Chapter Twenty-Three
A LITTLE BREEZE TURNED OVER THE LEAVES of the thorn trees that grew alongside the hospital ajoupa, and ran through the open sides of the ajoupa itself, stirring the yellowing palm leaves of its thatch. It cooled the sweat that was running off the freckled bald slope of Doctor Hébert’s head, gathering in droplets on his eyebrows. He looked up from his task for a moment, turned his face into the wind. His patient relaxed his gritted teeth and sighed. Behind him, a few places down the row, the doctor could hear the click of the priest’s rosary and the murmur of a prayer.
“Sa ou fi mal?” The doctor looked down at the injured man, who smiled back at him thinly. He was cheerful enough, under the circumstances. Foraging far from the camp, he’d stumbled into a deadfall trap dug out by some other hunter, and skewered both his feet and calves on the bamboo stakes at the pit’s bottom. The wood had broken off in the wounds and the doctor had been engaged for more than an hour in fishing out the fragments with a pair of long-nosed pliers.
The priest’s daughter Paulette was looking on; she’d recovered herself enough to help around the hospital now, and the doctor found her quick and willing. “M’ap kòmasé,” he told her now, and Paulette, sucking in her yellowish cheeks, tightened her grip on the hurt man’s right ankle. The doctor probed at the ball of the foot. A stake’s point had broken off well inside the wound, and so far he’d been unable to extract it. It splintered further whenever he tried to grip it with the pliers. The iron edges of the instrument grated on the edge of the tough callus at the borders of the cut. The leg stiffened, kicked reflexively. Paulette, ever determined, swung her leg over the shin and rode it like a bucking horse. The doctor loosened his grip on the pliers and straightened. The breeze had died, and he blinked back the salt of the sweat than ran into his eyes. He called down the slope for Marotte, who was tending the fire, to come and help.
“Be still, man,” the doctor said, as the wounded man grunted and flexed his bloody toes. “It’s not so bad. You won’t lose the leg.” The doctor was cheerful saying this, confident that the promise would come true. He had learned enough of herbal medicine to be sure enough that he could keep off gangrene.
“All the time I tell him to be still,” the hurt man said, sighting down the bare length of his leg. “But he keep moving.”
Marotte slapped him on the muscle of his thigh, and hunkered down to fasten her hands on the shin just below the knee, giving Paulette a wink as she took her position. The doctor stooped and dug again, spreading the pliers’ jaws slightly within the wound. The broken butt of the bamboo shifted from him, and the injured man gasped and twisted his head, but Marotte and Paulette held him fast between them. The stub slipped within the pliers’ mouth and the doctor felt that he had caught it. He groped a little farther toward the point, grasped and pulled back with a smooth, steady pressure. The sliver resisted, gave a little, and plopped free in his hand. The patient’s breath hissed out and, as if with the same exhalation, a quantity of blood flowed from his foot, spilling onto the doctor’s fingers. With his free hand he flexed the corners of the foot. The blood looked clean. A centipede was walking off the edge of the straw paillasse, jointed and metallic; the doctor couldn’t see its feet. He straightened up, waving the two-inch bamboo splinter over his patient’s head.
“You see?—No barb.” He waggled the splinter between the teeth of the pliers. “You are lucky. And not poisoned either, I don’t think.”
The hurt man’s eyes had slid half closed, but they suddenly started open again, as Marotte thrust his foot into a kettle of disinfectant brew that had just come off the fire. He twisted to one side and tried to raise his knee.
“Leave it,” the doctor said. “Let it work, it will draw the corruption.” The hurt man breathed out whistlingly through his teeth, and relaxed enough to let Marotte bring his foot back into the hot water. The doctor turned and flicked the splinter away, spinning it past a live thorn-studded sapling that Riau had incorporated into the roof’s support. He wiped the pliers on his pants leg and walked down to the fire to wash his hands. In a moment, Père Bonne-chance had joined him.
“Success?” the priest said. The rosary was still looped over his hands and he inattentively continued to shift the beads under his thumb.
“Je pense que oui…” the doctor said. “She’s a very useful person, your daughter.” He had come to the point that he could allude to the priest’s children without any particular self-consciousness.
“She might owe you a lifetime of usefulness,” the priest said, inclining his head. Doctor Hébert reddened slightly and looked away.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “And yours?”
“That one has died,” said Père Bonne-chance. Drying his hands on a shock of grass, the doctor turned to face him.
“Are you certain? Come then, let’s go look at her.”
