Toussaint told Sabès and Gimont that they had never had any bad treatment from him, and that they had seen how well he treated all his blanc prisoners. It was hard for me not to look at Guiaou when Toussaint spoke so, though I held my eyes straight forward, and I saw from the tight jaws of the two blanc officers that they were having trouble too. Sabès and Gimont had seen a lot of unarmed blancs and women and children get butchered, at Savane Valembrun and Petite Rivière and probably a few other places too, even if Toussaint did not like such things to happen when he was there himself to see them. But Toussaint was still talking, saying again how he had done all he could do to stop this war from happening, and how all the war and trouble was really the fault of the Captain-General Leclerc.
Then Sabès could not keep his tongue still any longer, and he said to Toussaint all in a rush that none of the trouble would ever have happened if Toussaint had not disregarded the authority of Leclerc, and that he and Gimont had suffered a lot, and seen a lot of very bad things happen to other blancs along their way, which was as much as saying Toussaint lied. We heard a little whisper go around the men at that, like a small breath of wind on a still hot day, but Toussaint raised his eyes and the whisper stopped. I thought that Sabès must be a brave man, or maybe a little crazy, to speak as he had spoken then, though it was truth.
But Toussaint tried to hide his anger. He talked still more, telling how he had been named Governor-General of Saint Domingue by Bonaparte, chief of the soldiers in France, and that Leclerc had appeared to attack him the way a pirate appears on the ocean. Gimont was a captain of a French boat, and Toussaint finished by saying to him, “If you command a ship of state and if, without giving you any notice, another officer comes to replace you by jumping on the foredeck with a crew twice the size of your own, can you be blamed for trying to defend yourself on the afterdeck?”
Sabès and Gimont did not say anything more after that. Toussaint had already told them that they were going to be sent down to General Boudet at Port-au-Prince, to carry the letters Toussaint had written, and they would not have wanted to make him change this idea. Toussaint had horses given to them, and they rode out of Chassérieux toward the coast, with a small guard, while Toussaint went inside his tent, and the ring of people who had been listening broke apart.
After all that had happened since the French ships came, most of our people were thinking that any blanc was an enemy, so I did not know what they thought about all Toussaint had said that morning. But I, Riau, because I had copied them, I knew the words of the letter Sabès and Gimont were carrying to Boudet, and they were smooth as glass— The rights of man, which shelter them from all arrest, give me no right to consider them prisoners. I desire that you should act in the same way with regard to my nephew and aide-de-camp Chancy, who is at Port-au-Prince.
However well Toussaint liked his sister’s son Chancy, the person he would most want to trade for was his own son, Saint-Jean, but while Boudet held Chancy in Port-au-Prince, Leclerc himself kept Saint-Jean hostage at Le Cap, and it was Leclerc that Toussaint had spent the morning blaming, in place of all the French blanc soldiers. I did not know what he might have to trade to Leclerc for Saint-Jean, so his intention was very hard to see. These were troublesome thoughts, and maybe others in the camp were having them too. The men had rested a little now, enough to wonder what they were going to have to do next, and no one spoke about it, but all could feel a spirit of confusion in the air.
But on the afternoon of that same day, four riders came in a cloud of dust that we could all see from a long way off. They brought the news that the General Hardy, who was moving from La Crête à Pierrot toward the north coast, had passed through La Coupe à l’Inde and raided Toussaint’s habitation there, and among a lot of other things he had taken Toussaint’s white horse Bel Argent.
Toussaint did not hide his anger then, and all at once everything seemed clear. Before an hour had passed all of our men were hurrying north on the way Hardy had taken, except for a very few he left to guard Vincindière. Even without Bel Argent, Toussaint rode faster and harder than any of the men he was leading, but he and Bel Argent were like one animal when they were together, and we saw he would do anything to get him back. Another thing was that Hardy had been the man who captured Saint-Jean on the road out of Ennery, so maybe Toussaint had two points to take to him that day.
