Dumas's nègre

Enslaved people, such as clothing and wooden objects, such as flowers from hanging gardens, leave no trace. They are swallowed up by history and leave nothing more than an accidental trace in some auctioneer's account book or some cave that has happened to remain standing. Enslaved persons, like objects, are only valid while they exist, corporeal: a sick, mutilated or dying slave is of no use. They are an empty hull, a reduction ad corpusthat as soon as it ceases to be, it not only ceases to exist, but never did. How is it possible to tell the story of someone like that? Nothing that we can say about the life of Marie-Cessette is true or everything is true: this is a conjectural biography of someone who only left traces because, unwittingly (and perhaps unknowingly), she had a famous grandson. Let's stop on a Caribbean island almost three hundred years ago. Let's say that night is about to fall: crickets are heard, lots of crickets, and frogs. Also the riotous, deafening song of the birds, although little by little everything fades away and only the heavy silence of a coffee plantation between the mountains of what is now Haiti remains (although no one knew it yet: they still lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue). The heat and humidity have subsided. Let's also say that there is a full moon and everything is bathed in a dim light that allows us to see the plants that grow next to the house; Let's imagine that they are flowers and give off a scented air. We are next to a wooden cabin, which in turn is next to many more cabins. The moonlight, the flowers, the crickets: they all slip through the cracks. What else do you hear? Outside, the barking of dogs. Inside, because we know that human beings have the wonderful ability to find joy wherever they are, let's say you hear them singing. Songs are heard in the different languages ​​of West Africa. Cries are probably heard: the cry of someone who has lost an arm, the cry of newcomers, cries that are mixed with the daily pain of the child who begins to discover the injustices of the world. In the face of such desolation there are few consolations: let's give them zobo flowers (which have come to Mexico with their slave trade name: Jamaica), cultivated in secret not because they are a threat to anyone but because humans are petty and the foreman would uproot anything give comfort. What does Marie-Cessette have? She has three children of hers, two girls and a boy; she has the songs that her mother used to sing to her; the stories they told her as a child; she has her mother tongue and the Creole that she has learned. She has memories, now hazy. She has that name, Cessette, which is perhaps the Frenchification of a royal name. grown in secret not because they are a threat to anyone but because we humans are petty and the foreman will uproot anything that gives comfort. What does Marie-Cessette have? She has three children of hers, two girls and a boy; she has the songs that her mother used to sing to her; the stories they told her as a child; she has her mother tongue and the Creole that she has learned. She has memories, now hazy. She has that name, Cessette, which is perhaps the Frenchification of a royal name. grown in secret not because they are a threat to anyone but because we humans are petty and the foreman will uproot anything that gives comfort. What does Marie-Cessette have? She has three children of hers, two girls and a boy; she has the songs that her mother used to sing to her; the stories they told her as a child; she has her mother tongue and the Creole that she has learned. She has memories, now hazy. She has that name, Cessette, which is perhaps the Frenchification of a royal name.

