daughter reaches out to the poor!… Everybody had heard of South Beach Outreach. There were even some celebrities, such as Beth Carhart and Jenny Ringer, who were involved with it.
He stared over Ghislaine’s shoulder and out the window… at nothing… with a rueful expression. He was not all that far from being as light-skinned as she was. He could have done what she was now in a position to do, couldn’t he… but he was known as a Haitian. That was why EGU had hired him in the first place. They liked the “diversity” of having a Haitian… with a PhD from Columbia… who could teach French… and Creole. Oh yes, Creole… they were hot to have a professor who taught Creole… “the language of the people”… probably 85 percent of his countrymen spoke Creole and only Creole. The rest spoke the official national language, French, and quite a few of the fortunate 15 percent spoke in a casserole of both Creole and French. He made it a rule that here in this house, they spoke only French. To Ghislaine it had become second nature. Her brother, Philippe, on the other hand, although only fifteen, was already contaminated. He could speak French pretty well, so long as the subject didn’t go beyond what an eleven- or twelve-year-old was likely to know about. Beyond that he struggled along with something not far above Black English, namely Creole. How had he even picked it up? Not in this house, he hadn’t… Creole was a language for primitives! Oh, no two ways about it! The verbs didn’t even conjugate. No “I give, I gave, I was giving, I was given, I have given, I had given, I will give, I should give, I should have given.” In Creole it was m ba, and that was it for that verb… “I give, I give, I give”… You just had to figure out the time and the conditionals from the context. For any university to teach this stupid language was either what Veblen called “conspicuous waste” or one of the endless travesties created by the doctrine of political correctness. It was like instituting courses and hiring faculty to teach the mongrel form of the Mayan language that people up in the mountains of Guatemala spoke—
All this shot through Lantier’s thoughts in an instant.
Now he looked directly at Ghislaine. He smiled… to cover up the fact that he was trying… objectively… to assess her face. Her skin was whiter than most white people’s. As soon as Ghislaine was old enough to understand words at all, Louisette had started telling her about sunny days. Direct sun wasn’t good for your skin. The worst thing of all was to take a sunbath. Even walking in the sun was too much of a risk. She should wear big-brimmed straw hats. Better still, an umbrella. Little girls couldn’t very well go around with parasols, however. But if they had to walk in the sun, they should at least have straw hats. She must always remember that she had very beautiful but very fair skin that would burn easily, and she should do anything to avoid sunburns. But Ghislaine figured it out very quickly. It had nothing to do with sunburns… it had to do with sunbrowning. In the sun, skin like hers, her beautiful whiter-than-white skin, would darken just like that! In no time she could turn Neg… just like that. Her hair was black as could be, but thank God it didn’t have a crinkle in it. It might have been a little softer, but it was straight. Louisette couldn’t bring herself to dwell on the lips because Ghislaine’s lips didn’t tend toward arterial red in the red spectrum but more toward an amber-brown. They were beautiful lips, however. Her nose was perfectly fine. Well… that fatty fibrous tissue that covers the alar cartilage and creates those little round mounds on either side of the nose at the nostril—oh, alar cartilage, absolutely! He knew as well as any anatomist what he was talking about here. One had better believe that! Hers flared out slightly too widely but not so far that she didn’t look white. Her chin could have been a little larger, and her jaw a bit squarer, to balance the little round mounds. Her eyes were black as charcoal but very large and sparkling. Much of the sparkle was from her personality, of course. She was a happy girl. Louisette had given her all the confidence in