Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

born made Faye mad enough to spit. Finally, she had found the link between Mariah, her great-great-grandmother’s grandmother and Cally, whose legends had been passed down to her through her own grandmother. Mariah was forever silent on the subject, but the journal’s remaining pages were cluttered with several decades’ worth of scrawled notes and recipes and planting schedules. Even if there were no more personal entries, surely there was a little more information to be gleaned.
    Slips of paper poked from between the journal pages and she plucked them, one by one. A tiny drawing of a man in a powdered wig fascinated her. Could this be the miniature sent by Henri LaFourche to Mariah all those years ago? Could it really be her great-great-great-great-grandfather? It was unsigned. She would never know.
    Obituaries of people Faye didn’t know fell from between the leaves of the old book. Yellowed quilt patterns joined the pile. As the paper artifacts stored in the journal dwindled, she held onto twenty or thirty sheets of onionskin typing paper, folded and stapled. The bundle looked like her best bet for retrieving family history, so she superstitiously saved it until last.
    Faye unfolded the papers and saw that they were a smeared carbon copy of a document produced by a bad typist. She skimmed the first few lines. Realizing what she held, she paused to offer up a history lover’s prayer of thanksgiving. Then she added a few words of blessing for FDR and his inspired plan to keep unemployed writers busy. Somebody that the Federal Writer’s Project sent out to locate and interview former slaves had found one here on remote Joyeuse. Cally was going to tell her whole story, in her own words, after all.
    ***
    Excerpt from oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded by the Federal Writer’s Project, 1935
    I’ve been a slave and I’ve been free. I’ve been mistress of a big plantation, and of its master, too. I was there when the water pulled itself far, far from the beaches at Last Isle and I saw the wind blow the water back. It rolled over Last Isle and washed away the big hotel and all the rich white people, and their slaves, too. Nobody ever gave much thought to the slaves that died on Last Isle, but I did. I was a slave on Last Isle and I was there when the big storm roared in and washed the whole island away.
    You could say I saw the big storm twice. I saw it in my sleep a long time before it happened. I guess I should have tried to warn all those rich folks, but they wouldn’t have listened to me. Still, I knew death was watching over us. My dreams ain’t never once been wrong.
    My worst dream came first, when I was a slip of a girl. I saw people sick and dying. Miss Mariah was laid up in the bed alongside the Missus, and my mama was tending them. Then Mama took sick and they laid her on the sleeping porch and there was nobody in my dream to tend them but me.
    And that’s just how it happened. When the fever came, I took care of all three sweet ladies, but the typhoid carried them away, along with half the slaves.
    When the fever passed, the Master sent all the house slaves to the fields. ’Twasn’t any other way to get the harvest in. My skinny six-year-old self wouldn’t have been much good in the fields, so they gave me the whole Big House to dust and sweep and clean. I was so good at keeping house that I got to where I knew the Master wanted coffee before he did. I liked to bring him a hot cup in his office. He was a handsome man and I never, before or since, saw the like of his golden hair. I was about grown before I found out he wasn’t nothing but a mean man.

Chapter 19
    Faye knew she should be working. She should be looking for artifacts to sell to bolster her failing fortunes. She should be restoring Joyeuse, giving her the attention she deserved. Instead, she was sitting on the ground, watching Joe do target practice with his bow and arrow. Their conversation was punctuated with the pronounced thwump of stone arrows striking a rotten pine stump.
    Instead of doing something constructive, she was talking to a man who had very little to say. “So, I had a nice time with Cyril last night. I think I’m going to tell him how to get in touch with me through Wally. Maybe even bring him out for a visit.”
    “You trust him that much? You could lose all this.” Joe gestured at the wild beauty of Joyeuse. “I don’t understand what you want with him.” He let another arrow fly.
    She could