Chapter Twelve
WHEN NIGHT CAME DOWN TO COVER US we left the women and children hiding in the jungle on the mountain slope and we came down on the plantation of Noé, only our band going along together at first, Achille and César-Ami and Jean-Pic and Paul Lefu and Aiguy who was one of us now, also some of the others who had come out to meet us from Le Cap. We came to the edges of the Noé cane fields and we began to see others there hiding in the cane, the slaves of Noé itself and some of those who had been at Bois Cayman with Boukman. They said that Boukman was there himself somewhere though I never saw him. In the cane piece where we were waiting was a commandeur of Noé who had been at Bois Cayman and he had some direction to give to everyone but of course none of us maroons had to obey him and many of the Noé slaves did not obey either. They had left their families in the quarters, and we passed them going through the cane, rows of neat cabins whitewashed and well kept, but they were too quiet now, silent as death, though not empty. If I had been a whiteman in the great house I would have heard the silence and known. And maybe they did hear it, but knowing did not help them.
A moon was in the sky curved to a knifepoint at both ends of it, and the sky so clear we could see well all around. I went along between Achille and Bienvenu. Achille had found some powder and shot for his long gun and when we paused he crouched down and loaded it. Then through the stalks of cane we could see the clearing and the candles burning inside the grand’case.
Someone down the line from where I waited began drumming on a little drum, a dry rasping sound, shallow, but the Noé commandeur came crashing through the cane leaves and stopped the noise. We waited while the quiet returned, the insects singing and nothing more. There was no sign of anything from the house or the outbuildings, only I did see a few house servants come out and go scattering into the cane at the left. It was windy, a dry wind rising and falling and knocking the cane leaves together like blades. I took my cane knife from the piece of cloth that tied it to my hip and tasted the bitter edge of it with my tongue and held it flat across my knees as I squatted. I heard Aiguy begin to hum low in the back of his throat and down the line Jean-Pic took it up and César-Ami and Paul Lefu and others too. A deep drone like a hive of bees, and the Noé commandeur could not stop this.
I wanted to swallow but my throat was stuck. As I might feel coming to a woman for the first time, or some special time. The drone was there inside my head and I was not quite Riau any longer and not quite yet Og?n. My mouth was full of water and my tongue floating but I could not swallow and the water ran out at the sides of my mouth. On the far side of the compound fire broke out all at once in the cane and everyone was up and running altogether toward the buildings and Riau running too. Before this I had thought I would keep near Achille that Riau might be protected by his gun (or if he died then I might get the gun) but now Riau was not thinking about the gun or anything. He whirled his cane knife running toward the house, and felt his bare heels banging on the battered dirt of the compound. The drone of many voices pulled tighter and tighter as if it must tear and just ahead of Riau they were already splintering in the door.
Most of the whitepeople in the house had been already in their beds but for one young man in the main room, who was in shirt-sleeves and had taken off his boots. He had just the time to rise from his chair when Achille fired at him from the hip. Even so near the bullet missed him but Achille had overcharged the gun and the blast of powder blew back the whiteman’s hair and burned his face. He put a hand in his breeches pocket and raised a shout, but no one answered. One of his eyes was blistered shut from the powder burn and the other was brown and swimming with fear. Riau came near enough to see this and he hacked his knife at the whiteman’s head, but the whiteman dodged it partly and the stroke only caught his ear and left it dangling. He didn’t seem to notice this because someone else was already stabbing him between the ribs on the other side and he folded his fingers over the blade and let them be cut to the cords inside as the other withdrew the blade very slowly, all the time looking into the whiteman’s one open eye.
A glass bell that had covered a clock was swept to the floor and Riau saw the shards of it rebounding and pattering back down onto the boards as bright and slow as rain. Aiguy had seized the clock by its brass legs and danced around the room with it, shaking it and talking to it, trying to make it chime. Riau went toward the rear of the house where he heard women screaming now. A whiteman stepped into his path, dressed only in a shirt and a nightcap. His hair was gray between his legs and he was trying to charge a pistol but his fingers were shaking and he had no time to finish before Riau stabbed him in the belly, hardly breaking his step. Riau felt the blade go deep and catch between two sections of his backbone, and he twisted it loose and whipped it out the other side of the long sickle-shaped cut. Out of the hole smoked blood and a chitterling stink. Riau left the whiteman groaning, as some other blacks came up and began clubbing him with sticks. In the next room several had surrounded a whiteman who seemed to be in his sickbed and they were all flailing at him with machetes with no care to strike any vital spot, beating him as much as they cut.
