Catherine Carmier

  ERNEST J. GAINES

  Catherine Carmier

  Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. His novels include the much-acclaimed The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Of Love and Dust, Bloodline, and A Gathering of Old Men. He divides his time between San Francisco and the University of Southwestern Louisiana, in Lafayette, where he holds a visiting professorship in creative writing. His most recent novel is A Lesson Before Dying.

  ALSO BY ERNEST J. GAINES

  Of Love and Dust

  Bloodline

  The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

  A Long Day in November (for children)

  In My Father’s House

  A Gathering of Old Men

  A Lesson Before Dying

  First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, April 1993

  Copyright © 1964 by Ernest J. Gaines

  Copyright renewed 1992 by Ernest J. Gaines

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Atheneum Publishers in 1964.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gaines, Ernest J., 1933–

  Catherine Carmier: a novel / by Ernest J. Gaines. — 1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83034-0

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A355C36 1993

  813′.54 — dc20 92-50589

  Author photograph © 1983 Thomas Victor

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  FOR S—

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN Brother got out of the car, the two Cajuns sitting on the porch turned to look at him.

  “How y’all feel?” Brother said.

  “Brother,” the younger Cajun spoke in return. The other Cajun smiled at Brother, but did not speak. After standing on the porch a moment, Brother went inside the store.

  “Mail come?” he asked the clerk.

  The clerk sat behind the counter, fanning himself with a piece of cardboard. He was a very big man with a red face and blue eyes. He did not answer when Brother spoke; he did not even look his way. Brother stood in front of the counter, wondering whether he should ask him again.

  “Mr. Claude?”

  The clerk waved the piece of cardboard before his face, but he was sweating as if he stood out in the sun bareheaded. Two old black fans in the ceiling spun slowly and monotonously, but they seemed to make the place warmer instead of cooling it off. Brother passed the tip of his tongue over his dry lips.

  “Mr. Claude?”

  “Goddamnit,” Claude said, looking at Brother. “Why the hell can’t y’all come out here the same time? Look like the hotter it get the more you niggers want to bother people.”

  He threw his fan to the side and went to the mailbox at the end of the counter. The mailbox was one of those wooden boxes used on office desks for incoming and outgoing papers. The clerk cursed again before gathering up the mail.

  “You want it all?” he asked, without looking around.

  “Yes, sir,” Brother said. “Checks, too, if they done come.”

  The clerk turned from the mailbox, threw the mail on the counter, and went back to his chair to sit down. After looking at each letter, and then putting them all in his pocket, Brother dropped some money on the counter and got a bottle of cold drink out of the icebox in back. Claude looked at the bottle in his hand when he passed by the counter, going onto the porch.

  “Pissed off in there, hanh?” the older Cajun asked Brother.

  “Reckon’d so,” Brother said.

  “This heat,” the Cajun said.

  “Guess so.”

  “Don’t pay him no mind,” the Cajun said. “This heat. Cussed out me and Paul the same way.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “I say, ‘How it go there, Claude?’ He say, ‘Cram it up your ass.’ ” The Cajun smiled. “This here heat, there.”

  They were silent awhile. Brother drank from his cold drink and looked at the river on the other side of the road. The river was very calm and blue. The trees on the other side of the river looked black, and Brother noticed a car, quite small from this distance, passing through the trees.

  “See you not working today?” François, the older of the two Cajuns, asked Brother.

  “On vacation,” Brother said. “Three weeks.”

  “Yeah?” François said, looking up at Brother from his seat on the floor. “I thought y’all get your vacation in the winter there?”

  “Taking mine now,” Brother said. “My friend coming in from California.”

  “Yeah?” François said, squinting up at Brother. “Oh, yeah, yeah, I hear ’em talk ’bout him there in the field. That boy there Charlotte, no?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Yeah, I hear ’em talk ’bout him there,” François said. “So he come visit the people, hanh?”

  “Might be to stay,” Brother said. “From all I done heard ’bout it.”

  “Stay?” François said. “People leaving here; not coming back.”

  “That’s what I heard,” Brother said.

  “And what he do here?” François said. “Farming? It’s all gone.”

  “Think he go’n teach,” Brother said. “Think that’s what he studied for.”

  “Yeah?” François said, looking up at Brother from under his sweat-stained straw hat. He wanted Brother to say more, but Brother did not.

