All Souls' Rising

Chapter Twenty-One

“WRITE WHAT I SAY,” Toussaint told to me, Riau, who had become an I again from listening to him make me make his words. I sat on a stone above the river with a paper on my knees, waiting to be mounted by the voice of Toussaint the way I would wait sometimes for Og?n. Beside me, also on the rock, was sitting the little white-man doctor with the beard, and he also held a pen.

The wind was blowing, so the leaves turned back and tossed. Below the rocks by the river shore a red rag clung to a stick where the women had been washing. The rag went streaming along the wind in tatters. Toussaint did not say anything, it seemed like a long time. I thought that when he went away I would climb down the rocks to where the red rag was sticking there.

“Monsieur,” Toussaint said. “Yes—write that.”

I moved my pen, so did the doctor.

“Monsieur,” Toussaint said. “We have never…sought to…to depart. No—don’t write depart. To wander. No. To deviate. Monsieur, we have never sought to deviate from the duty and from the respect we owe to the King’s representative, nor indeed, to His Majesty.”

The doctor had stopped moving his pen a long time before I could finish these words. Then Toussaint moved around to stand behind us, looking at what we each had written.

“You have not done it well, Riau,” he said. “Look, see the hand of the doctor. You must make the same letters that he uses in each word.”

But just then someone came calling him from the camp, so he could not go on with his speaking and our writing. I watched him go walking back toward Biassou’s tent. A little bowlegged, swinging his arms. The wind was teasing at the ends of his kerchief, below the knot. He looked back over his shoulder once.

“You must teach him,” he called to the doctor. “The way I taught you herbs.”

I looked at the little doctor sideways, and he looked back at me with half a smile. So I put my paper down and climbed over the rocks until I reached the stick where the rag was hanging. Toussaint had set the doctor over me, to guide my writing. But I was set over the doctor too, to guard him and to keep him safe. This pleased Toussaint, it made him smile. Always he liked to arrange his people so.

Toussaint was not yet what he would become, or if he was he did not show it. They still called him Médecin Général. He went around the camps doctoring and showing the whiteman doctor the ways to use the leaves. It was Biassou, Jean-Fran?ois, Jeannot, who were called generals then. But they were not fighting many battles any longer. No one wanted to fight the whitemen in open country by that time. We had learned that we could not hold the mouths of cannons shut with our hands. A h?ngan’s word would not often stop a musket ball, and even Og?n could not always catch a bullet in his teeth. In the mountains to the west the whitemen were strong in their forts and we could not break through the line to the rich land of the western department.

Being a h?ngan himself Jeannot held petro dances in his camp, and being there I danced at these; there I was Og?n’s horse. Biassou was a h?ngan also but in this camp I could not dance or lose my head. My head was full of Toussaint’s words and letters and the words were thinking Toussaint’s thoughts. That the rebellion might not last the winter. The Spanish whitemen were sending guns and powder but they could not send food. We had burned so much of the northern plain by then that it was hard to forage for so many. So many all together, stripping the land of food and firewood. Among the Creole slaves were many who did not know how to make an ajoupa well enough to keep off the rains. I met men from Bréda, or other places where the slaves were treated well, who would have returned if they had been able. For three days congé and abolition of the whip, like the King In France had promised us. Or even without those things which had been promised.

The Spanish whitemen spoke to us of kings, the King In France and the king in their own country. But from the French whitemen we often heard that the King In France was a prisoner in his land. Yes, and we had kings of our own who were made slaves and not one of them ever returned to rule in Guinée unless he passed en bas de l’eau. What was coming from France instead of the king’s promises was an army of ten thousand soldiers who would sweep the camps of Grand Rivière and hunt and kill us through the mountains.

Jeannot and Biassou and Jean-Fran?ois were living like kings of Guinée then, but their only wealth was in the women they could take and the men who would follow them. They did not have many yams or cattle. The words were thinking in my head that they were like the corrupted kings of Guinée who sent the raiders to my village and sold me and my people to the whitemen on the coast. And it was true that Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou were thinking of selling us then, although I did not understand this until later.

Toussaint helped, or he seemed to help. So did the whiteman doctor, and so did Riau, making words on paper for the colon white-men to read. But Toussaint was learning the way to make the words in knots instead of lines, so that they twisted like mating snakes upon each other and would say more than one thing.

The words were struggling in my head as I went climbing down the rocks. I wished that I had run away to Bahoruco with Jean-Pic. At the same time the words thought of Merbillay and of the name of the baby, Pierre Toussaint. I came to where the rag was and held it in my hand and felt it trembling across my fingers, wind pulling it against the piece of stick that held it where it was. Then I saw them coming down the river, him and the woman and all the children, I knew who they were before they were near enough for me to see their faces.

        

DOCTOR HéBERT’S HAIR had grown very long and the damp wind was whipping the grease-stiffened ends of it across his parted lips and teeth. A cloud had passed across the sun and a thin line of rain was marching up the river, stippling the surface of the water, rain and not-rain divided by a clear frontier. The wind teased at the papers on his lap; he lifted a sheet and puzzled over Riau’s strange orthography, similar to Toussaint’s, in fact. The words were French, not patois, though one could not tell by looking. One must sound out the syllables to know.

