Dreams of Glory Page 19

  Around us loomed the official buildings, the Church of St. Louis, the mansion of the governor, the barracks of the garrison that de Rochemore commanded. On our right flowed the brown Mississippi from the heartland of my native continent, North America. Already I thought of myself as an American, even though I spoke mostly French.

  “We shall see about your doing what you please, you and your fellow Hebrews,” de Rochemore snarled at my father.

  “Sire,” my father said with a brief bow, “I am at your service any time you wish to discuss this matter with his excellency the governor.”

  De Rochemore muttered an oath and strode away. I looked up at my father’s face. It reminded me of an old house, battered and worn, but wide and charming. “Papa,” I asked, “what’s a Hebrew?”

  “A Jew,” he said, “what I am. Some people don’t like us. They blame us for killing the Lord Jesus, long, long ago. But that’s not true. Don’t worry your head about such things, my darling. Come on, now, let us go see the alligator Captain Dias Arias has brought from Pensacola. They say it’s the biggest one ever caught.”

  We continued across the Place d’Armes to the wharf, where Captain Daniel Dias Arias had docked his ship, Texel. On deck was a huge alligator, over thirty feet long, its legs and tail tied to keep it from attacking anyone. Black seamen poured water on its head and the beast opened its small, glaring eyes, then gaped its great jaws with their rows of gleaming teeth. I was terrified and began to cry.

  “Ah,” my father said, “he can’t hurt you. Watch this.” He seized a stick and thrust it into the monster’s mouth, propping its jaws open. The alligator thrashed its head back and forth until it dislodged the stick. “I wouldn’t do that again, Moses, if I were you,” Captain Dias Arias said.

  Alas, my father did not listen. He liked to do daring things.

  Captain Dias Arias, a small, sad-eyed man, died of fever in our house on Rampart Street a month later. Only when I was older did I grasp the whole story. Dias Arias was also Jewish, A war was raging between France and England. Under a flag of truce Dias Arias had sailed from British-owned Jamaica with French naval prisoners to be exchanged for captured British sailors. The captain also carried a cargo of merchandise he and my father hoped to sell in New Orleans. Monsieur De Rochemore claimed the cargo violated the flag of truce and seized the entire ship as an enemy vessel. When my father protested, the commissaire made an ugly attack on all the Jews in New Orleans, demanding their expulsion under Article I of the Black Code, which regulated slavery and religion in the colonies of France.

  Most of the other Jews in the city - there were about a dozen - had been terrified and ready to abandon Dias Arias. But my father had dealt with petty bureaucrats in a dozen countries and colonies. He went to the governor, Chevalier Louis Billouart de Kerlerec, promised him a share of Texel”s profits, and poof went Monsieur de Rochemore’s seizure. As for Article I of the Black Code, it was an anachronism ignored in all the French colonies. The French were not inclined to fanaticism in religion. They regarded Jews as useful, valuable citizens. They stimulated trade, the chief reason for founding a colony in the first place.

  But the second most powerful man in New Orleans became my father’s enemy. For the next five years de Rochemore and his friends never missed a chance to insult “the proud Jew” Lopez. One of their chief weapons was the relationship he dared to call a marriage, his open alliance with a free woman of color and his public acknowledgment of his quadroon child. Even more infuriating to these bigots was the way my father had gone to the Ursuline sisters and persuaded them to admit me and other quadroon and mulatto children to their convent school. The gossips fumed but the sisters accepted my father’s argument that we had souls that were eager for religion and minds ripe for learning. He paid for all of us at first, when he could afford it. This generosity and tolerance only aroused more antagonism. Not even the dinner for fifty or sixty people he gave to celebrate my first communion changed his enemies’ minds. They called him a hypocrite, a poseur.

