Chapter Nineteen
DOCTOR HéBERT SAT ON A STONE high above the riverbank. Behind him was the bustle and whir of Biassou’s camp; ahead, large boulders tumbled down into the water and partway across the river stream. Near the water a calabash tree was growing, oddly decorated with cords the blacks had tied around the gourds to shape them as they grew, for later use. Round the tree’s foot sprouted rich red-blossoming fronds of what the doctor had heard from Toussaint was a sort of ginger.
A tickling on the back of his hand distracted him. Looking down he saw a small olive-green beetle with one yellow spot in the center of its back, walking over the hairs on his skin. Involuntarily he started and the beetle cracked its carapace and flew in a silent whirring of its transparent wings. The doctor raised his head toward the river, where five or six of the captive white women stood waist deep in the cold water, laying out clothes on boulders and scrubbing them with smaller stones. From the bank, a gaggle of black women gossiped among themselves, and occasionally called out instructions and commands. This latter group was dressed in a mélange of slave garments and finery looted from the plantations. Many of the clothes the white women were laundering might formerly have been their own.
The doctor’s eye was on one of them in particular, a dark-haired girl wringing out a white chemise: Hélène. There was something about her that recalled Elise to him, though they hardly resembled one another, unless in bearing or in attitude. The doctor had not seen his sister for so long he sometimes wondered if he’d know her, if she did appear before him, changed as these women had been transformed. Hélène spread the chemise out on a boulder and scoured it with hands chapped and reddened by the cold water; her lips were pursed, and he thought that perhaps she was even humming as she worked. He studied her profile, wondering what Elise might be doing at this moment (if she were still alive) and if he’d ever see the niece he’d heard of. He had attended Hélène for a time after Biassou had discarded her, and had, a week previously, believed that she would likely die. She had been cruelly used by the black general (as he styled himself), probably by others in his retinue as well, and for her unwillingness she’d been injured in more ways than one, and cast off all the sooner. The doctor had treated the weals on her thighs and buttocks with herb poultices Toussaint had taught him to prepare, embarrassed to see the damaged flesh and touch it, doubting that his ministrations would be of great use. But the girl had surprised him by rallying suddenly, as if the ordeal had cut through to a powerful resilience at her core, and she seemed stronger now, more cheerful than she ever had before.
A mulattress, Marotte, called her to the bank. Hélène waded till she was no more than ankle deep, her thin legs storklike under the wet mass of skirt strapped up around her thighs. She shook out the chemise and displayed it to Marotte’s critical eye. The doctor could see no blemish on its striking whiteness, but Marotte frowned and sent her back, with large theatrical gestures, to continue the washing. Hélène took it meekly enough, expressionless as she carried the chemise back to the boulder she’d been using as a washboard. The black women tittered among themselves at some insult Marotte called after her as she went.
Behind them there began an outcry, men’s voices raised in anger in the camp. The doctor went quite rigid when he heard it; he could even feel his testicles retract. Among the rebels there was always some faction in favor of killing all the white prisoners on the spot, though as a rule they were not so badly treated in this camp, where some of them, like the doctor, were free to wander as they wished, like officers on parole. But since he had seen the white man flayed in the blossoming tree, the doctor had been wary of where his wandering might lead him. There was a fear that twisted his vitals and never really left him, tremulous below the outward aspect he struggled to keep mute. But in the camp the tumult quickly died, and he relaxed a little, watching a green-headed hummingbird flick among some vines beside him and pause to hover before a barely opened bud. The hummingbird flew. Restively the doctor shifted his buttocks on the stone. He reached into his pocket and took out the shard of mirror he’d picked up from the ruin of Nanon’s rooms and somehow managed to retain all through his wanderings. Cupping the small reflection in his palm, he scanned his face section by section: eyes bloodshot and sunken darkly in the sockets, face scratched and grubby, rough beard growing down his throat.
