My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. It was 1840. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A free skin was an awkward suit in West Tennessee. His own father was a man called Germain Bouguereau that spoke French and owned a big sugarcane farm ten miles out from New Orleans, and his mother was a woman from Madagascar but her name has long fallen away. I remember my mother talking about her though, when we were little, not that she could have known a thing about her. It was all just pretty legend. If Germain asked a by-your-leave of my grandmother then I’m a Frenchman too.
He had a sort of is-he-isn’t-he look to him, my father. But he was charming as all get-out, and lots of folk loved him. My mother said old man Bouguereau had let him go. But who knows? Maybe that was just part of his story, when he sneaked up to Tennessee. Germain Bouguereau never sent a hunter or set a notice so maybe it was so.
He had a long shining face, my mother said. And he was fortunate in his trade as a blacksmith, fixing ploughs and wheels and shoeing horses, that he had learned as a trusted Creole man.
He had found himself able to earn decent money in Louisiana – and, having made his dangerous move, in Tennessee.
The reason he felt bound to make that journey he never made clear. Stupid folk that didn’t know said he was too handsome for Louisiana and too clever. He wasn’t long suiting himself out to be a king on Sundays, and he had an open laughing manner which was why people took to him and the patrollers let him be for the most part. No man was free to a patroller. And West Tennessee was not big on the notion of free in general. There was no going into the town of Paris just as he liked. He’d be whipped and worse if he tried that, just like today. He had to have a bona fide docket from someone, saying he needed iron or whatever. He made nails and horseshoes with his furnace and his blacksmith’s anvil. He brought that anvil all the way up the country, pulling a little wheeled cart behind him – no Mississippi river for him. That took four weeks. He settled in a shack at the edge of the Littlefair place, because of his obvious usefulness to them. He brought the bounty of his skill everywhere.
That was the legend of my pa.
*
By his own account, he happened on my mother one day. Love loves an accidental sighting, and that was how it was with him. He knew no better than to fall for her. I believe in her extreme youth she was the best-looking girl in Paris. Small, shaped nicely, and with a sweet, trusting nature. She told me this, and I can believe it. My father set eyes on her and the die was cast. Aleaiacta est, as Caesar said. She was walking between the fields and the house, with a red kerchief at her waist full of biscuit. It wasn’t his fault that he put down his sack of tools and politely enquired who she was. She told him. Well. But what could he do? He was smitten. She was a house-girl on the Littlefair place, which was a big enterprise of tobacco, and also honeybees, and acres and acres of wheat, and often had urgent cause to call a blacksmith. That’s why he had situated himself there, we may suppose. He was a free person but he knew what it was to be her. Louisiana had slaves too, plenty. And every day that summer he made it his business to walk her way, and in the great enthusiasm of love he won her heart. Not that she had two free minutes in a day to have it won, but he managed to cram in the courtship. And although he was in a poor position to seek her hand, he was that sort of man – he went down to see Colonel Littlefair. And he went in as bold as anyone ever did that task. The big old house with its wide wooden floors, and the clattering sound that his hobnail boots made, didn’t daunt him. There were old leather books everywhere that the colonel’s father must have bought to give it a bit of a face. Sticks of gleaming furniture. Chandeliers with their trapped bits of sunlight.
He had taken care to don his best shoes and trimmest trousers.
And he went in to Littlefair, who was stretched nearly flat in a big leather chair, because of his stiff high boots, and his round stomach, and asked for my mother, who was only eighteen years old and had great value.
‘Well, Colonel,’ he said, ‘my name is Chas Bouguereau and you may know me from my little house at the border of the trees.
And I have done a devil of a lot of work for you and I am in love with Cissy, your number-two house-girl, I believe that is the case, and I wonder will you part with her?’
There may have been a lot more talk before it got to this point but I’m packing it a bit tighter.
‘I will,’ said the colonel, who, if he was powerful, which he was, was also very small in stature, the Littlefairs being nearly dwarves, some of the men, ‘if you pay me one thousand dollars.’ At this he shifted in the old chair, making it creak. Or maybe it was the colonel himself creaked.
