Chapter Eight
ALL THE WAY DOWN INTO BOIS CAYMAN, I was thinking of Macandal. We were going there, to LeNormand plantation, where he once lived, or where his death began. The whitemen might say he died for love—whitemen believe that things happen for reasons, or if they don’t believe it always, they always wish that it were so. All that happened before I was born, when my gros-bon-ange was still with les Mystères, and my ti-bon-ange, eh, where was that? But I knew about it, everyone knew, and as we were coming down from the mountain I knew the others would be thinking of it too.
In Guinée, Macandal was a Mandingue but at Habitation LeNormand he was a slave who fed the sugar mill. He stood at the end of the line and pushed the trimmed cane through the place where the raised edges of the grinding wheels meshed together like teeth in a mouth as they pulled inward. The mules that powered the mill walked around and around at the ends of their long poles, led by yawning children, half asleep, because at LeNormand they ran the mill at night. It’s not such hard work feeding cane into the mill, not dangerous, so long as you stay awake, but a slave who has been in the fields all day and then goes to the mill at night may grow tired and drowse and give the mill a finger or a hand. That’s why they always sing in the mills at night, to keep themselves awake, and I wonder what they were singing then, before Macandal’s scream cut through the song and someone stopped the mules, too late, when the mill had already taken his arm to the shoulder.
Or maybe there was no scream, maybe he never cried out at all, even when the mill ground to a stop and someone took a cane knife and cut his arm off at the shoulder to get him loose from it. And they were singing to him all the time, whatever song it was, they never stopped, and he was singing too, and kept on singing when they cut him away and his arm came out the other end of the mill with the flesh in ribbons and the bone crushed into the frayed and flattened bagasse. His blood ran down into the syrup, and somewhere in France a whiteman stirred it into his coffee, Macandal’s blood poisoned him, and he died. Yes, it must have been like that. When we were coming down the mountain into Bois Cayman, I saw how he would have taken the knife himself and cut through his own arm, or gnawed it through with his Mandingue teeth like an animal will do with a leg in a trap, because once the arm was severed, he was cut through. No one sends a one-armed slave into the mill or the fields again.
Another man would have died from the wound, and seen his corps-cadavre put into the ground, but if Macandal died he was born again. They made him a herdsman. I know how it was for him, that part of it, because Toussaint once let me go myself, to watch the cattle. So he was alone, out there for weeks at a time, running out of food most likely, having little water, but able to think and learn, how to live from the land, what vines to cut for water. To protect himself from the wild dogs and protect the cows, and from the maroons too. There were always maroon bands passing through the foothills, here in Bois Cayman where stray cattle might wander. It might not be the first time, not the second, but one time he would follow them. But he was Macandal, he would not follow, he would lead.
Bois Cayman is an old forest and we were in it a long time. It was a living place and we cut nothing to get through it. The paths were few and they went nowhere or just ended. Sometimes we could hear other bands moving in the jungle near us, large or small. Some seemed to know their way and passed us quickly, and there were others that we passed ourselves. Macandal would have known them all, he went from one band to another. He was everywhere on this side of the mountains, and many places on the other. He learned all that was in the forest, and learned the secrets of Guinée that the old maroons had saved for him, and he learned secrets which the caciques knew before the whitemen killed them all.
He learned herbs, and medicines, and poisons, especially those. He gave poison to the maroons and gave it to herdsmen too, and field slaves, and house slaves finally, best of all. They killed animals in the fields with it, and of course they killed each other, and themselves sometimes. Macandal knew what we all do. Any death can hurt a whiteman somewhere. If it is only a slave or a cow, he is less rich. You make a man like Arnaud grow a little smaller if you kill only his dog. But soon the whitemen began to die in their own houses too. The slaves learned to find new poisons in the house, arsenic and lead. Then there were trials and torture and burnings but the poisoning did not stop. Macandal filled the city of Le Cap with it. Thousands of slaves were saving poison, waiting for that single day when they planned to use it once to destroy all the whitemen. Then the whitemen would be finished in this country and the city would belong to the maroons.