Again Marotte ordered Hélène out of the water. The doctor pocketed his glass and raised his head to look. The white girl shook the dripping chemise out at her arm’s length, revealing that the fabric had gone threadbare under too much scrubbing, holes appearing in it here and there. Marotte raised her voice and cursed Hélène for her stupidity, begging her to look more closely at the damage her carelessness had caused. The doctor remembered the mulattress from Arnaud’s house, and he thought it was there she must have learned the language and the gestures she now employed. These were the caprices of Madame Arnaud which Marotte was reenacting, as was strictly natural, certainly—as chains of being bound her to do. There was, after all, something quite impersonal about it. The two woman were of a height and similarly slender, though Marotte was perhaps ten years the elder. The doctor watched her slap at Hélène’s face, but weakly, meaning to shame her more than to do real physical hurt. The white girl turned her head just ahead of the blow, so the yellow hand just grazed her cheek in passing, and remained with her face averted, eyes cast down.
Toussaint was coming over the rocks, his small jockey’s body erect and surely balanced, despite his slick boot soles. He snatched the chemise from between the two women and held it at eye level. Inserting his fingers in one of the larger holes, he ripped the whole thing down the middle. Cowed, the black women fell silent on the bank. Toussaint said nothing, as if the tearing were enough to rebuke Marotte’s perversity. He passed between the women and came up toward the doctor, methodically tearing the cloth into long strips they’d use for bandages, once dry.
As he reached Doctor Hébert, Toussaint turned and glanced back toward the women, smiling faintly in one corner of his mouth. Marotte had turned her back to Hélène, disdaining the white girl as she gathered up the washing. The black women’s voices recommenced, a little softer than before. The doctor watched Hélène raise the sodden bundle to her head; she could not balance it as a black woman would, without using a hand to steady it. He got up and followed Toussaint’s beckoning. By now the ankle scarcely pained him at all, but his cracked ribs had healed more slowly, and he felt a jolt from them upon first rising from his seat.
The sick and wounded lay on pallets in a grove uphill from the main encampment, under a wall-less ajoupa thatched over with palm leaves against the rain. There were a few white people here, mostly fallen ill with fever, and many more blacks, some wounded in skirmishes with the white men in the hill forts all around, others from fighting among themselves, which was almost equally common. Toussaint made rounds as a white doctor might, but with less presumption, stooping to speak softly to each invalid who waked. Unlike the other blacks who held position, he had not tricked himself out in any quasi-official regalia, wearing only his coachman’s livery still, the worn green coat with its old stains, bare of the decorations the other self-appointed officers liked to flaunt. Still, the odd assortment of h?ngans and leaf-doctors over whom Toussaint had at least a nominal authority paid as much respect to the faded bandanna knotted over his head as they would to a general’s bicorne cap.
It was something to be a dokté-feuilles, Doctor Hébert had come to recognize. He felt that his own education had begun anew from the first days he’d been held in the encampment. Despite the rustic situation, Toussaint adhered to a standard of cleaniness higher than that the doctor had known in many French hospitals, and he had for the most part dissuaded the lesser h?ngans from practices such as packing wounds with dirt. As for Doctor Hébert himself, he’d largely been demoted to the status of surgeon, amputating injured limbs that were past saving, a point on which he and Toussaint did not always agree.
A few feet outside the ajoupa’s roof, an old woman called Ti-Jeanne tended a fire and a boiling cauldron. Herbs dried on a latticed rack beside the fire, and she used them to prepare the various infusions. The doctor went to help her with this work. He’d learned that the plants of the colony had virtues quite unknown in Europe, and many of these were now unlocked for him. A tisane of armoire could halt the course of dysentery. For cough, one brewed a mixture of several flowers: gombo, giromon, herbe à cornette, and pectoral. A tea of herbe à pique was effective against fever…The doctor crumbled leaves between his fingers, combined them in the bottoms of the gourds, while the old woman ladled boiling water over them. Abstracted as he was, it took him a moment to respond to the voice of Toussaint, slightly raised to call him.
Toussaint knelt at the side of a young man, who’d been quite badly hurt in a fight, no doubt over some woman or other. He’d been struck a glancing cutlass blow on the outside of his upper arm, which stripped the meat away from the bone and left the severed muscles hanging. The doctor saw him as an immediate candidate for the surgeon’s saw, for such a mangling wound must certainly go to gangrene. Left to himself, he’d have taken the arm off at the shoulder.
