Chapter Seventeen
PèRE DUGUIT, THE PRIEST OF LIMBé, visited the white women held prisoner in Jeannot’s camp at Habitation Dusailly. As always when he first entered their enclosure he loudly offered a prayer for their well-being, and then solicited confessions, though none were forthcoming. A stout lady in middle age transfixed him with a stare of pure fury. The younger women simply turned their faces from him.
Père Duguit was a tall man, skinny as a thrashing stick, with long angular boney features, tunnel eyes and eyebrows tufted like the ears of a cat. The hem of his cassock was all in rags and he wore sandals so soleless he might as well have gone barefoot. His feet were painfully riddled with sores full of burrowing worms—a mortification, as he sometimes observed with a certain air of spiritual pride. A slight fever lingered with him also, though he took it as a form of intoxication.
His mind wandered, along the mazy windings of his fever. He looked about himself, dazed as if drunk. The grove of new-growth sabliers in which the white women were contained was fenced about with creeper weavings, more a symbol of a line they must not cross than any effective physical barrier. There was in any event nowhere for them to flee. The Creole ladies among them had erected some flimsy lean-to shelters, thatched with banana leaves; these were partially successful in keeping off the rains, which increased with the advance of the season.
Père Duguit squinted up toward the mountains which rose beyond the river. Another small dark squall was idling over the slate-gray peaks; it was unclear if it might blow in their direction. Between them and the river stretched a cinder-strewn desert which had once been a cane field, and farther off there was a planting of bananas that had survived the holocaust, long flat leaves twisting like mule ears in the breeze. At the edge of the jungle proper there stood an outbuilding or small house that must have gone to ruin many years before the insurrection. A full-grown tree thrust out of the wrecked roof, with orange blossoms upturned like cups toward the uncertain sky. The priest was startled to see a brown nanny goat poke its head over a plank that barred the dark doorway of the crumbling building—surprised that no one had killed and eaten it. His stomach contracted round a vacuum. Perhaps the goat was being kept for milk.
The wail of a crying baby brought the priest’s attention back to the women’s enclosure. Some of the white women were attending as best they might to the infants who’d survived the first carnage of the insurrection, and a few older children ran about with a weary carelessness, their faces smudged with dirt. Père Duguit watched a lank-haired Creole wife awkwardly try to suckle a baby who until the change of circumstance would have been put to wet nurse; the mother had not enough milk and the child was crying. Another woman was watching too—milk began to move in a spreading stain on the fabric of her chemise. Murmuring, she took the crying child and loosened her garment and began to nurse it. Père Duguit regarded her; he knew this woman from Acul, and knew that she’d lost her own newborn the night the first plantations burned. That child would be in Limbo now, the priest reminded himself automatically. He studied the nursing woman, breast and thigh, and she stared back at him, her jaw set, an iron hostility burning out of her rust-red eyes. She was well formed, but would not suit Biassou—a problem of comportment.
He passed on, observing the younger girls with sidelong glances. Some of the black women had come into the enclosure and were bringing out the older women they’d taken to be servants, those who were too old to interest the black men as concubines or who’d been so used and then abandoned. These would be taken to the river to wash clothes, or to dig in the provision grounds or to grind meal and do cooking. The stout woman went out among them, and Père Duguit was pleased to see her go, misliking the uncharitable way she always looked at him.
As he paced, his gnarly hands twining together behind his back, he caught a sort of flinching movement from the corner of his eye. Something that he’d learned to value. He moved in. The girl was sitting on a stump, her head cast down. There’d been some others standing near her but they dispersed sullenly as he approached. Hélène was her name; she was eighteen or nineteen, probably. Père Duguit did not know just where she’d come from, though perhaps she was also from Acul. Her head of dark hair was neat and clean—remarkable really, as these captives were infrequently given enough water to wash. He took her chin in his hand and examined her face. Her lips trembled and her eyes were full, so he was unprepared for the quick slash of her nails across his cheek.
“A little cat,” he hissed, and caught her wrist as she tried a second time. He twisted her arm down toward her bosom, and leaned in closer to smell her breath, as a buyer might do with a slave on the block. Her jaws were clenched but somehow he was convinced all the same that the breath would be sweet. Her mouth worked and he saw that she would spit at him. He let go her arm and drew back out of range.
“You must cultivate humility, my child,” he began. “Meekness and complaisance are most pleasing to God.”
