SHAPING A SYMBOL


 These "crabs," significantly, call readers' minds back to the account
 of a slave woman publicly tortured to death earlier in the novel. As the
 text depicts, her mother's friend, the peg leg, looks on placidly as the
 woman's molasses-coated body was devoured by ants, and is content
 to murmur, "de son ordinaire voix de bete soumise: Les Maitres sont
 bons, les Maitres sontjustes, les Maitres sont bons, les Maitres ... "in his
 usual voice, the voice of a docile animal: The masters are good, the
 masters are just, the masters are good, the masters ..." (52, 59). As he
 does so (and as Man Bobette similarly looks on with cold impassivity),
 a surprised Rosalie/Solitude suddenly perceives that, "tous deux
 regardaient la scene avec les memes yeux: deux petits crabes de terre,
 bien tapis sous leurs paupieres et qui n'arritaient jamais de bouger, de
 fureter, de cisailler l'air ambiant. "they were both observing the scene
 with the same eyes: two little land crabs darting this way and that,
 searching, biting the air" (52, 59).
 Solitude's own crab-eyes later in the book seem to mirror these of
her mother and the peg leg. She deliberately dons this mask, as these
others have done, in order to conceal for a time her "rage secrete"
"secret rage"-which has developed rapidly as she has come to
understand for herself her mother's statement: "Pays de femmes
blanches, pays de mensonges" "Land of white women, land of lies" (68,
81). In the web of lies woven by and surrounding Mlle. Xavier, Solitude
has to be very, very careful about what she reveals.
 Specifically, Solitude (again, appropriately designated "Deux-dmes,"
or "Two-Souls" at this point in the novel) must mask the anger which
rises in her as she listens to her mistress, the supposedly mild and
empathetic Mlle. Xavier, discuss how blacks do not feel pain as whites
do and hence can act perfectly tranquil even while undergoing the most
brutal tortures. This statement is painfully ironic in its rather twisted
half-truth: for while the notion that blacks do not feel pain is insidiously
false, Solitude herself becomes living proof of the ability shared by all
humans to suffer in silence. For her pretended pleasantness masks
her resistance, and her outward passivity is directly proportional to
her inner anger and desire to both injure and escape.
 Such masked passions, however, as Schwarz-Bart's text seems
powerfully to suggest, cannot be shunted aside and ignored forever.
They must eventually have some outlet, some channel in which to flow.
And once Solitude is robbed of the desperate hope of joining her mother
among the maroons, she begins to change. Specifically, the novel tells,
she arises one night, having been plagued by dark dreams, and stands
alone in the middle of a darkened room, feeling a kind of darkness