  Over the next few years these slanders slowly diminished my father’s business. He was a commission merchant, who sold goods shipped to New Orleans by Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen. Gradually the word went out that Moses Monsanto Lopez was unpopular in New Orleans, that the best people in the city would not trade with him. More and more of his clients sent their wares to other merchants. He was forced to take cheap cloth, spoiled beef, shoddy goods that desperate ship captains dumped in New Orleans when they couldn’t sell them elsewhere. Gradually my father’s store, which had once been the favorite of the city’s wealthy ladies, became known as the place the poor and middling sort went in search of bargains.

  At home on Rampart Street, I never heard a word about these troubles. Each day at sunset I would race the whole length of the block to fling myself into his arms. Father would sweep me above his head and tease me about my name. “What flower are you today?” he would ask. “Rose, violet?” I would choose the flower and he would call me by that name for the rest of the evening. He loved music and could not hear enough of my playing and singing. “Encore,” he would say, and join me for a reprise in his husky baritone.

  Toward bedtime I would sit on his lap and he would tell me tales of the cities he had visited in his travels: London, Paris, Antwerp, and his birthplace, Lisbon. He had grown up speaking Portuguese, which was why he spoke French so badly. His family had lived in Lisbon as Marranos, converts to Christianity who ate pork and went to mass on Sunday but thought of themselves as Jews. They were forbidden to practice the Jewish religion under pain of expulsion.

  While my father was on a trading voyage to London, one of his brothers had been caught visiting a secret synagogue. From a fellow merchant, who warned him not to return, my father learned that everyone in his family had been arrested by the Inquisition and tortured until they confessed to being Jews. Some, including a favorite sister, were killed, the rest expelled from Portugal. Father settled in England, a country he soon admired. The government’s power was limited; citizens had the right to vote and speak freely. Jews could practice their religion.

  “Why did you leave England?” I asked him.

  “I fell in love with a beautiful English woman who refused to marry me. It may have been because I was Jewish. Or only because I was ugly and not very rich. I didn’t think I would ever love another woman until I met your mother here in New Orleans. I came with a ship. I was only going to stay for a month, until I sold my cargo. Now I shall die here. The fever will get me one day, or your mother will poison my gumbo when she sees a chance for a younger wealthier man.”

  The mere thought of his dying terrified me. I began to weep. My mother scolded him for frightening me. “She’s only a child,” she said. “You talk to her as if she’s a grown woman.”

  He smiled at me and caressed my cheek. “I think of her that way,” he said. “I have a feeling that I’ll never see her as a grown woman.”

  Father gave me a squeeze and laughed at his own fears. “I’m in a gloomy mood,” he said. “Just remember this, chérie, the important thing is to die in a place where you have been loved, where you leave some love behind you. I’m afraid that’s all I’ll be able to leave you.”

  One evening a year later, when I was about eleven, I came home from my music lesson and heard my mother and father talking in the sitting room. I stood in the shadows of the hall, unable to resist listening.

  “What will become of Flora?” my father said. “That worries me more than the pain in my belly.”

  “She’ll be very beautiful. She’ll have no trouble,” my mother said.

  “I don’t want her to be the plaything of some fat commissaire or wheezing judge.”

  “You must leave that to me. She won’t have to choose low. I’ll make sure she has every protection the law affords.”

  My father sighed. “If I could get her to England, she could marry wealth. Even a nobleman might not ask questions. The English aristocracy often marry outside their cl
ass.”

  “But you can’t get her to England,” my mother said. “Your creditors will never let you leave New Orleans. We must bear what we can’t change.”

  “Sometimes it’s like a stone on my chest,” my father said. “I can hardly breathe thinking about it. She’s white, Madeleine. She could pass for white anywhere, especially in England.”

  “But not here, it’s written on her birth certificate: F.D.C. You know that.”

  The next day, when I came home from school, I asked my mother what F.D.C. meant. “Femme de couleur,” she said calmly. “It is what you are, what I am.”

  My mother’s skin was the color of coffee with milk in it. I looked at my hands and arms and said, “But we’re not the same.”

  “Come with me.”