They reentered the hospital ajoupa, and the priest led the doctor to the pallet where the dead girl lay. The doctor knelt, felt for a pulse, held a finger underneath her nostrils, but a glance would have sufficed to confirm the priest’s diagnosis. The girl was ten or twelve years old, or had been. She lay on her back with her mouth slightly open, the white of her teeth and her eye whites exposed. The velvety black of her skin was turning gray. Her arms and legs were so emaciated that the knobs of her joints looked painfully swollen, and the gaseous balloon of her belly puffed out between the sharp blades of her rib cage.
“Starvation,” the priest muttered.
“Yes, or worms, possibly.” A fly circled the dead child’s head and the doctor fanned it away before it could light. He stood up. Down-hill, a plunking of sour-sweet notes began; it was Riau, playing an instrument he had lately made for himself, which he called a banza. Another fly swooped toward the dead girl, but this one was a dragonfly, and it whirred past without stopping. The doctor followed it out, stooping a little to pass under the fringed eave of the ajoupa. Beyond it, several dragonflies were circling each other in a green and sunstreaked glade.
From here he could look down to see Riau, who sat just outside the ajoupa where they slept at night, cradling the banza in his crossed legs. The instrument was made of a planed length of mahogany attached to half of a large round calabash over which had been stretched a drumhead of sheepskin parchment. There were three strings, twirled out of the guts of an agouti Riau had killed. The doctor admired the ingenuity of the whole production, though the music the thing could make grated on his nerves, tending to produce melancholy. He raised his eyes toward the horizon, where the lush green of mountains blued in the distance, the plain a scorched gap passing in between them.
“They’ve been a long time gone,” the priest said, as he came out, echoing the doctor’s thought. He was referring to the pair of mulattoes, Raynal and Deprés, who had gone to present the peace proposal so carefully drafted and signed by Toussaint and the others to the Colonial Assembly in Le Cap some days before.
“I wonder…” the doctor said, trailing off. The child Merbillay and Riau called Caco came out of the ajoupa and began turning bowlegged circles to the notes of the banza. Riau beat out a rhythm with the heel of his hand on the skin head as he plucked.
“If it goes well?” the priest said.
“How could it not?” the doctor said. “We—they ask so little. Four hundred manumissions, to bring all the rest of them back to the fields?”
“If they can bring them,” the priest said softly.
“They’re starving,” the doctor said. “I’d think many of them would gladly come in.” He moved toward a twig where a dragonfly had lit, its opalescent wings shimmering in the uneven light. The insect flew, and he turned back toward the priest, who’d seemed to shrivel in his brown robes over the weeks. The doctor felt the boniness of his own face and hands. They’d all become familiar with short commons. These great encampments laid waste to the land like a plague of grasshoppers or locusts.
“It would be madness for the assembly to refuse,” the doctor said.
“Yes…there is madness enough to go round, I think.” From the hollows of his sinking eyes, the priest held his gaze. “Well, but it is an unpleasant thing.”
The doctor looked down through the trees, toward where Riau played the banza and his son danced around him in slow circles. “What do you mean?” he said.
“Betrayal,” said the priest. “These hundred thousand given up to buy the freedom of their leaders.”
“Do you see it so?” The doctor stooped and picked up a bright seed of a bead tree and began scraping the mud from it with his thumbnail.
“What’s your opinion?” asked the priest.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said truthfully. “It isn’t at all clear to me.”
“Now that’s a feeling I have shared,” the priest said, and gave his unaffected smile. He let the rosary drop to his waist and began making his way down the slope, holding to the thorny saplings to preserve his balance.
The doctor watched him out of sight. He’d felt no guilt, in fact, in helping to work up the compromise, for after all he’d made no promise that could be betrayed, and yet he was uneasy in his mind. Here in this place, he came and went much as he would—seemed free without truly being so. The prospect of real freedom had unbalanced him. His bones seemed to ache for it, but he was also more afraid than he had been in quite some time.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THAT AFTERNOON, the doctor retreated into the shade of the sleeping ajoupa, and dozed off there without quite meaning to. Strangely, he dreamed of being cold, of wandering in a featureless, snow-covered landscape like nothing he’d ever known in his waking life. From behind the icy crest of a ridge, a huge howling rose to the violet sky. Wolves. He woke then, sweating and confused. He could still hear that howling—it was still going on.