‘Hmm, that’s a tidy sum of money,’ said my father. His name was really Charles, but Chas did him fine.
‘It has not escaped my notice,’ said the colonel, with a horrible wink, ‘that she’s been bred, so I could charge you for the child, but I won’t do that, as I am in God’s truth a fair man.’
‘Heavens, mercy,’ said my father, blushing rose red. And true enough, one fine day earlier in the summer, when the heat had sat on everything, my father had lain down in the farthest meadow with my beautiful mother and there were no prizes for guessing the result. Which was part of my father’s anxiety to marry her. So the colonel would have been charging him for his own child. Or children. My mother used to say the old colonel was a romantic sort of man and owned many lovelorn paintings, and was a follower of the poet Tennyson with his weepy poems, and that was why he made an effort to help – a very small effort, it was true. The colonel was also known to be a murderer.
There was also the fact that he was probably my mother’s father.
‘Could I work it off in blacksmithing, how would that strike you?’
‘I think,’ said the colonel, ‘ready bills will meet the day.’
My father didn’t even see Cecilia Littlefair in all this. She was deep in her duties somewhere in the old house. He went off then. He was trying to see how he could get a hold of a thousand dollars, considering that was about seven years’ wages or more.
*
At this time of course my father was well known where he was living, so he took the precaution of going some hundred miles west of Paris, making his way tree by tree through the thick forest, keeping clear of bears, and found a quiet little bank there, wherever it was, I forget the name of the town. One of those little cities that made whiskey. I can see him in my mind’s eye stepping out from the trees. With his best trousers and his hardened blacksmith’s look.
He went in with a short gun, a bit bigger than a señorita gun – he just walked in. It might have been better to have a bigger plan than that. And a bigger gun. There was a clerk there, as he described it to my mother later, with a cloud of white hair, and beside him was a young coloured girl who cleaned the bank-notes. In farming country banknotes would get very dirty.
My father levelled the little gun at the clerk and asked for money. He must have said it very nicely because for some reason the clerk wasn’t too alarmed.
‘We don’t get many coloured bank robbers in here,’ he said. ‘In fact, I don’t believe we ever had even one, do you say so, Maisie?’
Maisie was the girl that washed the notes. She said nothing.
She wasn’t so relaxed about the gun, maybe.
‘Anyhow,’ said the clerk, ‘we don’t have much money here most times and all the distillery wages have gone out last evening and we don’t hold gold or notes.’
‘I only need one thousand dollars,’ my father said in his most reasonable tone.
‘One thousand dollars,’ said the teller. ‘That’s a proper fortune. And we don’t have it anyhow.’ Then he jutted out his chin and scratched at it with his left hand. ‘Oh, but that’s a very precise amount. How come you need just that?’ His head was cocked sideways with interest.
‘I could tell you,’ said my father, in his version of all this, just before he died, ‘but it wouldn’t advance your understanding.’
I suppose he couldn’t just say: I need it to buy a wife I have my hopes set on. Because then he’d be drawn into the complicated details.
Then two beardy boys came in from the sheriff ’s office next door and my father was wise enough not to shoot anyone and they took him roughly and locked him in the jail. I believe they broke his jaw. When the visiting time for the assizes judge came round he tried my father, bruises and all, and they were going to send him east to Nashville to hold him in the big prison there, but a bunch of the townspeople broke in and wanted to serve justice on my father as they saw fit. This didn’t disturb the judge much either. Sometime in the two nervous days he was in the cell, Maisie, the little note-washer girl, who had heard the full affecting story, and of course was a coloured girl herself, went and got my mother. My mother was already big in the stomach even though she wasn’t far along – which was the first inkling it might be twins. Which is to say, myself and Rosalee my sister, who are therefore both in this story, if inside the skin of our mother.
The judge was kind enough to give them a blessing of sorts which my mother always termed as a proper marriage, but how could it have been? Though she could be very persuasive, that was true. That’s certainly my memory of her. And then, having sort of married them, but likely not, he turned my father back over to the townspeople and they hung him off a black-nut tree.
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From The Newer World by Sebastian Barry, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Sebastian Barry