He looked to where Riau had climbed on the rocks below, apparently to retrieve a bright scrap of rag down there—a childish project, though Riau was not a child, nor was he stupid. Far from that. The doctor saw from a change in his posture that he had noticed something, and he looked upriver, where Riau was watching.

There were seven or eight of them coming along the riverbank, making their way among the rocks: the woman and the children and the white man in a priest’s brown cassock. The apparition of a priest was bizarre in this place; the doctor would scarcely have been more surprised to see a robed cleric descending from a cloud. Then he remembered hearing of a priest in the camp upriver who helped Jeannot select who would be tortured—that and worse.

The priest was sweating, Doctor Hébert saw as he came near. Exhausted too, and stumbling as he moved among the rocks, coming toward Riau, who’d pulled the rag loose from the stick and was twisting it around his hand. He carried a child, some five years old, across his chest, so no doubt it was the burden that so tired him.

“Ah, Riau,” he said, approaching. “Your son is well. And of course the mother.”

Riau said something in reply, but his voice was so low that the doctor could not well hear it. Still holding the red rag in one hand, Riau clambered backward up the rocks, holding out a hand to assist the priest in mounting with the child he carried. The other children stood perched on the points of various stones nearby, raindrops stinging them through their ragged clothes.

“She has an awful fever, our Paulette,” the priest said. “And a cough—we had heard that there was someone here, a dokté-feuilles.”

Doctor Hébert looked over the priest’s shoulder into the child’s face. Her hair was sweat-matted and her eyes were slits. She breathed hissingly through bubbles of mucus in her nostrils. The doctor touched her forehead and drew his fingers back from the heat.

“I can help her,” he said. The priest turned to him, his round red face flushed from his effort, his expression open. The doctor felt a thrust of revulsion—this face had arranged for the rape of Hélène by Biassou. Riau had caught the sick girl’s attention with the red rag. He’d bundled it doll-like around a finger and was making it nod what seemed to be its head.

“Follow me,” the doctor said curtly. He turned his back and went stalking toward the camp.

He and Riau had made themselves a snug ajoupa on the slope below the makeshift hospital, with walls of sticks laced horizontally and the roof well thatched with palm. Riau’s design—they’d shared the labor. Coals from the morning’s fire still smoked under an adjacent lean-to. Riau blew them into flame and boiled water. The priest and his children, meanwhile, filed one by one into the ajoupa. It was raining harder now, and generally, drops patting softly down on the palm thatch, but under the roof the dirt floor was cool and dry.

The doctor reached into one of his several collecting bags and began crumbling dried lantana flowers into a gourd, then added some crushed leaves of giromon and herbe à cornette. He pointed to the priest where he might lay the sick girl on the pallet where he slept himself. Riau came in with the kettle and poured hot water over the herbs to steep. Doctor Hébert wet a rag from the kettle and carefully began cleaning the girl’s snot-sticky face. When the tea had brewed sufficiently, he motioned to the mother to raise the child’s head. As he moved the gourd toward the girl’s cracked lips, she coughed rheumily, and Fontelle, murmuring something, took the gourd out of his hands.

The doctor straightened and took a step back. The children scattered from him, like mice along the wall. They all smelled damp and woolly, rather like wet sheep. In the small space it was impossible not to be near the priest.

“I had not known that Riau was father to a son,” the doctor said, stiffly, unable to quite resist his curiosity on that point.

“I believe so—one cannot be certain,” the priest said. “But the boy exists. I baptized him.”

“I would have assumed that the last rites were more your specialty,” the doctor said.

The priest chuckled uncomfortably. “Perhaps you’ve confused me with Père Duguit,” he said. “Jeannot’s…confessor, as you might say.”

“Is it not yourself?” The doctor glanced around the walls of the ajoupa, seeing the priest’s jovial beaverlike features repeated darkly in the faces of the children.

“As you see, I am guilty of many venalities, which I would not wish to deny,” said Père Bonne-chance. “Père Duguit, however, has unfortunately gone insane and lost all control over his own actions. God no longer hears the cries of his unreason.”

“I misapprehended you,” the doctor said. “I must apologize.”

“It’s nothing,” said Père Bonne-chance. “I notice that you yourself are not entirely what you seem.”

The doctor bowed and stepped out of the shelter. Rain collected on his beard and seeped into the corners of his mouth. Then it began to slacken. Riau appeared a step behind him and plucked at his ragged sleeve.

“Nou alé,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Ki koté?” the doctor said.

“Vian,” Riau said. “Meat.” The doctor had already turned, automatically, to follow him up the slope and into the denser trees.

They climbed above the whole encampment and passed through jungle that was thick with the black boles of wet gommier slick-slimy from the rain, overrun with creepers and the vivid wild flowering orchids. The way was very steep and the doctor was in such difficulties he could not much observe the flora, but had to go scrabbling along on his hands and knees sometimes, as the wet leaf-mold was too uncertain a footing for him to walk upright with security. He was sweating very much despite the rainy chill. Meanwhile Riau proceeded ahead of him, always erect and with gazelle-like poise, turning now and then to wait. The black man carried a small cloth-wrapped bundle under his arm and sometimes he would lift a flap and peek at whatever was inside of it.

