited on the water front of St. Pierre were the porteuse coalwomen of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique.
All day, the sweat running into their eyes, singing as they worked, they would normally empty the warehouses of Fernand Clerc, load the barrels of rum and sugar on flatbottomed tenders, and ferry them out to the ships moored in the roadstead.
They waited now for Julie Gabou to arrive. She reigned as queen over St. Pierre’s one thousand porteuses. Twenty years old, with the build of an ebony statue, she could hoist up to 180 pounds on her head and carry it to Fort-de-France, fifteen miles away, without a pause. She was six feet tall, strength and grace united from neck to heel.
Now, smoking a bout—the long, thin cigar of Martinique—she walked on to the water front.
There would, she said, be no work that day as a reprisal against Dr. Guérin for making his workers break the Sabbath. One of the men who had been crushed in the fissure had been her common-law husband. Mixing grief with industrial retribution, Julie Gabou was showing that la fille de couleur was a force to reckon with.
Two hundred sixty-seven years had passed since the first colored women slaves—the original porteuses—had been brought to the island. In 1665 the Code Noir had given them freedom, if not complete liberty. But as miscegenation increased, a revised Black Code in 1724 forbade marriage or concubinage between the races. It appears to have had no more effect than the previous law. And by the eighteenth century the slave women had begun to exercise their proven sex appeal to obtain their wants.
To Lafcadio Hearn, the island’s historian, the emergence of the slave women to power was barely credible: “Scarcely a century had elapsed since the colonization of the island, but in that time climate and civilization had transfigured the black woman. After one or two generations, the Africaine, reformed, refined, beautified in her descendants, transformed into the Creole Negress, commenced to exert a fascination capable of winning anything. Travelers of the eighteenth century were confounded by the luxury of dress and of jewelry displayed by swarthy beauties in St. Pierre. But the Creole Negress, or mulattress, beginning to understand her power, sought far higher favors and privileges than silken robes and necklaces of gold beads: she sought to obtain not merely liberty for herself but for her parents, brothers, sisters, even friends.”
She obtained it the only way she knew: like Lysistrata she put a price on her favors. To Hearn: “So omnipotent was the charm of half-breed beauty that masters were becoming the slaves of their slaves. It was not only the Creole Negress who had appeared to play a part in this strange drama which was the triumph of nature over interest and judgment; her daughters, far more beautiful, had grown up to aid her and to form a special class. That which only slavery could have engendered possible, began to endanger the integrity of slavery itself.” So emancipation advanced. Nature, in the guise of the slave girls, had mocked at slave codes.
Now, born free, their descendants stood on the water front and exercised their right to collective bargaining.
It was the first time the women of Martinique had gone on strike. Typically, the coalwomen announced the fact by singing. With Julie Gabou at their head, they marched off the water front, chanting the words of a Creole folk song that told of their fight for freedom.
Out in the harbor, the Pouyer-Quertier was weighing anchor to resume her search for the broken telegraph cable. On the bridge, Captain Jules Thirion paused from watching the preparations for sailing as the sound of the singing coalwomen drifted across the water along with the tropical odors of St. Pierre awakening. To him the singing sounded “like a celebration,” and looking up toward the mass of Pelée—high, towering above the town in cold silence—he wondered whether the celebration was somehow connected with the volcano. Since the black cloud had brought a momentary fear scudding over his ship the day before, Pelée had given no indication of behaving unusually. The cauliflower-like clouds had been replaced by no more than wisps of cotton around its summit.
In his own mind he was satisfied that whatever threat St. Pierre might have faced from the volcano, it was, for the time being anyway, over. A mile offshore from the water front, he could not distinguish the ash, the cracked walls of the mulatto quarter, the remains of the broken Pont Basin bridge, the disrupted telephone cables, the Roxelane River still in flood, the refugees from Le Prêcheur, the survivors from Ajoupa-Bouillon, or a hundred other things which would have told him that the situation in the town was still critical.
The threat of contamination from the animal carcasses and the occasional body which had disturbed him the day before had gone, carried out to sea. Even the ash on the surface of the water had visibly thinned; it was barely coating the chain-cable as it rumbled up through the hawseholes in an iron torrent.
Below him the deck started to shudder, and at the stern there was a whirling and whispering of water being whisked into a foaming stream as the propeller bit hard.
Steadily and swiftly, the land swung slowly round from the bridge, and St. Pierre and the pitons and mornes behind it veered and changed place and began to float away. Only the massive might of Pelée remained constant as the cable ship headed out to sea.
