Chapter Fifteen
BY MID-NOVEMBER, the Bréda plantation still stood isolate and undisturbed like an islet in the midst of the river of fire which streamed perpetually over Haut du Cap and down to the borders of the city itself. Bayon de Libertat was absent, trapped in Le Cap from the first flare of the insurrection. But there had been no burning or looting, no outrages nor much sign of any disorder at Bréda. A few slaves had slipped off to join the roving bands, no more, while the rest remained at their work, cutting and milling the harvest of cane.
This evening however there was no one at the mill, and most of the slaves had retreated within the doors of their cabins as Toussaint walked toward the grand’case through the cooling of dusk. Before him, a black hen bunched herself and clumsily lifted and flew to a roost on a low branch of an almond tree. Toussaint went on with his boots whispering on the dust of the path. In the garden alongside the grand’case, the desiccated roses hung head downward like paper bells. He climbed the steps and crossed the gallery, knocked on the door frame and waited. In a moment, Madame de Libertat called for him to enter.
The white woman took only a light repast in the evening, some biscuits and a little watered wine. Before the rising, her appetite had been hearty enough, but this abstinence was her only visible reaction to the trouble and otherwise she behaved trustingly, as if all was as usual. When Toussaint arrived, her two daughters had already dined and left the room. She looked at him directly, one finger turning a biscuit crumb in a circle on her plate. Madame de Libertat was younger than her husband, but her eyes were pinched with wrinkles, and her skin had begun to loosen on her face, turning papery as the petals of the roses in the yard. She was solemn but not apparently unhappy. For a few minutes she questioned him on commonplaces and they talked of affairs at the plantation.
“It’s quiet tonight,” she said. “There’s no one singing.”
Without, the fronds of a coconut palm shivered together in the wind with a sound like rain. The breeze stopped and the rattle died away.
“The mill is empty,” said Toussaint.
“Yes,” said Madame de Libertat. “Do take some wine.” At her gesture a housemaid filled a glass from the carafe and passed it to Toussaint, who turned the long stem through his gnarly fingers. The cup itself was scarcely larger than a thimble. He held it without tasting.
“Madame, you have made ready?” he asked with some reluctance. He watched the water-paled liquid revolving in the glass.
“It must be tomorrow?”
“Madame,” Toussaint said. “I could not any longer answer for your safety.”
Madame de Libertat passed a veiny hand across her eyes. A peculiar low drone breathed out of her; she was praying, perhaps. When she looked at him again her eyes were watery and clear.
“And will I ever see this place again?” she asked.
“I will pray and hope for an end of these troubles,” Toussaint said, “as you must, Madame.”
“On doit éspèrer toujours,” said Madame de Libertat. She nodded to him. He was free to go or to remain. He stood, placing the untasted wine glass on the table, and bowed to her and left the house.
Outside the door of his own cabin his brother Paul stood waiting. Toussaint told him that he expected him to drive Madame de Libertat down to Le Cap the next morning, as they had thought. There would be a wagon following with the household goods, as well as the coach carrying the mistress, which Paul would drive himself. Toussaint told Paul that he had already placed a loaded musket under the driver’s seat of the coach; Paul nodded without asking how he had obtained the weapon.
“When you return, I will be gone,” Toussaint said.
“Ouais,” Paul said, unsurprised.
“Stay here—if you can,” Toussaint said. “While you can. Keep order. If there is trouble, you must try to cross to Santo Domingo or come to Grande Rivière. Or I will send you a message.”
“Yes,” Paul said. “I will be waiting.” He reached to touch his brother’s hand and walked away slowly down the row of cabins into the dark which was now complete.
Toussaint sat down on a plank bench just outside his door. Beyond the cabins, in a grove surrounding a watering pool, he could hear the voices of children. Isaac and Placide would be among them; they had already eaten and gone out. Suzanne came out of the house and handed him a bowl of soup. While he ate, she sat on the bench beside him, opening her dress to nurse Saint-Jean. It was a green soup, flavored with lemon grass and thickened with coconut milk. He ate it slowly, without talking at all. When he had finished he set the bowl down on the plank.
“The mistress?” Suzanne said. “I know she will be unhappy to leave this place.”