Hélène dropped her head, turning her face aside, and he admired the whiteness of her throat as it emerged from the torn neck of her dress. That burst of spirit seemed drained from her now, but still it was a becoming pose, and her figure was good. He ran a hand across his cheek. It stung where she had scratched at him, but his fingertips came away clean; she’d drawn no blood. He flushed a little, perhaps from his fever, as he went on explaining to her in a low tone the opportunities for humility which would be provided to her on that night or the next.
A few moments later he was walking across the main compound of Habitation Dusailly where Jeannot was encamped, chewing absently on half a cold yam he had picked up somewhere. Pus pumped out of his infected feet as he walked, but he was scarcely aware of the pain, or of the orange pulp of yam squeezing out the corners of his mouth. He was approaching a long brick building formerly used for the roasting of coffee, where the imprisoned men were now locked up. Within sight of the iron gate, the priest tossed away the end of his yam. From behind the grille, one of the prisoners cursed at him.
“You throw your food to the rats,” he complained, “while we’ve had nothing these last two days but three rotten bananas and a bit of an ox’s ear…”
The prisoner’s lips were also cracked with thirst, so much so he had difficulty speaking. Père Duguit stopped at the gate, a thin smile on his lips, and breathed in the stench of human excrement. The prisoners were in irons and had no choice but to let their feces fall at their heels and remain there. There were some twenty whites. On a camp bed was stretched a half-conscious, militia officer, his back caked with blood from the two hundred lashes he’d received the previous day. There were also a few blacks who still professed loyalty to the white masters, and these too had been put in chains.
A drum began beating, off to the rear. Père Duguit recognized the approach of Jeannot’s cortège. His own heart swelled and throbbed in time. “Mes enfants,” he said in a loud voice. “Il faut savoir mourir, notre Seigneur Jesus Christ est mort pour nous sur la croix.” Then his heart ballooned into his throat and he was unable to say anything more.
Jeannot marched into the compound surrounded by the blacks and mulattoes who were closest to him. The drum continued to pulse slowly as the black Chacha Godard unlocked the gate and led out the white prisoners. His heart still beating powerfully, Père Duguit contemplated his instruction to them. You must learn how to die, as our Lord Jesus Christ died for us on the cross.
Jeannot watched the captives for a time, silently. Sometimes he would lecture the prisoners before beginning, but today he said nothing. He was a small man, muscular and coal black, with a Chinese slant to his eyes. He wore a military coat with no shirt beneath it and his chest and belly were glossy with palm oil. His eye stopped on a grand blanc who’d been captured with the rest.
“White man, you are too tall,” Jeannot said. “Chacha, will you lower him for me?”
There followed a brief struggle which ended with the planter flattened on the ground, a black kneeling on each of his arms and a third sitting on his head. His bare ankles protruded from the legirons. Chacha Godard walked toward him casually, carrying a two-handed woodsman’s ax. Père Duguit watched avidly, pricked his ears for the crunch of bone. Abstractedly, he picked a crust of yam from the edge of his lip with a long horny fingernail. The other whites looked down inexpressively—to close one’s eyes or turn away meant joining the victim, if Jeannot noticed it, and they were to a degree inured to such sights by the events of the past few days. The drum continued grumbling throughout.
When the operation was complete, Jeannot took a step nearer to evaluate the result, chuckling in his throat as the blacks tried to balance the moaning planter on his stumps. With no feet to retain them the irons had slipped loose. Jeannot concluded that the white man was now too short, and ordered that he be hung upside down from a tree limb to see if this procedure might lengthen him to a happy medium.
Père Duguit knelt near the planter’s lightly swaying head, to offer him extreme unction, but he seemed incapable of response. Footless as he’d now become, he swung from nooses at his knees, and his severed ankles drooled blood onto the ground where his loose hair was dragging…Père Duguit finished the ceremony and walked away to a seat behind a board laid across two kegs, a desk of sorts where he waited until his services would again be necessary. His eyes slipped out of focus for a moment; the board blurred and then reclarified. A strange metallic sort of millipede was crawling down one of the barrels, shiny as a polished bayonet. Strange how it seemed to advance without moving its multiple sections. The priest tracked it into a heap of yellowing leaves, where two mantises were engaged in their devouring act of copulation. Père Duguit thought to separate them, but knew it was impossible; they would suffer themselves to be dismembered before they would desist.
Jeannot had meanwhile caused two other whites to be bound to ladders. At his gesture, Chacha Godard went up to one of them and struck him a lazy blow with the ax. The stroke bruised as much as it cut, but there was a popping sound and a gasp from the victim that suggested it must have broken a rib. Chacha laid the ax aside, drew a small sharp knife from his belt and approached the second white man. He pushed up his chin and made a shallow cut all along the jawbone, not piercing anything vital.