Nine or ten blacks, all strangers to him, came bursting into the ajoupa. The doctor got up onto one knee and was jerked forward, out of the shelter. He saw that the priest was similarly chivvied out, his harriers pricking at him with swords’ points. They were sweeping through the hospital as well and flushing out such whites as lay there ill or injured. Fontelle had collected all of her children that were at hand and was shepherding them uphill into the bush. She looked back at the priest but he could not see her. Someone had hit him in the face and blood was running into his eyes.
A couple of musket shots sounded, random, people firing at the sky. Conchs were whistling here and there, their shrills punctuating the deep, throbbing ululation that seemed to blend into a single voice, like a low chord on an organ. The doctor was running willy-nilly down the slope, branches lashing across his face. They menaced him with cutlasses from right and left, and someone directly behind him kept slamming him across the shoulders and the lower back with something that felt like either a tree limb or a plank, blows so powerful he could scarce keep his feet. The whites were being herded in from all directions, toward the clearing within the grove where the white women slept; they were all screaming and weeping now. The blacks pressed on them from every side, cursing them and howling. Among the white men there was a half-organized effort to link arms to shelter the women in the center but there were not enough of them to close a circle.
Doctor Hébert locked elbows with the priest and stood breathing shallowly against the bruises on his back. Behind, a woman’s voice kept plaintively calling something indistinct. In the moil of shrieking black faces turned against them the doctor could make out no single individual he knew.
Then an avenue opened in the mob and at its farther end Biassou appeared. The blacks nearest him quieted a little, so that the doctor hoped for some return to order, some revelation of the logic of the situation, if any there was. But Biassou raised both his hands above his head, one holding a short knife whetted to a silver gleam, and cut shallowly across his other palm and waved the hand to show the blood around. A froth was sizzling at the corners of his mouth; he was transfigured. “Kill the white men!” he was shouting. “Kill the women. Kill them all.”
Behind them, within the circle of linked arms, some of the women renewed their screaming. Among the blacks, there seemed a total willingness to carry out Biassou’s suggestion on the spot, but before the butchery could begin, Toussaint appeared at the head of a troop of the best-disciplined men, all of them carrying new Spanish muskets. They cut between the prisoners and the mob and quickly formed into a line.
Toussaint was standing directly in front of the doctor, his gray pigtail twisted over the greasy collar of his old livery coat, green fabric stretched taut across his shoulders with the browned old bloodstains scattering over it like the map of some undiscovered archipelago. Toussaint spread his hands high, palm-down over the crowd that faced him. He made a number of smoothing motions, like a woman smoothing dough across a bread board. The people nearest him lowered their knives and began to listen with a sulky attention. Even Biassou was silent. The doctor had not heard what he had said.
Toussaint turned around to face the white people. “Kneel down,” he shouted. “All of you down on your knees.” The doctor wanted very badly to connect with Toussaint’s eyes, but they shot over his shoulder, even as Toussaint switched his leg and hooked the doctor’s feet from under him so that he dropped deadweight onto the ground. Then all the white men began loosing their arms and kneeling. The doctor bowed his head and looked at the scuffed dirt; he felt as if he were waiting for the fall of an executioner’s ax.
“Put them in irons,” Toussaint shouted out. The doctor squinted up at him sidelong. The kerchief that covered his head was dark with sweat, his face was twisted, his eyes were shriveled away in their sockets. He was still shouting, something unintelligible, as if his rage was one with Biassou’s. A cart pulled up, drawn by a donkey; Riau and another man walked alongside it. The bed of it was piled high with rusting old slave shackles. Toussaint dropped his fisted hand, or let it fall. The whole crowd sagged accordingly. In the quiet that followed they could hear the birdcalls and the chink of the chains as Riau began tossing them down out of the wagon onto the ground.
The blood mood was broken, and the mob had begun to dissolve and drift away. There was the ringing sound of Riau pounding rivets into the irons with a blacksmith’s hammer as he made his way around the circle of white men. The doctor sat on his heels, waiting his turn. He was watching Biassou, who stood in slack confusion, the sacrificial moment snatched from under him. Toussaint approached him, braced his arms on Biassou’s shoulders. They spoke for a moment, too low to be overheard, then Biassou broke away and stalked off through the trees.
It grew calm enough for Doctor Hébert to turn to the priest and briefly examine the cut above his eye, more superficial than he would have supposed from the amount that it had bled. “You’re a free bleeder,” the doctor began to say, with an attempt at half a smile, but one of Toussaint’s guards chopped a musket barrel down on his wrists, knocking his hands away from the priest’s face and, grunting in a low harsh voice, warned him not to speak.
