There. Toussaint stopped by the door, half smiling, his head cocked toward the keyhole, for the sentry on the other side had sneezed or shifted his feet. He listened, but there was no further sound. The adjoining cell was empty now, since his personal servant, Mars Plaisir, had been shipped out to some other, unknown destination. Before the valet’s departure, they had been in one another’s company for a little more than an hour each day. Mars Plaisir had seen to Toussaint’s needs and comfort as best he might under such conditions. He had brewed the coffee, sugared the wine, warmed the food—small ceremonies which Toussaint would not now permit himself to regret. Also the companionship. Even when they were apart, each could listen for and sometimes hear the movements of the other in the neighboring cell, though of course they were forbidden to call out.
Toussaint stood listening, but there was nothing more to hear, except the echo of the distant drip and splash in the third corridor, whose floor was always inches deep in water . . . His mental exertion had made him forget the chill, which now cut through to him again. He paced toward the window. Now that the image was complete in his mind, he must search the words to bring that image into being . . .
It is necessary that I account for . . . he began, but no. The phrasing implied too much in the way of external constraint. The impulse to tell the perfect truth must rather come from within the character he was creating. Unconscious of his action, Toussaint sat down in the chair by the fire. He gripped the wooden arms with both hands and focused his concentration.
It is my duty to render an exact account of my conduct to the French government. Yes. I will report the facts with all the frankness and naïveté of an old soldier. Yes, that was the tone, the attitude. The flow of his own words began to warm him. He sat with his eyes half-closed, his lips sometimes moving slightly, as he chose the words, reviewed and refined them, and set them down firmly in his memory.
Shortly after the fort’s bell had rung twelve times, he heard boots splashing in the third corridor, the sentry’s challenge, and then Baille’s reply. The huge iron key cried in the lock, but when the door opened it did so almost silently, floating into shadows by the wall. Baille came in with another, smaller Frenchman. The door shut behind them; the key screeched again and the lock snapped shut.
Toussaint did not rise from his chair, but lifted his head ever so slightly to acknowledge the visitors.
“You are well, I trust?” Baille’s smile was ever uneasy; his gray hands worked over each other. In one hand he held a white cloth bag.
“I am well enough.” Toussaint sniffed, then throttled the cough that tried to rise from the back of his throat. “Apart from the cold.”
“You understand, the requisition . . . be it for firewood or . . .” Baille’s weak smile guttered as he trailed off, then slowly regained its pale strength. “In the meantime, I have brought you sugar from my own personal supply.”
“You do me honor.” Toussaint glanced at the small square table.
As if released, Baille walked across and placed the supplementary sugar among the other provisions there. From the corner of his eye, Toussaint measured the package—perhaps two cupfuls.
“As for your other request,” Baille nodded to his companion. “I present my personal secretary, Monsieur Jeannin.”
Toussaint looked into the fire. The movement concealed his face from the others and so concealed his feeling—a quick rush of relief he much preferred not to reveal. He would certainly have been capable of phrasing the necessary document without the services of a secretary, but he knew that both his spelling and his penmanship were poor.
“C’est bien,” he said finally, raising his head.
Baille looked into the corners of the room, then clucked his tongue and rubbed his hands together. “No chair for Monsieur Jeannin to sit,” he said. “I will order one to be brought.”
Toussaint rose from his own seat, abruptly, as if to dismiss the commandant. “No matter,” he said. “Let the chair be brought tomorrow. Today I will dictate standing.”
“I will be outside the door,” Baille said, taking a step backward. “In case of need.” He looked pointedly at Jeannin. His nod to Toussaint was just short of a bow.
The key whined in the lock once more, and the silent shadow of the door floated across the room. Toussaint looked at Jeannin more closely. The secretary wore civilian clothes, a dark blue suit freely sprinkled with lint. He was small and slight, with a ring of stiff, dark curly hair surrounding a scaly bald spot, like a tonsure. His head thrust high from his grubby collar. Under his left arm he carried a wooden lap desk.