The rain stopped, but it did not lighten where they were; all remained a cool subaqueous green. They climbed, cutting crossways on the slope. The sounds of the encampment were no longer audible. They had walked perhaps an hour and a half before they came to a gorge where jagged triangles of rock stretched out above a stream some thirty feet below. Here Riau stretched out on his stomach. The doctor, after a moment’s hesitation, joined him. The sun was shining on this place and the surface of the stone was warm and dry.

“We came for this?” the doctor said. “To sunbathe like a pair of snakes?”

Riau hushed him with a gesture and unwrapped the ragged bundle. Inside were the two pistols which the doctor knew the black man to possess; one an unornamented, long-barreled dragoon’s pistol, the other a lighter, fancier gun with a damasked barrel and silver chasings on the grip. Riau passed the larger one toward the doctor, butt first, then turned again to look over the gorge.

Doctor Hébert closed his hand over the dragoon’s pistol unbelievingly; it was much the same as the one he had lost at the time of his capture. He checked the priming. The gun was properly loaded and the powder was dry, so that, if he wished, he could blow the back of the black man’s head off and…then what? The truth was that he had no great wish to injure Riau even if he had believed himself capable of making his way back to the coast alone.

The doctor stretched out and propped himself up on his elbows, holding the pistol grip in his two hands. The pitted surface of the stone was warm and gratifying on his belly through his rags. Following Riau’s glance, he looked down the gorge. A heavy-billed toucan came flying over the gap and lit in a leafy swag of a creeper and remained there lightly swinging and turning its thick horny bill to and fro. Below, in a clear patch lowly overgrown with wide flat ferns, two spotted goats had quietly appeared.

Riau nudged him, mimed picking up the pistol, and pointed down at the big billy goat, crowned with long gray twists of horn. The doctor turned and mimicked the gesture, inviting Riau to take the first shot. But Riau rolled his eyes till they showed only white and exhaled hissingly through his nose; he was insisting.

The doctor lifted the heavy pistol and adjusted it in his double grip, scraping the rounded butt on the stone. It was a long shot at a queer angle—down to the patch of clearing where the stream ran out of the gorge and the goats were drinking. Sour juices squelched into his stomach, for he was at least as hungry as Riau. The doctor closed one eye and stared down the pistol barrel. He was very confident that he would miss.

“No,” Riau whispered to him. “Not like that.” He made a hideously strained grimace of squinting concentration. “Like this…” He made a pistol of his hand and lowered it quickly to the angle of fire and immediately snapped the hammer of his thumb. “Like when you shot the dog.”

“Dog?”

“At Habitation Arnaud.”

Again Riau demonstrated the movements he evidently believed he had once seen the doctor make.

The doctor shrugged. As good a way to miss as any…He sat up and raised the pistol two-handed till it pointed to the sky. For about a minute he stared at the billy goat, just at a place behind the muscle of the shoulder, until his eyes began to blur. He dragged the pistol down and when the muzzle covered the place he had been staring at he pulled the trigger. Riau had slightly overcharged the pistol and the flare from the flashpan blinded the doctor for an instant. When he could look again he saw that the nanny goat had bolted and the billy had been knocked over dead; it lay on its side with the foreleg reflexively kicking and pawing the air.

Riau had jumped up and was doing a capering dance on his toes. Of a sudden he skidded onto his knees and seized the doctor by the shoulders.

“Listen, blanc,” he said. “You will teach me this new way of shooting.”

“I don’t know what there is to teach,” the doctor said. “I don’t understand at all. Habitation Arnaud? How did you see me shoot the dog?”

“Moin caché.” Preparatory to goat-skinning, Riau had pulled out his knife and he was grinning across its edge. “I was hiding.”

        

WITHIN THE WEEK, Père Bonne-chance had erected a church of leaves and sticks, comparable to one he’d used on the outskirts of Oua-naminthe, and was celebrating Mass there daily. His oldest son, a skinny boy of fifteen whom everyone seemed to call Moustique, served him as an acolyte. Doctor Hébert, though he’d rarely entered a church before his capture, took considerable comfort in these services. Toussaint was also faithful in his attendance, and fluent in the Latin responses. A few others came, Toussaint’s familiars. Riau stood in the back, his face dark and clouded. Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou stayed away from these occasions, but the priest, like the doctor and Riau, was admitted to their councils, where Toussaint made the best use of their literacy that he might.

So after one Sunday’s Mass they adjourned to the tent of Biassou, ornamented with skulls on its four corners, with strings of snake bones swinging in the wind. Biassou sat in a low carved chair, stroking a small striped cat that stretched across his military tunic.

“We must make him some answer,” Toussaint was saying, referring to Governor Blanchelande’s demand for the immediate, unconditional submission of the slaves. His pale pointed fingernail tapped on the paper which the doctor had drafted to the group’s dictation.

“This answer will bring the soldiers down on on us,” said Jean-Fran?ois from his corner of the table.

Toussaint pinched his fingernail between his teeth. “Yes, the ten thousand soldiers…”

“A letter like this will madden the whites,” Jean-Fran?ois said. “You know it.”

“Would you crawl to them?” Biassou said. “Let the soldiers come.”

“You have a ouanga to stop them,” Jean-Fran?ois said. “Is it so?”

“Perhaps the soldiers will not come,” said Toussaint.

Jean-Fran?ois cleared his throat. “You must know the whites will never accept what the letter says.”