It was better to be moving than to wait and think. General Hardy was moving fast, for a general with a lot of prisoners and baggage, but Toussaint was following even faster. At Saint Michel, on the Central Plateau, the people told us the French blanc soldiers had passed through that day and they were marching for Dondon. It was already night when we reached Saint Michel, and so we rested a few hours there.
When they saw us come into the town, a few dozen men of Saint Michel came in from the woods where they had been hiding since Hardy came. They had muskets, but they had been afraid to fight, and the man who led them was shaking his head, saying that these men were not like any other blanc soldiers he had ever seen. They could run through the bush and climb the mountains as fast as any man among us, and the leader of Saint Michel even said he had seen some of them pull down wild horses by their ears and ride them without a bridle.
Guiaou and Guerrier looked sideways at each other when they heard that part, but Toussaint only laughed and said, “I have already told you, Bonaparte has sent his very best men to fight us. They have done wonderful things in Europe and they may work wonders here for a short time, but the fire of our sun will weaken them quickly and you will outlast them all at the end.”
We slept a few hours with these words of Toussaint, but before the light of the next morning we were going after Hardy’s soldiers again. When we had passed the quarter of Bassaut, Toussaint found a morne to climb, and from the top he could see where Hardy had stopped his men on the outside of Dondon.
Then it was noon, and Hardy would let his soldiers rest through the heat, we thought, but we were not resting. Toussaint sent Riau and Guiaou to look for General Christophe, who had been fighting in these mountains with what was left of the Second Demibrigade, and also a few hundred men of the hoe who had taken up the guns Toussaint had hidden in the mountains. By good luck we found Christophe before too long, on the slopes of Morne La Ferrière, which was not so very far above the town of Dondon. Christophe knew already that Hardy was there, but he did not have men enough to fight him by himself.
Toussaint’s order was that Christophe should attack Hardy from one side while Toussaint himself attacked from the other. Christophe was ready enough to try this plan, now he knew Toussaint had come, and he began to move his soldiers down the mountain toward Dondon, but Hardy had put his men on the march again before we knew about it, and they struck us before we were ready for them, on the road coming out of Dondon.
Christophe had not many regular soldiers left in the Second Demibrigade, and the men of the hoe who carried guns for him would not stand when the French blanc soldiers made a wall of bullets by firing on them all at once and then ran at them with their bayonets shining like steel teeth. Christophe could not make them stand. They scattered into a grove of palms, and Christophe had to run away himself, with the French blanc soldiers running after him hard, so that for a little while it seemed like he would be captured. And I, Riau, though I had a good horse, I felt their bayonets close behind me, as I rode away with the palm leaves whipping across my back, and my face rubbing against the mane of the horse because I had ducked down to hide the bullets singing over me. I had not been in any close fighting with these French blanc soldiers before then, though I had seen some big fights from a distance. It seemed as terrible to face them as the chief at Saint Michel had said, when they were so quick and so fierce, and a hundred of them could move almost as one.
But once in the woods it was all different. The trunks of the trees broke up the charge of the French blanc soldiers. They began to stumble and separate from each other and they did not know how to shoot very well among th
e trees. I saw then that they did tire quickly, as Toussaint had said, after their first big try. The fear that was with me went away, and I caught up with Guiaou and Guerrier at the edge of the trees, where a narrow road went off among coffee terraces. Guiaou was tightening the knot of his mouchwa têt, getting ready to turn against the French blanc soldiers again. He and Guerrier did ride down on the blancs and cut a few of them with their coutelas, before Hardy could get his own horse soldiers to come up. Hardy’s men were in trouble now, with our men shooting them one by one from behind the trees, and Christophe, who had got away, was forming up his regular troops to go back into the fight.
But I, Riau, I rode as fast as I could around all this fighting, back toward Dondon, to let Toussaint know that it had begun. Maybe he knew already from the noise, or he was watching somewhere from the top of a morne. I met Placide with Morisset, leading the riders of the honor guard into the battle. In place of his silver helmet, Placide today wore a red mouchwa, and from the wideness of his eyes and the far distance they were looking, I thought some spirit was in his head, one strong enough that I could feel it too. Everything seemed calmer to me then, and the noise of the fighting was farther off, as if I heard it from under water. Placide was carrying a French three-colored flag into the fighting. I sent my message on to Toussaint by another man and turned to ride with Placide and Morisset, moving up to the head of the line to show them where to find the enemy.