“To begin.” Toussaint indicated the chair he’d vacated with an unfolding of his right hand. Jeannin hitched the chair to the table, sat down and opened the lap desk. He took out a pen, an inkwell, and several sheets of paper, then looked up and cleared his throat.
“You are ready? Good,” Toussaint said. “Write what I say: It is my duty to render an exact account of my conduct to the French government; I will report the facts with all the frankness and naïveté of an old soldier, adding such reflections as may naturally present themselves . . .
Jeannin’s mouth opened. He dampened the pen point against his tongue, then dipped it in the ink well and began to write.
“You have it? Good.” The spiral of Toussaint’s steady pacing brought him near enough behind the table and chair that he could see the secretary’s hand was fair, and his transcription faithful. He nodded, pursing his lips as he moved toward the window.
“In the end, I will tell the truth,” he continued, “even if it be against myself.” He waited, listening to the scratching of the pen. A chunk of wood collapsed in the fireplace, scattering coals on the hearthstone.
“A new paragraph,” Toussaint said, when Jeannin’s pen had stopped. “But first, if you please, attend to the fire.”
Jeannin scratched around the edges of his tonsure and looked at him, eyes startled and glittering like a bird’s. After a moment, he shrugged, dropped the pen in the inkwell and did as he was bidden, adding a couple of sticks to the fire and, for the want of a proper tool, scraping the coals together with the side of his shoe. Toussaint waited for him to regain his seat.
“To the next paragraph. The colony of Saint Domingue, which I commanded, enjoyed the greatest tranquillity; both agriculture and commerce were flourishing there. . . .” Toussaint paused, listening to the pen. Jeannin slumped gradually forward across the table as he wrote, supporting himself on his left elbow, his head turned to one side. When he had finished he pushed himself upright.
“You have all that? Excellent,” Toussaint said. “All that, I am bold to say was my own work.”
In a matter of two weeks the memoir was drafted, recopied and ready for its reader. Toussaint might have finished it in half the time, but he had the services of only a single secretary and that for no more than a couple of hours each day. Yet his consciousness of time fell from him, and when Jeannin was absent he composed and memorized constantly, except for the moments when he ate and the hours when he slept. In a state somewhere between waking and dream (he had taken a slight fever) his mind’s eye filled with images of Saint Domingue, where Captain-General Leclerc now found himself more and more severely pressed on every side, as his European soldiers, already decimated by the battles of the spring, died out from yellow fever at a terrifying rate, while his black generals observed the weakening of his situation with what seemed an increasingly ill-concealed satisfaction, for the sly and diabolical policy of Toussaint continued to exercise itself through his former subalterns even in his absence, so that it was worth almost nothing to be rid of him. Everywhere there were risings in the hills, which the black generals never managed, and perhaps never really tried, to suppress completely. Leclerc’s program to disarm the population was revealed a wretched failure, and in fact he had no idea how many guns Toussaint might have poured into the countryside, though there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply, as if the weapons grew, like soursops and mangoes a
nd bananas, on the jungle trees. The black generals could neither be trusted nor arrested (for only they controlled the black troops nominally under French command), and more and more it seemed impossible that the captain-general could ever satisfy Napoleon’s imperious demand—“Rid us of these gilded Africans, and we shall have nothing left to wish for . . .” Sonthonax had been right, Moyse had been right, Toussaint himself would be right in the end. Dismisally, Leclerc wrote home to France, “It’s not everything to have removed Toussaint, there are still two thousand chiefs here to be removed.”
As Toussaint emerged from the composition of his memoir, time began to weigh on him more heavily once more; the first day that Jeannin did not return passed very slowly. Not that the secretary had furnished conversation—indeed he had never spoken at all, except when, infrequently, he echoed one of Toussaint’s own phrases by way of confirmation. After the first hour Toussaint had understood that Jeannin’s silence must have been ordered by Baille or else by someone who stood above the commandant. This hardly mattered. But Toussaint had been warmed and distracted by the act of composition and by the sight of the stack of papers steadily growing under Jeannin’s trained hand.
