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  • The Enchanted Second Lieutenant*
  • Jacques-Stéphen Alexis (bio) and Translated by Sharon Masingale Bell

I couldn’t have known Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow—but on the other hand, I wouldn’t swear that I never met him. I can almost see his changeable, rather blue-green eyes, bitter and blood-shot, and his humped nose, curved and worried and aimed at his too-thin lips and undershot chin. And his hair—I see it like a reddish brush, abundant and curly, floating like a halo above a lanky body. Maybe that’s simply the image of some other yankee soldier encountered some morning of my vagabond childhood; but anyway, I see Lieutenant Wheelbarrow. Arcane mysteries of childhood! Imagination! Fancy! Alluvions and illusions! Memory, that incredible sculptor that gives dimension, form, colors, and life to the entire virtual little world where we frolicked, stretched, and played so long ago!

But don’t conclude from that that Second Lieutenant Wheelbarrow never existed. Everyone knows how close I was to Maréchal Célomme, God rest him, and how he loved me. For this old fellow, a bit scolding and fatherly, a pious, severe papaloa, 1 was actually a great friend of plants, animals, and small children. It was he who entrusted me, long, long ago, with the few yellowed pages where the second lieutenant told his strange, brief story. Maréchal Célomme even showed me the little tomb crowned with basil where the second lieutenant lies, a few steps from the famous La Voûte grotto in the St. Marc highlands—a small sepulcher of bricks, ashes, and conch shell whitening next to the verdant little trail. Considered alone, the manuscript is nothing but the disturbing notation of an inner dream; and without Maréchal Célomme’s narrative—he was a marshall in the rural police force—I would never have been able to reconstruct the harsh poetry, the strange love that enflamed a brief but enchanted life like a Bengal light in the violet, violent mountains of the Bassins-Coquilleaux.

The story takes place around 1913 or 1914, when Earl Wheelbarrow was a non-commissioned cavalry officer in the United States Army. Born in Kentucky, an orphan, poor, and unsure of what could be done with a human life, Earl had vegetated up to that time like mildew without ever truly plumbing the depths of his own heart. Once he’d graduated from the high school where his uncle, a major in the Marines, had had him sent after his parents’ deaths, the youth was very much at a loss. He had no desire to go into the only large business in town—Chattanooga, a typical small southern town, where he’d always lived. As a matter of fact, it was the metal works where his father had been killed by falling into a rolling mill. Earl wasn’t very good in math, so he couldn’t have made it in a small business or in sales. Being a bookmaker didn’t interest him. Becoming a gangster, a Tennessee terror, didn’t attract him either [End Page 504] because it took too much energy; besides, he’d’ve had to recruit his own gang, there being very few racketeers and killers about town. At one point he’d thought of becoming a preacher and founding a new religion, but the Bible bored him. Leave, then? . . . Yes, but . . . He’d had no real friends, no real joys but ice cream sodas, the few parties to which nameless buddies would take him sometimes, Thanksgiving Days, a few deplorable lynchings of Negroes who’d had lustful eyes, and other obscene gesticulations that shook his native Chattanooga. So a carefully thought-out choice was no easy thing for this young man as tall as three days without bread are long. He operated for a while as a campaigner for a Dixiecrat candidate for governor; he tried baseball, joined the Salvation Army, worked on the local paper, pumped gas; nothing worked out. In the end, since his uncle (whom he’d known only through his letters) had often said that the Army was a good old gal who relieved a man of the bother...

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