Now Toussaint signaled him to change the dressing on the wound. The injured man turned his head and grinned at the doctor as he loosened the bandage, no mean impression in itself, since a few days earlier he’d have moaned in pain at the lightest touch on the injured arm. Inside the binding, the wound had resolved into an inch-wide gash from shoulder to elbow, crusted over and puckering at the edges. There was no proud flesh, no pus when the doctor probed the edges with his fingertips, though the other’s breath came hissing hard. The wound smelt clean, and it was healing from the bottom. The doctor nodded and withdrew his hand and Toussaint began anointing the cut with a paste he’d ground in a shallow wooden bowl: aloe, guèrit-trop-vite, and mal dormi—medicinal herb used in plasters. Finished, he bandaged over the ointment and stood up, smiling sidelong at the doctor.
“White people are sometimes too free with other people’s limbs…”
Doctor Hébert did not know if he were being accused or taken into a confidence. He simply nodded, feeling quite deracinated by Toussaint’s remark, as if he no longer belonged to any category. He could recall, as well, that on the worst plantations such amputations were practiced for no medical reason, but as a punishment for runaways. They had finished here. Toussaint motioned him with a finger and they walked down the slope and through the camp until they reached the riverside again.
Moored to a stake on a muddy bank were a couple of canoes made in the ancient Carib way: the trunk of a gommier dug out and spread with water and hot stones, reinforced with curving struts pegged against the interior, a plank on either side to raise the gun-wales. Toussaint climbed into one of these and the doctor followed, taking up the oars. Toussaint pointed and he settled to the rowing, pulling against the current of the stream. Paired pegs served as the oarlocks, the oars shuttling somewhat awkwardly between them. With his back to the prow, the doctor could not see just where they were going, but he began to break out in an anxious sweat, knowing that Jeannot’s camp was this way, up the river. But before they had gone nearly so far as that, Toussaint directed him into a back-water, an abandoned paddy of sorts where rice or indigo had once been grown. A small gray heron, red-breasted, flew over the flat expanse, and far beyond it the shadows of clouds were running swiftly over the mountain slopes.
It was very hot. Toussaint undid his kerchief and trailed it in the water, then refastened the wet cloth over his forehead. The doctor was conscious of a runnel of sweat furrowing into the creases of his belly. His fear ebbed from him; it seemed to come and go sometimes, almost without reason. Toussaint pointed to a channel between two narrowly set trees. A spiderweb tore across the doctor’s back as he pulled between them. Toussaint reached across and flicked the hairy bee-striped spider into the water.
The stream was only a few times wider than the boat, and tightly shelved in on either side by mangrove trees, the flat flanges of their roots coming down into the water. Here the doctor saw a great dirt nest of grubs or insects, daubed in the fork of a trunk; there a whole mangrove had been eaten out by termites, cleaved as if by a lightning strike. The current was almost imperceptible and he rowed without resistance, as he might on a lake. The water was a flat brownish green and in its surface the mangrove roots entwined with their reflections and the tree limbs joined below as well as above, so that they seemed suspended in a symmetrical barrel vault.
“Sondé miroir…” Toussaint murmured, as if to himself. He touched the ball of his finger to the water. The doctor saw it join the finger of the other Toussaint beneath the river, like a touch of life, some communion he couldn’t comprehend, though he saw that it was more than mere reflection. Toussaint withdrew his hand and broke the contact. He dug into the skin of a grapefruit and broke the yellow sphere in half; the sweet acidic tang of it swelled into the still air.
The doctor shipped his oars and accepted the half he was offered. The fruit was virtually fleshless, so packed it was with juice. They ate contemplatively, discarding the peel and spitting seeds into the still water. The boat drifted sideways to the stream. Finished, they exchanged seats wordlessly and Toussaint took the oars.
His stroke was smooth and even, mesmeric, and the doctor’s mind went idling, as the sweat dried on his face and chest. The farther they went up the stream, the more tightly the mangrove branches laced them in. It grew dimmer, cooler, as they went upstream. A little black crab with hairy legs circled the narrow trunk of a sapling that grew straight from the water, hiding from them shyly. Somewhere above the forest canopy it began to rain and the doctor could hear it rattling on the leaves though few drops reached through to them.
By the time Toussaint moored the canoe, the rain had stopped. The doctor climbed out on a mudbank and followed him into the jungle. The slope was steep and muddy, scattered with bright red seeds from the bead trees. The doctor went haltingly, sweating in the damp, though it was rather cool here below the mountain clouds. After a while they reached a path where the going was much easier. The trail was not only worn, but made, with palm-sized flints packed close together in the mud like scales. When the doctor had caught his breath, he stopped and dislodged one of the stones and held it in his hand.
