Free Black Bird by Michel Basilieres Page A

clear that even once the snow stopped, it would be days before the city regained its normal life. Although the streets and sidewalks would eventually be plowed, some of this snow would last until the spring thaw, turning to black ice, invisible and treacherous to drivers and pedestrians alike.
    And when the snow did stop, the clouds dissipating and the sun bouncing off everything in a dazzling and painful display, the cold set in with a vengeance. With the silence still largely unbroken by normal traffic, the Desouches were near enough to the slopes of the mountain to hear the trees snapping as if they’d been struck by lightning, with a crack not of thunder but of the ice in their trunks, and a horrible quick ripping sound just beneath the sharp report.
    It was at this time that Marie chose to return.
    Marie didn’t stay long enough to find the cause of the two things that surprised her: that Grandfather was missing, and that Aline was installed in her room. She didn’t stay long enough to be plied with questions about her absence. She barely stayed long enough to observe that the other women’s meek expressions revealed their clear memories of which bed Marie had been found in. All those trivial things would have to wait for some other lifetime, one less consumed with the enormity and urgency of the work to be done. And at the moment, that work consisted of enlisting her brother’s aid.
    She knew he’d refuse; she’d told her friends so from the start. “He’ll never help you. He’s too much an Anglo for one thing, and too arrogant for another. He’s a poet, and thinks he’s above all worldly troubles. He’ll never consent to writing your articles for you.”
    Marie had always been troubled by the propagandistic strain in some of her friends. She was uncomfortable with manifestos, letters and proclamations of any sort, partly because she’d always had a tendency to turn away from her brother and his interests—so reading and writing impressed her as something only someone as goofy as he was could make use of—but also, truth to tell, because she had been raised bilingual, and that made reading difficult for her to learn. She had initially been unable to distinguish between the languages, because although her parents spoke to her in either one or the other, she and her brother had spoken them both interchangeably.Jean-Baptiste was already reading his mother’s English magazines before he was five, before he’d been sent to school. When Marie got to school, she discovered that much of the language she knew was not just unknown and unused, but actually discouraged. She was reprimanded for using French, and handed poor report cards and extra work. After only the first year she insisted to her parents that she wouldn’t return to school if she was going to be punished merely for speaking. She was sent to a French school. There, she did better, hated it less, but the unpleasant associations—words and letters, Jean-Baptiste and the English—remained, and she was never able to overcome them.
    Nevertheless the others convinced her that his help was needed, and she was sent to ask for it. And she couldn’t deny to herself that a brief respite from underground living would be a relief. Or so she hoped. The long walk through the snow and wind from the East End cold-water flat in which she was hiding with her friends (convinced they were known and hunted) actually cheered her. Even without proper winter clothes and boots—which she had left at home and now anticipated reclaiming as a benefit of the trip—there was a refreshing, cleansing spirit in the overwhelming quantity and purity of the snow. She took a lesson from the weather: that it was possible to remake the world, to purge it of its worn, decayed and corrupt face, and invest it with a uniform and absolute innocence, a zero-point from which to beginagain, and avoid past errors. But this was only possible by an action that would catch the old, complacent