Chapter Twenty-Seven
AFTER WHAT HAPPENED AT SAINT MICHEL, and later at Le Cap, when we took the prisoners there, and when we passed Bréda on our way back to Grande Rivière, there was not much I wanted to do anymore except to kill whitemen. It was not Og?n wanting to kill them as it had been before, but it was I, Riau, who wanted this thing for myself. With all our people there was anger and a hunger for blood, because we had let the white prisoners go for nothing and because the colons had tricked us again.
In this time we did kill many more of them. In this time, the way of our killing whitemen changed. Toussaint did not call himself a general yet, but he did not anymore call himself médecin. His old green coat was gone, but he had not then put on the coat of a whiteman officer. He would only whisper into the ear of Biassou, and other men, the younger ones he was teaching now, Moise and Dessalines and Riau and Charles Belair. Riau would be in the tent for talking and writing with these black men, because there were no whitemen anymore among us, no prisoners to be used for writing or planning. When writing was to be done, Riau would do it, or Charles Belair. But most of this time we did not write anything but only talked about the ways that were good for killing whitemen.
Jean-Fran?ois did not like to hear the voice of Toussaint anymore in these days. He mistrusted him and was afraid, because he saw that Toussaint was sly, like a tricky spider of Guinée—the fly will not know he has touched his web until he is rolled up in it. And the spider only comes when he is ready. Jean-Fran?ois had even moved his camp away from our camp. But when it was time for fighting, Jean-Fran?ois and his men went with us. They were all ready to kill whitemen, and our new way for that worked well.
In the first beginning time after Boukman danced and the fire was struck and the blood was running, we used to fight like we were dancing petro. It would be a big crowd screaming and beating drums and blowing conchs, most ridden by the loa, or else half in our heads half out. We were many, and with les Invisibles at our backs, and maybe we would kill all the whitemen, or if they killed us instead we would only be going to join les Morts et les Mystères in the Island Below Sea, where is our home, Guinée. But now Toussaint was teaching this new way, because he did not want us to go to be with the dead any longer.
The whitemen had made strong places in the mountains of the east which were between us and the plain of Fort Dauphin. Many of these whitemen were old Creole colons who knew the hills, and there were too the soldiers of France with them, and also gens de couleur, Candi’s men who had changed their side, and all good fighters. But now the rains were heavy, and in the mountains it was cold at night. These whitemen were wet in their wool clothes, and they were beginning to sicken there. They had been holding these mountain places a long time.
When we moved into the mountains of the east, we did it slowly and not many at one time. I, Riau, and a few others went in front along with some of Toussaint’s band while the crowds of men belonging to Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou came after us, in cover of the jungle. If we saw a few whitemen scouting or hunting away from their camps, then we would kill them all, but if they were many, we did not show ourselves at all. All this time when we were moving and watching, you would not know anyone was there at all except for the silence of the birds.
We had a game we liked to play, I and Chacha Godard and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. I did not like Chacha any more than Toussaint trusted him. He was not with us in the tent. And I knew what Biasssou meant for Chacha in the end. Still I saw that he would be a tricky spider in the dark. At night we went to a whiteman camp that was backed into some rocks. One side of it was fenced around with logs of wood that we could not come over, and there were sentries there. But we climbed around over the rocks and came down the cliff face on the strangler vines that hung down over it, slipping very quietly down the vines, with our knives held in our teeth. These were little knives and very sharp, much sharper and smaller than the big coutelas they use in the cane fields. We did not bring any guns at all for this game.
It was raining a little as we came down these vines, but very thinly, and sometimes the cloud would blow away from the moon, to make a little light. I saw the moon shine on Chacha Godard’s wet shoulders as he came down. We were naked all three of us except for our testicles bound up, and oiled like the warriors of Guinée.
The moon rode behind the cloud and it was dark again. I did not hear Dessalines come down behind me, but I felt that he was there. At one end of the camp was a small smudgy fire under a canvas, but it did not give much light. I could only see Chacha going over the rocks low like a crab toward a place where there was snoring to be heard. A minute later, the snoring stopped. By then I had crawled under an ajoupa where two whitemen were sleeping, and there I cut the throats of both. All this time there was no sound from anywhere except for sizzling when water ran off that canvas piece to drip into the fire.