Riau passed them, hurrying. In another room a whiteman hung upside down across a bed, gutted like a hog with his entrails swung from the breastbone tangling across his face, and below his stiffening open hands a naked whitewoman screamed and struggled on her all-fours. The man behind her was Paul Lefu, who kept jerking her up by the hips to meet his thrusts into her hindquarters, wanting her to support herself four-legged like an animal, but her palms would slip from under her on the blood-slickered floor and her face crash down against it.
Another whiteman, the gérant or the master, was pinned against the wall by the Noé commandeur. The whiteman was naked as if he’d been surprised in an act of love and he kept trying to talk about different acts of kindness he’d visited on the slaves of Noé, but the commandeur mashed the blade of his knife two-handed across his throat and held him to the wall with such a slow and steady pressure that it hardly cut at all, but only stopped his words. The whiteman choked and his eyes bulged out, while a second whitewoman, younger than the other on the floor, flung yelping around the room until someone caught her by the hair and threw her down, catching up the hem of her loose white shift and trapping her hands and swaddling her head in the wad of cloth. Her bared body flopped on the floor like a skinned fish, crooked elbows working like fins out of water. The man who’d pinned her so was squatting on her head, unable to see quite how to improve his position, so Riau was the first to fall upon her.
Then the Noé commandeur had a new idea and got himself behind the master and throttled him slowly with a lace from one of the whitewomen’s dresses, holding him so he was forced to watch. Each time the lace tightened the master’s eyes went white, and his tongue stuck out of his blackening face while the commandeur cried out in a loud voice, “See! I am making a new nigger here!” Then he would loosen the lace and give him air until his eyes reopened, and begin again. Under the strangulation the master’s member rose and pointed and the commandeur called out thunderously, “See how the whiteman is ready to take his pleasure!”
But he held the lace too long so that the whiteman died. The commandeur straightened, panting and sweating, and let the whiteman fall. Someone cut his penis off and crammed it into his mouth. Riau finished and got up, scrambling for the cane knife he’d dropped when he began. Another moved to take his place, but the white-woman had suffocated in the folds of her shift and she was dead too. A mahogany-framed mirror hung over the bed and Riau looked at it and I saw myself there and Riau smashed his knife handle into the reflection. The glass shattered but held to the frame and the image splintered into dozens of Riaus and Og?ns. Riau shouted and jumped out the window and ran howling up the slope to the sugar mill.
It was a moulin de bêtes, powered by donkeys who circled it endlessly, each harnessed to a spoke. The mill had been running when the raid struck, and the mill hands had overcome the white refiner but had not done him much harm before Riau arrived. It seemed that Aiguy had persuaded them to feed him bodily into the mill, and under Aiguy’s direction they had strapped his arms down to his sides with harness pieces and were beginning to push him in feet first. César-Ami and Jean-Pic and some others were happily poking up the donkeys to turn the mill faster. The refiner shrieked as his feet were crushed and thrashed so hard he broke most of his straps, but many hands came to hold him to the chute, Riau’s among them. Riau could not even see the whiteman he was holding; he had reached across Aiguy’s back to catch on, and he could see the scars the headstall had left on Aiguy’s neck beginning to flush purple with his excitement.
Someone had set fire to the building and there was no need to drive the donkeys now. Crazed by the fire, they bellowed and broke into a gallop and the mill whirled the whiteman through all at once into a mass of blood and bone meal on the other side. One of the mill slaves had not let go in time and the mill sucked him up to the shoulder and he was shouting for someone to stop the mill but there was no stopping it. The high round roof of the building filled with smoke. Riau cut a couple of donkeys out of their harnesses and followed them as they ran wildly from the mill.
The grand’case was burning now too and when Riau saw flames shooting out the windows he saw on his eyelids as if in a dream the pistol falling from the hand of the whiteman he’d stabbed and smoothly revolving under the bed. He climbed back in through a window whose smouldering sill scorched his bare thighs. The bodies of the white people there were all so cut and torn he could not distinguish who was who, and besides the rooms were full of smoke. He went along crouching with his nose and mouth covered with one hand and entered a room past a slumped corpse whose hair was burning fitfully and felt along the floor under the trailing bedclothes, where he found the pistol or another as good. It was a handsome little weapon with a carved handle and silver chasings and an octagon barrel. Because he’d cast off his trousers during the rape he had no place to carry or conceal it. He ripped a section from a sheet and rolled the pistol in it and tied it to his waist. Still carrying the cane knife, he scuttled toward the front of the house, bent double to keep his face out of the smoke as much as possible.