But there was love, if it was that. Macandal went to a calenda and they say he went to see a woman, that he would not have gone only to dance. Some say he had taken the woman off into the forest before and that it was a lover of hers, still on Dufresne plantation where the calenda was held, who saw him and told the gérant that he was there. They all say he was betrayed. The whitemen couldn’t catch Macandal by themselves. But the gérant did come to know of it, somehow, and because no one had ever taken Macandal by force he used cunning. He had barrels of rum sent to the calenda, and then, when the dancers were all drunk and asleep, he tied up Macandal and took him that way.
So then he died again. Not easily or all at once. He broke the ropes and got away before they left Dufresne, but dogs ran him down before he could go far. They took him to a prison at Le Cap and that is where they burned him. Inside the fire he broke the chains that held him to the stake, but he did not walk out of the fire still in his body. The fire took his corps-cadavre, but he turned his ti-bon-ange into a mosquito and it flew away. The mosquito is still here somewhere. Many saw it. Achille says that he was there and saw it all, though he may be lying. But he says that he saw everything and that he shouted out when the others did, Macandal is free.
That must have been a fine calenda there at Dufresne, where Macandal was taken, or he would not have come, but I don’t think even it could have been so big as the one we danced at Bois Cayman. At once I could see that the people must have come from plantations all over the northern plain and there were as many as at the market in Le Cap. Thousands—and that is only the number of the living.
A long way off still, we could hear the drumming. It was rada drumming we heard first, though both rada and petro drums were there. It was thick dark by the time we came near but we could feel more and more people moving around us in the jungle, and when we began to come into the clearing it seemed that there were even more people than trees. There were more and more people coming out of the jungle all the time so it looked like the trees were giving birth to men.
Boukman and his people had made a big h?nfor in the clearing. No altar sheds, but at the center of the peristyle they had topped a straight tree and left the peeled trunk standing for a poteau mitan. Damballah and Aida Wedo were wrapped in a painted spiral around it to the ground. There were forty young hounsis all dressed in white, and a mambo whose name I never learned, though she was as big as two houses. I looked around and saw at the edge of the clearing the mapou tree which was Damballah’s house. I knew Damballah must live there because a bowl of milk and egg had been put there for him to eat, nailed up in a crate so no one but Damballah could slither between the slats to eat his food.
Damballah had not raised his head or come out of where he lived in the tree, but in the peristyle the hounsis sang a song for him while they clapped their hands and rolled their hips with the drumming.
We come from Guinée
We have no father
We have no mother
Marassa Eyo!
Papa Damballah, show us
Show us Dahomey again…
I listened to the song of Damballah, standing there beside Jean-Pic and also with the new man, who had run away from Arnaud’s plantation. Aiguy, we called him. It was what he called himself, though we didn’t know if this had been his name when he was a slave in Arnaud’s cane field. Some men who we knew from the town of Le Cap came to us then, and I told them the name of Aiguy.
When I looked at Aiguy then I still saw him as he had looked before, wearing the headstall and thrashing his head around like a wild cow crazed for water. The stall was gone now, and the only sign of it was a thick weal healing pink across the back of his neck, and some other hook-shaped slashes where the tin collar had cut him each time he hung the prongs up, running through the jungle. Aiguy began telling the men from Le Cap what had happened and what Riau had done. How he had lain with the headstall caught in lianas, waiting for the dogs, and how he heard us coming, Riau and Jean-Pic, and heard Jean-Pic tell Riau that he should kill him.
Aiguy believed that Riau would do what Jean-Pic had said, or else he would be left there for the dogs. He knew that there was no love between maroons and slaves, and that the maroons did not trust the slaves who ran away to them, thinking that they might be spies who would deliver them all to the whitemen again. But still, the maroons must have been slaves themselves sometime, except the ones who were born in the mountains. Anyway there was nowhere else for Aiguy to run, and he had seen that if he stayed on Arnaud’s plantation he would surely die. Then he would rather die in the jungle, and he thought that he would rather be killed by Riau’s cane knife than wait for the dogs to find him there. So when he heard the knife blade go humming up and then start whistling a little as it dropped he expected to return his gros-bon-ange to les Mystères…
When this story was done I asked of the men of Le Cap how many had come here to Bois Cayman from that place, and he told me there were very many. In the city too the word had passed from h?ngan to h?ngan, h?nfor to h?nfor, the same as in the mountains and all over the plain. There were maroon bands from everywhere in the island too, even a band from Bahoruco, over beyond the torches on the far side of the peristyle.