When we came to the place where our camp was, we looked to see how many ears we had brought away each. Chacha had more, I had the same as Dessalines. But Dessalines traded us his share of tafia for our ears that we had taken. With a thread he sewed them altogether as a white pompon which he wore on his hat to show that he was for the King In France.
Toussaint did not like it though. Toussaint did not say a word when he saw this cockade of ears by daylight. He swung his sword and cut the ears loose from Dessalines’s hat and kicked them into the fire with his toe. It was a heavy sword and that surprised me, how he could cut the ears clean away without even knocking the hat crooked on the head of Dessalines. That whole time Dessalines stood straight and still like a soldier with a whiteman officer cursing him and his face did not change. No one said a word about it then or later. After this, we still took ears when we went out at night, but we did not show them.
There were others who played this game, besides us three. Sometimes the men from our old band of Achille, César-Ami and Paul Lefu, or sometimes others that I had not known before. So we made the whitemen fear, and we learned to know how all their camps were laid and how nearly we could come to them. The men of Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou had all come up through the jungle by that time. By night we took our places all around the camps. I was so near the whiteman I had chosen I could hear him breathing through the night, but he knew nothing about me. We waited till first light came up, to have light for the killing. When I could see the slick black trunks of gommier and bois bander, and water beading on the elephant ears all around, then I saw the hairs of the mustache of my whiteman, and so I shot him with my gun.
Once the shooting started there was not a reason to be quiet and tricky any longer, so we blew conchs and screamed and beat the drums, and then we heard the voices of the loa. It was all right to frighten the whitemen then. Most of them were killed then at this camp and many of the others there were killed or chased away. Then the cordon de l’est was broken and we came into the eastern plain and burned the plantations there and killed all of the white-men we could find. We could not come into the town of Fort Dauphin, though, because of many soldiers who were there, and if we had fought them in the open, too many ones of us would have gone to be with the dead.
After this fight was finished up, Biassou took some people to fight the whitemen at Le Cap. Toussaint did not go that time, but some of his men slipped away, and so did I, Riau, because I was still hot for the death of more whitemen. Along the way we gathered some men of Pierrot and Macaya who were camped on the northern plain or in the hills outside the city, but still there were not so many as we had been on that plain by Fort Dauphin.
But the walls on the landcoming side were not so strong at Le Cap, because these colons who first built the town only expected war to come from oversea. We came over the low dirt walls fighting well and we ran all over the hospital of the Pères de la Charité, which was there at the edge of the town. That was the place where Biassou had been a slave and there was his mother still a slave, and he had come to take her from this place. It was the only thing he wanted, so when he had taken her he did not want to fight the whitemen anymore.
Then we all stopped the fight and went away. If not for Biassou, maybe we would have killed all the whitemen of Le Cap that time. But then I understood why it was that Toussaint did not go.
Toussaint had made two whitemen prisoners in the fighting around Fort Dauphin, an old whiteman who had been an officer, and one other of the militia too. When I came back from the fighting by Le Cap, I saw how these whitemen were drilling Toussaint’s people. The one old whiteman with his gray hairs, and the younger colon with his beard growing rough, were marching our people up and down. Moise and Dessalines and Charles Belair were with these whitemen, calling out commands like halt and about face and quick march. There was Moise, whose skin was black and shiny like a wet tree trunk, dressed in nothing but a dirty pair of cotton trousers hanging in rags around his knees. He had not even any shoes, but he was wearing two horns of a hat and shouting orders like a general.
These things all seemed foolish to me, because it was not our way to fight. It was for whitemen to row out in lines or box themselves in squares for shooting. Ours was another way. Also I did not like to see our people moving to these orders that came from the thin cold lips of these whitemen.
I wanted to stay away from Toussaint then, because when I saw what Moise and the others were doing, I knew that Toussaint would tell me to do the same, doing the words of the whiteman officers. I went to the ajoupa I had made and played with Caco and that night I lay with Merbillay. It was next day Toussaint came. We had already eaten in the morning and I was playing on the banza, sitting outside the ajoupa while Caco walked around smiling and shaking a long pod from a tic-tic tree I had picked for him to have for a rattle.