Other salvagers were looting the storeroom, handing out kegs and bottles as fast as they might. Someone gave Riau a bottle of wine still corked and he carried it out onto the gallery and paused for a breath. The gallery roof was burning but the wind carried enough of the smoke away that the air was breathable. Just then the fire reached the powder in the storeroom and the explosion sent Riau pinwheeling halfway across the compound. He sat up gasping and felt for the pistol; it was still there and his knife was lying near him. The core of the house caved in on itself and burned with the luminous heat of a smelter’s forge. The heat was baking Riau’s face and he felt like both his ears were bleeding. Somehow he had kept hold of the wine bottle and now he broke off the neck on a stone wedged in the earth and gulped at it, not feeling how it cut his lips.
People were beginning to scatter from the compound now, and Riau got up and went down toward the quarters, sucking on the wine as he walked. A naked man tiger-striped with fresh wet blood ran with a torch from cabin to cabin setting all the roofs alight for no good reason but bloodmadness. The women and the children came pouring out looking for where they might turn for some other shelter, but as far as the jungle on the mountain slopes there was nothing at all but walls of fire. A mass of the rebels was collecting at the bottom of the quarters and Riau went there. He was losing the momentum that had carried him this far and I began to feel the scrapes and bruises he’d got in the explosion, though the wine partly numbed him.
After this we went to Galifet, where they had already attacked before, but here the whites had taken warning and were barricaded in the house with guns. I took out my pistol to shoot at them but Riau had not got any powder or lead so I could only snap it empty and put it back where I kept it again. Some of us had already been killed by bullets from the house and their bodies were lying in the open in the compound. Riau took a pair of trousers from a man who was dead there in the yard. After that we set fire to whatever was not already burning and then we went away.
Some were going back into the mountains already and many were drunk on tafia from the houses and some were lying down right in the roadways to sleep. There was no place in the fields to rest because they were all burning. I was tired enough to lie down myself but I didn’t want to be alone with dreams of what Riau had done and seen although Riau wanted still to do more of the same. If Og?n had done everything himself then Riau would not even have remembered it, but it had been part Riau and part Og?n and I did remember but I did not know what to think or do. We went up and down the roads all night thinking we might meet some whitemen who were running away but we met no one but other bands. Of who had started with us there were just Jean-Pic and Paul Lefu and they didn’t know what had happened to the others any more than I. The rest in the group were strangers and there was a big Congo wearing a whitewoman’s dress that they all seemed to follow. We kept on walking that way all together until morning came.
There was only a red blaze in the smoke where the sun should have been, like it was one of the fires still burning in the cane fields all around. My eyes stung and ran from the smoke and there was a heaviness on me like I had awoken with some sickness. My mouth was swollen with cuts from the wine bottle and most of all I wanted water, but there was none. This was the hell where Jesus sends people who serve him poorly, and I saw that he had made it here for the whites as they deserved but that somehow we must be in it with them too.
After a long time walking we saw a wagon and beside it one man riding a horse. We came near but before we could see them well the horseman began riding down on us and our people scattered, thinking that what he had in his hand must be a saber or a knife, though it was only a switch when I saw it near. He swung at me with it and almost fell from the horse and I might have caught him and dragged him down but just then I saw that it was he who had killed the dog at Arnaud’s place and I was so surprised that I did nothing. A few ran after him a little way but they could not keep up with the horse.
So we all went down together toward the wagon. It was pleasant to see them like they were, all stunned and blind with misery, the same expressions as our people wore when they were carted from the barracoons to the slave market at Le Cap. The Congo walked all around the wagon to admire them while the rest of us watched from where we stood. The whitewomen had all been used already till they were nothing but bloody bags, so we probably would have killed them all except for a strange thing which happened.
The one whitewoman who was driving the wagon was different from any whitewoman I had ever seen before. She stood up with an odd stiffness as though something was crowding into her body beside her, as though she was a serviteur though this could not be. When she spoke it sounded like the voice of a loa. The Congo grabbed at her as much to drive the loa out as to get her ring, I think, but that was not what happened. No one of us could have believed that any whitewoman would do what she did then. Of course the women of Guinée would often swallow their tongues and strangle their own children to take them home to freedom that way. But we had not thought any whitewoman could cut her own limb free of a trap and when we saw her do it, we did not know what to do about her anymore. We let them go by then, without touching them at all, not even taking the water they had with them in the wagon. They moved very slowly, and it was long before they went out of sight, long after the horseman had joined them again. An hour later I looked back and thought I could still see the wagon as a dot or a fleck of ash where the land ran into the smoking sky.
