Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  No matter. Toussaint brought his heaviest artillery to Fort Tavigne, and from that height commenced to shell that town. The fiery rain, he pointed out to the troops under Dessalines, was now falling on their enemies.

  The rumor that Pétion was commanding at Jacmel, which the doctor had reported to Arnaud, proved to be incorrect. Up until the taking of Fort Tavigne, another officer named Birot had been in charge of the town. After the fort was overrun and the bombardment began, Birot and his officers concluded it would be best to evacuate as best they might; however, the men in the ranks refused to follow them. With a handful of officers who shared his pessimistic view, Birot slipped out of Jacmel in a small boat and sailed west to Les Cayes, where he reported to Rigaud the parlous situation in the besieged town.

  For months, Rigaud had done little enough to prosecute the war he had started. Above all he hoped for relief from France, if only in the form of an endorsement. While he waited for news, he could not settle on a course of action, but rather poured himself into his pleasures, which were various and exotic. But now he set out to relieve Jacmel, though with a contingent of only five hundred men. This mad sally was shattered by the regiments of Dessalines and Charles Belair. No matter how many were killed, the black soldiers of the north kept coming down, till finally Rigaud’s troops broke under the wave and began to flee. Rigaud dismounted his horse and snatched at their shoulders or their coattails, trying to turn them back to the battle. When he failed, he began to scream at them: Run then, you cowards, since honor is not enough to make you face death. Finally Rigaud himself was dragged from the field by his own officers, lest he be killed or taken prisoner.

  Following this catastrophe, Rigaud sent Pétion to Jacmel by sea; he managed to reach the town intact, paddling a canoe underneath the cannonfire from Toussaint’s new batteries on the shore. The situation when Pétion arrived was still worse than what Birot had described. The soldiers were so weak from privation they had barely strength to hold up their weapons, and ammunition was so low they had to gather the missiles that rained down on them day and night to fire them back from their own guns.

  All this news was vaguely known to the besiegers through several spies inside the town. And yet the resistance was still very stubborn. Christophe’s best effort to take the Grand Fort a second time had been deflected, with heavy losses. Every day there were heavy losses, and the doctor labored hour after hour in the infirmary tent, up to his elbows and shoulders in blood. He had insisted that both Giaou and Riau be sent down from the front line to help him in these efforts.

  Picking bullets out of Arnaud had become a regular activity for these three. Arnaud was hit half a dozen times, but never fatally, in spite of his enthusiasm for exposing himself to the enemy guns. “Creole courage,” Captain Maillart muttered, at night under the tent he shared with the doctor. “You may call him cruel, call him foolhardy—call him a wastrel of the lives of his men. But the man will stand and fight.”

  The canvas of the tent flared red in the light of a shell bursting over the town. Maillart’s face appeared, drawn and exhausted, in the crimson flash. The doctor knew he hated the siege, the spectacle of their opponents hemmed in to suffer and starve like rats in a trap. They might all hate it equally, but it made no difference—the doctor could barely register his own feeling, through the layers of his fatigue.

  Arnaud would return to combat as soon as the doctor had him bandaged. No wound he took seemed to affect him, till finally, at the end of another terrible, interminable day, he came stumbling into camp with a look so deathly that the doctor thought he must have been hit in the vitals at last. But Arnaud protested that he was unhurt, and he didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere.

  Both the doctor and captain offered to share their small portions of cornmeal mush. By that time rations were short even for the besiegers, whose numbers had picked the surrounding area nearly clean. In the shadows at the edge of the ring of firelight, Riau and Guiaou were probing goat bones for their marrow. From the infirmary shelter, a bit farther off, came cries of delirium and occasional groans of pain. Arnaud would accept no nourishment, but when rum was produced, he reached for it eagerly. Finally, in fragments, his story spilled out.

  That afternoon, Pétion in his growing desperation had concluded to send the women and children out of Jacmel to throw themselves on the mercy of the enemy. Some three thousand of them had drifted toward Christophe’s position. The order was given to fire on them with grapeshot.