In a short while St. Pierre had become indistinct; its face had merged into the hinterland. Then the island itself had become a silhouette—similar to the outline it had offered Christopher Columbus from the deck of his caravel on another Monday morning four hundred years previously.
Satisfied that the plotting of the ocean floor had been properly resumed, Captain Thirion left the bridge for breakfast.
Dr. Eugène Guérin was breakfasting alone in the dining room of his villa. From outside came the familiar sounds of the sugar factory coming to life: the rustle of bundled sheaths of cane being fed to conveyor belts which carried it in a never ending stream from the wooden-wheeled carts into the factory itself, and the steady rumble of the dynamo which drove the machinery that chopped, shredded, and crushed the cane into juice.
He had just finished breakfast when the sound of screaming came from the kitchen. Moments later Mary Goodchild, the English nurse and governess, raced through the dining room slapping at her body and shouting: “Fourmi-fou! fourmi-fou!”
The cry was taken up in other parts of the villa, and from the sugar factory. Dr. Guérin rushed outside to see his head overseer, Joseph du Quesne, organizing the workers to fight the plague of ants and centipedes which had swarmed in from the banks of the Blanche River.
They had been driven farther and farther down the slopes of Pelée by the ash falls; the fourmi-fou, speckled, yellowish creatures whose bite stings like a red-hot needle, and the bête-à-mille-pattes, many of them a foot long, black, with mouths capable of biting through shoe leather.
Thousand upon thousand were swarming into the factory yard, creating near panic among the workers and bringing terror to the horses as the ants and centipedes climbed up their fetlocks.
Behind him, Dr. Guérin heard the rattle of shutters closing as the villa prepared to resist the invaders. Undaunted, the ants and centipedes had started to climb the villa walls. Workmen pounded them with canes, splattering the walls with blood. From inside the villa came screams and shouts as the working women fought off the insects.
Already the centipedes had moved upstairs, lurking in bedrooms and parlors, nestling in bedding and night clothes. Mary Goodchild was hunting a group of them when she became aware of a prickling of feet on the back of her neck: a centipede had climbed up the back of her dress. With a fresh scream she raced for help, unaware that in her panic the centipede had been dislodged.
Outside, the battle was in full progress. Barrels of oil, used for lubricating the machinery, had been emptied into the yard. File after file of ants and centipedes were trapped in the thick black morass. A bucket brigade, led by Eugène Guérin, was pouring buckets of water over the terrified horses to drown the insects. Another group, seemingly oblivious of the bites, were systematically beating their way through the sugar factory, crushing the insects under damp sacks.
At the wall, over which new hoards still swarmed. Dr. Guérin and Joseph du Quesne had fired some oil-covered planking in the path of the insects. Other workmen were busy coating the wall with oil to repel the droves.
The plague which had invaded the Guérin factory was not uncommon. In 1851, when the volcano had gushed ash, the creatures had swept into the coastal areas, creating great havoc. In places they had destroyed whole plantations. Babies in their beds had been eaten alive. Immense balls of living ants had rolled into the sea in the north of the island, drifted down the coast, and come ashore at St. Pierre and Fort-de-France. It had taken months to route the insects and drive them back to the higher slopes. Behind them they had left a trail of dead domestic animals and a whole range of new superstitions to fill the mulatto minds. When cornered, went one legend, a centipede would leap at its attacker’s face, and could not be dislodged without cutting it to pieces; its footmarks would have left certain living and ineffaceable marks upon the skin, a condition known as ca ka ba ou lota.
No one had actually seen these marks, but stories about them had been handed down from generation to generation. Another legend claimed that to kill a centipede meant a gift of money would soon fall due; even to dream of killing one brought good luck. Over the years the saying had become so universal that normally intelligent people subscribed to it. In the process the centipede had taken on the attributes of a human enemy.
So this morning the normally reserved, autocratic Dr. Guérin led his workmen in a litany of abuse against the invaders.
With every blow he shouted: “Out of my house or be damned! Get out of my house, you murderers!”
From inside the villa the cry was repeated as centipede after centipede fell under the flailing pans and flatirons of the household. Retreating, under attack, both the centipedes and the ants displayed cunning, fighting to the last bite.
In Eugène Guérin’s house, his brother Joseph and the housemaids were engaged in a running battle with a score of centipedes, each a foot long, with pink bellies and violet heads. The creatures, their legs moving in panic causing their bodies to lengthen and shorten, were darting from room to room with stunning speed.
Holding an iron cauldron of boiling water between them, the maids tipped its contents over the creatures.
