“The blood is of the martyrs,” said Jean-Baptiste, in the recitative voice of catechism.
“It is so,” said Moustique, “but water is greater. Greater than either blood or wine.” He touched the child on his head, and stood up.
“Lamou pi fò pasé lahaine,” Jean-Baptiste said.
“Yes,” said Moustique, with some difficulty, as another contortion ran over his face. “Love is stronger than hate.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “he has learned a great deal since he came into your care.” He glanced from Moustique to Marie-Noelle, who stood with her legs set slightly apart, rooted. A beautiful girl, with large clear eyes. She was pregnant again, and it became her.
The doctor lowered his eyes and looked at the ring of water sinking into the dust. Moustique had told him how such an offering of water might raise a spirit from its resting place. And at this moment he did feel the presence of the Père Bonne-chance, a sort of hum between the tendons at the back of his neck. A short, burly, balding man, with a smile that split his bullet head from one ear to the other. He had been a worldly man, excessively so for a priest (though the priests of Saint Domingue were quite an irregular lot). If one judged by his death, which had been slow and gruesome, he had hardly lived up to his name for good luck, and yet in his worldliness he had done, in small, barely noticeable increments, considerable good. In his worldliness, he would certainly have appreciated the woman who had captured his son’s fancy. Lamou pi fò pasé lahaine, indeed.
The moment had passed. Marie-Noelle twitched out a basket from behind her hip and ducked her head, with a smile. Taking Jean-Baptiste by the hand, she went off to do her marketing.
With Riau and Moustique, the doctor went out riding. The mission was to gather herbs, but they took a desultory way. For once there was no need for special caution—all was calm in all directions—and in any case both he and Riau carried their customary weapons, though they were not needed. Around noon, they swam in a spring-fed pool, and afterward ate the cold yams from their saddlebags with unusual relish.
Once they had eaten, Moustique seemed of a mind to turn back. But Riau lured them on ahead. Pi devan, he kept saying. A little farther . . . In fact there were attractions he seemed to have known in advance. Here a quantity of herbe à crabe, a specific against diarrhea, there a stand of belle de nuit, useful as a poultice to reduce the swelling of sprains. At last he brought them to a damp, shaded glen full of wild mushrooms enough to feed all the guests at the Cigny house and most of Moustique’s lakou.
With their saddlebags bulging, they rode on, down the slopes of Morne Rouge, with the afternoon sunlight beginning to slant between the heavy, dark boles of the trees. Riau pulled his horse up before a great mapou tree, contemplated it for a long moment, then dismounted. From somewhere on his person he produced a whole egg, which he placed softly in a wooden bowl which lay before the mazy opening of the tree’s branching roots. He walked on, leading his horse into the clearing.
It was an unremarkable spot, a wide space of packed earth, with a painted post driven in near the center. The doctor had learned enough of such matters to recognize a hûnfor, but that was not enough to explain the prickling he felt at the back of his neck—a stirring, collapsing sensation in the hollow just at the base of his skull. But it was Moustique, who also seemed somewhat out of equilibrium, who put the question.
“What is this place?”
“Bois Cayman,” Riau said. He stood by his horse, with a casual air, not far from the poteau mitan. The doctor looked at the ground more closely. The dirt had been pounded smooth by many feet, but why did he feel this had happened quite recently? There were patches of sticky, cakey stain near the center post, some shards of broken clay vessels, and a scattering of black bristles.
“Bois Cayman,” Moustique said in a shivering tone. “Why have we come here?”
Riau inclined his head, politely. “You brought me to see your son pour water,” he said. “Sometimes, too, I serve in your mother’s house on the hill, so in my turn I have brought you here, where Ogûn spoke through the mouth of Boukman, to inspire our first rising.”
The tingling at the base of his head was a compound of fear and attraction—a mixture the doctor knew very well. He spoke without knowing he would do so. “Here is where the massacre of the white people was planned.”