Jeannot stood by, a watch in his hand. Père Duguit knew from past experience that it would be precisely fifteen minutes before he ordered the next cut. He bethought himself of writing a note to Biassou, detailing the evening’s delectation. There was paper and a stub of charcoal in a cloth bag swung from his cassock’s belt. He spread a bit of paper on the plank and licked the charcoal and began.
“J’ai disposé la dame une telle à vous recevoir cette nuit…” He thought for a moment, picturing the attitude of Hélène when he had first noticed her. “Vous n’avez jamais eu de telle jouissance, mon cher Biassou, que celle qui vous attend ce soir…”*9
Idly he looked about. The drummer’s long flat palms caressed the skin of the drum’s head, but despite the noise from the drum the priest felt that he could also hear the sound of Jeannot’s watch. Of a sudden, the planter began to scream and thrash, scattering droplets of blood in a semicircle from his stumps. A barefoot black walked up and kicked him in the face; his head snapped back and his screams subsided to a gurgle. The priest was thrilled to his fingertips. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured random scenes from the Inquisition, each sin and heresy meticulously extracted. His face stung slightly and he saw Hélène’s face as she’d looked when she had struck him. He opened his eyes and wrote again.
“La petite de fait la reveche mais apportez de la pitre pour la disposer à souscrire à vos désirs…”?10
Jeannot turned his watch over in his hand and coughed out an order. Chacha Godard took out his knife again and drew his thumb down along the blade to the point. In the woods all around, the birds were chattering, and the beat of the drum became harsher and drier. Père Duguit looked abstractedly at the two men bound to the ladders. He signed his name to the letter and folded it in three.
THE WHITE MEN HAD BEEN DYING on the ladders for four hours, sixteen cuts apiece, when Choufleur and the Sieur Maltrot strolled up to join the rear of the audience: the white prisoners who were bound to watch, and those of the blacks bloodthirsty enough to appreciate this spectacle. Maltrot arranged himself in a cantilevered pose, like a Greek statue, resting the tip of his sword stick on the toe of his opposite boot. His brocaded coat was dusty with travel and his breeches were sweat-stained where they’d been in contact with the saddle, but apart from these details he appeared much as he would have on the street of any city. Choufleur stood foursquare, his arms folded, wearing a white shirt open at the neck.
Maltrot twitched, and moved his hands restively on the pommel of his cane. Jeannot had given a low grunting order and, under the direction of Chacha Godard, three blacks were untying the first white man from his ladder. They carried him, dazed and bleeding, to a zaman tree in whose trunk had been set an enormous butcher’s hook, seven or eight feet off the ground. Standing on a stack of packing cases, the blacks raised the white man and adjusted his jaw above the hook’s point. Chacha Godard yanked him down sharply by the waist to set the hook, using such force that the point broke out one of the man’s lower teeth as it curled around the jawbone and emerged from his mouth.
The drumbeat turned still more shallow, dry as the whisper of dead leaves. The white man had been comatose, but under this new stimulation he enjoyed a remarkable return to life. He hugged the tree and tried to climb it, but Chacha Godard twisted his arms away and a black man tied his wrists behind him with long strips of liana. The white man hung, kicking his feet against the tree trunk. His chest and belly grumbled with a suffocated scream, but his own weight sealed his throat shut so it could not escape. Above, the rounded leaves of almond tree fanned him gently.
“You must have these monstrosities stopped immediately,” said the Sieur Maltrot. His tone was customarily crisp, though he kept his voice low. His eyes cut from the hooked man to the suspended planter, who had died a couple of hours previously and was just beginning to stiffen where he hung.
“Be careful,” Choufleur said. “You’re not master here.”
“I believe that was a friend of mine,” Maltrot said, looking at the planter’s blotchy face with an evident fascination. “Or an acquaintance, rather.”
Jeannot was whispering something to Chacha Godard, who signaled for his assistants to reverse the ladder on which the second man was strapped, so that he hung upside down. Godard knelt at his side, his short knife drawn. The white man’s eyes rolled toward the blade and then away. Jeannot was kneeling also, holding out an odd round cup or drinking bowl, which had a curious mass of tendrils dangling from it, as if it had been rooted in the ground…. Maltrot saw that the bowl was in fact a scooped-out cranium, with a dried scalp clinging to its underside, and the trailing hair. As he made this recognition, Godard jerked a short deep cut in the white man’s neck as one might bleed a hog. Blood gushed over the edges of the skull and matted the hair where it hung beneath and spilled over to darken the gold braid on the cuffs of Jeannot’s coat. Jeannot stood up ceremoniously, holding the brimming skull out from himself like a chalice. He looked at the man hooked to the tree as if he meant to propose a toast to him.