Toussaint was standing over me so that he was between me and the sun. He told me that I must go and learn the whiteman way of soldier with the others, as I had been knowing he would say. I could hear them already this morning, below in the clearing, the officers all barking like some casques outside a cowpen and the drum of men’s feet moving on the ground. There were seven or eight hundred men to fight with our band then—that was before Laveaux attacked us.
I could not tell Toussaint no or yes. I made the guts of the agouti cry under my fingers and I hit the drum of the banza with my hand. I was thinking how it might feel, if I did what he asked. I had not followed the say of any whiteman since I had fourteen years and ran away from Bréda. I thought of how Toussaint had taken the doctor and the priest and other whitemen into the tent at Grande Rivière and left us out, and how they would have sold us again to the colons, and I thought too of how he had taken my bayonet to kill this one whiteman at Haut du Cap who had once beaten him long ago. There was one thing I wanted to know of him but I did not know what I would ask before I heard my mouth start speaking.
“Tell me about Béager.”
Toussaint laughed. He must have been surprised. He did not often show his teeth in laughter, though he did smile behind his hand, and sometimes he would grin at you.
“What do you want to know, about Béager?”
“The story that they tell of him and you,” I said.
Toussaint squatted down beside me and the sun struck on my face again. Caco had broken the pod open and was spilling beans out of it onto the mud. Toussaint blinked at him. He hunkered with arms wrapped around his knees, all wrinkled up and knotted like old Legba. I knew that if he wanted he could squat so for one hundred years.
Béager was gérant of Bréda before Bayon de Libertat. I did not know him because he was gone before they sold me there, but not long gone. Bayon de Libertat was a kinder master, and the slaves of Bréda talked of that sometimes. But Béager had not been cruel like Lejeune or Arnaud, only hot-tempered, hasty and quick to strike in his anger.
“I was young then,” Toussaint said, looking at Caco smiling with his pink mouth open over the beans he was pushing in the mud. “I had no wife, but there was more than one woman that I knew.” He smiled his usual way, behind his hand, and above the hand the eyes looked at me craftily. “Then I worked mostly with the horses. It was summer, very hot. There was a fine horse, a black gelding with white socks and a white star on his forehead. They named him Treize. Béager took him out riding in the heat of the day. When I saw him come in I thought they must have gone at a gallop all the way to Le Cap and back. It was still hot when he brought him in all foamed up and slobbery. Béager took him to the water trough.”
“That’s how you kill a horse,” I said. “He must have known—what was he thinking?”
“I don’t know,” Toussaint said. “Sometimes I still wonder. Maybe he thought he had killed the horse already. And you know, Riau, that sometimes a Creole will destroy a thing only to show that he is master of it.”
“Ouais,” I said. “I know it well.”
“I called him to stop,” Toussaint said, “to think what he was doing.” His eyes were far away, over my shoulder. “He did not listen. I caught the bridle out of his hand. He pushed me out of the way and led the horse nearer the trough. I hit him with my fist before I knew that I would do it—never knew I’d done it till I saw him sitting on the ground.”
I laid the banza on the ground and breathed out through my teeth. I heard this story times before but never from Toussaint.
“It was all in the open,” Toussaint said. “You know where we water the horses at Bréda. There must have been twenty slaves that saw it. No white men, though. Béager got up. He touched his mouth and showed me blood on his fingers. He took a step toward me where I was holding Treize still. The horse was tossing his head because he wanted to go drink the water and die. Then Béager turned around and went into the grand’case by himself.”
I, Riau, I had not believed this story before. It was like stories that you hear of jesus. In that time, before we rose, no slave could strike a whiteman and live afterward, it was unknown.
“What did you do,” I said.
Toussaint shrugged and rocked back on his heels with a slow rhythm. “I walked the horse,” he said. “Circles and circles, on into the night, till he was cool again. All that time I knew I was a dead man. I was walking like a zombi, Riau, do you know how it feels?”