  She seized my hand and walked swiftly from Rampart Street to Chartres Street, in the heart of the city. There, in the hot sunshine, not far from the Ursuline convent, sat a fat old Negro woman as black as the mud of the Mississippi bank. In front of her were piles of fresh fruit. I passed her stand every day on the way to and from school. Often, she called to me and gave me a pear or peach. I thought of her as a friend.

  “Bonjour, Mama,” my mother said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, daughter,” the woman replied. “How is your good husband?”

  “He’s not well. He spits blood,” my mother said. “Pray for him, will you?”

  “Of course. But the prayers of this angel will do far more than my sinful croaks.”

  As she said this the old woman reached out to me. Her leathery black hand caressed my cheek. I recoiled. I could not believe this blackness was part of me. My mother soon convinced me that it was.

  “My mother was a slave,” she explained as we walked home. “She was very beautiful when she was young. Her master made her his second wife. When he died, he freed her and her children in his will. My brothers live in the country on a farm and are as black as she is. Because I was not black, she sent me to live with her cousin on Rampart Street. By law, women of color can only live there if they choose to stay in New Orleans. It’s written in the Black Code that they can’t marry white men. That’s why your father angers people by calling me his wife. He hates the Black Code and often talks against it.”

  Our route back to Rampart Street took us through the quarter where the free Negroes lived. I stared at the glistening black skin of a tailor, sitting in front of his shop sewing a coat. “Who shall I marry?” I asked. “A black man?”

  “No,” my mother said, looking around her contemptuously. “Never. You are better than these people. You’ll marry no one. You’ll find love with a white man, one of the rich. I’ll choose him for you. You’ll have a house of your own and a servant and more jewelry and dresses than you can count. If you’re clever, you may even get a plantation on one of the bayous, where you can live like a queen with dozens of black slaves at your call.”

  My mother didn’t know that I had overheard my father’s loathing for this future. Hour after hour in the following weeks I would lie awake, trying to imagine what this rich white man would be like. Would he be a fat commissaire or a wheezing judge? Would my mother condemn me to such a fate?

  It was the end of girlhood for me, the harsh arrival of womanhood. It coincided with the coming of age of many of my friends on Rampart Street. There were numerous femmes de couleur in the quarter and many of them had children. Like my mother, they waited until we were close to maturity to explain the special future that awaited all of us. Most of my friends seemed to accept the part they were to play with unquestioning, often greedy expectations. A sickening competition sprang up between us, where before there had been nothing but girlish good nature. We began comparing each other’s hair and eyes, and especially our skin color. I was envied because I was by far the whitest. Aware now of the nature of their mother’s friendships with their fathers, they talked incessantly of the presents some of them had recently received, silver plate and gold candlesticks and jewelry, expensive dresses. My father’s worsening poverty left me with little to say in this competition. I grew to hate it and to doubt more and more the faith my friends seemed to have in the love of rich white men for their femmes de couleur.

  Then news arrived from Europe that made all our futures a blank. New Orleans was no longer French. France had given it to Spain, had given all of Louisiana to the Spaniards. My father told us about it one night in the spring of 1766, his voice hoarse with apprehension and anger. The Seven Years’ War had ended with numerous Spanish colonies seized by English fleets and armies. “In the peace conference,” my father told us, “to compensate Spain for her losses, King Louis gave Louisiana to Charles the Third of Spain, his cousin. That was two years ago. Louis was so ashamed - or it meant so little to him - that no one in Paris even notified us.”

  “What will happen now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, chérie,” my father said. “I only know this. Spain hates Jews even more than Portugal. To live in a Spanish colony, you must have a certificate testifying to the purity of your blood. It’s a detestable system. But they may hesitate to enforce it here in New Orleans. All we can do is wait and see.”

  Later in 1766, Don Antonio de Ulloa, Spain’s first governor, arrived in New Orleans. He was an aloof, icy aristocrat, totally indifferent to the needs and interests of his new subjects. Without consulting anyone, he began issuing a stream of restrictive commercial regulations that were certain to extinguish most of the port’s free trade. Excited crowds collected on street corners to discuss the situation. There were mass meetings, at which my father was a frequent speaker. My mother took me to one of these gatherings in the Place d’Armes. It was thrilling to hear my father shout his detestation of Spain in his bad guttural French.