I stood on my toes and craned my neck to look for the Bahoruco maroons, who I had heard much about but never seen. People said that they had a big fortress in ancient caves the caciques had used, and where the gods of the caciques still lived. Somewhere they must have found a great power, the people said, because they had fought a war with the whitemen and won it, and made the whitemen give them their own country and write a paper that said that it was theirs. So I was looking hard to see these strong maroons, but before I could see them there was a stir in the crowd and someone came through handing out papers.
No one could read but still everyone was reaching for the papers and some were fighting over them. Except Riau, I, Riau didn’t want a paper, not this night. But Aiguy got one and clutched it in his hand. It was a single sheet, but made to look like a page of a journal. No one knew till a long time later that these papers were false and that Toussaint had got them to be printed. Aiguy ran his eyes up and down it, sticking his lips out like a kiss. He was holding it sideways so the words dropped down in columns instead of running in rows like they should. He gave the paper to Riau then and all by itself my hand turned it right way up. The letters were rattling like chains linked together on the paper. They wanted to start speaking to Riau, but I threw the paper down. Jean-Pic picked it up and glared at me, because he knew.
Just the same the words began to talk. On the edge of the peristyle, a big Ibo field hand lifted a smaller mulatto onto his shoulders. The mulatto wore rich man’s clothes and had a funny freckled face. Jean-Pic shifted beside me.
“I don’t like to see him here,” he said. “He has a white father.”
Of course it was plain that he had a white father, like any homme de couleur, but what Jean-Pic meant was that he had a father who protected him and gave him property, and that probably he owned slaves. I was near enough to see his face well. Except for his pale skin and his funny spots he had the face of a man of Guinée, but the expression of a whiteman—cruelty, and the habit of power his whole life. But he opened his mouth and the paper spoke through him.
The paper said that the King In France had made a new law for the slaves here, we. The new law was that there would be no more whippings now. Abolition du fouet—there was shouting when the paper put these words in that mulatto’s mouth. And the law said that the colons must give us three days free each week, Sunday and two others these three days congé, to rest or work for ourselves in our provision grounds. And for this the shouting was even louder than for what the paper had to say about the whip.
The whitemen would say that we were foolish to believe these things the paper said. Sometimes it happens to one of us too, the good blood of Guinée drains out, a man becomes old and pale to transparency and he can’t know what to believe anymore at all. But it was easy to believe what the paper said then. The King In France had made laws for us before this time. There was the Code Noir, which said that our masters must feed us, and limited our work, and outlawed the worst punishments, but many of the colons did not obey this law. Lately there were new laws about the colored people, but the colons would not obey these either.
Also, some of the people then at Bois Cayman had been kings in their own country. It was not hard for them to believe that these whitemen would go against the right of a king. Some said that the whitemen had made the king a prisoner in France and that they sent him to work in French fields every day with his family. Some said that the King In France was a black man and came out of Dahomey like ourselves.
Boukman stood up. He did not need to sit on anyone’s shoulders to be seen, he was head and shoulders above the rest, standing on the ground. He wore white trousers and a red sash with a sword in it. His head was big enough for two men and the lower part of his face hung over his bare chest like an open door. Before he spoke we all could feel his esprit. It was not one loa riding him that night, but all les Morts et les Mystères.
Boukman told then that the King In France would send his army over the sea to make the colons obey his law. But that we, the people of Guinée, must not wait for the king’s army to cross the ocean. We would rise and claim the new law for ourselves.
Then Boukman looked at the petro drummers and they began to beat. The la-place began going backward around the poteau mitan, as if he would undo time and bring us home to Guinée where we came from. It was Jeannot who was dancing la-place that night, and as he moved backward the hounsis began to sing to Legba, as we must always do at the beginnings of things.
Papa Legba
Open the way for me
When I have passed
I will thank the loa
Papa Legba
Open the gate…
Then Legba came to ride Jeannot. I watched carefully because it is rare. Jeannot toppled back and the hounsis caught him and when he could stand again he was Legba, Legba grown old, crippled, walking on broken legs and his arms twisted in deformity, his whole self crushed down under the weight of the big macoutte he had to carry as far as the end of the world. The hounsis sang.