How automatically one thought of them as Toussaint’s guards…The doctor knelt rigidly like a man at prayer, numbly obedient, looking at nothing but the trampled ground between his knees, until Riau came to him. He was a long time selecting a set of irons, which he fit loosely over the cracked rotting uppers of the doctor’s boots. After he had driven in the rivets, he ran his finger around inside the shackles and gave the doctor a look of some significance which the doctor could not fathom. Riau reached out and squeezed the muscle of his shoulder, giving him a little shake, then his eyes went blank and he passed to the next man.
Still the doctor was facing forward, his feet sticking straight out before him now. Toussaint had remained at the edge of the trees, after Biassou’s departure, and now the doctor saw him take his headcloth off and wring it out slowly, hand over hand to the sweat-dripping corners. He shook the kerchief out into a square and let it billow in the breeze, then tied it carefully around his head again before he left the clearing.
Twilight came down, cool, gray and cloudy. Two big green parrots flew from tree to tree. Toussaint’s guards still loosely enclosed the prisoners, less to keep them in than to protect them from a fresh assault, the doctor surmised. They were free to move about within the circle if they chose. Only the men had been put in chains, the women and children left as they were.
The doctor got up and shuffled to the edge of the ring. When a guard noticed him, he gestured at his breeches; the guard nodded and waved him toward the tree line. There he unbuttoned and relieved himself with a painful difficulty. His urine was bloody from the blows his kidneys had received.
He closed his trousers and shuffled back, crossing the center of the circle. The chain on his shackles shortened his step, but he was more discommoded by the simple weight of the iron. He came upon the erstwhile procurator of Vallière crouched among some of the other men and a few of the older women. His teeth were almost chattering from agitation as he spoke in a low urgent whisper. The doctor squatted down among them. “What has happened, do you know?”
“The lunatics at the Assembly rejected the proposal.” The procurator sprayed his face with a nervous spittle as he spoke. “Would not even have it read or hear it. Would not treat with them at all till every man surrendered, in advance.”
The doctor’s heart bulged and contracted. He must have known this, he felt now, from the moment that he woke that afternoon, but it was still a shock to hear it.
“O mon Christ,” the doctor said. “It is madness, truly.”
“And the commissioners?” someone said.
“What about them?” the procurator said in a breaking voice. “What can they do? C’est foutu et c’est tout. Do you understand that? We are already dead.”
A woman moaned and mashed her face into her tattered sleeve. The doctor stood up in his shackles, his sudden movement dizzying him. The inner walls of his mouth had gone as dry and rough as sandpaper. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe, but instead of a blanket of comforting darkness he seemed to see that tree so redly flowering, tonguelike stamens lolling from the blooms as if they’d lick the raw flesh of the white man who’d been skinned alive there. What difference was there, under the skin? He’d believed Toussaint had saved them, but probably it would have been better if they’d all been shot at once. He took a step and then another, the bare pressure of his shinbones against the bands of iron. He kept on going among the others with that same shuffling gait of any other member of the walking dead.
I, RIAU, WHEN I CHAINED THOSE WHITEMEN, I nailed the chains as tightly as they would have done on me. But with the doctor, I put the irons outside his boots, and loosely too. In the dark, if he had taken off the boots, he might have twisted his heels out of the irons, I set them loose enough for that. But he did not understand it, though I shook him by his shoulder to try to make him see. I did the same for the little fat father also (he was not so fat anymore by that time) and I saw by his eyes that he knew what I was doing, but I saw too he would not run away.
I did so because I didn’t want those two to have to die then, even if I would have been happy to have killed the others all myself—all the whitemen and whitewomen who were there. It was not that they were kind, the doctor and the priest, because the kindness of whitemen is so shallow it does not even go so deep as their thin skins. But because I had helped them as much as they helped me, building them a shelter and hunting food for us to eat, and we had eaten and slept all together like brothers, and with our women and the children in the one ajoupa. I wanted to save them because they were mine. But neither one of them knew how to live in the bush alone, and if they had run away they would have been caught and shot, surely, that night or the next day. So it was useless, what I had done. That was a word Toussaint put into my head, useless. But it happened that they did live longer, at least for a little while.
