Author's Note:
Almost all the characters are derived from the original series with the following exceptions: the servants (slaves) on the duPres sugar plantation, Josette's mother, the Obeah woman, Reverend Jennings, and Curtis Braithwaite the banker. The idea of making Barnabas's mother from Quebec is entirely my own.
Historical Tidbit: There really was a deadly epidemic of yellow fever in New York City in the summer of 1795, how cool is that?
Those Nights in Martinique
(based on Dark Shadows, the original series)
Chapter 1Angelique and Josette were more than friends but less than sisters. Inseparable companions from the start, their wooden cradles rocked side by side. They lived in the same plantation house on the island of Martinique in the colonized West Indies, in the days of long ago when wooden sailing ships braved pirate-infested seas to feed the white man's craving for sugar cane, molasses, and bottled rum.
Josette duPres was the darling only daughter of Andre Barthelemy le Comte duPres, master of one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands. The orphan known by the name of Angelique Bouchard was merely her playmate servant. The two girls had contrasting complexions of dark and light: Josette's thick chestnut hair, buttermilk skin, and molasses brown eyes were in every way opposite to Angelique's sandy blonde curls, pale eyes like water, and fair freckled skin that burned so easily in the midday sun.
"I wish I had your skin," Angelique said to her companion one day, as her raw crimson shoulders flaked and itched. "Instead of turning into a boiled lobster."
Josette laughed. "I can't give you my skin! But you can have this parasol."
They shared the same nursemaid, a Cajun slave baptized with the name of Veronique. Both Josette and Angelique called their nursemaid Mamma and respectfully addressed Josette's real mother as Madame. The nursemaid had secretly told Angelique her real native name in a language older than Creole, a secret name by which the spirits of her own ancestors knew her. Mamma asked Angelique to promise not to ever tell anyone. "Names are power," the nursemaid taught her. "And Monsieur duPres has enough power over me as it is."
At the end of each day, Angelique had the special privilege of withdrawing to the downstairs kitchen for supper when Josette was told to go upstairs alone. She ate scraps and leftovers out of a chipped stoneware bowl—one of the few possessions that the orphan truly called her own. Yet, at the time, she never felt that her meals were second-best to Josette's servings. The master's table provided plenty of waste, and so Angelique and the slaves who served the duPres household never went hungry.
Nightfall meant storytime in that big warm kitchen, when the work was done and the pots were scraped clean. She joined with singing in Creole the special rhyming songs that Josette would never know. A three-legged stool seemed to be made just for her. Low to the floor, it was just the right size for Angelique's little legs. The stool was colored light blue in chipped paint that under the cracks hinted of wood grain covered up and trying to peek through.
By the firelight, sitting on the stool at Mamma's side, Angelique learned age-old tales and parables that were not written in any of Josette's books. She clapped for the clever Rabbit and laughed at the antics of foolish Cat. She always tried to guess what Dog or Monkey or Turtle would do next, but her favorite stories were about Anansi the spider. Everybody who gathered in the kitchen after dark knew Anansi stories, even if they called him by different names. The Haitian who tended to Monsieur duPres's horses, and the Jamaican who knew fifty ways of cooking shrimp, and the chambermaid who rinsed Madame's silk stockings in a bowl of rosewater—they all knew stories about the tricky spider.
"Time for a crick-crack story, Veronique," said the butler who was the eldest man of them all. Every evening, he took his seat on the bricks next to the fireplace. He lit a clay pipe and puffed it from the corner of his smile. Despite his white hair, and the wrinkles in pouches around his eyes, at storytime he acted like a boy again. "Time for a crick-crack story."
"Yeah, it sure is." Mamma settled cross-legged onto a patch of hooked rug on the floor. "I've been thinkin' all day about somebody who needs a story told about him. Who do you think it is, lil' angel?"
"Compė Anansi," said Angelique on the special stool at Mamma's side.
"That's right! Oh child, do you know about that time he almost kept all the smarts of the whole world to himself?"