Too little space was here, and too much time. In Saint Domingue, in (why not admit it, to himself?) his own kingdom, he would have been at some active work—campaigns or battles or oversight of cultivations—whenever he finished his travail du cabinet. But here he was caged in his own thoughts. As one chess player imagines the mind of another opposing him, he pictured Napoleon Bonaparte: a man of slight stature (like himself), a fine horseman and cavalry commander (like himself) who had come to political power not only through his military prowess but through a native political sagacity.
How would he, himself, respond, supposing their situation to be reversed? In Saint Domingue, certain men had died, ignored, in prison, such as Blanc Cassenave and Dieudonné—but he, Toussaint, had not killed these men! Such reproaches were inaccurate, and injust. Dieudonné, for example, had died as the captive of General Rigaud, at Les Cayes, while Toussaint was at the opposite end of the country, in the Department of the North. It was said that Dieudonné had been loaded with so many chains that at last he suffocated under their weight . . .
Now in his cell at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint felt the cold cut through to him again, and he was sweating, but his sweat was cold, and there seemed insufficient air in the cell for him to breathe. When Baille presented himself with the day’s rations, Toussaint declared that after all there was something more. Something different. After all, he would not send the document he had composed, or would not send it now. In its place, he would send a letter to Napoleon, no more than a line or two—five minutes of Monsieur Jeannin’s time. Toward nightfall, as the diamonds of weak daylight died on the cell floor, he dictated to the secretary the briefest of notes, which merely said that after all certain matters had been too delicate for commitment to a written memoir—matters it would be best to communicate in person.
When Jeannin had left with this last letter, Toussaint’s agitation drained from him. He sat for a while longer in the waning light of the fire, suffused with a sense of renewed calm, a patience too deep even to be aware of itself. The gongs of the fort’s bell no longer impressed him. He lay down on his cot and slept, free of dreams.
Part Two
BLACK SPARTACUS 1794–1796
Let righteousness cover the earth like the water cover the sea . . .
—Bob Marley, “Revolution”
In the spring of 1794, the military map of Saint Domingue was signifi-cantly redrawn by Toussaint Louverture’s abrupt shift of allegiance from the Spanish monarchy to the French Republic. While in Spanish service, Toussaint had taken pains to reinforce the line of military posts known as the Cordon de l’Ouest, which ran from the seaport of Gonaives through the mountains to the border of Spanish Saint Domingue in the interior. The Cordon de l’Ouest effectively cut off the Northern Department of Saint Domingue, with its important town of Cap Français, from the rest of the colony, whose coast from Saint Marc (the port immediately south of Gonaives) to Port-au-Prince was now occupied by the English invaders or their allies. To control this line improved the French Republican position immeasurably.
Governor-General Etienne Laveaux had technically become the highest French authority in Saint Domingue upon the departure of Sonthonax. The scope of his authority was greatly enlarged by Toussaint’s volte-face, which made it possible for Laveaux to return from his hemmed-in position at Port-de-Paix to the seat of government at Cap Français, the northern capital. During Laveaux’s protracted absence, Le Cap had become a mulatto stronghold, under the command of the colored officer Villatte, and members of the colored land- and slave-owning class had substantially rebuilt the town, from which most whites had fled when it was sacked and burned in June of 1793.
The arrival of Toussaint Louverture in their camp was not necessarily welcomed by this mulatto class. Toussaint did have colored officers in his own force, and he cooperated with Villatte and other colored officers of the Le Cap region, under the command of Laveaux. Nevertheless, the mulatto faction of the north regarded Toussaint’s sudden ascendancy, and Laveaux’s rapidly increasing dependence on him and his men, with suspicion and even a degree of alarm. This anxiety was shared with the Republican colored party in the south, led by André Rigaud, a general of considerable ability who was fighting the English invaders with some success on the southern peninsula, also known as the Grande Anse. Pinchinat, an elderly colored gentleman respected as a rhetorician and feared as a propagandist, carried messages back and forth between Rigaud in the south and Villatte’s party in the northern region.