When I heard that the colons in Le Cap had turned away the messengers and spat on the paper where the two-faced words of Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou were written without even letting the words begin to speak, I was ready to start killing the whitepeople again. I chased down to where they were holding them, with all the rest of us, and I would have torn them into pieces and scattered their arms and legs across the ground. I was ready to kill like Biassou, though that was useless also, because the two-faced words of that paper would have freed Biassou but not Riau. Then Toussaint came and stopped the killing before it could begin.
It is not true that Toussaint loved whitemen, not so much as people sometimes said he did, at least not always. But he would never kill without a use in it. Almost never.
It happened that Biassou had run out calling for the death of the whitemen before Deprés and Raynal had finished all they had to say. Toussaint stayed back and heard them through. He heard that the two-faced paper had grinned and whispered to the commissioners who had come from oversea and now these commissioners wanted to make a meeting with our leaders.
So it was done. Toussaint calmed Biassou by telling him this thing, so he did not talk anymore of killing the prisoners for that time. Still Biassou would not go to the meeting, but Toussaint went, and Jean-Fran?ois, and I, Riau, went riding with them. There were not so many of us going, even though we were expecting soldiers to be there.
The meeting was to happen at Saint Michel plantation, and this is where we were riding to. Some of the fields around this place were burned but as we rode nearer to the grand’case there was still some cane standing in the fields. The cane looked like maybe they had been working it, even, though I didn’t see anyone working then. We came along the road that went between the whole cane field and one that had been burned, and so we came to the other road that led to the grand’case. This was a long straight allée with tall palm trees planted on either side, many times the height of a man, with coconuts growing at their tall bushy tops. Looking down to the end of this road, we saw the grand’case was still standing too.
We pulled up our horses there, and Toussaint spoke to Jean-Fran?ois, a little apart from the rest of us. Then Toussaint spoke to me and told me to go riding around the fields to see whatever I could see of the main compound, while they stayed there to let the horses rest in the shade of the palm allée. I kept riding around the cane field path. I had my good sorrel horse to ride on.
The cane was so high that I could see no more than the rooftops but when I had come around behind the buildings on the side where the little slave cases stood, the road climbed up on top of a bank above the cane. From this place I could look over the tops of the cane leaves and see into the main compound.
There were soldiers there like we had thought, but not so many, not so many more than we. Most of them were the walking soldiers, I saw only a few horses tethered in the yard behind the grand’case, where the soldiers were standing. They had not as many horse soldiers as we, I thought. I rode back then, to meet the others in the palm allée. The soldiers must have seen me too, because it was all open country. But they did not stir or shoot a gun, or give any other sign.
I told Toussaint what I had seen, that these whitemen were not strong enough to frighten us. Then all of us who had come rode down to the end of the palm allée until we had come to the place where there was a garden in front of the grand’case. It was a garden of flowers arranged in a design with paths in between and in the center there was a fountain, though the fountain was not running anymore, and the flowers were dying and grown over with weeds. There where the allée opened onto the garden, all us waited with our horses, and only Toussaint and Jean-Fran?ois and two others went ahead. But we were near enough to see everything that happened.
Some whitemen, colons and the ones who came from oversea, were sitting on the gallery of the house. Toussaint and Jean-Fran?ois got down from their horses and began walking toward them through the path of the garden, but before they could get there, another whiteman came riding out from behind the house where the soldiers were waiting. He was not a soldier, but a colon, and he was shouting before he had come near them, and he had a whip in his hand. He rode the horse across the flowers that were still living there, and when he came near enough he began cursing Jean-Fran?ois and beating him with the whip.
I don’t think this whiteman knew who he meant to beat. He picked Jean-Fran?ois because he wore his fine uniform with the ribbons and coins pinned to it, while Toussaint still wore only his old green coachman’s coat. The whiteman never called the name of Jean-Fran?ois while he was beating him, but we knew his name. This whiteman was Bullet, who had been Jeannot’s master. Those were famous names for cruelty, Bullet, Le Jeune, Arnaud. Bullet made Jeannot from nothing. Without Bullet, Jeannot could never have been all that he was, and he learned many of his torture tricks from Bullet, though also he had ideas of his own.
Jean-Fran?ois did not draw his sword to defend himself from the whip, or take his pistol and shoot Bullet down from his horse. He only covered up his face against the whip and came staggering back to his own horse and climbed into the saddle. Then he and Toussaint and the other two came riding back to us. We would have all of us gone away then, except for a strange thing that happened.
