I Am Madame X Read Online Free PDF Page A

plummet, and the blockaded ports meant she couldn’t sell her sugar, she was determined to keep Parlange going. She was up every morning before dawn and pacing the back gallery and reciting her Rosary, her thick heels clomping on the cypress floors. Sometimes she’d stop and curse loudly at one of the slaves who had stayed on the plantation; then she’d clasp her beads and start pacing again. Afterward she’d pin her skirt up to her knees, don a pair of men’s cowhide boots, and tromp out to the fields to supervise the workers. In the evening, she balanced the ledgers by candlelight in her “office,” a corner of the back gallery where she had set up an old table as her desk. She hired laborers—poor bedraggled white men—to replace the slaves who had left, and every Saturday morning they came to collect their wages. Grandmère would arrange several whiskey bottles and glasses on the table, and as each man approached, she would pour him a drink and place a few coins in his outstretched hand.
    Doing a man’s job had coarsened Grandmère and exacerbated her bad temper. She was always yelling at somebody about something, and I knew to stay out of her way.
    Nothing infuriated her more than hearing a member of her household speak English. She had banned all use of “les mots Yanquis” at Parlange. In Grandmère’s view, English was “la langue des voleurs,” the language of thieves, because all the words were stolen from other languages, chiefly, of course, from French.
    She claimed that the few times she was forced to speak English she almost dislocated her jaw, which you’d understand if you heard her pronounce, say, “biscuit” or “potato.” In Grandmère’s mouth, they sounded like “bee-skeet” and “pah-taht.”
    Only Alzea, who had been raised on an American plantation before Grandmère bought her on a New Orleans auction block, was allowed to speak English. Papa had also known English, and, unbeknownst to Grandmère, he and Alzea had taught Charles and me some of the language. But we never dared breathe a word of it in front of Grandmère.
    On her birthday, Charles and I prepared a little French poem to recite to her after dinner, before the cutting of the cake. We stood in front of her chair in the parlor while Mama played softly on the dainty Pleyel piano. I was waiting for Charles to nod, our agreed-upon signal to start reciting “Oh, notre chère grandmère, oh, que nous sommes fiers.”
    I looked at Julie crumpled under an old shawl on the settee. She looked so sad it broke my heart. I wanted to cheer her up, so I blurted out a fragment of an English verse:
    Rats, they killed the dogs and chased the cats,
    And ate the cheese right out of the vats.
    Mama’s playing halted, and I heard Julie laugh softly behind her shawl. Grandmère stared at me with bright blue eyes. She rose slowly from her chair, walked up to me, and slapped me across the face. I ran to my room and stayed there for the rest of the evening.
    I dreaded facing Grandmère the next morning at breakfast, but when I entered the dining room, it was obvious she had more important matters on her mind. Julie’s former fiancé, Lucas Rochilieu, was sitting at the table, dressed in frayed, grubby grays. He had grown desperately thin in the eight months since I had seen him last, and his brown hair hung over his collar in scraggly grayish strands.
    He had fought at the Battle of Shiloh with Papa, I later learned, and then gone to Vera Cruz, Mexico, on orders from President Jefferson Davis, to buy guns. He was to rejoin his regiment in Richmond, but instead he deserted, bolting for Louisiana, traveling mostly by horseback through back roads and swamps. It took him two weeks to reach his plantation in Plaquemine, where he collected some money and valuables. Now he was on his way to the Gulf of Mexico. He hoped to flag down a foreign ship to take him to France. But he had heard that Yankee troops were in the area and decided to stop off at