Angelique squirmed with delight. She knew this story by heart but could not wait to hear it again. Mamma had a way of making each retelling seem like the first. Her voice never lost its enthusiasm for drama; her hands reached out and sculpted the words in mid-air; her eyes looked up to the rafters and sparkled as if she could see it all happening.
"Sure he knows lots of things about how to spin silk and weave webs, but that's not enough for him. Oh no, that Anansi, he wants to know everything there is to know. So he sets off one day to gather up all the smarts in the world. He takes up a little piece here and a little piece there. He overhears a mama calling her baby girl or a papa teaching his son. He spends time talkin' to the old folks who sit lookin' out at the sea. He puts all the smarts that he gathers into a big ol' calabash gourd. They rattle around in there, till it gets fuller and fuller, and then one day it's all the way full. Anansi figures to himself he's now got all the smarts there is to be had. But do you think he's gonna share any of it?"
A grinning Angelique shook her head, no. She knew Anansi would never share.
"No, he's keeping it all to himself! First he thinks of burying that big ol' calabash in his garden. Then he gets worried, what if Dog comes along to bury a bone and finds it? No, he needs to find a safe place where Turtle and Rabbit and Goat and Cat won't ever think to look. So he gets an idea of where to put his calabash full of all the smarts of the world. Where do you think? He's gonna put it up top of the tallest coconut tree. Because he's a spider, Anansi has eight arms and legs. He can hug onto his calabash with his front two arms, and he uses his other four spider legs to start climbing up that tree trunk. But as you all know, when you climb a coconut tree, you gotta hold on real tight and shimmy your belly up."
Angelique nodded, that was true. Often she had seen young skinny men wriggle their way like caterpillars up the trunks of coconut trees, up to heights twice as high as the second-floor of the plantation house.
"Anansi, he's having a terrible time getting up this coconut tree and holding onto his big ol' calabash! He climbs all day, and all night, and on into the next day. But he barely makes it halfway up! He is so tired by noon, with the sun all hot in his face, that he has to stop and rest. So there he is, resting, just hanging on, and wondering how is he gonna make it to the top?"
The melodic rhythm of Mamma's words sketched a picture in the air. Angelique imagined the scene like a memory she had truly experienced. Every detail shined clearly in her mind: the spider's fuzzy brown body, the straight pole of the coconut tree, the bottle-shaped pink gourd.
"Now, a little baby child comes walking by, and he looks up at the tree, and he sees Anansi hanging on there all sweaty. The child says, 'Compė Anansi, what are you doin'?' Anansi says, 'I'm climbing up this coconut tree to put my calabash up at the top and it's takin' a little longer than I figured.' Then that little child, he says to Anansi, 'Well, why don't you spin a web and sling that there calabash onto your back, so you can use all your eight arms to shimmy up that tree?' Oh! What a good idea that is! And do you think Anansi is happy to get that help? No, he is not. He shoulda thought of it himself! Here he figured he had all the smarts in the world bottled up in this calabash, and along comes this little baby child with still some smarts left over. So Anansi, he got so mad that you know what he did?"
Angelique giggled like a sparrow's chirp. She knew what he did, but her eyes widened with anticipation for Mamma to tell her.
"He threw it! He threw that big ol' calabash down! It landed smack to the ground and it busted wide open. All the smarts he collected blew away on the wind. They scattered all over, and you know how it is with the wind blowing stuff around—it don't blow even. Some places there's lots of it, and in some places there ain't so much, and in some places there ain't none of no smarts to be had at all there."
"Not one little bit," the old butler said as he puffed thoughtfully on his pipe.
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In the nighttime, she got to keep Mamma all to herself. Angelique slept on a trundle bed in a narrow room barely large enough for the nursemaid's cot and a wash basin. But it was a private room of their own, not a communal bunkhouse where the field hands slept. To Angelique it felt superior to the finest suite in Versailles despite the packed dirt floor and the leaky thatched roof. She smiled in her sleep to know that she owned something Josette did not, even if it was just for the dark hours. She dreaded the dawn when she would have to share Mamma's attention with others. Often she wished that she could hold back the rising of the sun; if only the night could last forever.
