A story about a family torn apart by race, hate and miseducation. The Price's and Cotillard's, decendants of a tortured past; thier stories told, recalled by a shopkeeper and a washerwoman, but will it matter, would it save, redeem and heal?

ANew Ancestry
by M. James Cooper
      The Washerwoman: The good old days never existed. Your Tanty Cynthia lied to you because she didn't want you to know the truth about uncle Byron and the rest of them. That notion, that fantasy, that corrupted telling survived all the ones that the past was no good to. Your father and I tried to keep clear of all that corruption; orphans in a land of strays were we; the well-to-do have no more use for us, and the corrupted blood of our mothers and fathers detested we and our skins that made them remember acts of a tortured past. They walked a joyless and privileged path. My name is Blessed Marie Cotillard, daughter of Doreen Edna Price, mother of Inis Cotillard. I write these words down for him and his children, and his children's children. The year is nineteen hundred and sixty six, four years now since we were granted independence. Not much seems changed, a new world full of old memories, a new people with old haunts. This is the way I see it, and I am certain there are more who do, but I have not met them yet. I was born in 1949, daughter of the colony and to crown rulership, and would be slave to my own mother and her kind. Three things happened in that year on the twenty-fifth day of August: I was born, the British West Indies dollar was put in place and my mother screamed at the sight of me. According to my great grandmother, known to all as Ma Arabelle, Doreen, daughter of Alston Price, covered her face and said aloud, "Take it from out'a here! Fast! Before She see it!" That order of instruction was given to my grandmother Salma, daughter of Arabelle, the 'she' was the lady of the house, Mrs. Valerie Price. Doreen Price, the daughter that would be mother of four, only twenty years of age then, and sure of nothing except that Ms.Valerie wanted this daily reminder of her husbands obsession with black flesh gone.
Years of mistreatment. Rivers of tears. But one savior. Ma Arabelle, the woman who protected me, named me after my own mother refused me. No breastmilk, no warmth or claim. I would be given the name Cotillard, a clear indication that I was undeserving of any reciprocity, any stature associated with the Price name. Salma was weak and scared of her own shadow, so she would not or could not fight for me. Abused by the man who forced his love upon her and the woman whose house she labored in. She birthed three children, a son, Doman and two daughters Doreen and Helen. Doman had a son, named Winston. His sister Helen gave five, Rachel, Bernard, Marcel, Robert and Katharine and my mother Doreen gve four. A blessing, they assured themselves, convinced that God himself had finally saw fit to bless them, first visibly with fair skin, then, the children, offered permanence. All carried the Price name, all assured a place as long as Mr. Price breathed air. After the death of Ms. Valerie years later, a jostle for position among the two sisters began. Doreen won. One by one she defeated them, first her sister Helen and then her nieces and nephews. By Ma Arabelle's account and by the time I knew my own name most of them were gone. One man named Benoit, son of Paul, who was brother to Salma stayed behind after the cleansing. Salma who had developed a strange habit of talking to herself, one day decided to walk off the compound and never returned. Mr. Price, Doreen, Ma Arabelle, Benoit, and two other black boys with no names that I could recall, lived in that house in 1950. That was the year Ma Arabelle named me; she was sure now that I would survive the fall from heaven, sure that my sacrifice be worthwhile. Now they call me, Bless.