“The Caribs made this road in the time before,” Toussaint said. “Before the white people came.” He turned and went ahead; the doctor replaced the stone in its socket of mud and followed him. The terrain was changing slightly; it was no longer so wet as it had been underfoot, and there was not much undergrowth below the tall trees. The doctor heard shifting animal movement on one side of the trail, but whenever he stopped to look he could see nothing.
The thing, or things, seemed nonsensically large, a wild boar possibly, but invisible. The doctor stopped in place when he heard a dry rattle stirring a pale patch of deadfallen bamboo leaves, still shivering.
“You’re looking where he’s been,” Toussaint said, with his odd half smile. “You must look where he’s going.”
The doctor concentrated. At the next burst of ticking he raked his eyes in a circle around the troubled leaves and finally saw the lizard, blue striped and nearly a foot long, a slender beam of sunshine on the loose skin of its throat where it was breathing. Toussaint had gone on ahead. The doctor hastened to catch him up.
“Where are they now?” he said. “The Caribs.”
“They are gone,” Toussaint said. “All dead now, they would not be slaves…” He didn’t look back when he spoke.
The doctor followed on. It occurred to him that for all his knowledge Toussaint was not a native of this place himself and that no one surviving here was truly native to it. As he was thinking this, they came out suddenly into a wide clear slope above another river gorge.
In this field, lantana grew and blossomed. Doctor Hébert automatically began gathering it, breaking off the flower tops and stowing them in his cloth bag. Lantana was effective against colds, pneumonia…Each flower top bristled with small round blooms, yellow, white, and coral rose; they had a pleasant dusty fragrance. The doctor picked his way around the edges of the clearing. The grasses were damp here, and soon his boots were sucking at his feet.
A gray fringe of low-hanging cloud drifted over; higher up the sky was purple and engorged. Then the sun cut through the swollen weight of the clouds like a cutlass slashing through a bruise, and the whole hillside was drenched in a strange green light. Doctor Hébert was exhausted and terrified. He understood he was in the presence of God. The weird euphoria lifted a little distance out of his body and above his fear. Down the slope, Toussaint continued trimming leaves from a vine, as if insensible of the ray that held him in its nimbus, and yet the doctor felt that he must be absorbing it, and that he would have the power, when he chose, to give it forth as a healing light.
They were not alone. Down toward the rapid chattering of the unseen stream appeared two men, near naked, obsidian against the jungle green. One moved restively under the doctor’s observation, like a deer. Toussaint spoke without seeming to look at them, his voice low but carrying well in the damp air. “Yes, Riau, I see you. Now, come here.”
I, RIAU, I CAME TO BE on that slope in the sunshine because of many things. After the fighting with the soldiers, when I had found the horse, I rode away alone to look for Merbillay. The horse was green, gun-shy and half crazy from the smell of blood all over, but Toussaint had taught me to gentle any horse.
First I rode back to the place on the mountain where the women and the children had been hiding, but they were not there anymore by the time I came. I went along the mountains looking but it was a long time before I met anyone that I had ever seen before, days and weeks. After a while it seemed good to me to be alone. Sometimes I came upon other bands but since there was not anyone I knew among them I kept away. Also I was afraid for my horse. There was fruit to find and other things Toussaint and others had shown me were good to eat, or sometimes I was hungry, but it was good to be by myself this time, only Riau.
Sometimes the soldiers came out from Le Cap and walked all over the country looking for a fight, but the bands would not stand to fight them in the open country on the plain. The soldiers could not go too far from the city either, because the bands would attack it if the soldiers were far away. There were some attacks and some came near, but our bands could not come all the way into the city like we had wanted to at first.
Later I heard this but I did not go to these fights myself. The bands were too big now and the leaders becoming too strong. Biassou and Jeannot and Jean-Fran?ois were all leading big bands that were like armies though the people still did not walk in step like people in a whiteman army would do. But these leaders had all been commandeurs in the cane fields and often they still behaved like they were driving slaves. There were more slaves than maroons in these bands and I did not like that so much either. I think many other maroons began to go back to the mountains then, some going to Bahoruco.