“No.” Riau’s voice was sharp enough to echo, but from what? There was no barrier anywhere to produce the ricochet.
“It is here that the spirits joined us to make one people,” Riau said. “All we who are children of Guinée, and showed us how we must take our freedom.”
The doctor stopped himself from replying. He saw that from Riau’s point of view the slaying of a few hundred whites had been no more than a minor side-effect of the movement over the road toward liberty . . . as perhaps the destruction of thousands of Africans was only an unpleasant by-product of the manufacture of sugar. But that was another way of looking at it. His sense of disorientation increased.
“Lamou pi fò pasé lahaine,” Riau said, looking over his shoulder and all around. “There is a spirit who walks with you too.” He was speaking directly to the doctor. “Balendjo, the traveler. Even now, he is near.”
“But all this was long ago,” the doctor said. “In ninety-one.” His lips felt thick and awkward. He was speaking in spite of his sense that what Riau described was going on invisibly around him even now.
“They come here every year, I think,” Moustique was saying. “August, at the middle of the month, so it has been, perhaps, six weeks?”
“No,” said Riau, gathering in the space around him with an encirclement of both hands. His horse stirred its head at this movement, jingling the rings of the bit.
“It is now,” Riau said. “Still, and always.”
The doctor glanced at Moustique and saw that he was only feigning comprehension.
“Our dead do not leave us,” Riau said. “They do not go away into the sky like spirits of dead blancs.”
At this Moustique nodded, for they both knew this litany.
“They are with us here, although invisible, les Morts et les Mystères,” Riau said. He drew his sword and pierced the ground with its point. “They have their home beneath the surface of the earth—they are waiting beyond the gate, on the opposite side of the crossroads.”
The doctor, who knew some portion of this reasoning from his conversations with Moustique, felt the small hairs rising on his forearms nonetheless. Moustique went on nodding rhythmically in the flow of Riau’s words.
“At dawn or sunset, when the light makes the sea a mirror,” Riau said, “then they are very near, les Invisibles, beneath the surface of the waters.” He withdrew his sword from the ground and brushed the crust of dirt from its point. “When they come through the crossroads, then they move us,” Riau said, looking very pointedly at the doctor. “That is how it is at Bois Cayman. And we must move as we are moved.”
The doctor saw that Moustique had stopped nodding; the boy understood this last remark no better than he did himself. But Riau seemed satisfied, or finished, anyway. He turned, leading his horse after him out of the clearing. Under the trees again, he vaulted into the saddle, and took them on a spiraling route back home.
I, Riau, I did not know why I brought them to Bois Cayman at first, or even that I meant to do it. It was first one leaf, and then the other, the mushrooms, then we had arrived. Afterward I saw that I had wanted them to know, but especially the doctor, what was going to happen, what was happening already even then. I, Riau, had served at Bois Cayman once more this year, and with my spirit in my head. Six weeks before as Moustique had said, but that meant nothing. Time was nothing in that place. If Riau had brought his watch, it would have stopped ticking there, but I did not bring it. They did not understand what it all meant, but I was not sorry for bringing them there. I took them in and out again by such a twisted way that neither could have found the place again, alone.
At that time the divis
ion between Moyse and Toussaint was always growing greater. Moyse was made captain of the plantations in all the north, but he would not drive the men of the hoe to work as Dessalines did in the south and the west. Dessalines would drive, Dessalines would whip, Dessalines would kill any man who rebelled, and sometimes with torture equal to what the worst blanc could have dreamed. Dessalines had tasted it all in his own flesh, or much of it, and it seemed that he was willing to give it all back, and that he did not care in what direction he would give it. It began to be said that ten men who awaited an inspection from Dessalines could do the work of thirty under slavery.
Moyse looked at all this and said, My old uncle can do what he wants, but I will not be the executioner of my people.
By then, some people had begun to believe that Moyse really was Toussaint’s nephew, because Toussaint was always so easy with him. Maybe Moyse believed it himself. But in truth, Toussaint was Moyse’s parrain as he was mine, from our days at Bréda, and Toussaint had no blood tie with Moyse, any more than with Riau.