“No,” said Toussaint. “But we must not give ourselves up for nothing. And it is possible to send more than one message at one time.”

“Comment ?a?” said Jean-Fran?ois.

“Jeannot,” Toussaint said, as if nothing more were needed than the name. For some reason everyone in the tent looked at Père Bonne-chance.

“Do you mean to assassinate Jeannot?” the priest said.

“Bring him to justice,” Toussaint said, “I had rather say. Put an end to murders for amusement. An end to rape.” He looked at Biassou, who glanced down at the cat purring on his belly.

“And send this letter,” Jean-Fran?ois said.

“And let them see we can be treated with,” Toussaint said. “That we keep order in our camps. We are not a mob but an Army.”

He looked around at the others’ faces. No one gainsaid him. He folded the letter over twice and began softening a stick of sealing wax in a candle flame.

“Whose army?” asked Biassou, and the cat raised its head inquisitively at his grunt.

“Of course,” Toussaint said smoothly. “We are the army of the King of France.”

        

THE WAX FELL ON THE LETTER’S SEAM and spread like a brilliant globe of blood. By the time it crossed the wasted northern plain to reach the hands of Governor Blanchelande in Le Cap, the seal had dried and hardened to the color of a scab. Blanchelande, whose gray hair had paled toward white in the last months, turned the letter over and over without opening it. He was in the presence of several members of the Colonial Assembly, all immoderate Pompons Rouges, who thought his hesitation rather strange.

“Shall we get on with it?” one of them said. Blanchelande sighed and broke the seal, turned up the top fold of the letter.

“Allow me,” he said wearily, and began to read.

“‘Galliflet Camp

“‘Sir,

“‘We have never sought to deviate from the duty and from the respect we owe to the King’s representative, nor indeed, to His Majesty. But you, General, who are a just man, come among us and see this land which we have sprinkled with our sweat or, rather, with our blood; these buildings which we have raised, and that in hope of a just reward. Have we obtained it, General? The King, the universe, have bemoaned our fate and have broken the chains we bear. And we, humble victims, we were ready for anything, not wishing at all to abandon our masters. What am I saying? I am wrong! Those who should have been as fathers to us, after God, they were tyrants, monsters unworthy of the fruits of our labors, and you wish, brave General, that we should be like sheep and go and throw ourselves into the wolf’s mouth? No, it is too late. God, who fights for the innocent, is our guide. He will never abandon us. This is our motto—Conquer or Die.’”

“No nigger could have written that,” one of the assemblymen said.

“Possibly not,” Blanchelande remarked. “I’m told they have a few bush priests in league with them.”

“If it is not all the work of royalists and the émigrés,” said the assemblyman.

“Yes, Governor,” said another among the Pompons Rouges. “Why do they campaign under the white flag and fleur-de-lis? Why do they talk so much of kings?”

The paper shivered in Blanchelande’s hand. “May I continue?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.

“‘To prove to you, worthy General, that we are not as cruel as you may believe, we wish, with all our hearts, to make peace. BUT on condition that all the whites, whether from the plains or the hills retreat in your presence and return to their homes and so leave Le Cap, without any exception, and take with them their gold and jewels. We only seek after that so precious thing, beloved liberty.

“‘There, General, our profession of faith which we will uphold until the last drop of our blood. Then will all our vows have been fulfilled and believe me, it costs our hearts dear that we have taken this course.

“‘But, alas! I finish by assuring you that the entire contents of this is as sincere as if we were before you. The respect which we have for you, and which we swear to maintain, will not disappoint you, think that it is weakness, as we shall never have another motto: Conquer or Die for Liberty.


“‘Your humble and obedient servants,

“‘The Generals and Chiefs who make up our Army.’”


“There’s only one answer possible to that,” said the first assemblyman. The second snatched the paper from the desk, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.

        

TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN THEY WOKE US, those who would go to Jeannot’s camp. There was a way worn through the jungle between the one place and the other. That priest of Jesus might have used it, if he had known where it led, instead of finding his own way down the river. It was wide and easy, like a road. Biassou and Jean-Fran?ois went horseback in their uniforms with the braid and sashes and ornaments taken from the whitemen, and Toussaint was mounted too, though he wore only his old green coat, but I, Riau, I was going on my feet, with the musket they had given me on my shoulder. There were fifty men, the trusted ones, and each with a good musket from the Spanish whitemen. They had all been training to walk in rows like whiteman soldiers, and our line went into the jungle two by two, although we did not make the noise that a whiteman column would have made. Everyone stepped softly on bare feet and Toussaint had even wrapped the horses’ feet in rags and tied up the rings of the bits so they would not jingle.

But before we had gone very far from our own camp, we at the end of the line heard a noise behind, a gasp and the sound of stumbling. Quietly a pair of us went back, I, Riau, and another. It was that little priest of Jesus who had been following us and although I tried to send him back he would not go and finally we agreed to let him come, walking beside me in the column.

It was raining when we first began to travel, and very dark under the big gommier trees the trail passed among. We could see nothing, and went along by touch, nose to the neck of the man ahead. Some rain leaked down through the leaves above and I doubled my hands over the flashpan of my musket, to keep the powder dry. We did not know if there would be any real fighting, though we hoped that there would not. After a while the rain stopped and we could hear the voices of birds speaking in the high branches as if they could see light somewhere. When we came out into the clearing of Jeannot’s camp the sky had cleared and the stars were there, and a little crescent of moon like a fingernail.