“How good it is,” Jeannot pronounced, “how sweet—the blood of the white people.” He raised the skull to his lips and drank, blood running from the corners of his mouth and separating into threads as it mingled with the oil on the bare skin of his chest. Maltrot hiccuped and looked away, toward the scarecrow of a priest who sat behind a sort of bench, watching the proceedings with a rapt attention. Then he looked at Choufleur’s freckled profile.
“It isn’t that such things occur,” he said. “It’s that you permit them to be shown to me.”
Choufleur did not react, and Maltrot waited. Waiting, he drew out his snuffbox, took his dip and sneezed. A few of the black men gathered around looked at him curiously.
“A certain decorum ought to be maintained,” Maltrot said. “But you have fractured it. I meant to say as well that instructions appear to have been exceeded quite drastically all around.”
Choufleur broke from his reverie, and gave Maltrot a distant look.
“Come with me,” he said. “They’ve finished here.”
As he turned moving toward the edge of the central compound, he made a covert movement with his hand, and a group of five black men began following them at a little distance. They walked a way in silence, climbing through the terraced coffee trees.
“Who was that devil of a priest?” the Sieur Maltrot inquired. He paused, resting with one hand on his hip. His face was lightly broken out with sweat. Choufleur looked back at him noncommitally and climbed ahead.
They entered a trail that passed through the jungle and wound toward the bluff above the river. It was cool and shady under the thick-laced forest roof, and all around was the damp smell of leaf mold. A macaw flicked across the way ahead of them. Maltrot looked back, and saw that the five men were still following them, two dozen paces back.
“Who are those fellows?” he called to Choufleur. “Have they no work?”
“They work as they are ordered,” Choufleur said, without turning. His back receded on the trail, a shifting patch of white on the dense green.
Maltrot shrugged and kept following him. They came out together on the bluff’s edge, where the sound of the water rushing downriver reached them much more clearly. The river turned through coffee trees planted almost to its edge. It was a pleasant vista, on the whole. At the bend of the river, a party of the men who’d assisted Godard were dumping dismembered parts of bodies into the water.
“Nous sommes arrivés,” Choufleur said. He stood on the balls of his feet, beneath a tree lurid with red flowers whose stamens lolled from the blooms like tongues.
“Arrivés où?” said the Sieur Maltrot.
“á la fin du monde,” Choufleur said. “Tu comprends ?a?”
Maltrot swung at him with his stick, but Choufleur caught the end of it with an even quicker movement. Maltrot let him try his strength for a minute or more. They set themselves against each other, Choufleur straining to twist the stick out of his grip. Then Maltrot released the catch and whipped free the blade, leaving Choufleur unbalanced, holding the empty wooden sheath. He might have skewered the mulatto then, but instead he only grazed the sword’s point across his cheek.
“Was that your game?” Maltrot said. “Tu oses me tutoyer, toi? Get down, ungrateful cur, and beg my pardon.”
Choufleur stepped out of the blade’s reach and touched the butt of a pistol stuck in his belt.
“Is that it?” Maltrot said. “Shoot, then. I’d welcome it—compared to what I’ve seen.”
Choufleur winked. A black arm wrapped across Maltrot’s neck; his arms were pinned by several hands. He’d forgotten the men on the trail behind, and now they’d overtaken him. The hands were peeling his grip from the sword stick, finger by finger. Choufleur moved near him, and Maltrot kicked him neatly in the groin. Choufleur gasped and dropped into a crouch, gagging from the pain. But Maltrot could not get free of the other men. The sword stick was taken from him. The black men tied him carefully into the heart of the blooming tree.
“Enough,” Choufleur said. “Go now.”
The black men retreated down the trail. Choufleur approached the flowering tree, with a mincing step from his injured groin. Maltrot wriggled his fingers; it was the most that he could do. They’d tied his legs below the knee so that he could not kick again.
Choufleur reached into Maltrot’s vest pocket, took out the snuffbox and wrinkled his nose at the powder inside. He poured the snuff out on the ground and put the box in his own trousers pocket.