Moyse did not want to drive the men of the hoe to work, even on the lands which he now owned. He gave those lands to some whitemen to manage, and took a part of the money and did nothing more. Toussaint was very angry at this, and he let Moyse feel his anger. As captain of plantations in the north, Moyse ought to be managing his own land and making an example of how to squeeze more and more work from the men of the hoe, as Dessalines was doing in all the other parts of the country. Toussaint made his anger known, but Moyse was not in the humor to take that warning.
Moyse did not get much credit from the blancs for being captain-general of the north. He liked the blancs even less than they liked him, but still when he came to Le Cap he noticed how the blancs all preferred Christophe, who was commandant of the town at that time and had a more pleasant manner with white people. That was because Christophe had been a waiter in a blanc hotel, during slavery time, although I don’t know how many white people understood this.
Moyse was not happy about Toussaint’s Constitution. He heard what was in that paper from Riau, before it was printed and taken to France by Vincent, and after it was printed, the paper went on stinging him. This Constitution was a hard rule for the men of the hoe, because it bound them to stay working on the plantations for all of their lives under the hands of the army. The paper also said that Toussaint had power to bring more men into the country to work with the hoe, which meant that he would buy them as slaves. When they came here they must be made free, but it began to look like a strange kind of freedom.
From Toussaint’s councils I knew that he did not really mean to put those new people into the fields. That part of the paper was meant to fool the blancs in France. What Toussaint planned was to bring in twenty thousand new men and put them into the army, to replace all the men who had been killed by the war in the south, because he was afraid a new army would come against us out of France, or maybe he already knew this was going to happen. Still, it meant that he would be paying to steal more people out of Guinée, as Riau and many others had been stolen.
Moyse was at Bois Cayman that year, and Joseph Flaville, and other officers of the army of the north, though not all of them. Toussaint did not know that they had gone there. Toussaint was not in the spirit of Bois Cayman anymore, or he did not seem to be.
I did not know what I would do when the thing began. At that time I had much freedom to move around the north with my horse soldiers. Even though Captain Riau was under command of higher officers, with the favor of Toussaint and the friendship of Moyse, I could often choose where I would be, sometimes at Ennery, or Dondon, or Le Cap.
Until the last day I thought that maybe I would take off my uniform coat and draw out my coutelas and begin killing whitemen again like before. Moyse expected this of Riau, and of Flaville also. That last day, I still did not know for certain, until we had passed Limbé, where Flaville commanded. There my heart turned cold and shrunken, and I knew my spirit was going to move me in another direction from Moyse.
We were going down to Ennery that day. But when we had come to Pilboreau, I took Guiaou away from the others, and told him he must ride without stopping to find Toussaint at Verrettes—he must not stop even for a moment at Ennery to see Merbillay and the children. Nothing was going to happen at Ennery, but he must tell Toussaint that the ateliers had risen and were killing whites all across the mountains from Limbé to Dondon, and all across the northern plain as well.
Guiaou looked at me without understanding. We had passed Limbé some hours before, and there was not any killing there. Guiaou had been at Bois Cayman that year himself, but since Agwé was riding his head the whole time, he did not remember anything afterward, himself, about what had happened or what it had meant.
“They are killing the blancs,” I told him carefully. “But truly, it is a rising against Toussaint.”
Guiaou’s nose opened wider to breathe in my words.
“Go without stopping,” I told him again. “Remember to tell him you come from me.”
Guiaou nodded and turned his horse—I watched him canter down the slopes of Pilboreau. From Quamba I knew he had been afraid of horses when he first had joined Toussaint, but he was a good rider now, and his horse was strong. It would take death to stop him from reaching Verrettes. Toussaint had given him revenge for his scars and for the Swiss, and Guiaou was for Toussaint without any question.
