Read Online I Am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto - Free Book Online

silently to the convent. Mama said good night to me in the visitors’ hall and kissed me perfunctorily.
    In the dormitory, Aurélie’s bed sat empty. It was still empty when I awoke the next morning. Aurélie did not appear for breakfast, nor Mass, nor for Madame Farnsworth’s class. I asked the other girls where she was. No one knew. “She never came back from her visit home,” one told me.
    By the end of the evening recreation period, I was frantic. As the girls marched inside, I slipped out of the line and hid in an alcove until they had passed. Then I crept to the stairway that led to the cloister cells. The nuns were walking slowly down the hall, chanting their prayers in Latin, as they did every night before retiring at eight-thirty. When they reached the plaster Madonna at the end—the one Aurélie and I thought looked exactly like Empress Eugénie—they crossed themselves, muttered one final prayer, and then disappeared to enter their cells for the night.
    I ran to Sister Emily-Jean’s door and knocked gently. When the lovely nun saw me, she put her fingers to her lips, pulled me into the room, and closed the door behind us. The tiny space was dark except for a shaft of moonlight slipping through a thin curtain. Sister Emily-Jean lit a small candle.
    “I know why you’re here,” she said.
    “Aurélie.”
    “Mimi, she’s been sent home.”
    In the silence, I could hear a nightingale’s song wafting up from the garden. “Why?”
    “Mother Superior thought it was the right thing to do.”
    I started to cry. I was certain I knew what had happened. Without saying anything to me, indeed, while pretending to like Aurélie, Mama had written Mother Superior to denounce Aurélie as a Negro. Sister Emily-Jean hugged me to her slender body, and my tears dampened the front of her habit.
    The next afternoon, she took me to Mother Superior’s office. The old nun was sitting behind her chunky walnut desk, a stack of letters in front of her. “Mademoiselle Avegno would like Aurélie Grammont’s address so she can write to her,” Sister Emily-Jean said, clasping my hand tightly.
    Mother Superior looked at me with her gluey brown eyes and spread her square hands on the desktop. “I don’t think your mother would like that,” she said. She leafed through her pile of letters and removed a blue envelope. She pulled the letter from inside and handed it to me. I recognized Mama’s round, spidery handwriting. But the words were English. Mama must have had someone—perhaps Rochilieu—dictate a translation. I began to read:
    It has come to my attention that a student in your junior class, Aurélie Grammont, is a Negro. I understand that she and her family are passing for white. I have asked around among my associates from Louisiana, where the girl was born, and I have it on good authority not only that her mother is fully African, but also that she is a woman of the loosest morals. Knowing the Negro’s reputation for mendacity and immorality, I’m sure you will share my concern for my daughter Virginie Amélie Avegno, as indeed for all your students. If Aurélie Grammont is not immediately sent home, I will have no choice but to withdraw Virginie from your school.
    Sincerely,
    Virginie de Ternant Avegno
    Too ashamed to say anything, I handed the letter to Mother Superior, who replaced it in its envelope and returned it to the pile on her desk. Sister Emily-Jean put her arm around my shoulder and led me out of the office.
    Two weeks later, when Mama showed up at the convent to take me home for the day, I refused to see her. “Your mother is in the visitors’ hall and she is screaming at the nuns to let her upstairs,” one of the junior girls reported. Then an old nun with a rubbery face appeared at the dormitory door. “It’s a sin to keep your mother waiting,” she snarled.
    “I won’t go down,” I said, firmly planted on my cot, my feet crossed, and my arms folded across my chest. The nun grabbed my ear,