Attibon Legba, limping along
It’s a long time since we have seen you
I will carry Legba’s macoutte
Put his straw sack on my back…
Legba was coming toward where we were standing now, and in his face I saw Grand Bois D’Ilet, master of the Island Below Sea, where the loa live among les Morts et les Mystères. He was coming down, down into the mirror himself, already Legba could see his shadow rising there. A step ahead of me, Achille stiffened and dropped his gun as he was taken, but it was not Ghede this time. His ruined body straightened and became young and strong again for the loa, the muscle throbbed across his back as he lifted his arms in the shape of a cross, ridden by Ma?t’Carrefour.
Legba, Grand Bois, Legba—inside Jeannot’s body Legba saluted Carrefour with his sly smile. These loa know each other well, because they both sit on the gate. Legba opens the way for the day loa, but the loa of night, who must sometimes work evil, all pass through the hand of Ma?t’Carrefour. So they cannot always agree, but tonight they smiled on each other like brothers, and danced with each other, hand in hand. I didn’t see Ghede, not yet, but I knew he was there, below the bright surface of the mirror that turns your image back, his hand now holding Carrefour’s other hand. The hounsis sang.
O Creole, sondé miroir, O Legba…
By my side Aiguy trembled as Baron Samedi mounted him. He stepped forward to join Legba and Carrefour, dancing around the edge of the peristyle. The high whine of petro drumming shrilled inside Riau’s head. Yo di, the mirror breaks through rock. The ocean is mirror, mirror is ocean, by day we see ourselves in it, but when it turns transparent then we see through into the Island Below Sea which is the world of death, where les Morts et les Mystères reach up into our world, climbing Grand Bois’s tree from the dark side of the mirror. They were shooting up the poteau mitan now, as fast as the vévés written in gunpowder could burn. Now I saw Ghede dancing everywhere in the peristyle, one, two, many Ghedes. The drum scratched at the inside of Riau’s head, Og?n wanting his body to dance, wanted his ti-bon-ange to make way for Og?n. But I wanted my own head for thinking with, and so I stepped away, moving somewhere I could not hear the drums so well.
But the forest itself was crowded with esprit. I walked in the shadows just outside the tree line, feeling it. I was farther away but still I was circling the poteau mitan. There were so many to be drawn up from the Island Below Sea. I knew that our living people outnumbered the whitemen ten to one. The whitemen knew it too and were afraid—this was the fear that drove the whip. But what the whitemen never knew was that every one of us they killed was with us still. And by this time they had killed so many, a hundred to our one. A dead white person disappears but our dead never leave us, they are here among les Invisibles. They were coming now, all les Invisibles, through the mirror from below the waters, and every tree in Bois Cayman became a poteau mitan for their arrival.
Walking around the edge of the clearing I came to Damballah’s tree and there I stopped and squatted down. Damballah came out of the hole in his tree. No one was watching him, only me. He crawled between the bars of the crate and put his head in the bowl to eat his food. His split tongue flicked in and out of the egg and milk, trying it before he drank. His scales were dark and glossy on his back and his small round eye shone when it looked at me. I raised my head then and I saw Toussaint, squatting down on the other side of the crate. I don’t know when he had come there. Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou were sitting a few yards in back of him, talking together in low voices. I couldn’t hear what they said.
Later, a long time afterward, people said different things about what Toussaint was doing that night. Some say he led the ceremony himself and cut the black sow’s throat with his own hand. Some say he never went to Bois Cayman at all. I know that he was there. Who knows what is true? Maybe he was there, or not there, but I know that I saw him, if few others did. All the time they were feeding the loa he and I sat talking quietly beneath Damballah’s tree.
“Parrain,” I said. I was the first to speak.
Toussaint nodded. I could see his face plain in the torchlight from the peristyle. His mouth was pursed slightly like he was whistling and his eyes looked cheerful, torchlight flashing in them. Like always he wore the bandanna tied around his head and he wore the green coat with the old bloodstains. He looked like he had been squatting there for a year, but I was surprised to see him there at all, because I thought that he served jesus, who had made him swear against serving the loa.
“Ehé, Riau, sa ki pasé?” he said. “What are you thinking?”
