The bell at Belleview Plantation Chapel hadn’t rung for the dead for thirty-five years, but on All Saints’ morning in 1868, Father Antoine ordered it to be rung three times.
The sound traveled through the old sugarcane fields in muffled waves of bronze. It spread over the weed-choked furrows, over the ruined foundations of the boiler room, over the shacks patched up with new planks by people who, now, worked for a wage when it came and left as they pleased—at least in theory. It flowed down to the Mississippi, where the river carried driftwood, steamboat smoke, and the ceaseless news of Reconstruction, skirting the German coast all the way to New Orleans.
Camille Duron stood near the chapel steps, a gloved hand resting on her black parasol, wondering if the bells remembered whom they had been designed to call.
She had arrived from New Orleans two days earlier to settle Belleview’s final affairs. Her uncle Armand had sold the property after his wife’s death and fled to France, where he had drowned his sorrows in alcohol, leaving behind debts, letters, and an old claim to property that no one in the Duron family had been willing to pursue. The war had disrupted property, labor, money, and laws, but not paperwork. The paperwork had survived storms, regimes, armies, widows, and shame. So Camille, thirty-four years old, single, and with a knack for accounting that her brothers never had, had been sent upstream to see if the Durons’ remaining shares could be sold, bought back, or simply buried.
The parish had decided that this morning would be suitable for a memorial ceremony.