There was a crackling sound as the steaming water cascaded over the centipedes. They curled up in protective cocoon shapes. One or two of them made a last desperate sortie. Centipedes on a frontal attack are an unnerving sight, but the maids kept their nerve. They hurled the cauldron itself down on the heads of the creatures, crushing them to death.
Louis Labatut, a stoker employed at the refinery, badly bitten by ants and centipedes, had come to his own decision: no matter what the inducements, threats, or fears of future unemployment, he would not stay a moment longer in the factory. Without waiting to collect even his bottle of tafia, the staple drink of sugar cane workers all over the island, he ran from the yard toward St. Pierre.
Outside, the invasion had been contained. But soon there would come a new, far more terrifying menace from the Blanche River.
In his Presbytery in Morne Rouge, Curé Mary pondered at the miracle that had happened. At midmorning a group of coal-women from St. Pierre had arrived in the village, carrying essential foodstuffs. They had been sent on the instructions of the “Action Committee.” Later. Les Colonies would make political capital from this gesture, pointing out that the Governor had intervened to relieve the suffering of the mountain village. But now, as the coalwomen distributed the dried fish, vegetables, and white beans among his parishioners, Curé Mary could only think that God had intervened in answer to the nightlong vigil of prayer he had undertaken before the church shrine, where in the past other miracles had been prayed for and received.
For this devout Catholic the only way to acknowledge such intervention was by further prayers.
He left the Presbytery. Outside in the single, straggling street, the villagers were taking food back to their wooden cottages built into the hillside. Normally the cottages were screened by banana trees, Indian reeds, and wild roses. But the ash had killed the vegetation. Only the four palm trees grouped around the entrance to the church seemed to have survived the fallout.
Out in the street Curé Mary glanced, as he always did nowadays, in the direction of Pelée. Its head, hazy in the sunlight, towered over the shoulders of intervening mornes. It appeared to be totally lifeless, and Curé Mary, in his own words “ever hopeful of further bounty,” wondered whether God had also answered his prayers about the volcano.
In many ways the island was outwardly more Catholic than the Vatican itself. Every road, every path, was flanked with shrines, statues of saints, or immense crucifixes. Every town or village home—whether it was an imposing stone residence, wooden cottage, or palm-thatched ajoupa—held a chapelle: an ornate wall fixture for holding crosses, vases, lamps, and wax tapers. Statues were placed in windows, above doorways, in dormers.
Curé Mary’s own room in the Presbytery resembled a religious museum. Its chapelle held eight Virgins, a St. Joseph, a St. John, a crucifix, and a host of minute hearts or crosses, each having some special religious significance to the priest. Like so many of the religious emblems which littered the island, Curé Mary’s display of crosses and statues had little to commend them as art; some of them bordered on the grotesque, jarring the esthetic senses.
To the outside world these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone were visible evidence that the Church remained rich and prosperous in Martinique. Roman Catholicism was one of the elements of the common culture which theoretically bound the island’s Creole society. In St. Pierre and Fort-de-France, the Church did, in fact, still hold a place in the affection of the population. But in the country, where the influences of voodoo were powerful, Christianity was locked in battle with the pagan beliefs of Africa. In many parts of Martinique, the quimboiseur, or wizard, already wielded more authority than the priest, exercised more terror than the magistrate, commanded more confidence than the physician. The images and crucifixes still received respect, but there were many, like Curé Mary, who felt that this respect was inspired by a feeling that was purely fetishistic.
The priest had been on the island forty years. In that time he had seen the French Government reach out from Paris to expel various religious orders and establish lay schools where the teaching was largely noted for its aggressive antagonism to Catholic ideas. But in spite of it all, the Church had survived, though its once total hold on the maintenance of social order had been weakened.
Now, at the start of a week in which Martinique would face its gravest crisis, the Church was effectively led by a prelate who held little influence with the Governor or the lay administration. Prayer, as the Vicar-General and Curé Mary were soon to find out, would not be enough when the crisis came.
At the southern end of St. Pierre’s water front, near the Savane du Fort, a topic of burning interest occupied the women who sat there. There was news of the ripening romance between René Cottrell and Colette de Jaunville. It had been brought to them by Marguerite, the old blanchisseuse at the villa where René was staying with his uncle and aunt. For sixty years Marguerite had brought the household linen down to be washed in this quiet tributary of the Roxelane River and afterwards left it to bleach upon the huge boulders of prophyry and prismatic basalt along its banks. With the other washerwomen, their faces hidden beneath immense straw hats, she had stood knee-deep in the water rubbing her wash.