With the rest of my men I rode east from Pilboreau to Marmelade. There was some confusion there, and when it ended, Bienvenu and Bouquart and four of the men who were close to them had disappeared into the dust. They were marrons in their hearts, those two, and I thought they must have returned to Limbé. Though darkness had come, and the rain too, I took the other men on through the passes onto the plain again, until we came to Habitation Arnaud, because I knew the doctor was meaning to go there.
I found him already arrived, with Nanon and Captain Maillart and Isabelle Cigny. They were all making ready for bed, but I made them get up again, to return to Le Cap if they wanted to keep on living in their bodies. Moyse had come across the plain that same day toward Dondon, and everywhere he passed the ateliers would be rising, and Arnaud’s people were going to rise too, whether or not he wanted to believe it.
At first only the doctor trusted what I told them—if he had not understood at Bois Cayman, he understood quickly now. He went outside at once and saddled his horse. Captain Maillart had been carrying on his love with the blanche Isabelle again, since she had come back from Vallière, and he did not want to go back to Le Cap so soon, where her husband was staying in her house, but with some talk I made him understand that it was necessary. With Arnaud, the trouble was that Flaville had protected him until now, but this time Flaville was very busy at Limbé, where three hundred blancs were killed that same night.
There was moon enough to see our road plainly. In time we began to see fires on the horizon, and after that there were not any more complaints. By morning we came through the lower gate into Le Cap. No one had attacked us. Twice there were bands who came near with knives and torches, but when they saw so many horse soldiers they went away again.
There was a rising in the town too, but Christophe took his men to put it down. I did nothing after those white people had been delivered, but took my men into the casernes. We had all been riding two days without a rest. When Christophe came in, he looked at me strangely, but he said nothing. Then there was nothing to do but wait. In another day, Bouquart and Bienvenu and the men who had gone off with them returned. I did not ask any questions of them, and they said nothing to me either.
If Moyse had had a little more time, even as much as one more day, he might have taken all the Cordon de l’Ouest from Limbé de Dondon and given Toussaint some real trouble. That chain of mountains had been the root of Toussaint’s power from the beginning, and maybe Moyse thought the power would wither if the root were cut, or he might be able to take it for himself. But Dessalines, who was following Toussaint’s orde
r, brought his soldiers into Plaisance right away and broke the line. Wherever he went after that, Dessalines killed a great many of the men of the hoe who had rebelled, and Toussaint, who was coming up toward Le Cap from Gonaives, did the same thing.
When Toussaint came into the town, he ordered all the soldiers to parade on the Place d’Armes. I, Riau, stood at attention among my men, breathing as deeply as I could so that no part of my body would tremble. I had not seen Guiaou since I sent him to Verrettes, so I did not know what might be coming to me, but Toussaint was more terrible than I had ever seen him. People thought he was mounted by Baron de la Croix. He threw his plumed hat on the ground and tore the red cloth from his head and crushed it tightly in his fist, many times folded over.
“Here I stand,” he screamed in a breaking voice. “The man that Moyse claimed would restore slavery. I stand before you—assassin of my brothers. Traitor to the French Republic. He who would make himself a king to rule a heap of corpses.”
Toussaint was shaking from his heels to his shoulders as he paced the ranks of soldiers drawn up on the square. His mouth was bloody at the corners because his teeth had bitten into his cheeks. I thought he was coming straight for me.
“Step forward,” Toussaint said, through gritted teeth.
But it was Bouquart who stepped out of the ranks from his place at my left side.
“Shoot yourself,” Toussaint commanded.
Bouquart, standing very straight, picked up his pistol and blew his brains out through his ear. He fell down dead on the bloody stones. Toussaint walked on. Toussaint gave the same order many times. When it was enough for him, he ordered the ranks of soldiers to part. At one end of the square appeared three cannon. At the other came Joseph Flaville, bound among other prisoners Toussaint had taken on his way. All those cannon were loaded with grapeshot so that afterward no one could tell which scraps of meat and bone had belonged to one man or another.
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