Maltrot’s face had turned quite gray. “You must remember,” he began, in a level, formal tone. “I’ve shown you every consideration, every generosity. I gave you education, sent you off to Paris, sparing no expense. I’ve given you land and slaves of your own.”
Choufleur drew a knife from his belt and ran his tongue along the blade. Maltrot choked.
“I am your father,” he said flatly.
“Do you acknowledge it?” Choufleur said.
“Yes,” Maltrot said. “Yes—and publicly, if you like.”
“If it is true,” Choufleur said, “then you gave me a nigger to be my mother.”
He cut a bracelet all around Maltrot’s wrist, just above the thong that bound it to the branch. He made a vertical incision into the palm and turned back the flaps of skin from the whitish fatty layer underneath and began peeling it back toward the fingertips as if he were slowly taking off a glove. Maltrot ground his teeth and bit his lips till the blood ran freely, but finally he could not contain the scream and when it came it was large and loud enough to split the sky.
DOCTOR HéBERT was coming upriver along the bluffs from Biassou’s encampment, in the company or custody of a black man he’d come to know as Jean-Pic. In his pocket was a safe conduct in the name of Biassou. It was Toussaint, however, who’d signed Biassou’s name to the paper—a curious instrument, the doctor thought, for none of the people who challenged him in his perigrinations could read it. And yet in every case where he was required to produce it, the document would be scrutinized (upside down or sideways like as not) and its talismanic significance acknowledged. He would pass. He was, as had been said of certain privileged slaves, liberté de savane—meaning that he was at liberty to go more or less where he liked, but without being truly free. The constant presence of Jean-Pic or someone like him also served as both protection and restraint.
With Jean-Pic he had been crisscrossing the bluff trail, making little ventures into the surrounding jungle to collect medicinal herbs Toussaint had taught him to recognize, and also other plants which were unknown to him and which he believed Toussaint might identify. The black man had a skill with medicinal herbs, some of which he’d used to poultice and soak the doctor’s hurt ankle. Doctor Hébert was not entirely certain of their efficacy but he had recovered most of his mobility with good speed.
He was just reaching into a cluster of bamboo to pluck a section of a climbing vine with fragrant trefoil leaves and small white star-shaped flowers when the air all around him was cleaved by a scream. It was not precisely an unfamiliar sound; the doctor had grown somewhat accustomed to hearing it at some distance upriver from Biassou’s camp. But now it seemed to be just at his feet. He thought that he must have strayed nearer than he should have to Jeannot’s encampment, or perhaps Jean-Pic had lured him here deliberately, and this idea frightened him. But he saw that Jean-Pic was as startled as he, was parting the fronds of bamboo with great caution so that he could look down on what was happening below.
The doctor stepped up softly and looked over Jean-Pic’s shoulder. At the bamboo’s edge there was an abrupt drop of some fifteen feet, and below, the blooming tree. The doctor noticed the tree first, its flowers such a fresh and vegetable red that all the blood seemed flat and dull beside them. He was aware of the rank bloody smell. There was a man, two men, one operating upon the other with a concentrated and scientific precision.
The doctor had seen this sight before, or something like it, and indeed his own position on a height above reminded him all the more strongly of the operating theaters of his training, where he had learned anatomy. With the difference that here the subject was screamingly alive. The epidermis had been peeled away strategically to reveal the workings of the musculature on the hands and arms and thighs; even the cheeks were laid bare, and the lips had been cut away (so that the man must scream without a proper mouth to do it with). Two tendons had been severed, so that the large muscles of the thigh hung down below the trembling genitalia, and above these, an incision had been made into the body cavity. The operator pulled out the mass of intestines, straightened out the kinks in them and let them drop. He reached within and laid his curious hand on the liver, the spleen, the palpitating heart.
The operator was a mulatto, oddly freckled—the doctor felt he’d seen him somewhere before. The subject, on the other hand, was skinless now, deracinated, transmogrified into the internal self he possibly had always been, raw human nature laid bare to greasy viscera and a scream. The doctor had seen the assembly of these parts oftentimes before in his own chilly dissections—but this was life itself. Unconsciously he mutilated the vine he’d plucked between his fingers; new fragrance rose from the crushed leaves. He felt through his nausea and terror that he was witnessing something well beyond torture or murder. Though he could not understand or grasp it, he was seeing what it meant to be human. This was a sincere inquiry into the nature of man, not how a man is made and how his parts cooperate, but what a man is, in his essence, and who, in the final analysis, would be allowed to be one.