All of the camp was sleeping, no one had yet stirred. Dogs began to bark as we came across on our soft feet, but no one raised his head before we reached Jeannot’s ajoupa. We went around in a circle, the first man facing in and the second out—to protect the place from the people of the camp. Jean-Fran?ois opened the ajoupa by kicking down a wall, which made me think again of how the raiders first came to our village in Guinée, bursting through the walls of all the huts…A woman jumped up from beside Jeannot and broke out of the circle screaming. Her voice mixed with the barking of the dogs and then the camp began to wake.

By then the light was turning silver and the piece of moon began to fade. There were a couple of men in the ajoupa with Jeannot but right away some of us knocked them down with musket butts. Looking at all the gun barrels pointed at his head, Jeannot had already begun to cry like a woman and beg.

Toussaint said something to Jean-Fran?ois, who opened our line to a half-circle, so that we faced the camp, and the people there could see and hear what we were doing. People were coming up quickly, women and children and men. Some of the men had weapons, but no one raised them against us. I watched Toussaint, whispering again to Jean-Fran?ois.

“This is a military tribunal,” Jean-Fran?ois said in a loud voice. “You, Jeannot, have offended against the King In France. You have broken the law of our Army. How? You have done unspeakable things to women. You have killed helpless prisoners with torture, you have drunk their blood…”

And Jean-Fran?ois went on speaking this way for a long time, but I stopped listening to him. In the crowd that was silently watching I saw Merbillay, with Pierre Toussaint on her hip. Her face was sober, and the baby hid his face against the cloth under her breasts. Jeannot was kissing Jean-Fran?ois’s boots and crying that he would serve him in chains for the rest of his life, if he were only let to live, and I remembered how he had been in the first fights against the whitemen, facing their guns with his chest bare, and calling insults at them. But this bravery was not his own, it belonged to Ma?t’Carrefour, who was hungry for death. Jeannot had fed him well, in the fights and with the prisoners in the camp. But the Baron’s hunger is bottomless. Time now for Jeannot to feed the grave with his own flesh.

Jean-Fran?ois kicked Jeannot’s face away from his boots and took a few steps back. The priest came forward then, the little fat man who had walked with us, for Jeannot’s bad father had run away in the jungle when he first heard that we had come, and no one ever saw him again in that place. The priest was holding out his cross with God nailed to it and he was talking in a low voice about the kindness of Jesus. But Jeannot clutched him and held him with his arms and legs like the priest was a woman and Jeannot wanted to do the thing with him.

It needed five men to pull him loose. They tied Jeannot to a tree. The priest came to him again and spoke to him and showed him the cross, but it seemed that Jeannot would not hear him. He pulled against the sisal ropes so that they tore his skin, and his face was so twisted with screaming that we could not see his eyes. They picked ten men to shoot him with their muskets. I was glad that they did not choose me.

After this, Jean-Fran?ois ordered Jeannot’s body to be hung by the jawbone from a hook in a tree, the way he’d once hung living men. Jean-Fran?ois collected together all the whiteman prisoners who were still alive, and then we went away. I was thinking, if Jeannot was going home to Guinée, he had not looked happy to go there.

Jeannot’s camp was breaking up, with the people going off in all directions, many of them following us. We went raggedly through the jungle going back, not so much like a column of whiteman soldiers now. The sun had come out clearly and it grew hotter as it climbed the sky. I doubled back and found Merbillay walking with the baby among the other women and children who were following. Partway I carried the baby on my shoulder. I had kept the piece of red rag and I did tricks with it to make him smile.

When we came to our camp again, I took Merbillay to the ajoupa that I and the doctor had built. The sang-mêlé girl Paulette was in there resting. Her fever had broken but she was still weak. I saw her smile to see the baby. She stood up and raised him with his hands in hers and moved him so he seemed to walk, though he could not walk, not really.

After this, Toussaint did not make me go into Biassou’s tent any more to listen to the talk, although the doctor still went there, and the priest too. Toussaint knew I would not have liked what they were talking about then, and I did not learn just what it was until a while later. Toussaint kept me away. But he still gave me things to copy out, so that I would put the same letters in each word that the priest and the doctor used.

6 December 1791

Great misfortunes have beset this rich and important colony—we were involved in it and there is nothing more for us to say to justify ourselves. One day you will give us back all the justice that our position merits. The mother country demands a completely separate form of government from the colonies; but the feelings of clemency and goodness, which are not laws, but affections of the heart, should cross the seas and we should be understood in the general pardon which the king granted to everyone indiscriminately.

We see from the law of the 28th September that the National Assembly and the king grant you leave to pronounce finally on the status of nonfree persons and the political status of colored men. We defend the decrees of the National Assembly and your own, invested with all the necessary formalities, to the last drop of our blood. A large population which submits with confidence to the orders of the monarch and the legislative body which it invests with its power definitely merits some consideration. It would, in fact, be interesting if you declared, by a decree sanctioned by the general Assembly, that your intention is to take an interest in the fate of the slaves. Knowing that they are the object of your concern and knowing through their leaders, to whom you would send this work, they would be satisfied and that would help restore the broken equilibrium, without loss and in a short time.