Toussaint, meanwhile, was busy fighting a war on two fronts. Along the interior border, significant Spanish forces (mostly composed of black auxiliaries) remained to be dealt with. These troops, under the command of Toussaint’s erstwhile superiors Jean-François and Biassou, were less well organized and well trained than Toussaint’s own men, who were usually successful against them. At the same time, Toussaint’s army made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to dislodge the British from Saint Marc and fought numerous engagements in the region of the Artibonite River, the next significant natural boundary south of the mountains of the Cordon de l’Ouest. These areas remained in dispute, but from Dondon in the interior across the mountains to Gonaives, Toussaint—and thus the French Republic—was impregnable.
10
Papa Legba, we were singing, Attibon Legba, ouvri baryè pou nou . . . We sang, and Bouquart, the big Congo maroon with the cross-shaped marks of his people in Guinée paired on his stomach, struck the Asoto tambou, there at the center of the batterie of three drums. He touched the Asoto drum with his left hand and a small stick crooked like a hammer in his right. Papa Legba, open the gate for us . . . It was Bahoruco Mountain where we danced, on a height above the mouth of one of the great caves, and when the drums played, the cave spoke too in a drum’s voice. The drums called Legba to open the crossroads, let the loa come up from the Island Below Sea into our heads, and I, Riau, was singing too for Legba, not hearing my own voice any more than I felt the salt water gathering on my face. We call for blessed Legba to come, but sometimes it is Maît’ Kalfou who brings himself to the crossroads, the trickster, betrayer sometimes, magouyé.
Singing still, I watched Bouquart, his face sweat-shining, with a motionless grin gleaming as he drummed. The fleur-de-lys was branded on his left cheek, to punish him for running away, and for another such punishment his right ear had been lopped off, and for the same reason he wore on each leg a nabot the size and weight of a cannonball, welded around his ankles, and yet he had still run as far and fast as Bahoruco. If there had been a forge, I, Riau, might have struck the nabots off his feet, using the powers of fire and iron (for that Riau who was a slave had learned blacksmithing from Toussaint), and equally the power of my maît’ têt, Ogûn-Feraille, but there was no forge at Bahoruco, only the voices, the drums, the low droning out of the cav
es, then silence with hands fluttering on the drum skins light and soundless as the wings of birds, their gray and white feathers shivering, and the scream that came from Riau’s body, stripped the body from the mind, as the god came up from beneath the waters, through heels and spine to flower in his head.
It was not Ogûn who came, they told me after, not the proper master of my head, but Maît’ Kalfou who took my body for his horse, though never before had that one mounted Riau. Jean-Pic told me it was so, when Riau came to himself again at dawn, the cool mist rising round him at the edge of the sacred pool. It was quiet then, the birds speaking softly, hidden in the leaves, and only a drum’s echo beating slowly somewhere behind my head. Maît’ Kalfou, Jean-Pic told me, had walked among the dancers, his arms raised in the shape of the cross and his muscles trembling from their own strength, and had spoken in his wet, croaking voice, but Kalfou’s words belonged to the proclamation of Toussaint from Camp Turel.
My name is perhaps not unknown to you. But Maît’ Kalfou must have already been recognized by the serviteurs there . . . I have undertaken to avenge you. I want liberty and equality to reign throughout Saint Domingue. I am working toward that end. How such words must have sounded in the harsh, damp mouth of Kalfou . . . on the morning after my throat ached from his shouting them. Come and join me, brothers, and fight by our side for the same cause . . .
Master of the Crossroads Page 20