  Brother drank from his bottle and looked out at the river. Two motorboats raced by the store, going toward Bayonne. Brother watched the boats until they were out of sight, and drank from his bottle again.

  “How’s the work going?” he asked François.

  He wanted to change
the conversation from his friend to something else. Maybe he had already said too much about Jackson. White people were suspicious and afraid of strange Negroes; and they were more suspicious and more afraid if they knew that those Negroes came from the North.

  “All right,” François said.

  “Taking the day off, huh?”

  “Waiting for that tractor,” the other Cajun said.

  “Y’all getting another one?” Brother asked.

  “Yeah. Everybody got one now.”

  “Reckon’d you can destroy some land with all of ’em going,” Brother said.

  “Yeah,” François said. “Knock it all out in one day like that.”

  Brother drank the last of his cold drink and took the bottle back inside the store. The clerk behind the counter was too busy fanning himself to look at Brother when he came into the store or went back out.

  “See y’all,” Brother said to François and Paul. “Hope your tractor hurry up and get here.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said.

  Brother got into the car and backed away from the store. The two Cajuns watched him turn around and go back up the road. He did not have to go far, and François could see him turn down the dirt road and park the car in the ditch.

  “You think he one of them people?” François asked Paul.

  “Who?” Paul said.

  “Them things there. You know. Them demonstrate people there.”

  Paul shrugged his shoulders and leaned back against the wall. Paul wore khakis, a pair of brogans, and an old sweat-stained straw hat. He cocked his straw hat over his eyes and looked out at the river. François could tell that Paul did not care who Brother’s friend was or what he did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Brother parked the car in the ditch and turned all the windows down. If there was any wind stirring at all, he would be sure to get it.

  When he sat up again, he saw another car coming his way. It was Raoul Carmier’s car, and Catherine Carmier was driving. Catherine was driving slowly, but the car still spread dust on either side of the road. She blew the horn as she went past Charlotte Moses’s house, and Brother thought he heard Charlotte speaking to her. A moment later Catherine had driven up to where Brother was and had parked the car in the ditch across from him.

  “See you just relaxing yourself?” she said.

  “Waiting for somebody,” Brother said.

  “Come out here to meet somebody myself,” she said. “Oh, but it’s hot today.”

  “Burning up,” Brother agreed with her.

  Catherine opened the door, then she took off her straw hat and began fanning with it. Brother looked at Catherine, but each time she looked in his direction, he turned his head away.

  Catherine Carmier was Negro, but with extremely light skin. With her thin lips and aquiline nose, with her high cheekbones, dark eyes, and dark hair, Catherine Carmier could have easily passed as an Indian.

  The Carmiers lived in a large old house about three hundred yards from the highway. The house had once belonged to the white overseer, but when the Grovers, who owned the plantation, began sharecropping, the overseer and his family moved away. No other white man wanted the house, and since the Grovers refused to rent it to a Negro, the house remained vacant.

  One summer afternoon, Robert Carmier rode up to the plantation store (the store was still being managed by the Grovers then) and asked Mack Grover for the house. (Antoine Richard, who was at the store, brought this version of the story into the quarters.) “What color are you?” Mack Grover wanted to know. “I’m a colored man,” Robert Carmier said, “but I can farm as well as the next one.” Mack Grover told him that he had a smaller house farther down the quarters that he would let him have. Robert Carmier repeated that he could farm as well as any man and better than most. Mack Grover told him that the other house farther down the quarters was smaller and would be easier to keep up. Robert Carmier told him that he would keep up this one as well as anyone kept his.

  Antoine Richard said there was silence after this, and he lowered his head to look at the floor. He saw a grain of rice at the foot of the counter and began moving it with the toe of his shoe. He moved it out, then in, from one side to the other; and still neither one of them said another word. He raised his head and looked at them again. First, the colored man—tall, slim, whose hair was as black as a crow’s wing; who held his hat in his hand. Hat in hand, yes, but not fidgeting with it one bit—as any other Negro would have done, and many whites, too, who stood before Mack Grover—but holding it as steady as a professional beggar would hold his. Only Robert Carmier was not begging. The eyes said this from the moment he came into the store until he walked out. He had come up there as a man would come up to a man, and he had asked for the house as a man should ask for a house. He had taken off the hat, not because he, Robert Carmier, thought he should take it off, but because someone in the past had told him that this was the proper thing to do when asking a favor.

