as tradition required. He would have told him the history of his family and his country. With Henri Laroche gone, Joseph’s grandmother Louisette took on the job of sharing the family lore every time she stopped by the house.
Louisette—whom everybody affectionately nicknamed Lisettine—was a down-to-earth and honest woman who worked as an ironer, an occupation that required strong arms and legs. She walked several miles every day to pick up bundles of clean linen from the rich families in Le Cap. She smoothed out and carefully folded the linen at home, before making the return trip to the owners’ houses for delivery and compensation. Although she did not get paid much, “all work is noble,” Lisettine told Joseph, showing him an iron box filled with hot coal. Thanks to her work tool, this old box purchased long ago with her meager savings, she had raised with dignity the two children she had with Henri Laroche before their separation: Euzélie, born in 1862, and Bertrand, born in 1865.
For Joseph, Lisettine’s visits were always enchanting, even though she never failed to grumble a little while passing the threshold. She found fault with the house, which she deemed unclean, or with the food, which she believed left a lot to be desired. She reprimanded the maid for a fork stored with the spoons, or a bedsheet placed on the wrong shelf. She inspected every room, every piece of furniture, and noticed the thinnest layer of dust. Nothing ever met her approval.
Although Joseph feared his grandmother’s strict rules, remnants from the hard life she’d lived in the past, he nevertheless loved her very much—for her kindness and for the stories she shared about his family and Le Cap. Some of these stories, he’d heard a thousand times, and yet he did not tire of them. He asked to hear them again.
“Your great-grandfather, Henry Laroche, was a white man,” Lisettine began in a high-pitch voice, “a soldier in a garrison here in the north.” She continued, “One day he came across a free woman of color. She turned his head.” Lisettine asked, “Do you know what a free woman of color is?” (Joseph shook his head, eager to hear what happened next.) “Well, it means that this black woman was no longer a slave, as opposed to the rest of the black population. Her name was Hellène François. She liked Henry Laroche, and he liked her back.” Lisettine smiled. “So, they knew each other in the biblical sense and that is how your grandfather was born.” She became pensive. “But during that time, even when they were not slaves, people worked with their hands as much as with their head. And because your grandfather did both well, he rapidly learned the craft of shoemaker. You see these leather shoes you are wearing? Well, he made things like that.”
As her mother revived the memory of the late Henry Laroche, Euzélie watched her son’s eyes light up. Both Euzélie and Lisettine answered Joseph’s questions with candor. The boy was curious about everything, and his mother appreciated that. Was it not the sign of a brilliant mind? He would go far. That was a certain. His mother believed it.
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Only once did Euzélie elude Joseph’s questions. That night, as it was getting late, Joseph was worried about his mother, who still hadn’t returned home. He paced the house, irritable and impatient. When she eventually returned, she didn’t return his hug. She remained silent. When he tried a smile, she kept her stony expression. He understood that something serious, even terrible, had happened. But what? He remained in the dark until the next day, when, during mass, the priest in his homily asked the believers “to pray for the victims of the sinking.”
Joseph didn’t know what the word sinking meant, but he could read consternation on everybody’s faces. What did it mean? Why was it so painful? The boy would not wonder for very long. From his pulpit, the vicar enlightened him by describing the dreadful scene of a liner sinking in the ocean.
The liner in question was the Ville de Saint-Nazaire46 in route from New York. Laded with merchandise for the West Indies, it was to stop over in Le Cap on March 6, 1897. It never arrived. It went down due to a leak, worsened by a violent storm. Among the eleven passengers and seventy-four crewmen aboard, only eighteen people survived. As Joseph listened to the macabre account of the sinking, he pondered the stories he’d been told about the animal world, where only the shrewder one played his cards right. Was it the same for humans? Were the survivors luckier, or simply more astute, than those who’d drowned?
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Answers to Joseph’s questions came from a Martinican survivor, sailor Marcel Héber-Suffrin.47 He explained that, the entire night, the crew used big buckets to try to empty the engine room. But at seven in the morning, “all hope to save the ship was lost.” When the captain ordered the evacuation of the Ville de Saint-Nazaire, boarding the three lifeboats and the dinghy was extremely difficult. “They had to strap down the women,” Marcel Héber-Suffrin said, “because the wild sea terrified them. Using a hoist, they hauled down the human cargo into the small boats. After a ninety-minute operation, they had been able to squeeze twenty-one people in the first lifeboat that then set off to the high seas.”
The men were rowing. The storm was not waning. The sea was “furious.” It was cold. After four days, fatigue, hunger, and thirst “started to have a disastrous impact on morale.” Unable to stand it any longer, a boy “profusely” drank salted water.48 Soon, he was rambling and wanted to throw himself in the ocean. “After a few hours of agony, he breathed his last breath.”
A man also died that evening, and then a woman the following night. “From the moment she got on the boat,” Héber-Suffrin said, “she sat on the edge. We provided her with all the care we could, but the violent waves kept her constantly drenched and helpless. It was torturous for her.
Her moans, moments before she died, broke our hearts. She extended her arms toward us, mouth open, her voice raspy. The water ultimately choked down her whimpers, and she died in agony.”
The next day, a man jumped into the ocean. The captain sobbed, disheartened, calling over and over for his wife and five little girls, whom he would never see again.
Héber-Suffrin was rescued in extremis by a passing ship. He later found out about the ordeal of the people evacuated in the two other lifeboats.
In one boat, the madness started on the third day in open sea. From that point on, not one day went by without four or five “poor souls” going insane and jumping into the ocean. In the other one, many were driven to incredible acts of lechery that should forever remain untold. As for the dinghy, it disappeared with everyone on board.
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The sinking of the Ville de Saint-Nazaire created heartbreak in Le Cap because the locals loved to welcome the ships that regularly stopped over at the port. They came from America, France, Germany, and even Denmark, carrying all kinds of products that brought happiness to the young and the old alike.
The liner Franconia49 was one of the star ships of the time. Starting in 1874, it regularly set sail from Hamburg, headed to the West Indies, until the new owners changed its name to Olindes Rodrigues. For a while, the ship traveled between different local ports in France, until 1891, when it was assigned a new itinerary: Le Havre-Haiti. Historian Marc Péan explains that, “every month, whenever the liner Olindes Rodrigues arrived in Le Cap, the local joined in celebration. A converted cabin on board the ship held a very large selection of magazines and books, from the last Zola,50 Loti,51 or Bourget52 novels, to other political, economic, and scientific works.” These books and magazines brought happiness to the teachers, lawyers, or reporters who were members of various literary clubs in Le Cap. They regularly met to talk about literature, music, or philosophy, in the home of wealthy merchant Larante Desormeaux or famous physician Nemours Auguste, an uncle of Joseph Laroche.
The ships that stopped in Le Cap were usually freight vessels that had been remodeled to hold a few passengers. The journey was long and grueling. In bad sailing conditions, the crossing between Le Cap and New York could take up to seventy days. Christina Schutt relates that, “during the many storms that sometimes lasted for days, passengers were confined to their quarters, crammed in filth and stink, with no light—to avoid the risk of fire—and no access to the deck. Windows remained tightly closed to protect against large waves. Some ships, however, had cabins for the passengers of more fortunate means.” And it