“Ouais,” I said. “I know it.”
“Béager never came out of the house,” Toussaint said. “The horse was saved though. It was five days before I saw Béager again. He never spoke of it or of the horse. We went on as before. Maybe he thought that a good horse was worth more than a nigger after all. I won’t ever know what he was thinking. I was walking like a dead man for five days.”
Toussaint stood up then, and his shadow fell across me.
“Who knows, Riau,” he said, “do you? Maybe I have been dead all the years since then, only I don’t know it.” He grinned at me then, and went away without saying anything more.
So I did not go to train with the soldiers that day or the next. But in some days that followed I saw that of all those I had fought with around Fort Dauphin, the only other one who did not go was Chacha Godard.
After I began training with the others, Toussaint made me a lieutenant, like he did Moise and Dessalines and Charles Belair. Lieutenant Riau. Now when I met Paul Lefu or César-Ami while they must stand very straight and throw me a salute, though it was hard for them to do it without laughing. And sometimes I must laugh myself at this Lieutenant Riau. But not where anyone could hear my laughing.
There were good things about this way of training, I soon saw, beyond the foolishness of lines and squares. It made that each man would know to keep his musket clean and ready to fire. Each man would always have his musket and his bayonet, good weapons that had come from the Spanish whitemen, and each man would wear two leather belts across his shoulders with two cartridge boxes always full. Every man would always know to have these things all of the time, even if he had no shirt or shoes, and most did not.
Also we could make many men move as quickly as one man and all together. And any one man or any few would do what they were told to do, that moment they were told it and no question—as slaves do. But it was good to know these things when fighting came. And it was good that we had learned it, because it was not long after that Laveaux came out from Le Cap to fight us with new soldiers.
These were new soldiers who had come oversea from France, they had not long been in the country so they were not yet sick. They were not like the old soldiers of Blanchelande or the militiamen, we could not scare them so easily, and when we spread away in the jungle, they would still come after us very fast. There were thousands of them too. It was not long before they had broken up most of the men of Jean-Fran?ois and Biassou and made them run away.
All we who were with Toussaint were left to hold the hill called Morne Pélé, which was keeping the whitemen out of our camps at Dondon and Grande Rivière. Toussaint knew we could not win this fight, I think. We were hundreds, but there were four thousand soldiers coming. Toussaint was meaning to make time for Biassou and Jean-Fran?ois to get their men away into the mountains. This was a new thinking which came from him talking to the whiteman officers. But he did not tell us that we could not win the fight at Morne Pélé.
At Morne Pélé we began on the high ground and we killed very many whitemen with our guns while they were coming up the hill. But they were many and they did not stop charging and at the last we could not keep them from coming among us with their swords and bayonets. I saw Toussant fighting a whiteman officer face to face with a sword. It was the Chevalier d’Assas, we found out later, and he gave Toussaint a big cut on his arm, but neither one of them died from this fight.
We were chased back to the fort that Toussaint had made us build at La Tannerie. But next day we attacked them again on the top of Morne Pélé. Toussaint wore his arm in a sling, all bandaged with the herbs he knew to use. All the other men he had tended through the night went to this fight behind him, all the wounded who could walk and use a hand. We surprised the whitemen just at dawn on the top of Morne Pélé, and drove them down the hill again to the place that they had started from, but still they would not give it up.
They were very tough then, these soldiers of d’Assas and Laveaux. All this second day they kept on charging up the hill. In the afternoon, they broke us once, but Dessalines caught the horse of some whiteman officer who was killed and rode it down on them, alone at first, calling the others to follow which they did, even I, Riau, charging with the bayonet, and only I not Og?n in my head to lead me. Dessalines was young then, a tall man, red-skinned like a coal in a fire, and he wore no shirt or coat that day. We could see the tangle of white scars of old whippings all across his back, because he had a bad master when he was a slave.
That day Dessalines was hurt in the foot, but not so that he could not fight. We held the whitemen one time more, but we had many killed, and when they charged again we could not hold and so they chased us back and we had again to run to our fort of La Tannerie.