Every morning, Mamma always combed Josette's chestnut hair first, and then styled Angelique's golden curls to match. She dressed the girls in identical frocks—Angelique in the cast-offs and leftovers that Josette did not want anymore. On the occasion of one Christmas carnival, Mamma crocheted for Angelique a linen doily as an imitation for the French lace that Josette wore in church. She always kissed the top of Josette's forehead first in turn, but Angelique sensed that Mamma lingered a bit longer on her.
"My beautiful baby girls," she would often say, when Madame duPres was not around to hear.
"Are you really my mother?" Angelique asked her, after the end of one typical day, when they were alone in their shared room. One half-melted candlestick glowed against Mamma's mahogany brown cheeks. The rest of the room was a wonderfully deep darkness.
"In all ways that counts, I am, little angel. You're as dear to me as if you 're my own."
The orphan girl insisted, "But you really aren't my own mother? The way Madame duPres is Josette's own? They look like the big and little of the same person. Why don't I look like anybody?"
Tears swelled up to fill Mamma's big brown eyes. She raised the sleeve of her cotton nightgown to dab at her own cheeks. "Oh, little angel, your eyes are seeing the truth for sure."
"Who's my real mama?"
"Nobody knows but the Bondye and your mama herself—wherever she is. Now, you pay no more mind to that, 'cause it'll only lead to frettin' and misery if you're always wantin' what you can't ever have. You got what you need with me. I love you, little golden angel."
Angelique sprang up on tip-toes and hugged her fiercely. "And you won't ever leave me?"
"Never, child, never."
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One morning, a carriage came to take Mamma away. The master Andre duPres came to the doorway of the servants' quarters and stood there overseeing her exit. For the first time, Angelique understood the true power of the words master and slave. His ginger blonde hair and paper-colored skin granted him authority to sell Josette's nursemaid the same as any of his trotting horses, his hunting dogs, or a sack of sugar cane. Mamma did not complain. With quiet dignity, she collected her meager belongings into a knitted sack. Gruff and impatient, the master hurried her outside.
Josette wailed and clung to her nursemaid's skirts. Angelique dogged along behind—afraid of Mamma leaving, but more afraid of the Monsieur who could not be swayed from his decision.
"Stop crying, Josette! You're nine years old, now, much too old for a nursemaid. You're a big girl. It's high time we cut the apron strings and you start acting like a young lady. My sister is coming to stay with us. Your Aunt Natalie will teach you how to be a lady, the things that Veronique could never know. Stop crying, I said!"
He stepped between them and forced them apart. Mamma was crying too as she stepped into the coach where another gentleman waited. A new master. A new family. She was taken away by the crack of a whip and the lurch of carriage springs.
Angelique hugged herself. She watched it go, the black coach like a hearse robbing her of the only mother she had ever known. Instead of sadness, she felt a smoldering rage gain strength within her.
Little Josette screamed in one of her tantrums. She broke loose of her father gripping her wrist. Arms flapping wildly, she started running up the road.
"Josette!" Her father chased after her.
His pudgy legs and barrel belly weighed him down. He looked like a fat old dog chasing a butterfly. His hat blew off. From where Angelique stood at the front steps of the plantation house, she watched them go uphill the slope of the sandy road.
The carriage went up to the ridge where the road curled and dipped over the other side. All too soon, its black roof was lost to view on its descent towards the sea. Josette scrambled wildly to the very edge—as if to jump off and fly. That was where her father caught her and picked her up. He carried her back downhill, with her legs kicking and her ruffled pinafore swirling in the air.
The rage inside Angelique swelled and spread, a silent scream privately held within herself just as loud as the tantrum screams of Josette being carried back down the hill by her father. Mamma was sent away because Josette did not need a nursemaid anymore. This was all Josette's fault.
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