Some soldiers came out and caught the bridle of Bullet’s horse, and began leading him away. Bullet swore at them and for a moment he looked like he would strike them with his whip, but these were not militiamen, they were soldiers coming from France, and I think these soldiers would have shot him if he used the whip. Bullet must have thought so too, because he let them lead the horse around behind the grand’case, him still sitting on it with his whip hand hanging down.
When Bullet had gone, we saw that a little man had come down from the gallery and was coming toward us, on foot and all alone. We could see from the clothes he wore that he was not a colon, but that he must have come from oversea. Also he was not carrying any weapon when he came into the palm allée. Two of our men pointed their pistols at him, but he did not stop or even slow his step until he had come near enough to speak to us without raising his voice. So then we saw that he was not afraid to trust us.
He told us that his name was Saint-Léger and that the King In France had sent him on Commission. He said that he was sorry for what Bullet had done, that no one had known that he was going to do it, and that Bullet had been taken away and would not be let to come near us anymore. He said that he wanted peace and that if the generals Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou would talk with him, he would make a peace between them and the colons of the Assembly.
Jean-Fran?ois had had his fine uniform coat torn across the shoulders by Bullet’s whip. Some of the coins pinned on his chest had been whipped away, and one of the ribbons hung loose at one end. He got off his horse and knelt down at the feet of Saint-Léger.
When I saw him do this I thought of something strange. I thought how Jean-Fran?ois would sometimes sell slaves himself from out of the camps over to the Spanish. He claimed that those were criminals, troublemakers, mauvais sujets, but it was not true of all of them. Sometimes women and children were sold, and how could a child be a mauvais sujet? He sold them for the money he could get, the same way a whiteman would do. Biassou had done the same, along with making zombis.
Saint-Léger raised Jean-Fran?ois to his feet and took him with Toussaint and some others back to the gallery with the whitemen there. They were there a long time talking in the grand’case while we waited with the horses in the palm allée. It was near night before they returned and we started riding back to the camps at Grande Rivière. I was riding near to Toussaint in the dark, and I knew that he was happy, and Jean-Fran?ois too, because there would be a peace and a stop to all the killing and burning. But the blood was dark running in my heart, because I thought that Jean-Fran?ois had sold some of us before, and now he would sell all of us.
Then we were going to give up the whitemen prisoners, but many of us did not want to give them back alive, because we thought we were going to be sold back into the cane fields. Many were whispering for the deaths of all the prisoners again, but Biassou did not call for them to be killed now, because Biassou would be free. And I, Riau, when it came time to move them, I struck the irons off the legs of the whitemen so they could walk. The white-women and the children were all loaded into carts.
No one raised a hand against the prisoners then, but I knew that they would be attacked somewhere along the road and I would have been there too, Riau, with my pistols and my knife. Only Toussaint called me apart and he told me to go with the guards and with him protecting the white prisoners along the way. I am not sure why he called me to do this or why I chose to go. Toussaint often could see through my head to look at what was in my heart and know it, so it may be that he knew I would be in ambush at La Tannerie if he did not bring me along with the guards. Maybe I was thinking that if I went with Toussaint and the men he had chosen, then I would be free myself, with them and him and Biassou and Jean-Fran?ois. Even though I had not been in the tent when the two-faced letters were written, I had heard that there would be four hundred men made free. It happened, though, there were no freedoms given.
The carts with the prisoners started off then, with the whitemen walking behind them and the guards on either side, all of us with the new Spanish muskets and carrying boxes with many cartridges on a sling. At La Tannerie the people came out to kill the whitemen. They were in hundreds and they could have run over us all, even though our guns were better, but they did not really want to fight with us. We did not really want to shoot them either. There I, Riau, came face to face with César-Ami who had been with us in the band of Achille and helped to kill many whitemen and who had come at last to the camp of Biassou. César-Ami raised his cane knife to strike past me to the whitemen who were prisoners but I showed him my musket with its bayonet and he backed away. So we brought the whiteman prisoners through unhurt, nothing worse happening than shouts and a few stones thrown. Then we brought them down to Saint Michel again and gave them to their friends, who were waiting there.
After this was done, we went on to Le Cap to make the peace with the colons, like Saint-Léger had fixed it. Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou did not go, this time Toussaint was going as the messenger. But the colons of the Assembly would not keep the promises that Saint-Léger had made. There would not be any freedoms, and no peace either then. I saw Toussaint coming away from that meeting with his eyes shining with sadness. I knew that he was sick with the blood and the killing, and I knew he was angry too because the prisoners had been given up for nothing, and because the colons of the Assembly were all fools.