On the afternoon of that day we came upon Jeannot leading a big party back to Le Cap. So many they were they’d swollen from the road and many were walking over the fields though these were still hot enough to blister your feet. Jeannot was leading them all and carrying a white baby stuck onto a spear. The baby was newborn, or notborn even, and it was not quite dead but could still move its arms and legs a little the way a frog does when you stick it. I looked at it wondering why if it was not dead it did not cry.
It was different to see this thing than to make the words that say it—as terrible but in a different way. You cannot understand this when you only see the words I make. I knew this was a thing the whitemen had done before. They carried colored children on spears this way when they were attacking les gens de couleur, their cousins, in the west. But it was different to hear about it than to see it. When I looked I knew for the first time what it was we were doing and what we all wanted although I could not make the words for that either. Riau and Og?n and I all wanted this thing together though we couldn’t say what the thing was, but I knew that I would follow the spear and what was on it, where it would lead me.
Then the whitemen must have known too, carrying such a standard, they must have known where they meant to go. But it was a long time later before I thought of that.
Achille and Aiguy and César-Ami were all in Jeannot’s gang then. Still there was no water I could find but César-Ami had rum so I drank some of that. From them I heard how it was that we were going to Le Cap. There should have been a rising there when the plantations were all burned on the plain, but someone had given up the secret and the whitemen had killed several of the leaders and the others were afraid, so nothing had happened—it was like in Macandal’s time. Also most of them with a taste for killing had come out onto the plain with us.
But Jeannot had got word that the soldiers of Le Cap had set out for Limbé that morning, so with the city naked it seemed that we might take it after all. While we were going there another strange thing happened. A gang of young whitemen, only a few, came riding out toward us with no guns, only whips that they waved and snapped. They ordered us, in our thousands, to go back to our masters on the plantations, and told us our punishment would be light if we obeyed. This was ordinary whiteman madness, not like what that woman had done, but still I think these must have been very stupid young men. They were pulled down off their horses and Jeannot commanded them to be skinned, meaning to send their skins back where they’d come from, as a sign. But whiteman skin is so flimsy we could not get a whole pelt off any of them. At the end they lay flayed on the coals of the cane field screaming and begging for death, and we trampled over them all of us as we went on toward Le Cap, so I think they had died by the time we had all passed over.
We could not come into the city at once because of a fort with guns, so we attacked this fort and the soldiers that were there. It was not a real army that we had yet, and people ran up on the cannon carelessly and many were killed. Later I heard that Paul Lefu was killed this time, but I did not see it. It was only a low earthwork fort and if we did not fear the cannon it was easy to get into it. No one feared. I did not even have to have Og?n in my head that time, but I could be still myself and willing to toss my body away. I was running right behind Achille when he tossed away his gun and wrapped himself around a cannon’s mouth calling out to everyone behind him, “Come, brothers, I am holding it for you!” I saw the artillery sergeant’s eyes swell wide and yellow while Achille grinned at him down the cannon’s barrel and I almost reached him before he fired the touchhole, but not quite. Achille kept grinning and his hands held tight to the gun carriage even after the rest of him had been blown half across the field in a bloody net to catch the others’ faces. I cut the artilleryman’s head half off while he was trying to get his pistol unstuck from his belt and I took the pistol for myself along with the belt and his powder and lead.
The soldiers in the fort surrendered then, believing the game would be played by the rules whitemen use on each other or wanting to believe it. Jeannot lined them up and had their throats cut like cattle at the slaughter and he went from one to the next drinking their blood he caught in his cupped hands and screaming praises to the loa. Many of us did the same. But then the other soldiers came back from Limbé and there was a worse fight. We wanted to shoot the cannons at them but we didn’t know yet how it was with cannons and when we put the balls in before the powder the cannons wouldn’t fire. So after a while the soldiers drove us off.
Achille was killed and again I didn’t know what had happened to the others. I didn’t know what had happened to Jean-Pic or César-Ami, and I didn’t know about Merbillay. We had come farther than we meant from the place in the mountains where the women and children were hidden. After the soldiers chased us away from the fort, most of us went running back to the plain, but I caught a horse I found wandering loose and rode away by myself alone.