The French blanc soldiers ran from us when Morisset’s riders smashed into them, and Toussaint’s foot soldiers were coming up very fast behind. We chased them through the pass which drops through the Black Mountains from Dondon, down the snake-back road onto the low ground of the Northern Plain. In that open country, Hardy formed his men into squares again, so that we could not attack them so easily, but they were still retreating, and as fast as they could, and they had left many dead under the trees and by the roadside. Hardy had dropped a lot of what he had taken at La Coupe à l’Inde, and a lot of the animals he had stolen were scattered, so that we could catch them later on, but Bel Argent was still with him as he hurried to Le Cap. That horse was not easy to keep up with. For some reason Toussaint decided not to keep chasing Hardy after darkness came, even though he had not got back Bel Argent. Our men were all tired from long hours of running and fighting, but we had beaten these blanc soldiers who looked so strong, and we had driven them all out of the mountains, even if we had not been able to catch and kill them all as Toussaint would have wished.
After that day the French blanc soldiers could not hold on anywhere in the mountains of the north. In the days that followed, Toussaint took over all his old posts from Grande Rivière to Marmelade. From what I had seen in earlier times, I thought he would be thinking that if he could fight through from Marmelade to take Gonaives again, he could cut the country in half the way he had done when he was fighting other blancs before, the English or the Spanish. These mountains were the root of Toussaint’s power, and I think the spirits that sometimes walked with him were sleeping there, maybe in the old caves of the caciques beneath the mountain of Dondon. A man who knew the caves could walk from Dondon to Marmelade underneath the ground, if those old spirits were willing to let him pass. And wherever Toussaint went in the mountains now, he shouted to all the people there that the blancs had come to make us slaves again, though he had not said anything about that to Sabès and Gimont.
Toussaint made a headquarters at Marmelade, and no blanc soldier came any nearer to him there than Gonaives. There were no blancs at all in the mountains by then, because those on the habitations who had not been killed in all the fighting had run away to the towns on the coast. Sometimes there was talk of French blanc soldiers at Plaisance again, but if they came there they did not stay long, because Sylla was behind them there, with the men he had fighting in the hills above Limbé, and Toussaint kept his own men going back and forth between Marmelade through Limbé to Acul, because, unless he could take Gonaives back from the blancs, the Baie d’Acul was the only place where he could touch the sea. So the only part of the country the blancs could really hold was the low ground of the plain around Le Cap, and even there Toussaint kept trying to start risings in the ateliers, with his story that the blancs were sure to bring back slavery.
I did not know how the blancs were doing in the rest of the country, and maybe they had been more successful there. Toussaint wanted Dessalines to take back the ground around La Crête à Pierrot from them, but he had not yet been able to do it.
Only a few days after our big fight with Hardy’s soldiers in the pass below Dondon, Sans-Souci came into Marmelade with a lot of French blanc soldiers he had taken prisoner in a fight around Grande Rivière. Boyer, who was a colored general who had been with the party of Rigaud before, brought fifteen hundred French blanc soldiers to fight Sans-Souci at Sainte Suzanne and other places, but Sans-Souci had beaten them all and driven them back into Le Cap, even though these were new soldiers who had just come over on new ships from France.
This news interested Toussaint very much, and it seemed bad to me at first. I did not forget how strong those ships had looked when they were blowing up the forts of the harbor at Port-au-Prince, and how those French blanc soldiers would run all over everything, like ants, when they were fresh. How could we ever kill them all, if they kept pouring out of France?