  Antoine Richard looked at the other one next. Mack Grover was one of the landowners, not the only one, but the one responsible for hiring or discharging. He was considered the best of the Grovers by the Negroes, the worst Grover by the whites. He was forty-five or forty-six, still a bachelor, and both winter and summer he could be seen in a seersucker suit. Every morning he stuck a match stem in his mouth, took it out at mealtime, then put it back again. Now as Grover stood there contemplating Robert Carmier, Antoine Richard found himself not looking at either man, but at the white speck of sulfur on the end of the match stem. He knew that when the match stem moved to the other corner of Mack Grover’s mouth, he would give his answer.

  “Will day after tomorrow be too early?” Robert asked.

  “What?” Mack Grover said, as though he were surprised that Robert would dare open his mouth before he was given orders to do so.

  There was silence again. The swarm of flies that had been flying around in the sunlight all afternoon darted into the shadows. Antoine Richard thought they were gone for good this time, but before you could count to three, they were back again. A truck went by the store, then a bus went by and blew, but neither Mack Grover nor Robert Carmier seemed to be conscious of anything but each other.

  Antoine Richard saw the match stem move halfway and stop, then go on.

  “Friday,” Mack Grover said, and turned away.

  “Wednesday would be much better for me,” Robert said. “Especially since it’s already empty.”

  Mack Grover turned again, but not completely around.

  “Wednesday, huh?”

  They looked at each other only a moment this time, then Robert made a slight nod, put on his hat, and went out. Mack Grover and Antoine Richard followed him onto the porch and watched him ride away on the horse.

  “You know him?” Mack Grover asked.

  “Heard o’ him,” Antoine Richard said.

  “Well?”

  “Good worker from what I hear.”

  Mack Grover and Antoine Richard watched the horse move farther and farther away from the store.

  “I’m going to regret this,” Mack Grover said. “I’m going to regret this sure.”

  “He’ll car’ his share,” Antoine Richard said. “I know ’bout them kind o’ people.”

  “His share of the work, yeah,” Mack Grover said. “But that ain’t enough for a nigger, no matter how white he is.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A hard rain fell all day Thursday and most of Thursday night, and when Robert Carmier tried to cross the bridge on Friday to come into his yard, the bridge broke into halves, and the wagon went into the ditch. Robert told everyone on the wagon to get off, the furniture would be carried the rest of the way by hand. Besides Robert there were three others: his son Raoul, his wife Lavonia, and his sister Rosanna. The Carmier family was much larger than this (there were five daughters and one son altogether) but the girls had all gotten married and left. Two of the daughters, who had once lived in Opelousas, were now living in Bayonne about fifteen miles
away.

  Two men from farther down the quarters stopped by the wagon and asked Robert if he wanted help. Robert thanked the men very politely, but told them that their help would not be needed. A light drizzle had begun to fall again, and the men stood under the oak tree by the fence and watched the people carry the furniture into the yard. For three or four hours that afternoon, the two men and two women moved from the wagon to the house. By now a crowd had gathered under the tree to watch them. No one left until the last piece of furniture had been taken inside, the wagon had been pulled out of the ditch, and the bridge fixed again.

  It was soon learned in the quarters that the Carmiers had little use for dark-skin people. They went by without speaking, and when you spoke to them they hardly nodded their heads. When they needed help to get in their crops, they hired people their color. Once the work was done, the people left, and no one saw them until the crops were ready to be harvested again.

  Robert Carmier and his family made as much crop for Mack Grover as any family that size could make. Morning until night, six days a week, they were in the field. Then every Sunday morning, they got into the buggy and went to the Catholic church in Bayonne. Around five in the afternoon they would return, change into everyday clothes, and sit out on the porch. They visited no one, and no one in the quarters would dare visit them. Every so often one of the daughters would come in from Bayonne or New Orleans, but the rest of the time, Robert and his family, the four of them, would be seen on the porch alone.

  One day Robert and one of the Cajun sharecroppers got into a fight. It was winter, and both men were hauling their cane to the derrick. They were about a quarter of a mile apart when they saw each other. Each man started whipping his team, each trying to get to the derrick before the other. Robert got there first by only a few feet, and the Cajun, so angry that he had lost, ran his team into the back of Robert’s wagon.

  “What the hell you trying to do?” Robert hollered at him.

  The Cajun leaped from his wagon onto Robert’s wagon, pulling Robert to the ground. When Mack Grover and several other men broke up the fight, both Robert and the Cajun were bloody.