She finds herself under the thumb of Charity Millais, her great aunt, Tante Charity (“the French form of address the old lady insists on”), harshly judgmental of Deborah’s wildness expressed in her boundary-breaking drawings and paintings. And so hangs a tale.
“Deborah’s Gift” ($21.99 in paperback from New Wind Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is a novel by Chico State grad Lois Ann Abraham who, before her retirement, taught literature and creative writing at American River College. Her story won the Gold Prize for fiction from the Northern California Publishers & Authors.
Deborah yearns to be free of “the dragon,” Tante Charity, who dies in 1902. Before that time, Deborah as a teenager had journeyed with her great aunt to Martinique, to her family’s estate in St. Pierre, “the little Paris of the Antilles,” historically rooted in white plantation owners “who continued to own, if not people, then certainly everything else on the island.”
A dalliance with the nephew of Villette, their Black servant, results in the birth of a baby boy, whisked away from Deborah as Deborah is whisked from the island to a respectable April-December marriage to a judge. She longs to find her son and live “where the color of his skin was not a scandal.”
In 1902, as Deborah once again approaches Martinique, Mt. Pelée explodes. “The ship was bombarded with burning stones that struck her face, and the passengers behind her screamed and pushed at her so that she lost her balance and tumbled the rest of the way down the stairs.” St. Pierre is obliterated, tens of thousands perish.
Deborah survives, though horribly burned, and paints what she witnessed. “With La Catastrophe, she had entered new territory, a place where she would challenge and implicate, grasp by the throat, and demand that her viewer not just look but feel, know, believe, experience, and respond. This, then, is what she had gained with the loss of everything.”
This, then, is the power of art, and Deborah’s gift.