“I was thinking about Macandal,” I said. When I said this, I knew where my thought had gone. Macandal was with us now, he had come up the poteau mitan at the head of les Invisibles. And with Macandal leading, the whitemen must all die. They were singing it now within the peristyle.
Eh, eh, Bomba
Canga, bafio té!
Canga, moune de lé!
Canga, do ki la
Canga, li!
The mambo stood up, all stained with blood from the sacrifice. Boukman was mixing blood with gunpowder and clairin to feed the loa, and most of the people were pressing forward to get some, whether the loa had mounted them or not. Jeannot raised his cup above his head and screamed into the sky before he drank, but I, Riau, I did not taste the blood that night.
Toussaint was looking at me as he would do when I was small, when I had understood something and he was trying not to show his pleasure. Then he turned his head to watch what was happening in the peristyle. In the torchlight I could just see the tips of his teeth. A big mosquito landed on his broad flat cheek and fastened itself to feed.
“You know what happened to Macandal,” he said. “The white-men burned him to death in a fire. And it was one of our own people who gave him up to the whites.”
“Do you think Macandal is like Jesus?” I said. “You are wrong.”
Now Toussaint smiled a little, openly. He felt the mosquito, finally, and flicked his finger at it. He didn’t kill it though. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill it. The mosquito lifted, whining high above his head, and vanished in the dark.
“I know what happened to Macandal,” I said. “Macandal turned himself into a mosquito, yo di. Who knows? Maybe this is the mosquito who has bitten you.”
JULY 1802
From the deck of Le Héros, Placide surveyed the harbor of Brest. The dawn was windy and warm, a pleasant July day in store. Later it might grow hot, but nothing to match the stifling heat of a tropical summer. In spite of himself, Placide was refreshed by French weather, French summers at least. He’d grown accustomed to them during the years he’d spent here as a student, or as he now more bitterly conceived it, as a hostage. Though the winters were hard, indeed, and made him wish for Saint Domingue. They had embarked in winter, scarcely six months before, and from this port. Even then Placide had not believed the blandishments of the First Consul, yet his heart had been sweetened by the thought of home.
He watched a sailor now, or maybe he was some sort of long-shoreman, unfastening the mooring of a longboat from a stanchion on the quay. He was whiskered and wore a striped shirt and on his head an old liberty cap, conical with the odd forward roll of its peak. Or once it had been that. They had made the old King Louis wear such a cap before they killed him, and wearing it, he drank a toast to liberté, egalité, fraternité. Placide had seen an engraving in a newspaper, the bonnet rouge shoved down over the king’s powdered wig. The king looked bilious, sickly, holding his wine cup at an insecure angle as if he would spill it. From his lips scrolled the phrase Vive La Nation, upside down and curling sideways, like a thread of smoke.
The sailor let the stern rope slither down into the boat, which rocked and drifted out from the posts of the dock. The cap he wore was ancient, grubby, faded to a scabrous brown, though once it had surely been red as a poppy. The tricolor cockade had been cut away and someone had flattened the peak and tacked it down backward with a few stitches, further to disguise its original shape. The sailor left the bowline doubled around the stanchion while he scrambled down, then pulled it free and coiled it neatly under a bench seat before he sat down and engaged the oars. A spiral of silver twirled out from the starboard blade as he brought the bow of the boat around toward the harbor. Placide watched as he settled to a longer, even stroke; the boat was too heavy for him to move it very quickly. Somehow he doubted that revolution had much bettered this sailor’s lot.
The harbor was full of warships; the sailor was rowing in the direction of one of these. Pennants snapped briskly from their rigging in the freshening morning breeze. All around the talk was of war renewed with England. Perhaps with all Europe, once again. No one would tell them anything directly, but the rumors were in the air. It had been the same when the fleet sailed out from Brest with the army of Captain-General Leclerc: official silence through which the rumors breathed of Napoleon’s real intent.
The ship’s officer Chabron drifted up to his elbow, and when Placide did not immediately recognize his presence, Chabron plucked at the sleeve of his plain brown coat. Placide hesitated, looking over the water. The sun had just cleared the roofs of the town and that sailor’s longboat was burned away in the reflective blaze.
“Venez, monsieur,” Chabron said. “He’s ready for you.”