  “The women?” Maillart hissed, leaning forward.

  “Indeed,” said Arnaud, “and also the starving infants they had at the breast.” But not all of them had been killed. For the survivors, Christophe had scattered some old bread on the ground. “They pecked it up like chickens,” Arnaud said. He stopped, and stared into the fire as if it were alive with devils.

  “And then?” the doctor asked unwillingly.

  Arnaud pulled on the gourd of rum. “The surviving women were rounded up and herded to Habitation Ogé. There they were forced to descend into a dry well, covered with firewood and burned alive.”

  Captain Maillart was on his feet. “I cannot believe that Christophe ordered such a thing.”

  “Where the order came from, I can’t say,” Arnaud told him. “But you may believe that he carried it out. And what would you believe of me?”

  Maillart lowered his eyes, looked this way and that. The doctor was frozen, cross-legged on the ground. Guiaou and Riau held their goat bones unconsciously in their tallow-streaked hands.

  “What choice did you have?” Maillart muttered.

  “What indeed?” Arnaud said, and rose himself. “I feel that I should have found some alternative. But perhaps I am best suited for such work.” He turned and left the circle of firelight.

  “Wait, man, wait,” the captain called after him, but the doctor caught him before he could follow.

  “Let him go,” the doctor said, and with a bewildered shake of his head, Maillart subsided.

  It had been six weeks since Pétion had come to the relief of Jacmel, and soon after the ill-fated exodus of the women, he concluded that the men must try to fight their way out. One of the garrison had told him of a little-used path which led out of Jacmel across Habitation Ogé on a short route to the mountains. Throughout the day, Pétion bombarded the road in the opposite direction, as a diversion, and after nightfall he led his men out by the other way suggested to him, under cover of a fort called the blockhouse.

  One of the spies had escaped Jacmel the day before, and informed Dessalines of Pétion’s escape route. So Dessalines’s response to the diversion was itself no more than a pretense. Once the darkness was complete, Dessalines shifted the entire twenty thousand men of his command to block the retreat of the Jacmel garrison, now reduced to fourteen hundred. Against those odds, and with no hope of quarter, Pétion’s men fought to the death and even, almost, beyond it. Tumbled in the mêlée, the doctor saw more than one man spurting blood from a severed arm and continuing to do battle with the other. Dessalines was impressed as well, enough to call a cease-fire. But the men of Jacmel used the respite to re-form themselves for one last desperate effort—they cut through Dessalines’s lines to reach the mountains and the jungle.

  Of the fourteen hundred who’d left Jacmel, only six hundred survived the battle. “What I could do,” the doctor heard Dessalines remark, “if I had such men in my command.”

  For all his ruthlessness, his thorough mistrust of white blood, Dessalines respected courage wherever he found it. Before the campaign against Jacmel had begun, a young mulatto officer in Port-au-Prince had broken his own sword over his knee, to demonstrate his refusal to put his arms in the service of the invading army from the north. But Dessalines had adopted this youth into his command and made him a special protégé.

  On March 13, 1800, the army of the north marched into Jacmel. The mood was less of triumph than of exhaustion, and the doctor had more work than ever before, for the acres of wounded soldiers surroundin
g him were compounded by hundreds of sick and starved civilians who had survived by a breath or two. The streets and squares were littered with the carcasses of mules and donkeys and draft horses which in the last days of the siege had been devoured to their ligaments. Vultures lined the rooftops, hungry for more death.

  In a couple of days Toussaint rode in, to take formal possession of the town. Within the week he’d ordered Dessalines on the attack again, to press the advantage against Rigaud. Dessalines marched against Grand Goâve. Toussaint, meanwhile, summoned the doctor and some others of his staff, and told them to make ready for a fast gallop to Le Cap, where a new commission from France had recently arrived.