  “We’re not a parcel of slaves to be sold to a new master at will,” he roared. “Above all to Spain, the most detestable, most tyrannical power in the world. If France doesn’t want us, we don’t want France. We’ve worked to build a city here. Why can’t we govern it ourselves with rational taws, laws that are not based on old blind prejudices and hatreds but on our brotherhood as voyageurs here on this great river, on this new continent? Let us create a republic of free men, ready to trade with any country. We’ll not only be happy, we’ll be rich.”

  “Viva la liberté - long live liberty,” roared the crowd.

  To everyone’s amazement, Governor de Ulloa did not even put up a fight. Panicking, he boarded a ship and fled the city. For a few months everything seemed possible. My father spent excited hours conferring with other leaders of the rebellion. He wanted them to write a liberal constitution for the Republic of Louisiana calling for freedom of religion and an end to restrictions against women of color and free blacks. He even urged a plan for the gradual abolition of slavery. Alas, these ideas only frightened and divided people. Some of the more daring spirits sided with my father. Others reacted to his proposals with suspicion and outrage.

  One blazing August day, a fleet of twenty-four ships appeared on the river. They included transports and men of war, with menacing tiers of guns, all flying the flag of Imperial Spain. A boat came ashore, and an arrogant young naval officer demanded the immediate surrender of the city in the name of the new governor, Lieutenant General Don Alejandro O’Reilly. If there was resistance, General O’Reilly was prepared to reduce New Orleans to ashes. But if the people agreed to accept the rule of His Majesty Charles III, King of Spain, General O’Reilly promised to forgive those “misguided troublemakers” who had forced Governor de Ulloa to flee.

  Only my father and his small circle of friends wanted to fight. O’Reilly was an Irish mercenary in the pay of Spain. My father was convinced that he had orders to crush resistance to Spanish rule and would obey them literally. But the majority of the citizens of our stillborn republic, already divided by their quarrels and with few cannon to oppose the men of war, had no stomach for defiance. They accepted General O’Reilly’s promise of forebearance and surrendered the city. We
watched Spanish troops and artillery, well over two thousand men and fifty cannon, stream from the ships and parade to the Place d’Armes. As their red-and-white flag rose above the city, the hundreds of cannon on the ships in the river thundered a salute that was answered by the cannon and muskets of the men in the square. It was an awesome display. It left no doubt Spain possessed New Orleans.

  That night, while we sat at supper behind the batten blinds of our house on Rampart Street, a fist pounded on our door. My mother opened it and a half-dozen squat Spanish soldiers carrying muskets with fixed bayonets crowded into the room. “Moses Monsanto Lopez?” asked the swarthy young man commanding them.

  “I am he,” my father said.

  “You are under arrest by the order of Governor O’Reilly for treason against His Majesty.”

  “Put down your guns, gentlemen,” my father said. “I’m not armed and have no intention of resisting you. Let me have a minute with my wife and daughter.”

  “Your wife?” mocked the young officer, eyeing my mother’s tan skin.

  “My wife.”

  The officer muttered something in Spanish. The soldiers laughed obscenely. But they filed out of the house. My father turned to me and took my hands. “I’ll probably never see you again, my darling. Now all I can leave you is this kiss.” He embraced me and in a choked voice said, “Remember how much you were loved by this old man. Never forget that you are worthy of love. Look for that before anything else.”

  “Are you sure it’s so serious?” my mother asked.

  My father nodded. “A Portuguese, a Jew, and a rebel all in one? That’s too much for a Spanish judge to resist. Take the goods in the store to Isaac Solomon. He’s a compassionate man and an honest one. He’ll get the best price and take no commission. Good-bye my dearest.”

  “I won’t say good-bye yet,” my mother cried. Tears streamed down her cheeks, as they did down mine. “We’ll pray day and night for you.”