Placide nodded and followed Chabron below decks. All during the voyage they had kept Toussaint sequestered from his family and even from his body servant, Mars Plaisir, but in the fortnight they’d been docked at Brest, Placide had been permitted to serve as his secretary. Chabron unlocked the cabin door and stood aside, his face averted, for Placide to enter. Placide could hear the key grinding in the lock behind him, once the door had closed; he heard no footsteps moving away.
The cabin was close, almost airless, with a ripening odor whose source was hard to fix. During the voyage Toussaint had been allowed a weekly bath but he still had no clothing but what he’d been arrested in. Placide could hear rats scrambling between the cabin wall and the ship’s hull. Toussaint sat calmly at the table, eyes shaded by one hand. A whale-oil lamp was the illumination. Because there was no daylight, this always seemed a timeless place.
The quill and ink pot sat on the table, by a stack of vellum which the Bible weighted down. Placide knew that Toussaint would have made no notes, that he would have spent some part of the night and the earliest hours of the morning composing in his mind the things he meant to say. He sat down. Toussaint, reaching to move the Bible from the sheets of paper, brushed his hand as if by chance.
“B?jou, Placide.”
“B?jou, m’pé.”
They sat side by side, for Toussaint liked to read over his work as he progressed. But he would not begin at once.
“Ta mére?” Toussaint asked him. “Tes fréres?” The same questions each morning of the fortnight. “Tout va bien?”
“Oui, ?a va,” Placide said, and when Toussaint inquired of his niece and daughter-in-law, Louise and Victoire, Placide replied that their health was also good. With his thumb he turned up the cap of the inkwell on its hinge, and then sat back.
“There’s talk of war with England,” he said, and then added quickly in Creole, “I wish it had come sooner.”
“That would be a treasonable thought,” Toussaint said stiffly, and in good French. “You know that I have always been loyal to France.”
What Placide knew was that Chabron or someone else must certainly be listening at the door, but again he thought he knew that dissimulation was pointless now; appearances no longer mattered. Irritably he fidgeted with the inkwell, flipping the cover open and shut.
“If there had been war with England,” Toussaint said precisely, “the Captain-General’s fleet would not have sailed, perhaps, and then I would have missed the sight of you, my child.”
Placide jerked his head toward the porthole, but it had been nailed shut. So fearful they were of Toussaint’s escape, they’d kept it boarded over even in the middle of the ocean.
“Come,” Toussaint said. “It’s time that we begin.”
Placide drew a sheet of paper toward him from the stack, picked up the pen and dipped it. Toussaint composed himself, drawing his hands back from the table and folding them in his lap.
“Citoyen Premier Consul,” he began. Placide wrote down the phrase, waited a moment, then wrote the date above it. 22 juin 1802. Toussaint tilted his head to look at his writing and gave an affirmative nod. He cleared his throat and spoke again, repeating the salutation.
“Citoyen Premier Consul, je ne vous dissimulerai pas mes fautes, j’en ai fait quelques unes. Quel homme en est exempt? Je suis prête à les avouer. Après la parole d’honneur du capitaine generale qui represente le gouvernement, après une proclamation promulgué à la face de la colonie, dans laquelle il promettait de jeter le voile de l’oubli sur les évènements qui ont eu lieu à Sainte Domingue, comme vous avez fait le 18 brumaire, je me suis retiré au sein de ma famille…”*2
At other times Toussaint might grope, fumble for a word, torture his amanuensis for alternative expressions. Sometimes he would have several secretaries compose versions of the same letter before settling on a final result. But Placide thought that he must have worked out this phrasing completely and probably memorized it the night before.
“à peine un mois s’est ecoulé que des malveillants, à force d’intrigues, ont su me perdre dans l’ésprit du general en chef en lui inspirant de la méfiance contre moi. J’ai re?u une lettre de lui qui m’ordonnait de me concerte avec le general Brunet: j’ai obei…”?3
He spoke in a high clear voice, as if he were giving a speech, and loud enough to carry well beyond the door. His only pauses were oratorical, for effect, but they did give Placide time to write. He felt as it were two invisible threads competing to control his quill. One ran to the hand of the Abbé Coisnon, the preceptor who’d had charge of Isaac and Placide here in France, who’d taught Placide the fair hand and the proper spelling he now used, which Toussaint’s sidelong glance approved.