Then we went riding to Bréda plantation. I was not so sorry that the lives of the white prisoners had been saved. I thought maybe I would kill some of them later on in a fight but it was not the same as killing them like cattle in a pen. I was not so sorry that the peace had failed either.
We spent a night at Bréda, because Toussaint wanted to see how things were there, the same as he had managed things for Bayon de Libertat. Most of the slaves were still at work there, and there had not been any burning. Toussaint’s brother Paul was there, still serving as a commandeur. It was a good night to spend for me talking to people I had not seen for a long time. Most were happy enough with the way it was at Bréda then. The work was easier because the whitemen had all run away, but still they stayed and worked.
In the morning we rode out from Bréda, and while we were passing through Haut du Cap some men from the colon militia attacked us. They were not so many as we, but they must have still believed that we would not know how to stand to an attack of whitemen in the open, when we had no jungle to run into. So I think they were surprised when we had killed them all.
One of these whitemen was the one who had beaten Toussaint that time so long ago when he was walking back to Bréda from the church, reading the book of Epictetus. Toussaint rode him down with his horse. He had the good horse that day, the stallion Bellisarius. The whiteman took shelter in a doorway and Toussaint got off the horse to go after him. He was so angry I could see his shoulders shaking from behind when he slapped at the seams of his green coat.
Do you know who I am? he said. The whiteman did not answer him. The bayonet was fixed on my musket and Toussaint grabbed it from me and killed the whiteman with the bayonet, I think he must have killed him a hundred times.
I wondered then, was there a use of killing this whiteman? I think there must have been. This was not the only time I saw Toussaint kill a man in anger, but it was rare. There were tears in his eyes after he had done. When he finished and the whiteman was lying dead half in and half out of the doorway, he took off his green livery coat, and he dropped it over the whiteman’s face. He took off his shirt too and dropped it somewhere on the body.
All the way back to Grande Rivière he rode with no shirt. Toussaint was an old man, for this place. In Guinée I had known old men, but here most men had died before they had the years Toussaint had then. When we were riding back to Grand Rivière I could see the strength in his body he didn’t often show, how the muscles were hard under his tight skin and gritty white along the ridges like worn stone. He was thin still, but no one would anymore think to call him Fatras-Baton. There were no whip scars on his back, because Toussaint had never been under the whip.
That was the last day he wore the green coat. Later on, he began to wear the uniform of a whiteman officer.
RIAU POUNDED THE RIVET OUT OF THE DOCTOR’S remaining shackle, and the iron opened and fell away from his boot, splitting like two halves of a nut. Reflexively he took off his boots and rubbed along the ridge of his shins, though the boot uppers had protected from any hurt. Père Bonne-chance, who was bare-legged, had his ankles blistered and rubbed raw. The doctor might have made a salve for them, but his herbs and medicines were at the hospital ajoupa, and it soon appeared that he would have no chance to return for them before all the prisoners were taken away.
The heavy wood wagon wheels grated and began to turn, and the men fell into line behind them. They marched in a double column with guards flanking them on either side. The camp at Grande Rivière was oddly silent as they left and none of the blacks came out to see them depart from that place. Père Bonne-chance was a long time looking back over his shoulder, and the doctor knew that he must be thinking of Fontelle and the children, but he had nothing to say to him because he had no better idea than the priest where they might have gone. For other reasons than that, his mind was uneven. One rumor ran back through the captives that they were to be released but there were other voices urging that they were merely being taken to some other place to be killed there.
They marched along by a low swampy place where egrets were standing spindle-legged in the dark water and hairy little black crabs had climbed the trees. Mosquitoes boiled out in swarms to bite them there. They climbed over a mountain pass where the women and children had to get down from the wagons and the guards must work in harness with the mules to draw them over the summit. As they came down the other side, a wild goat dashed across the head of the column and two of the guards gave chase and shot it. Toussaint rode back and rebuked them for breaking ranks and firing a shot without an order, but he halted the march long enough for the goat to be bled and gutted, and they went on with two men carrying it with its legs lashed to a pole.
By the time they came to La Tannerie, the march had degenerated into a stagger. A crowd of blacks was waiting for them there, all in a sweat and a fury, flailing sabers and cane knives. They knew that the prisoners were going to the coast to be released, but they said that they would kill them and send only their heads to Le Cap. There was a flurry as the mob pressed up against the guards. A stone or a stick clipped the corner of the doctor’s mouth, and he tasted his own blood another time. Toussaint was shouting something from the back of the big stallion he rode, but the clamor from the others drowned him out almost completely. Riau was holding his musket braced like a crossbar to shield them against further blows, and Doctor Hébert saw a saber descend on the barrel and ring aside. He saw too that the swordsman did not really mean to hurt Riau, for if he had he easily could have stabbed him in the body.