Jean-Fran?ois, General. Biassou, Field Marshal.


Desprez, Manzeau, Toussaint, and Aubert, ad hoc Commissioners.

Now I copied out each word of this letter very carefully with the words lined up like soldiers on the paper. But when I had done, I saw that Toussaint had learned a way to make his words march in more than one direction. They looked at first as straight as tiny whiteman soldiers, but if I took my eye from them, they would begin to twist and turn. And if a word on a paper could do this, I was thinking, why not I?

        

AFTER THEY HAD SHOT JEANNOT and hung his body from the hook, all the people went away from that camp near Habitation Dufailly. The whitemen who were prisoners came into the camp of Jean-Fran?ois, and no one kept them penned up any longer. No one thought that they would run away. It would be too far for them to go before they found any of their whiteman friends. Also Biassou told them that any one of them who ran away and was caught again would have the leg cut off he used to run with, and I am sure that they believed this because they had done this thing to us so many times before.

Of Jeannot’s people, some of them ran away altogether after he was dead and others of them came with us, like Merbillay. Of the ones who ran away at first, some came later to the camp of Jean-Fran?ois, but others never did. They had gone away to be with the maroons, or were just gone. The priest of the cruel Jesus who had followed Jeannot was not seen again anymore by any of us. Anything could have happened to him, he could have gone anywhere, but I believed that he died alone in the jungle then, where no one ever found his body, because he had been sick for a long time with fever, and the cruel Jesus rode him all the time and never let him rest. He ate only to feed the cruel Jesus, and he could not get any food for himself. So I think that he must have died for that reason, though no one ever found his bones.

Then Jeannot’s camp was empty, and no one would go there anymore, except that I, Riau, I went there sometimes. I didn’t know what I meant to find. For weeks the vultures hung over that place, because Jeannot did not bury the dead, and he did not always throw them in the river. The birds would ride on their black wings in a circle around the tree where Jeannot was still hanging, like a wheel rim goes around and around the axle pin. I went there sometimes and I saw how they flew this way.

I don’t why I would go there, but sometimes it would happen, when I was tired of reading and writing with the little whiteman doctor, tiring of learning to walk and think the whiteman way. Then I would become a petit marron for a day, creeping away from the camp of Jean-Fran?ois, sometimes carrying a musket or my pistols. Sometimes it would really be that I went hunting and would come back with an agouti or at least a manicou. Or I would go with the doctor and watch the way he had of shooting, which I could not learn. It must be that it came from some ouanga that he had, because he did not seem to know himself how he did it. But other times I went alone and only went to Jeannot’s camp, as if I were looking for something there, but I did not know what it was.

A place was there where Jeannot had left the bodies he did not cut up and throw into the river, north of the camp and a long way from the river shore. The dead people were lying in a grove of young thorn trees, wherever they had fallen or been dropped, and later scattered. Wild pigs tumbled them all around, for a wild pig will eat any kind of flesh. Sometimes I could have shot a wild pig in this place, but I did not like to think of eating what had eaten the meat from those bones. But soon enough all this dead meat had disappeared, and the bones lay there quietly, yellow-white, with long grasses sprouting up through ribs and eye holes, vines wrapping over them to bind them to the earth. You would not have known then that these were mostly whiteman bones. I thought that it would be a long work for Jesus to put them all together, the way they had been mixed and jumbled, so that each whiteman could have his corps-cadavre again. What a long work it must be to raise them…

The cross of Baron Samedi was in this place. Someone had carved it onto a little barrel and strung it up high in one of the thorn trees. But I thought that Ghede did not want these bones. Maybe Jesus didn’t want them either. They were alone like sticks or rocks, sinking into the jungle floor, with leaves falling down to cover them. The vultures and pigs didn’t come anymore, but the butterflies flew over the bones, through the patches of sun that came down through the leaves of the thorn trees.

Then, after I had looked at them for a little time, I went back to the camp of Jean-Fran?ois.

Now there were many people staying in that ajoupa I had showed the whiteman doctor how to help me build. The little sang-melée girl Paulette would lie there all the day with her fever. Then the fever passed and she sat up, and she could eat a little, eating solid food for the first time. But for some days she was too weak to move very far from the ajoupa. When her brothers and sisters ran away playing, she could not go, but she would lie quietly, or sit up with her back against a pole. Her breath still whistled a little from her sickness.

We kept a wall of the ajoupa open in the day, and at night too if no rain came, and the priest’s children would sleep outside unless it rained. I and Merbillay and the priest and his woman and the doctor all slept in the ajoupa, close together. When Merbillay and I were lying together, I did not think at all about who was near, because I was glad to be with her again after the long time she had stayed in the camp of Jeannot after I had come away with Toussaint. Other times I could hear the priest lying with Fontelle, both of them trying to do the thing quietly. I heard the doctor trying to make his breath sound more like sleep, and then I wondered, what voice might be speaking in his head while he lay there making himself be still in the dark. I wondered if he, a whiteman, could have a ti-bon-ange, and where his ti-bon-ange might travel while he was dreaming.