“She will not show it,” Toussaint said. “All month the countryside has been burning around us and she has not blinked at it once.”
“It’s hard,” Suzanne said. The baby rolled a little forward in her arms, revealing his sleeping face. Cradling him, she closed her dress.
“It may be hard,” Toussaint said. “I think I saw her praying.”
“And you?” Suzanne said. “What gods have you prayed to, my husband?”
Toussaint turned his head to look into the child’s smooth face. In his sleep Saint-Jean squinted and wrinkled his nose.
“What do you know of the nature of god?” Toussaint said. “We must take our gods as they come to us.”
“Jesus has been kind to us,” Suzanne said. “We have a good life here.”
“We have no life,” Toussaint said. “We are like the dead. We are yet to be resurrected.”
Suzanne’s face clouded over; she picked up the bowl with her free hand and carried the sleeping infant into the cabin. Toussaint waited but she did not return. From inside the cabin came a muted clattering. There was little enough for Suzanne to make ready, but he understood that no woman, black slave or Creole lady, liked to abandon a home. He leaned down and pulled his boots off and set them aside. His toes stretched in the dry dust under the bench. Boots were not new to him, but he had only lately taken to wearing them. He sat thinking about his forty-odd years of dependence on the kindness of white people, which kindness had indeed come more freely to him than to most. Silently he said a paternoster to himself in the dark, shaping with his tongue the Latin words he’d learned from Pierre Baptiste. While doing so he thought about Jesus, the frail white man who could transmute weakness into divine power. He thought too of the god who was Jesus’ father, whose son so little resembled him. Afterward his mind went blank and he sat listening to the insects and the leaves of the trees behind the cabins stroking each other with a slow susurration, enjoying the sensation of his feet freed from their boots, and hearing the voices of the children reflected from the pool within the grove.
IN THE MORNING HE APPEARED at the grand’case dressed in his boots and coachman’s livery, wearing the green coat with its faded bloodstains. The Libertat daughters took their seats in the carriage; Toussaint handed Madame de Libertat in to join them, solemn and mute as any slave on any such occasion. When the door was shut upon her, Madame de Libertat stretched her arm through the window, motioning as if she meant to speak, but in the end she only thanked him with a smile. He bowed and walked around the rear of the carriage, and back to the box where Paul was already seated. Toussaint ran his hand under the iron braces and felt the contour of the musket where it was strapped to the underside of the seat. Paul nodded to him, impassively, and as Toussaint stepped aside he slapped the reins across the backs of the teamed horses and the carriage moved out, squealing and jouncing toward the road.
Toussaint backed his way up the steps of the grand’case, watching the wagon fall into the train of the coach. Two lady’s maids and the cook were perched on the bags and bundles in the wagon bed, and Toussaint had sent two men along besides the drover, arming all three as well, in case of any trouble. He knew they would not be likely to meet any of the better-organized bands on the road today, but there was more to fear from the ill-organized ones, of which he could know nothing. When the wagons had left the yard he entered the empty house, closing the door softly behind him. His boots rang notes of vacancy on the bare floors. On one wall a forgotten mirror gathered the light that leaked through the closed jalousies to itself, like a pool in a forest. Behind a chair lay one of the girls’ fans half unfolded and beside it a large black beetle ticking erratically like a broken watch. Toussaint went out at the rear of the house, closing the door with as much caution as if he feared to wake sleepers within. In the garden the roses had wilted further and some were stretched to the length of their stems on the hardening ground.
Within an hour he was headed southeast, mounted on Bellisarius with Isaac riding pillion behind him, while Placide proudly bestrode his own mount, a mule. Suzanne also went muleback, carrying Saint-Jean in a sling. With them were fifteen men from the plantation, all the good saddle horses and half of the mules. The men now openly carried the muskets smuggled from the Spanish. Toussaint was quite certain they would meet no whites in this direction, but there was no way of knowing what else they might encounter. Once in the afternoon a handful of men emerged from the bush and swarmed in a bare rocky area far ahead of them, shouting and blowing on conch shells, but seeing the size and strength of Toussaint’s party, they did not make any closer approach.