  36

  The casernes of Le Cap were not so crowded as usual, since so many men had been dispatched to the south, but there was still a strong garrison in the barracks, and the doctor, with Maillart and Arnaud, made a private retreat to the Cigny house, where accommodations would be more congenial. The house was dusty when they arrived, and the news was thin. Monsieur Cigny had been in town within the week, but according to the servants he had no recent word from his wife, nor any apparent concern about her silence. The indifference which covered her romantic adventures must cut two ways, the doctor reflected. Cigny had deposited a quantity of brown sugar with his broker and then, after two days, returned to his plantation.

  “So he was not conscripted,” Arnaud began to grumble.

  “He is well past the age for military service,” Maillart pointed out.

  “Yes, and he can only produce brown sugar now, while I was sending out white.”

  “One could hardly imagine him absorbing even a single musket ball,” the captain said. “Much less half a dozen, like yourself.”

  As Arnaud began to soften under the warmth of this flattery, the doctor followed the servants into the yard. There was one old woman who had a particular fondness for Isabelle, whom she’d known since childhood. And she did have news, but it had come by a long and crooked route. Someone in the harbor at Fort Liberté had spoken to someone who’d brought out a load of coffee from the mountains of Vallière, and that person had passed the word to another, and so it had traveled from mouth to ear until it reached the Place Clugny in Le Cap. All was calm enough at Vallière; there had been no raids, no disturbances or revolts, and that plantation which had passed from the late Sieur de Maltrot to Choufleur was even producing a good deal of coffee now. A woman in the grand’case there was supposed to have had great trouble in childbirth, so severe that they’d had to send for the wisest leaf woman in the hills.

  “Did she live? What of the child?” the doctor blurted. “Tell me, grann, was it Nanon?”

  Here the old woman’s lips closed to a thin seam; she gave the doctor a canny look, but she would say no more.

  That night the doctor slept uneasily, though exhausted from the last couple of days in the saddle; Toussaint had pushed them from Jacmel to Le Cap in half the time humanly possible. He kept starting awake in a flush of fear, for the child he knew (but Paul was safe at Habitation Thibodet) and for the child he might never know . . . At dawn he rose and washed and dressed and went to Government House to look for Pascal.

  “There are three of them this time,” Pascal advised him. They strolled the avenue by Government House, keeping their distance from others on the promenade. “General Michel, Julien Raimond whom you know, and Colonel Vincent.”

  “The engineer,” the doctor said. “I know him too.”

  “They landed in Spanish Santo Domingo,” Pascal said. “When they crossed the border they were arrested!—by Moyse, I believe. Michel is so overwrought at this treatment that I think he will return to France at the first opportunity.”

  “And Vincent?”

  “He was dragged over the mountains at the end of a rope—made to run along behind Moyse’s cavalry. Atrocious, you know.” Pascal raised his thumb toward his teeth, then lowered it, at the doctor’s glance. “He seems to have borne up very well,” he went on. “Hardly even to have taken offense, if you can believe it.”

  “A resilient fellow,” the doctor said. “I like that in him.”

  “Yes . . . he is with Toussaint even now.”

  “And what are his orders?” the doctor inquired. “Toussaint was concerned, as you know—and that rumor of a whole fleet on the way? Is there a regular military expedition following these people?”

  They had just turned into the court of Government House, and Pascal lowered his voice as they approached the loiterers on the steps. “I don’t know anything about a fleet. As for the orders, I haven’t seen them. But Toussaint is to continue as General-in-Chief.”

  “So . . .” the doctor sighed as they climbed the stairs and entered the corridor. “Then Toussaint is justified. And Rigaud has waited for nothing.”

  “It would seem so,” Pascal murmured. “There are other details, but I do not know them. Only there is some sort of new government in France—I don’t understand exactly what.”

  As they walked into Toussaint’s anteroom, Pascal stopped talking, for others were already waiting there. He and the doctor sat down in chairs along the wall, inclining their heads toward the heavy doors of the inner cabinet, through which they could hear nothing.