By daylight the ajoupa would be empty except for Paulette lying on her pallet, and for Pierre Toussaint, who Merbillay began to call Caco. She called him this because of sounds he made that Merbillay thought were like the squabbling of the parrots. When Paulette grew stronger, Merbillay would leave the baby there with her, if she went out to dig in the provision grounds or looking for fruit trees in the jungle. The women had to go farther and farther to find food now, because there were so many of us living in this one place.

On one afternoon I came in from a day of my petit marronage and I found them there, under the roof. Caco was crawling to Paulette, his mouth open making a toothless wet shape of joy because he had learned how to crawl. When he reached her she took his hands and raised him to his feet and held him swaying there at his arms’ length. She turned him so he faced me and he smiled and laughed to see me, there where I had come very quietly up to the open wall of the ajoupa, swinging a manicou I had killed by its scaly tail. I felt a happiness then to look at him and see this smile he had for me, although most of those days my mind was uneasy with strange whisperings.

Toussaint did not make me go anymore to the meetings in Biassou’s tent. He wanted me to think it was because he did not mean to punish me any longer with words and the work of writing. But I know he did not really mean it so, because he still had me write and copy with the doctor, but only after the doctor had come out of Biassou’s tent again. It meant that Toussaint was still making Riau ready for another time, so maybe he did believe that time would come. Even then, he might already have believed it. He must have thought of it. He did not have me copy their letters to the whitemen anymore. The doctor would read to me from the book of Epictetus, and I would write down what he said, and he would read it over. But I knew that in the tent they were still making letters to send to the whitemen on the coast. Toussaint didn’t want Riau to know what these letters meant to say. They did not want anyone to know, but they were too many whitemen in the tent with them, the doctor and the priest and some others who were prisoners there and knew of writing. Among all us who were outside the tent there were others who heard uneasy whispering in their heads, and some were already beginning to whisper to each other.

I, Riau, I hated all of this. Riau wanted Og?n in his head again instead of all the shadowy thinking words. I wanted my ma?t’tête to come again. Each week all us would dance and feed the loa with Biassou serving, or some smaller h?ngan. Riau would be there dancing with the rest, hearing the drums the others heard, but Og?n did not want to come into my head because it was too crowded with the words Toussaint was putting there, and there were new words growing too that Riau was trying to learn to make in answer.

Toussaint was scheming in the tent and he sent me, Riau, to see to the horses. He knew I liked to do it. There were many of the good horses of Bréda there, even the stallion Bellisarius, that Toussaint used to ride more than the master did, when the master had grown too old to handle him. Also the big sorrel I had brought into Jeannot’s camp was there. I don’t know what had happened to the other horses—the green one and the other that Jeannot took from me—maybe they had been lost when the camp at Dufailly broke up.

Bellisarius had thrown a shoe. I went to the blacksmith box Toussaint had brought from Bréda. So many things he’d taken from that place, like he himself was a thieving maroon…There was a tool for trimming the stallion’s hoof and when I had finished this I found one of the shoes that had been forged for Bellisarius and I nailed it on.

I thought that I might ride him then, but I did not. I groomed the other horses that came from Bréda and rubbed their noses and felt them whicker into my hands. There was not any sugar to give them, not even green cane since it all was burned, and they were hungry because fodder was short. I put a bridle on the sorrel gelding and led him out to ride him bareback.

The river went twisting, south of the camp. On the other side, the mountains rose up hard and high, and a wind blowing down from the mountains cooled my face and moved the hair of the sorrel’s mane across his neck. I turned the horse from the river and rode across some cane fields that were burned, him picking through the scorched stubble, over the ash. In the next carré the cane was still standing and we rode along the side of this cane piece, outside of the hedge.

After a while we came up across the lower slope of another mountain, where it had been cleared and planted with coffee trees. When we had passed around the curve of the hill, the river was in sight again. The sun was going down behind the mountain we rode on. I watched the trees shifting in the wind on the mountains behind the river, and I thought how Riau might ride away alone, not coming back. I thought of Bahoruco, where Jean-Pic had gone. But even though I had never been to the Bahoruco mountains I knew I could never ride my horse so high.

I pulled the sorrel up again and sat him quietly, leaning a little to stroke his neck. It was foolish to think that he was mine. He was not owned by Jeannot either, or Toussaint, or even the officer I had killed to get him. He was just a sorrel horse, like I was just Riau. Bayon de Libertat had fooled himself to think that he had owned Riau, one time…I felt these things were true that evening, but I soon forgot it all, and it was a long time before I thought of it again.

The sun had gone by the time we came riding back to the camp. I looked for chickens going to roost, but all the chickens were already eaten. Some dogs came out of the camp to bark at me. They were hungry too, but they ran off when I got down from the sorrel horse. I led him to his place again and tethered him, and I stayed there until the stars came out, listening to the horses shift and breathe.

In going back toward our ajoupa I went by the place where the whitewoman prisoners were sleeping. While I was going along I saw a man come out of the trees on the other side and walk among the sleepers, all crouched down. He passed between me and the stars and I saw it was Chacha Godard, from Jeannot’s camp. But Chacha did not see me at all. He went crouching among the white-women, and I knew that not all of them were sleeping. They were watching Chacha, not moving anything but their eyes, like hens will watch a cat that walks below the branch where they are perched.