“Je me rendis, accompagné de deux personnes, aux Gonaives ou l’on m’arrêta. L’on me conduisit à bord de la frégate La Creole, j’ignore pour quel motif, sans autres vêtements que ceux que j’avais sur moi. Le lende-main ma maison fut en proie au pillage; mon épouse et mes enfants arrêtés: ils n’ont rien, pas même de quoi se vêtir…”*4
The other filament, meanwhile, was strung more tautly over the years, stretched to transparency before it reached the plank cabin at Bréda where Toussaint had first taught him how to make the letters. Placide half wanted now to see his father’s own crabbed hand and broken orthography scrambling over the page beneath his pen; it would seem somehow more just. But he continued to write in the clean correct fashion which the Abbé Coisnon had drilled into him.
“A new paragraph,” Toussaint said. “Citoyen Premier Consul, une mère de famille, à cinquante-trois ans, peut mériter indulgence…”
The pen had dulled. Placide shifted in his seat and automatically felt his pockets but there was nothing there. He clicked his tongue irritably and got up, quill in hand, and crossed the cabin to rap sharply on the inside of the door. The pause that followed was forced; Placide knew that Chabron must be standing just outside the door, counting off one, two minutes, to make it appear that he was coming from a distance. When he opened the door at last, Placide passed the quill to him wordlessly. Chabron would not meet his eyes. He knew the officer found this procedure shameful, gave him credit for that much. They would not let Toussaint come near a penknife, though it could not be that they feared his suicide, which would have gladdened them indeed, but that with so slight a weapon he might seize control of the ship.
Chabron sharpened the quill with his own knife, eyes fixed to the work as though it required his utmost concentration, and passed it back to Placide when he was done. Toussaint was waiting, the words began to flow from him as soon as Placide had resumed his seat.
“Citoyen Premier Consul, une mère de famille, a 53 ans, peut mériter l’indulgence et la bienveillance d’une nation genereuse et liberale; elle n’a aucun compte à rendre, moi seul dois être responsable de mon conduite aupres de mon gouvernement. J’ai une trop haute idée de la grandeur et de la justice du premier magistrat du peuple fran?ais, pour douter un moment de son impartialité. J’aime à croire que la balance, dans sa main, ne penchera pas plus d’un coté que de l’autre. Je réclame sa genererosite.”*5
Toussaint reached to take the sheet from under Placide’s hand and held it near the lamp, reading it over while the last line dried. He took the pen and signed it. Placide blotted the signature, blew on it and watched the ink darken. There was no sealing wax so he simply folded the sheet in three and passed it out the door.
Two days later the news came that Toussaint was to be stripped of all his property, by the order of the First Consul. Henceforth he would truly own nothing but the clothes he had on. Placide was with him when the notification was delivered. Seldom had he seen his father really shaken, perhaps never. The spectacle frightened him, and Toussaint’s voice was not entirely steady.
“But I had no answer to my letter…” he began uncertainly.
“You have your answer there,” Placide snapped. His own fear made him cruel.
Then Toussaint disappeared behind his face. Placide had seen it often, during the campaign against Leclerc, most especially in those months Toussaint had spent at Ennery, “retired into the bosom of his family.” He thought he remembered it from his early childhood also, but was not so sure. That spark which was himself would sink away behind his features—you must know him well to know that it had not been extinguished altogether. In front of him he’d leave his face as hieratic and inscrutable as a carved wooden mask that some old African dancer might have worn. That was the aspect which made men smile and call him old Toussaint, and shake their heads in admiration of his cunning. What they meant was that Toussaint was old as Legba.
Placide dropped onto his knees and kissed his father’s hand. He closed his eyes and laid his cheek against the fraying shiny seam of the old uniform trousers. After a little while Toussaint’s free hand lowered gently onto his head as if to give a blessing.
It was left to Placide to break the news to his brothers and the women. Of all the group only Justine, the femme de confiance, wept openly, while Mars Plaisir groaned and wrung his elongated hands. It frightened them more deeply, Placide thought, to see their protector’s strength undone. Suzanne took the hands of Victoire and Louise and bowed her head to say the Lord’s Prayer, half in a whisper. Placide did not pray with her; he kept his head up, but the words still calmed him somewhat, each an old touchstone. After the Amen, his mother raised her eyes.