They camped at the foot of the mountains near the Spanish border, while there was still good light. Toussaint took off his boots and went barefoot into the jungle, gathering fresh herbs for his sack. It was dark when he returned and Suzanne was cooking over the open fire; one of the men was helping her with a big iron cauldron. They ate in near silence, and slept ringed around the coals of the fire. Placide could not sleep, it seemed; the boy was not afraid, but excited by the journey and by the sight of the two pickets Toussaint had sent out from the camp in opposite directions. Toussaint talked to him in a low voice, identifying the night sounds and what each portended, until Placide slumped against his side and slept. Toussaint covered him and went to relieve his sentries. As for himself he required little sleep; a couple of hours, near dawn, sufficed him.
By first light, they had all remounted and when the sunlight had strengthened enough to filter through the leaves and gild the way ahead of them, the ascent had grown steep. Here Toussaint parted from his wife and children, sending them on up the higher trails in the care of five of the men he’d brought. On the far side of the San Raphael mountains was a boucanier’s camp where they were expected; two of the men he sent with them had been to the place with him before and he was confident they would reach it before night. Isaac rode behind one of the men, clinging with his face pressed to his shirt, but Placide twisted on his mule’s bare back for a look behind. Toussaint saw the baby’s head joggling between Suzanne’s shoulders where he was slung, but Suzanne did not look back. The trail wrapped snakelike around the mountain. He watched the smaller party out of sight around an inward turning and waited until they reappeared on the next elbow, though by then their faces were too distant to discern.
On the descent he passed the others he’d kept with him, and rode Belisarius out ahead of them all, alone. Some of the saddle horses might have kept pace with him, but not the whole string of horses and mules; they would come along a day later to Grande Rivière, which was where he was bound. He pushed hard, stopping only once to fill his gourd with water and add a few herbs to his sack: malnommée, guérit-trop-vite, herbe à cornette. In the late afternoon he came down into Gallifet plantation where Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou were encamped.
“Happy as a nigger of Gallifet” had been a proverb of the colony, for here the slaves had been treated with much the same providence as at Bréda. But now there were no masters kind or otherwise, save Biassou and Jean-Fran?ois—Boukman was raiding around Le Cap and Jeannot was camped at a little distance, near Habitation Dufailly. If happiness still obtained here, its character had changed. The Gallifet grand’case was still standing, alone among ruins of the mill and other outbuildings that had been burned and pulled down, and the big house now surveyed a waste of smoking ash and cinder where there had once been cane fields. On the borders of the destruction the blacks rested or wandered as it suited them. There was little shade or shelter except within the jungle green.
Toussaint came in with a stream of blacks, for there were more and more of them flooding into the camp every day, now mostly loyal slaves who would not have run away from their plantations if they had not been driven by white reprisals against any black skin within reach. If anyone gave him a second glance it was because he was one of the few with a horse and that his was better than all the others. Among the newcomers he rode the trail along the riverbank.
At a bend of the river, backed into the jungle cover, there was a tent where Toussaint dismounted. The tent was strung with curious little bones and the doorflap decorated with ouangas. He was looking for Biassou, but the tent was vacant except for three multicolored cats that burst out when he lifted the canvas. Also there were two large snakes coiled in a tightly woven Carib basket, curled in a torpor of black and chocolate brown. Toussaint let the flap drop.
Of the three original leaders of the rising, Toussaint now thought Jean-Fran?ois the most reliable, was inclined to trust him above Boukman or Jeannot. Both of these latter (though in rather different ways) had seemed unable to recall themselves from the first delirious frenzy of revenge upon the whites. As for Biassou he had come more lately to leadership and was less of a known quantity, though the accoutrements of his tent would seem to confirm his reputation as a h?ngan.
Somewhere up the river, in the direction of Jeannot’s separate encampment, a peculiar sound was audible; it might have been the echo of a scream. Toussaint shook his head and led his horse in the direction of the Gallifet grand’case, where Jean-Fran?ois was established. The distance was not very great; Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou still acted together in close concert.