  “My dear friend,” Toussaint said, turning his kerchiefed head to one side and carefully looking at Vincent from the corner of his eye. “I am so very sorry for the accident of your reception. All a great misunderstanding—and Moyse is impetuous, as you know.”

  Vincent brushed down the front of his coat. “I know it better than ever before.”

  “I will speak to him,” Toussaint said. “Yes . . . very seriously.” He stroked his jaw. “But why did you land in Santo Domingo, instead of coming to Le Cap? It must have been this that provoked his suspicion.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke; the voices of cart haulers came in from the street. They both knew that Hédouville had taken the same approach through Santo Domingo upon his first arrival in the colony.

  “One did not quite know the state of things here,” Vincent said carefully. “There were rumors of rebellion from Le Cap all the way to Môle Saint Nicolas.”

  “There is no reason for concern,” Toussaint said. “Everything is in perfect order, as you see.”

  “Oh, you have my absolute confidence.” Vincent rocked slightly in his chair, shifting the weight from his blistered heels. “As well as that of the First Consul.”

  Toussaint leaned sharply forward, like a jockey urging his horse on. “Then why does he send a fleet with soldiers?”

  “Oh, that?” Vincent said. “General, I am surprised to find you taken in. That story was a rumor planted to deceive our enemies in Europe. In reality, that fleet is bound for Egypt, to carry reinforcements to our armies there.”

  “Ah,” said Toussaint, leaning back. He spread his hand over the dispatch case which Vincent had set on the table before him, the moment he entered the room. “So he is cunning, your First Consul. Rusé.”

  “He is a military man,” Vincent, again with care. “Much like yourself.”

  Pursing his lips slightly, Toussaint lifted his hand from the dispatch case.

  “I have seen your sons,” Vincent said, in an easier tone. “They are healthy and prosperous, and thrive in their studies—especially Placide. Isaac is . . . rather the more volatile of the two.”

  “Well, I am pleased,” Toussaint said. “You are kind to visit them.”

  “They are with the fleet.”

  Toussaint made a movement of surprise. Then he settled himself and said contemplatively, “So they will see Guinée.”

  “At least they will see Egypt, if only from shipboard,” Vincent told him. “It will contribute to their education, certainly. And General Saguenat has been instructed to care for them like his own children. They are kept in the most perfect security.”

  “Yes,” said Toussaint. “I know.”

  Absently he touched the knot which secured his headcloth at the nape of his neck. Vin
cent looked into his molasses-colored, red-rimmed eyes. From outside the door there was a scraping of chairs as other people found seats in the waiting room.

  “But truly,” Vincent said, with a gesture at the dispatch case. “France supports you absolutely, as it has always supported the cause of the blacks.”

  Toussaint masked the beginning of his smile with the usual movement of his hand. Sober, he opened the dispatch case and lifted out the documents. Raising the papers near to his eyes, he began to sort through them.

  “You see,” Vincent told him. “All is in order.”

  “Yes,” said Toussaint. He laid down the sheaf of papers and stood up, moving around the desk. “I believe I ought to bring in our friends.”

  He drew the double doors inward, glanced around the anteroom, and beckoned to the doctor and Pascal, leaving the others to wait. Pascal pushed the doors shut behind him, while the doctor embrace Vincent with a genuine warmth. Tousaint, who had returned to his seat behind the desk, lifted a document from among the dispatches and began to read aloud.

  Citizens, a constitution which has not been able to sustain itself against multiple violations is now replaced by a new pact designed to affirm liberty.

  Article ninety-one carries the principle that the French colonies shall be ruled by special laws.

  That disposition derives from the nature of things, and from the difference of climates.

  Toussaint slid one sheet of paper beneath another and went on reading from the top of the next page. His voice was harsh and surprisingly loud.

  The difference of habits, of morals, of interests, the diversity of soil, agriculture, production, requires various modifications.