Toussaint thought then we could not hold La Tannerie either. I know he was sorry to leave this place, and I too, for all the work of building. I saw men crying to give up this fight, still they had not known they could not win it. But we had many dead, almost two hundred, and Toussaint said that we must go. In the night he sent out men ahead to drag the cannons we had there at La Tannerie, and all through the hours before dawn we began to slip out of the fort to the place in the Cibao mountains to the east where Toussaint had sent our women and children a few days before.
By morning, we were all gone out of La Tannerie. Only I, Riau, and Chacha Godard stayed there, hiding in the tops of trees outside the fort, so we could see these soldiers and know what was their strength. When the sun was well up, columns of soldiers began to come out of the jungle, very carefully at first, with their guns ready, but soon there was shouting all back down the line when they found the place was empty.
Then the officers came up, Laveaux and the Chevalier d’Assas. They walked up and down under the tree that I had climbed to hide, and I could hear all that they said. Laveaux was carrying a little riding crop and he pointed this at all the things Toussaint had made us build—the deep ditch full of water we had run in from a stream, the palisade of logs with their sharp points sticking out behind this ditch, the gates all covered with copper plates to keep out the cannon balls.
On the far side of the ditch, where my tree was, there was clear ground, and not far from the trees, Toussaint had told us to drive some stakes, so that the musket men would know their range. When whitemen came as far as the stakes, that would be the time to shoot them, but we never got to try it at La Tannerie. Laveaux flicked his crop against one of the stakes and frowned and then he pointed the crop at one of the places in the palisade we made for the cannons to look out.
“Vous voyez ?a,” he said to d’Assas.
“What of it?”
“Gun embrasures,” said Laveaux.
“But these niggers have no cannon,” d’Assas said.
“I think they do,” Laveaux said. “I think they have them still, wherever they have gone. What manner of men are these?”
“There must have been thousands of them here,” d’Assas said. In my tree, I could have laughed to hear that, but they would have caught me.
“Whatever they are, they are not savages,” said Laveaux. D’Assas pulled his mustache and did not answer him.
All that day Chacha and I hung in those trees, watching the soldiers make camp at La Tannerie. I had not known they were so many. I could not believe we had been fighting so many for two days. When night had come, Chacha wanted to cut throats and take ears before we went away, but I wanted to get off from that place alive, and I brought Chacha with me. A few ears taken would not have frightened these soldiers out of our place anyway.
So we came into the Cibao mountains, near the Spanish border, or across it maybe—who could know in that place. In the mountains it was cold and raining almost all the time because the heads of the mountains stuck up into the clouds. We had our women and our children though, more than Biassou and Jean-Fran?ois had theirs. Their men were in big camps not far from us, but they had run so fast away they left their women and children behind, and many of them who were left so gave themselves up to the whitemen and were slaves again.
There were then six hundred men of Toussaint’s band who were not killed. We did not know what we would do. It was all hunting and looking for food, and taking care of the ones who were hurt in all the fighting.
I made a tight ajoupa to keep the rain off Riau and Merbillay and Caco. I had brought my banza with me from the other camps, with my pistols and my musket and my cartridges. I sat under the roof watching the rain while I played the banza.
One day I was sitting in the ajoupa and Toussaint came and asked for me to play something for him. I was surprised, but I picked up the banza and did what he asked. I had not thought he cared anything about a banza. At Bréda, he would never go to any kind of dancing, or if he did go he would not dance. But I played a slow sad song for him because I was thinking of the ones who had been killed while we were fighting all the time. Paul Lefu had been killed there at Morne Pélé and I had been the friend of Paul Lefu.
When I stopped playing, there was no sound but the rain coming down on the leaves of the ajoupa. Toussaint was looking out into the rain. Then he looked at me with a queer smile.
“Have you heard the violin, Riau?” he said. I did not answer him but still he said, “When we are in the government house at Le Cap, then we will hear violins and golden horns.”
He sat by me for some while more before he got up and walked away into all the rain that kept leaking down from the high trees that shut out the sky. It seemed strange to me then, what he had said, but later I thought he must have always known that we would go there one day, where he said that we would go.