While I was alone in the woods, I practiced with the pistols I had got. I learned how much powder to put into each and how to prime them so they always fired and to hit what I aimed at most times if it was not too far off. One day I tethered the horse in the woods and ambushed two soldiers who came riding over the country in a place there was no road. These were not regular French soldiers, but from the colon militia, brave ones surely since most of the militiamen would not go out of the towns by this time. I shot one down from his horse at once. The other got down meaning to fight me with his sword against my cane knife, but when he came near I took out the second pistol quickly and killed him with one shot. I got some more powder and lead this way, and food and the things they carried in their pockets. And I caught both the horses, warhorses both well seasoned and well trained.
Then at last I went into the big camp that Jeannot had made at Habitation Dusailly near Grand Rivière. There I found Aiguy and César-Ami and most of the women who had been in our band before the killing of the whitepeople began. Merbillay was there too which was why I had come in. Also it was hard for me to manage the three horses alone.
I gave up two horses to Jeannot when I came into the camp, the green one and a good one but the other I kept, along with the pistols and other small things Jeannot did not have to know I had got. Jeannot had made himself like a little king of Guinée in this place, but a mean spirit ruled him. Erzulie-gé-rouge was his ma?t’tête, all spite and jealousy and malice mixed together. Each morning when he woke he drank a mixture of blood and tafia from the round top part of a whiteman skull he used for a cup and he went on from there all through each day. A palisade was around a part of the camp and on each fifth post a whiteman head was stuck. Jeannot had a lot of prisoners here and every afternoon he would bring out a few and with his favorites try to think of new ways to kill them slowly. He had a whiteman priest of Jesus who had gone over to him to help him make the Hell of Jesus for these whitemen, and there were whitewomen too, a lot of them, that Jeannot used for himself or his favorites and would give to our women as slaves when they were all used up.
Merbillay had her baby in this place. He was long and thin and chocolate-colored, pale on the palms and the bottoms of his feet. His bones were a little bent at first from being folded up in there and his hands and feet were wrinkled like a turtle from the sea. He had a lot of hair in tight black curls all over his head and his eyes looked tired like he had come on a long long journey without rest.
I carried him all around the camp or sometimes I would take him out. I had a watch from one of the soldiers, and he liked to hear it ticking and watch it swing on its gold chain, or he would touch it with his fists, though he could not collect his fingers to hold onto anything yet. He would go anywhere with me gladly and almost never cried. I was the man now, since Achille was dead. Only Riau. I took him horseback up the river to a little spring that fed into it from the woods. Here there was a hollow of moss and dragonflies and butterflies would be there. The moss was soft for him to lie and sometimes I would hold him so the spring water ran over his feet. The water was cold but it did not frighten him. He would move his feet in it and make low sounds I think he meant for words.
Then we would go to the camp, through the palisade where the centipedes were crawling in and out of the eyeholes of the rotting heads and the air was torn with screams of whitemen being tortured. I had not disliked these things myself but it was a bad place for a baby, though he didn’t seem to mind it. Merbillay had not given him a name.
Then Jean-Pic left the camp of Biassou and came to join us who were with Jeannot. It was he who had the idea of leaving that place and going to the maroons at Bahoruco. It was no longer good where Jean-Pic had come from, there with Biassou. The black men who were pretending to be white officers were wanting the others to be like white soldiers too. To drill and train and exercise even when there was not any fighting. It meant that they killed the whitemen more easily, with less danger, when they met them in the mountains, but still Jean-Pic did not like it. I did not like it either when I heard of it, though it was not happening then in Jeannot’s camp.
Also Jean-Pic told me that Toussaint had come to Biassou. I do not know why it did not surprise me, though I think I would also have believed it if I heard that he stayed by the whitemen all along. I felt his hand in all the doing of whiteman soldier things that was beginning with Biassou, though the hand did not show. If Riau broke a horse, there at Bréda plantation, the horse would not know it was Toussaint’s hand that moved Riau. I thought that I did not want to feel that hand moving me again and so I was glad when Jean-Pic said that we would go to Bahoruco.