A lot of our people wanted to kill Sans-Souci’s prisoners right away, and I don’t think Sans-Souci would have been unhappy to see them die. There was not anyone who hated the blancs more than he did, except for Dessalines. But Toussaint treated these prisoners very well. He killed cows for them to eat, and he found shoes for the ones who did not have any shoes. A lot of them had come from France without shoes, we heard, or else their shoes broke very fast on the rocks of our country. They said they had come without enough guns either on their ship, which interested Toussaint very much also. There were four hundred of these captured soldiers. He asked their leaders a lot of questions, and when he had taken their knives and guns away, he gave them the freedom of the quarter of Marmelade, as it would have been liberté de savane in slavery time. These blanc soldiers did not have a clear idea where they were, and there were too many of our people around them for them to try to get away.
These French blanc soldiers spent their days running races and climbing trees and jumping from one rock to another or across the streams in the ravines, or practicing fighting against each other with their hands. I did not see any of them pull down a wild horse by the ears, but they were very active and strong. Our women and children came out to watch them from behind the trees, laughing and covering their mouths with their hands. Some of our men began to worry again about how many such soldiers might still be coming from France. But Toussaint only looked at the sky and hid his smile inside his long fingers and told anyone who asked him that the rains would be coming very soon, and then we would see all these strong blancs made weak and dying from the fever.
Not long after Sans-Souci had gone off to Grande Rivière again, to fight any more blanc soldiers he might find there, Chancy came to Marmelade with letters to Toussaint from the General Boudet. Toussaint did not tell anyone what was in these letters, but read them secretly inside the house where he was living in Marmelade. Chancy did not know exactly what was in the letters either, but he knew Boudet had waited for word from Leclerc before he sent the letter to Toussaint. Chancy was not certain, but he thought that maybe Boudet’s letter might whisper to Toussaint that he could change his coat and come over to the side of the blancs at Port-au-Prince.
The blancs had been trying those tricks all over the country since their ships first came, the same as I, Riau, had done with Lamour Dérance and Lafortune, and as others had done with Laplume. Even Christophe, after our fight with Hardy at Dondon, came with a letter to show Toussaint— this letter was signed by Leclerc himself and it promised Christophe whatever he wanted if only he would catch Toussaint and sell him to Leclerc. That was strange, because Christophe had burned Le
Cap, and only he and Toussaint were made outlaw by the paper Leclerc sent out after that. That paper did not say anything about the other generals. But Christophe had also a copy of his answer to show Toussaint, and it was full of angry words.
You propose to me, Citizen General, to furnish you the means to secure Toussaint Louverture: that would be an act of perfidy on my part, a betrayal, and this proposition, degrading as it is to me, is in my eyes a mark of the insuperable repugnance you must feel if you believe me insusceptible of the least sentiments of delicacy and honor. He is both my chief and my friend. Is friendship, Citizen General, compatible with such a monstrous cowardice?
Toussaint only nodded and stroked his jaw when he had seen these words of Christophe to Leclerc, and his eyes were looking a long way off. Maybe he was not as pleased with Christophe’s words as Christophe had expected. I wondered how he would be reading Boudet’s words now.
I asked Chancy if the French at Port-au-Prince had become so weak that maybe they did not want to fight Toussaint any more, but Chancy did not really think so. It was true that General Boudet was hurt at La Crête à Pierrot and had not yet recovered. Pamphile de Lacroix had come back from that fight with big holes hidden inside his lines where men who were dead now should have been marching. And Lamour Dérance, when he heard that Rigaud was arrested and sent back to France, had abandoned the blancs at Port-au-Prince and taken all his people into the mountains again. Even so, Chancy did not think that the blancs felt in much danger at Port-au-Prince, and Toussaint had lost a lot of our men in those fights too.
It was beginning to hurt my head to have to be wondering what Toussaint was going to do. Maybe he had not wanted anything more than to get Chancy free in return for Sabès and Gimont. Maybe he only kept these captured blanc soldiers so well because he hoped to get Saint-Jean back in return for them. Yet it seemed that even four hundred of them would not be worth so much. When they began to talk to our people, and especially to some of our foolish young girls who began to go to them at night, it seemed that they had been brought here almost as slaves were brought out of Guinée. They were not chained inside their ships, but they did not have good shoes or clothes or enough food and they had been told lies about where they were going and they were forced to fight.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 74