So they came through. A couple of men among the prisoners were bruised or lightly cut and the women had all flattened themselves across their children in the wagons. The goat was lost, tumbled in the dust behind the column. As the doctor looked, he saw a group of scavengers quarreling for possession of the meat. They went on. The doctor noticed he had been slashed deeply across the meat of his forearm. It must happened during the scuffle at La Tannerie, but he had not felt it then and now it gave no more than a dull ache, which rather troubled him. He walked cradling the arm; the blood flow slowed and stopped and the blood dried to a black crust and blowflies whined around the edges of the wound. He had no resource for his own cure for he had left his herb bag at Grand Rivière and in any case he could not stop to treat the injury.
At evening’s end they came to the edges of the Saint Michel cane fields. The doctor wondered to see cane still standing—it had been so long since he’d seen anything but ruin or wild jungle. By the time they reached the palm allée, a deep blue darkness had lowered over them. No one spoke as they rode down the allée toward the grand’case. It was very quiet except for the creaking of the wagon wheels and the hooves of the horses sounding on the packed earth. In the gap of sky above the palms there hung a sliver of new moon and the long leaves of the palms shivered together with a sound that reminded the doctor of rain.
In the garden before the grand’case they had lit many torches, so that the arrangement of the plots could be well seen. A simple affair: a cross and concentric circles producing a pattern of crescent-shaped beds expanding from the stilled fountain at the center. Some of the beds had been trampled over and the flowers and shrubs battered down, and all were suffering from neglect, but still the doctor’s eye was taken by the firm regularity of the design. It was mostly jungle foliage, but all strictly ranged by human hands.
He stood a little apart from the others. The fringes of hair at the sides of his head had grown long during his captivity, and now they were lifted up to tease at his bald crown by the same wind that shivered the palm leaves. His hurt arm had gone numb, and the thought of the wound had ceased to trouble him. The column of guards had fallen away, and Toussaint was holding his horse well back. There were white men on the gallery, and some infantrymen standing in loose order on the far side of the garden. The distance was too great and the light too poor for them to make out one another’s faces.
No one moved, on either side. As if they each awaited an order from the other, a signal or a sign. Then one of the women cried out and swung her skirted legs over the rail of a wagon. She called a word, a name, something indistinguishable, and began running toward the people gathered near the grand’case. The doctor thought it was Hélène, but he might have been mistaken, for whoever it was carried a child in her arms. Then all the women and children were scrambling down from the carts and dashing toward the grand’case with their arms outstretched, calling out the names of the people they knew, and trampling more of the flowers in their haste.
A group of three or four women had fallen in immediately with the soldiers. They had not come from the camp at Grand Rivière, but had joined the column along the march from La Tannerie, so the doctor did not know them. But they all seemed to be pointing at him, and calling, That’s the one, there, c’etait lui…
Three or four of the infantrymen came thumping across the flower beds. Brushing past the doctor, they laid hold of the priest. Someone drove a gun stock into his side, and as he moved away from the blow he stepped on the hem of his cassock and fell. On the ground, he rolled about rather nimbly, to avoid the kicks that were coming his way. Two soldiers snatched him up by the elbows and hustled him away.
It all happened too quickly for the doctor to react; besides, his capacity for astonishment was greatly attenuated. He advanced a little way and stopped again, within the first precincts of the garden’s scheduled pathways. Others of the released prisoners were still rushing past him, calling out greetings to friends that they knew, but the ranks of white faces around the steps to the gallery were still foggy to the doctor, no more than a blur. He was quite alone where he was standing there. Someone was calling Antoine, Antoine! and a man threw his hat into the air, and caught it. A man in uniform, Captain Maillart. The doctor remained as if rooted on the garden path, swaying slightly from his knees. It seemed to him that he had completed the errand on which he had come and that he was now free to return to the camp with the others and take up his duties at the field hospital there. He looked over his shoulder to where Toussaint sat his horse, his face sealed away in the shadows; he looked for Riau but could not find him. He was free, alone, his freedom was equal to his isolation. After a long time, as it felt to him, he broke from his place and began walking along the curved garden pathway to join the other white people.