Where does she spend the night? Perhaps in the big house, with windows where the breeze blows and the flowers can be smelled, on a bed with the same sheets that she washes. Perhaps she returns —they return her— to the cabins of the domestic slaves, from where they pluck her when the master asks her to carry out another of his bodily tasks, perhaps when she returns she is reunited with her children, she has at least three, a product of the owner , Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, but we should not assume that he did not have more. Perhaps Marie-Cessette can bury it all: the memories of the transatlantic crossing and the horror of living with her aggressor; and thanks to her great capacity for cognitive dissociation, her children will remember her as a happy woman. Perhaps the master understands this forced relationship as affection and has given him some gift. maybe,du mas), Marie-Cessette also has some sort of advantage over the other enslaved women. The pleasure, if there is one, will not last long: when his son is twelve or thirteen years old, his father, the owner of the coffee plantation, in need of money to return to France to fight for the family title, sells everything: the house, the plantation, the slaves, the wife Marie-Cessette and the three children he had with her. What happened to Marie-Cessette and her friends, her three or four things from her, her Jamaican flowers grown in secret, her children? Will they have stayed together? A year later the male child disappears. We do not know what happened to Marie-Cessette or her daughters. That son, already fourteen years old, left Saint-Domingue never to return (not even in the form of a statue). Has Marie-Cessette said goodbye to Thomas-Alexandre or has he just been ripped away? Did she have she disappeared one day from a neighboring plantation and only rumors reached her mother? Thomas-Alexandre goes to France, where his father, now a Marquis, buys him and recognizes him as her own, although he never adopts him. Years later, the Marquis quarreled with his son and he signed up for the army with his mother's surname. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas will become a very important general in the Napoleonic wars. But what will Marie-Cessette know about this? Can Thomas-Alexandre write her letters, can she receive and decipher them? In all the years the Marquis kept Thomas-Alexandre as a dandy in Paris, how much did he think of his mother? Did he want to keep money, send for her as his father did with him? Did he think of her sisters? Or perhaps the pain of her reality, of being someone else, the shame that her mother was an enslaved woman, made him bury all the love she could have for him deep in her black breast? The Marquis is lucky enough to die before the Revolution breaks out (although, based on the dates of death, it seems that some of his nephews did go throughMadame la Guillotine ). Thomas-Alexandre begins to rise in the army, marries, has daughters, goes to Egypt with Napoleon, fights him, tries to return to France, and is captured in Naples. He finally returns to Villers-Cotterêts and has his last child, a boy with curly black hair, tall and handsome like his father, with blue eyes. They name him, in honor of the general, Alexandre, and the child will keep the two paternal surnames until he decides —years later and as a political bet for a surname that was not noble— to take the name of his grandmother, and thus he will sign all his works: Alexander Dumas.

What did Marie-Cessette know about this? She may have lived long enough to be saved by the Haitian War of Independence and perhaps she was reunited with her daughters. Perhaps she ended up living in a house of her own, farming Jamaica and singing at the top of her lungs in her childhood language, now unafraid. Maybe she missed her son or maybe she gave him up for lost. Did she know that she became an important general? When she heard about Napoleon, did she know that it was also news about her son? We do not know when Marie-Cessette was born. The dates that she assigns to him on Wikipedia, both of birth and death, are those of her master, the Marquis. We can conjecture that if Thomas-Alexandre was born in 1762, she would be in her early twenties. Marie-Cessette most likely outlived her son, who died of cancer in 1806, but where was she when her grandson arrived in Paris to become a writer, in 1823? If she was born in 1740, would she have ever heard of that French writer who became very famous by 1830? Would her two daughters, Dumas's aunts, know that the author ofThe Count of Monte Cristo was your relative?
Marie-Cessette never returned to Africa. However, her son Thomas-Alexandre went to the continent, turned into a mythical giant, came to an Africa that she would not recognize, to the desert and the pyramids and the Egyptian Arab. Her grandson, also gigantic, also mythical, traveled to Algeria: both, one as a soldier, the other as a cultural attaché, were sent to that continent by the same country that kidnapped her. Did she remember something of the language of her mother Thomas-Alexandre when she walked the earth? And what could she have inherited from her son Alexandre? Perhaps before he died, when the future writer was barely four years old, the general lulled him to sleep with some lullaby unearthed, who knows how, from his childhood memories.
We know nothing about Marie-Cessette Dumas, except that she existed. And we only know this because her genetic information left some trace. There is a theory that proposes that the trauma suffered by a parent is converted into genetic information. The hypothesis indicates that this phenomenon affects the genes, but if we have already imagined so much about Marie-Cessette, why not imagine that not only the trauma, but also the longings are inherited, implanted in a primitive memory? Alexandre Dumas wrote a lot, so much so that he was accused of having ghost writers (called "blacks") who wrote what he signed. The novelist inherited some traits from his grandmother and, by his own decision, his surname. Perhaps Marie-Cessette also inherited, without anyone noticing, the great longing for freedom that became The Count of Monte Cristo, that story where the captive escapes and punishes those who condemned a poor innocent to darkness and oblivion. Let's leave Marie-Cessette as Edmond Dantès at the end of the novel: free, back home: a survivor whose greatest act of rebellion is to be happy.