Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

and God’s beneficence in the form of good weather (How can He smile on such sin?), the harvest was bountiful. With the profits, Andrew plans to enslave more souls here on Catspaw Island. I mean, of course, on Joyeuse. Andrew felt the name given the island by the old settlers was coarse, but anything French is most elegant, so he named his plantation and his house—with all the luxurious furbelows he is forcing his people to add to our old dwelling—after joy. Now he has the effrontery to make it a place of misery.
    After weeks of argument over this issue, this morning I tried a different tack. I argued business with him. How could slave labor be so much more profitable than that of free workers? Both have the same needs for shelter, food, and clothing. Why not pay the workers to cover their own needs and avoid the cost of caring for them himself, while saving a significant purchase price?
    My only child gave me a soulless smile and reminded me that there were profits to be made from increase. “Increase?” I asked in my ignorance. When he explained himself, I knew that I had lost him forever. By increase, he meant the increase in value of his holdings generated by the birth of slave children. He sees no wrong in using human beings as breeding stock.
    After this conversation, I retired to my sleeping room and I have not come out since.
    Excerpt from the journal of Mariah Whitehall Lafourche, 3 August, 1829
    I am comfortably settled in my own home and my son is fit to be tied, but I could live no longer in a house built by prisoners and paid for by the profits earned on their labor. When I told Andrew that I wished to build a small cabin in the woods behind the kitchen, his response was kindly, even condescending. “And how will you do that? There is no one on the island to build it but the slaves. You may as well live in the Big House with me.”
    I said I could pay them for their efforts. Andrew’s condescension dissolved into outright mockery. He laughed at me, saying, “You don’t own a thing in this world, Mother.”
    The most galling thing is that he is right. The law does not recognize a woman’s right to own property. My father survived his last year by sheer obstinacy, determined to live until Andrew was of legal age. He managed to do so. He died believing that he had passed responsibility for my welfare to the one man he trusted with the job. The island, the crops, God help us, even the slaves, belong to Andrew. I am only his female dependent.
    I removed a comb from my hair, and another, and another until my hair fell loose. I cupped my two hands together and held them out to him. The tortoiseshell ornaments glowed golden from inside. “Are these yours? And my jewelry? You can have that, too. Does nothing really belong to me?”
    Andrew’s face flushed. “Of course, your personal items are your own. Do what you like with them. Build a house. Build a hotel. I don’t care.”
    So I did. I built a house, that is, not a hotel. I paid the workers with my mother’s silver flatware, one fork at a time, until I saw that I had something they needed far more. Since May, I have paid them in learning. On Sundays, I sit on a slave cabin’s porch. Anyone who comes to me can learn their letters. Some are quite bright; I think they will be reading by spring.
    I am touched by their gratitude. They bring me gifts that I try not to accept. I emphasize that I am paying them for their labor, but still they bring me things—fresh corn, hand-whittled figurines, aprons—that cost them time and goods I know they can scarcely spare.
    My favorite gift rests on my desk even now, beside my hand as I write. It is a stone spearhead longer than the palm of my hand. I pulled many a warrior’s long-lost weapon from the soil during a childhood spent running wanton through the woods. This is like none I have seen. It is far larger. Its shape is more oval than the familiar three-cornered one and its coloring lacks the typical reddish sheen. My generous friend got it from a slave who found it while fishing on the far end of Last Isle. He says there are many such treasures to be found along the channel that last year’s storm cut through the island. He also described a clearing west of the channel where, after a heavy rain, pottery with curious ornamentation surfaces. The spot can be found by a landmark thirty paces west of the channel, an old cistern cut into the highest ground on the island. The cistern, too, is said to be