But that was not all. Some weeks before a jolly little fat white-man priest of Jesus had come to Jeannot’s camp. His name was Père Bonne-chance, and he prayed to a different face of Jesus than Père Duguit, the kind face instead of the cruel one. For that reason Père Duguit did not like him. Père Duguit whispered to Jeannot that he should kill the little fat father or drive him away. But the little fat father pretended not to know about this, and he went around the camp smiling kindly at Père Duguit the same as anyone else he met. The little fat father had children with a quarteronnée woman he had brought there to the camp, and maybe it was because of that Jeannot did not hurt him. But it was hard to know why Jeannot did any of the things that he did. Also the little fat Père Bonne-chance wanted to baptize all the children and the babies who were being born in this camp.
Merbillay did not like this, so the little fat father came to me. At first I did not want it either. After the little fat father had talked to me, I took the baby away into the jungle. I laid him in the grassy place beside the spring which ran where he could watch it bubbling. He did not know how to walk or crawl so I knew he must stay there where I left him. I went away through the jungle crying and howling and beating my hands bloody on the walls of trees. This was because I could not remember the name of my father or my mother and I didn’t understand anymore the language of Guinée. I thought then that if I ever did reach Guinée en bas de l’eau I would be a stranger there and no one would understand me any better.
Then I thought it would be better for me to swing the baby by his heels and smash his brains out on a tree. But when I came back to the grassy place I saw how quietly he lay there trusting for me to return and bring him home again. I took him then to Père Bonne-chance, and saw him christened with the name Pierre Toussaint. I told the little fat father that I was choosing this name because Toussaint had been my parrain and had sponsored me when I first was brought as a bossale to Bréda, and that Toussaint had taught me the whiteman way of Jesus. This was a half-true thing that I said, and the little fat father smiled to hear it.
Then I did not know to go or stay. For days and weeks I did not like to see the child, a stranger with his whiteman name. Merbillay would not go to Bahoruco. She thought that Riau was not sure of the way there and she did not like the walking it would be. I did not have a horse anymore because Jeannot had taken it away. So it happened that I was going alone with Jean-Pic, carrying only the pistols I had kept hidden from Jeannot. But when Toussaint called me, I could not help but come.
At first he spoke over his shoulder without looking at us, only his voice. Then Jean-Pic stepped back into the trees, but I went toward Toussaint like I was dreaming, like there was a loa in my head. When he turned toward me I saw him taking a book from his coat pocket and holding it out so I could see it well. The whiteman with the short beard who killed the dog had come down to stand beside him but I did not pay him any attention then.
“I have been wanting to find you, Riau,” Toussaint said. “I think that you remember how to read.”
He held the book to me even nearer. It was a book I knew. Toussaint taught me to read from it along with others. Also it was the book he had been carrying when the whiteman beat him for reading in the street of Haut du Cap.
“You can read it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where you begin.”
When I took the book it seemed to burn my hand like manchineel. I let it open anywhere. The words were squirming on the pages. I saw they would burrow through my eyes like worms into my brain, to rule me. My voice was cracked and choking when I read them out.
If any person was intending to put your body in the power of any man whom you fell in with on the way, you would be vexed: but that you put your understanding in the power of any man whom you meet, so that if he should revile you it is disturbed and troubled, are you not ashamed at this?
If there was shame, it did not change anything. This was Epictetus, who had been a slave, speaking to me from the paper. But it was Toussaint, a long time before, who put the words inside my head. So it did not matter if I closed the book or burned it. Jean-Pic went on to Bahoruco, by himself, but I went following Toussaint.
AUGUST 1802
The interior of the coach was dark, sweat-smelling. Toussaint and his valet Mars Plaisir sat shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. There was no space for them to move apart, and a sweat glue seeped through the fabric of their clothing, binding them together. Mars Plaisir’s knees were uncomfortably cramped against the opposite wall of the cubicle, under the coachman’s box, which was invisible to him. He stretched his long neck toward the gap between the slats nailed and blackened over the window at his right, and flared his nose for a gasp of the outside air. To his left, Toussaint was spottily illuminated by chinks of light that came through the covered window on his side, shining on the gloss of sweat that coated his cheeks. He sat erect, both alert and relaxed, as if he were mounted on a warhorse instead of nailed into this box. There was too little light for Mars Plaisir to fully see his face or make out his expression.