Then Chacha jumped onto one of the whitewomen and stuffed her mouth with a rag or leaves, something, I could not see what. She did not fight him very much, only a little struggle, like wings beating in a bag. Chacha dragged her away into the trees, and I went after him, a few steps back. Under cover of the trees I could not see much. But Chacha was doing the thing to her, of course. They did not make much noise. It was like in our ajoupa, except that sometimes if I heard the priest with Fontelle I would want to do the thing myself. But when I heard Chacha it made me think that maybe I would never want to do the thing again.

There was someone else there watching Chacha too. I could not see who it was, but I heard a sound of metal touching metal. Chacha didn’t hear the sound. He finished on the whitewoman and went away, leaving her lying against a tree. I didn’t see what way he went. The whitewoman sat up with her back against the tree, crying in the pale way whitepeople do. Then she got up and limped back to where the other whitewomen were lying. When she came into the starlight I saw that Chacha must have filled her mouth with dirt, because there were mud streaks now running from the corners of her mouth.

The whitewoman went to lie down among the others, where she had been. I heard the metal sound again and I saw the other man step out of the trees not far from where I was still hidden. It was Biassou, and this surprised me, to see him walking alone at night, because Biassou had already the fears of a big chief. The metal sound was coming from the coins taken from the whitemen he had pinned across his chest, to look like a whiteman general. They clicked together when he stepped or changed his weight. Biassou looked toward me, like he could see me even in the dark under the trees. Then he turned and walked away with the coins all clicking and the spurs ringing softly on the heels of his boots.

I followed Biassou until he came to his tent. When he had lifted up his tent flap he looked back at me, still like he saw me, but he went without saying any word. I came nearer the tent flap because he had left it open. The light of a candle began shining inside.

“Come in,” Biassou said. “Riau.”

I was inside when he said my name to me. Biassou waved that I should drop the tent flap. He was sitting with one of the cats curled on his shoulder and the asson on his knee. I looked at the baskets where the snakes lived, I could not see them in the baskets but I felt that they were there. Among the ouangas strung from the ridgepole were hanging some puffer fish. He must have brought these from some other place because it was far from the sea, where we were at Grande Rivière. The fish had dried blown up with their spines prickling out like soursops. When Biassou began to shake the asson, I saw the fish begin to move, like they were again in water, their spiny shadows moving on the tent roof like shadows of a loup-garou.

Biassou’s asson was a special one, carved and blackened to look like a fish, with eyes and a diamond pattern on its back. There were seeds of the gourd that sounded inside it, along with the beads strung outside the shell. Biassou had a way of moving it that was less like one little gourd of an asson than a whole rada batterie. But he stopping shaking it for a moment and spoke to me.

“You saw Chacha, the thing he did.”

I said that I had seen Chacha. Biassou began shaking the asson again in his special way. I looked at the fish face, the fire-blacked nose. I could feel the sound balanced between my ears.

“Chacha disobeyed the order,” Biassou said. His eyes were in shadow, I saw only a glint. He had grown very fat in this camp. His cheeks were glossy and fat and the buttons of his whiteman soldier tunic had pulled away to show his stomach rolls. I saw that watching Chacha do the thing made Biassou want to do it too, but Biassou had not brought any whitewoman to his tent since Jeannot was killed. No one did the thing to the whitewomen after that. Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou ordered it so, but it was Toussaint moving them. I looked at Biassou but I could not tell if he felt who it was that moved him.

“If Jean-Fran?ois knows what Chacha did, then Chacha will be shot,” I said. “Or Biassou can order Chacha shot himself.” It was hard for me to say these things because of the way Biassou was moving the asson. My mouth was only half my own. And I felt that Biassou stood between me and Og?n, like Legba sitting on the gate. If I don’t feed Legba, he will not open the gate to let the great loa come through.

“Chacha will die,” Biassou said. “But Chacha will not die of shooting. You will see his corps-cadavre walk again, Riau.”

My mouth hung open, but I did not speak. In my head I saw the bones where they lay in Jeannot’s camp, not meaning anything to anyone. Spittle pooled inside the corner of my mouth.

“It’s true, Riau,” Biassou said. “What I say will be.”

“Ouais,” I said. “It’s true.” My voice came back to me from a long distance, but Biassou stopped the asson and put it aside so suddenly that the silence struck me like a blow.

        

OUTSIDE, WALKING AWAY FROM BIASSOU’S TENT, I felt a tearing in my whole body, like I had been torn away too soon from lying with a woman. I spat on the ground, all the water that had gathered in my mouth, but the tearing stayed. At our ajoupa they were all sleeping, only Caco woke as I came near. He began crying, so I lifted him from Merbillay’s side and carried him a little away until he would quiet. He kicked at the pouch that hung on my waist, because he had learned that there I kept the watch I had taken from that soldier.

I took it out and let him hold the chain while I wound it for him to hear. Usually I never wound the watch, though I always carried it with me. I did not like to hear it chopping up the time with no one looking at it, the way a book will measure words even when no one reads it. Let the whitemen chop up time.

Then Riau did not think of any time but the one he was living. Now, Riau must say then. But to Caco the watch sound was like the crickets in the jungle or water running from the spring into a pool. He did not make much difference between these things, only he liked the watch because it shone. While I sat holding him on my knees, the torn feeling passed away from me, and I began to feel better than I had felt when I first left Biassou’s tent.