“I never cared for the good things we had,” she said. “But what will become of us now?”
“I fear we may be separated,” Placide said.
He was thinking that he himself would likely be distinguished from his brother Isaac, since he had chosen to join the rebels while Isaac had remained with the French. In the back of his mind was an idea that did not quite qualify as hope, that after all he might stay with his father, for that reason, still. But that afternoon Toussaint was taken off the ship to a cell in the chateau of Brest, while Placide remained in his quarters on board.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD Captain-General Leclerc took up his pen to report on his mission from his brother-in-law Napoleon: to subdue the blacks of Saint Domingue and to restore slavery there. Again, and again, he wrote to the Minister of Marine Decrès: “Vous ne sauriez tenir Toussaint à une trop grande distance de la mer et le mettre dans une position très sure. Cet homme avait fanatisé le pays à un tel point que sa presence le mettrait encore en combustion…”*6 A similar letter, more measured in tone but of the same general drift, had been delivered by Le Héros itself. All the way over the ocean it had smoldered in the captain’s cabin like a bomb on a slow fuse, burning word by word to its conclusion:
“Il faut, Citoyen Ministre, que le Gouvernement le fasse mettre dans une place forte située dans le milieu de la France, afin que jamais il ne puisse avoir aucun moyen de s’echapper et de revenir à Saint Domingue ou il a toute l’influence d’un chef de secte. Si, dans trois ans, cet homme reparaissait a Sainte Domingue peut-être detruirait-il tout ce que la France y aurait fait…”*7
Still Leclerc could not leave his theme. He wrote constantly, constantly begged for more men, more money to pay them, again more men. He was transfixed by his belief that if Toussaint were able to so much as wet his boot toe in the water of any French port, he would be magically translated back to Saint Domingue to spread fire and ruin and destruction. Leclerc’s wife of course was unfaithful to him, so were his troops disloyal—most of the surviving men had belonged to Toussaint’s black regiments. He was sick and feverish, mere months away from his own death. In a shaky hand he wrote Decrès: “Ce n’est pas tout d’avoir enlevé Toussaint; il y a ici 2000 chefs à faire enlever…”?8 Each night in his febrile sleep he dreamed that Toussaint had never really left the island.
NEXT DAY IN BREST THE WEATHER TURNED, the sky shelved over gray as slate, and spat cold rain. An unfamiliar army captain presented himself in Placide’s cabin, not troubling to give his name.
“You are ordered to remove and surrender the uniform of the French army,” he announced. “Being divested of your rank you are no longer entitled to wear it.”
Placide pointed out that in fact he was already in civilian attire. The captain nodded, quite as if he had expected this reply.
“You don’t wear the French uniform because you know you have disgraced it,” he suggested. “Because you are a traitor to France.”
“I am as much a traitor to France as my father was,” Placide said. “No more and no less.”
“Then you must be a very great one,” the captain said. “But the slave Toussaint cannot be your father.” He jerked his jaw at Placide’s reddish Arada skin. “Anyone can see that you are a mulatto half-breed, neither white nor black. Some white man got you on the nigger whore, your mother.”
The captain’s tone was rote, however. The insults were not heart-felt, but formal and obligatory; Placide understood that he must say these things in order to divorce himself as much as possible from his own actions. For himself it was a formal occasion too. No matter what age he might survive to, his life was ending here and now.
“In heaven my father is God,” Placide said. “And everything you do, God sees. On earth, my father is Toussaint-Louverture.”
On deck, two dragoons were waiting. They fell in step on either side of Placide as he drew abreast of them, but he walked between them in such a fashion as to abolish their existence. The cold drizzle wet his hair, ran in his eyes, but he was unaware of it, recalling how Toussaint had looked, coming into Le Cap to make his submission to Leclerc, how people had said his entrance into the city was more like a triumphal procession. He crossed the deck toward the gangway, walking as if he owned the ship, as if the world were his, walking the way Toussaint had taught him, like a free man.
Part II
LEUR CAFé AU CARAMEL
August—November 1791
We got thunder
(thunder…)
Lightning
(lightning)
Brimstone
And fire
(fire, fire, fire…)
…wipe them out of Creation…
—BOB MARLEY