The "New York Times" bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick--the unique and deeply moving epic of four generations of African-American women based on one family's ancestral past.
1
CANE RIVER, LOUISIANA
1834
On the morning of her ninth birthday, the day after Madame Françoise
Derbanne slapped her, Suzette peed on the rosebushes. Before the
plantation bell sounded she had startled awake, tuned her ears to the
careless breathing of Mam'zelle above her in the four-poster bed,
listened for movement from the rest of the sleeping household, and
quietly pushed herself up from her straw pallet on the floor.
Suzette made her way quickly down the narrow hall, beyond the wall
altar, and past the polished mahogany grandfather clock in the front
room, careful to sidestep the squeaky board by the front door. Outside
on the gallery, her heart thudded so wildly that the curiosity of the
sound helped soften the fear. Her breath felt too big for her chest as
she inched past the separate entrance to the stranger's room and around
to the side of the big house where the prized bushes waited.
Barefoot into the darkness, aided only by the slightest remnant of the
Louisiana summer moon, she chose Madame's favorite, a sprawling rosebush
with delicate pale yellow flowers and visible roots as long as her
father's fiddling bow.
The task didn't take long, going and coming back, and Oreline's
breathing was still soft and regular when Suzette slipped back onto her
makeshift mattress at the foot of the bed. The only evidence that
Suzette had been gone at all was a thin, jagged scratch on her bare arm
from a thorn she hadn't seen in the darkness.
* * *
The day before had started with midsummer Louisiana
predictability, so smotheringly hot that the spongy air seemed to push
down on Suzette as she hurried to the cookhouse after church. Once
there, she slipped a clean apron over her good dress, a loose-fitting
dark calico with a yoke neck, one of Oreline's last-season castoffs her
mother had altered to fit the girl's small body. Her mother had left
room in the dress for a growth spurt. Every last item of Suzette's
clothing from undershift to leggings and shoes had first belonged to her
mam'zelle. Although the girls were the same age, Oreline was taller than
Suzette by half a head. They made an odd pair, the pale white girl, long
legged and gangly as a young colt, and her tiny cocoa-colored nurse,
Suzette, with skin like strong coffee after the splash of cream.
Suzette's eager smile showed off a gap between her two front teeth. The
space was almost the width of a full kernel of corn, and Suzette used it
to give more force to her whistle. It came in handy for calling chickens
or pigs or for impressing Oreline and Narcisse when they ran the woods
together in play.
The added heat from the blazing cookhouse fires made Suzette's dress
stick to her as she worked the paddle of the butter churn. Built at a
distance from the main house because of the risk of fire, the cookhouse
belonged to the Derbannes, along with the cotton and cornfields, the
swamplands, the facing rows of eight slave cabins in the quarter, four
on each side, and every other living thing on Rosedew, their plantation
along Bayou Derbanne.
Suzette looked over to her mother Elisabeth's strong, quick hands as she
pulled a gray white dough ball toward her, kneading air into biscuits
for the master's breakfast table. When her mother finished the cooking,
it was Suzette's job to run the food to the big house while it was still
hot and to serve the table.
Der-banne. Fre-dieu.