Jean-Fran?ois met him coming from the house, resplendent in a gray uniform with yellow facings, a black cordon ornamented with white fleurs-de-lis. On his chest was pinned an Order of Saint Louis he’d taken from a house they’d sacked and the whole ensemble was completed with polished top boots, a plumed hat, and an enormous cavalry sword whose sheath squeaked against his belt as he walked. Someone in his retinue took Toussaint’s horse away to be groomed and fed, while Toussaint retained only the herb bag that he’d carried across the saddle.
“You’ve come to stay?” said Jean-Fran?ois.
Toussaint pushed back his bandanna to scratch at the crown of his head. There was something floating down the river toward them, an oddly thick and pale piece of wood with a short crook at one end of it.
“It will be useful,” said Jean-Fran?ois. “Since you are a dokté-feuilles.” With a finger he prodded the fragrant bag of herbs.
“There’s illness,” Toussaint said.
“No more than usual,” said Jean-Fran?ois. “Some are wounded. Among the white people, a little fever.”
“How many whites?” Toussaint said.
Jean-Fran?ois shook his head. “I haven’t counted. It’s Biassou who’s interested…”
It was the hostage white women that interested Biassou, Toussaint was well enough aware of that. He moved a little nearer to the strange object in the water. As it drifted toward the bank, an eddy turned it over and they both saw that the clubbed end of it was in fact a white man’s foot, with only the great toe remaining and the others all severed individually. The leg had been cut off just above the knee. It caught itself on a snag of sticks and stones, tendrils of hair waving out from the dead flesh of the calf.
“Caymans,” Jean-Fran?ois said, under Toussaint’s interrogative look.
“Not a toe at a time,” Toussaint said. “That’s not a cayman’s appetite.”
“No—it’s from Jeannot,” Jean-Fran?ois said, looking away upriver. He drew out his huge sword with a grating sound and used the point to push the leg free of the snag and back into the current.
“It must not go on,” Toussaint said. “It ought never to have begun.”
“You know they do as much to us, and more,” Jean-Fran?ois said. “The white people.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Toussaint said. “We must act differently with them.”
“You say this because you are a Christian,” Jean-Fran?ois said.
“We will show the white people what we are,” Toussaint said. “And also what we are not.”
Jean-Fran?ois began a question, but an upheaval a way downriver distracted him. A small party of horsemen was crossing the burned fields below the Gallifet grand’case, surrounded by a larger throng of men on foot, stirring up great clouds of flaky ash. All of them were shouting something but nothing could be distinguished beyond the name of Boukman. A rider broke from the main body and came cantering toward them. It was Biassou, his squat toad’s body uneasy in the saddle, his hands high and loose on the reins. With some difficulty he pulled the horse up and stared at Jean-Fran?ois and Toussaint, his face running sweat and his flat nostrils flaring.
“Boukman’s killed,” he said, too loudly. For a moment it seemed he would lower his tone and give details, but a convulsion passed over his features and he kicked up the horse and rode off crying “Boukman tué, Boukman tué,” mechanically, as if an outside intelligence governed him. It was what they were all shouting, spreading dismay throughout the whole encampment.
“Boukman,” Jean-Fran?ois said, his face wrenched with genuine pain. “How could it happen?”
“Easily,” Toussaint said. “He ran in calling on Agwé and Og?n, waving a bull’s tail around his head and thinking it would fan the bullets away from him. What’s surprising is that Biassou has not been killed, since he tells everyone that whoever dies in these fights goes back all at once to Guinée.”
Jean-Fran?ois looked at him aghast.
“Yes, I know it may be true,” Toussaint said. He took off his bandanna and shook it out. “It’s what happens here in this world that interests me more.”
“You say we must become white men, then?”
Toussaint smoothed the bandanna over his forehead and reknotted it at the base of his neck. “You look very well in your uniform,” he said. “Have you become white? You may put on more than their dress and still remain what you are.”
“I am the grand admiral and commander-in-chief,” Jean-Fran?ois said stiffly.
“Yes,” Toussaint said. “And neither of us kills our horses recklessly. So the loa must not kill their horses without reason. Who serves the loa must be served in return.”
Jean-Fran?ois looked at him narrowly.
“It isn’t Boukman,” Toussaint said. “It’s any life that’s wasted.” He smiled and shook his bag of herbs. “Come and show me to the ones who need these things.”