That none should know who was being conveyed, the windows of the coach were sealed. The guard was strong—twelve mounted artillerymen, two gendarmes and their officer—but not so numerous as to attract undue attention. A separate body of soldiers went some miles ahead to clear the roads before they’d pass. The route itself was meant to be the closest secret, but in several of the towns where they were quartered for the night, they seemed to be anticipated, and crowds of curiosity seekers pressed around the coach, vying uselessly for a glimpse of the interior.
Then would come the curses of the mounted soldiers, the warning snap of the coach whip, once the sodden crunch of a musket butt into some overeager voyeur’s teeth. Next, except for the harness jingling and the beat of hooves, silence restored. It was not possible by squinting through the cracks in the window hatches to make out where they were at all in this strange land.
Holding his breath, Mars Plaisir broke wind, or let it slip as quietly as he was able. He twisted his face away from the smell of his interior corruption. He was ashamed, though Toussaint did not react. He never did, but rode in what seemed to be an easy silence, interrupting it at rare moments to tell some anecdote, often of his childhood, or the recollection of some episode he and his valet had shared. Mars Plaisir had little notion what he really might be thinking. The fetid smell lingered, and he recalled the tales he’d heard of slave ships, but those were worse. He and Toussaint were let from the coach to answer nature’s call (when absolutely necessary) and at night they were taken out to bed on pallets in the jail of some small town or other. Here the local dignitaries often made a discreet visit. They came to gape, but not to mock, and usually they observed the forms of courtesy.
They were bound for the Fort de Joux, near the Swiss frontier in the Jura mountains, though neither of them yet knew it. Toussaint had had no answer to his letters to Bonaparte. He was preparing, nonetheless, to be brought to trial. But in the air around the coach, more letters of Leclerc’s invisibly pursued him.
Dans la situation actuelle des choses, sa mise en jugement et son exécution ne feraient que aigrir les esprits des noirs…. Ces hommes se font tuer, mais ils ne veulent pas se rendre.*11
IN THE CLOSE INTERIOR OF THE COACH, there was a stuttering sound, a buzz, and a leggy thing brushed across the valet’s face. Startled, he gasped and clawed at himself. The fly, a huge one, bumbled across a wormhole’s worth of light so that he saw it briefly. He clapped his hands around it and for an instant felt its thin legs whispering on his palm, but it worked through the lacing of his fingers and eluded him. As he moved again to seize or crush it, Toussaint caught his arm and restrained him gently.
“Quiet now,” Toussaint said. “Listen.”
At first, Mars Plaisir could hear nothing but the fly, whirring at cracks which were too small for it to squeeze through; he could no longer see it in the dark. Then there was something, beyond the clumping of their escort’s hooves, some other party. Mars Plaisir felt his throat tightening, an odd electricity leaping in his veins. Some days previous a band of horsemen had been seen crossing the Loire and coming in their direction. They’d made no attempt, but their mere appearance brought great consternation among the guard. Toussaint had said nothing of it, but of course he would not speak of it even if there were a plan.
The two patterns of hoofbeats merged, then stopped. The coach pulled itself up shortly. Someone was arguing with the captain of the guard. In his agitation, Mars Plaisir lost his comprehension of the words, but he followed the conversation by its tones: resistance, assertion, a reluctant agreement. Someone prized open the left door of the coach. Mars Plaisir saw the fly escape, dwindling like a mote in his eye, and he blinked as the surprise of sunshine dazed him.
They were officers of the Eighty-second Regiment of the line, once garrisoned in Saint Domingue, and for time under Toussaint’s command. Mars Plaisir recognized a few of their faces: Majeanti, Sigad, a couple of others. The rest were officers who’d only heard of the black general and beheld him now for the first time. It was not a rescue, but a welcome of sorts. They’d come to greet him, make obeisance, lay a finger on his sleeve. Mars Plaisir’s eyes were streaming, and the light had also stunned Toussaint, who reached his hand out, like a blind man, to touch their upturned faces.
Part III
EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS
November 1791—April 1792
Maman w ak apap w tonbe
Nan basen an, Nan basen yo tonbe
Adan avè, w tonbe wo
Nan basen an, nan basen yo tonbe
Pitit ou avè w tonbe
Nan basen an, nan basen yo tonbe
Eve tonbe
Nan basen an, nan basen yo tonbe
Eve o Eve o Eve
—BOUKMAN EKSPERYANS