Chapter Thirty-Four
WHY IS IT THAT WHITEMEN BELIEVE THAT only jesus could come back from the dead? All men could do it. All black men do. More paths than one lead back from the Island Below Sea. There is the zombi astrale and the zombi cadavre. Les Morts et les Mystères are also there. This thing that jesus did, to come back in the body, I, Riau, could do it too.
When the whitemen brought Riau from Guinée, that was the same as death. The ship was a big wooden graveyard for men and women of Guinée, and each with a space to lie no larger than those wooden boxes whitemen use for burying. That was the first time Riau must pass through death.
Now it was Captain Riau in the hills by Habitation Thibodet, drilling and marching and learning how to be a whiteman officer. There was this other whiteman captain Toussaint gave to me, wanting us each to be a parrain to the other, so that Riau would turn into a whiteman officer, and this other would learn the ways of the men of Guinée. Captain Maillart. He was not so bad a whiteman, and he taught to Captain Riau many new things about drilling and marching and all the special ways that whitemen know for fighting and killing each other. But at the end of the day when Captain Riau took off his uniform, I had to look at myself all over very carefully to be sure that my skin was not fading into white.
Now we were free black men, free soldiers, as Toussaint said, and also those Spanish generals had said so. But slaves were still there at Thibodet. Every day they went into the fields to work the cane and coffee. They went singing like slaves of a good master, like the slaves at Bréda used to sing. But when I watched them in the cane, I thought I saw zombi cadavre. Where was the ti-bon-ange? Where was the gros-bon-ange? No one is there in the head of a slave, only cadavre.
Then the little whiteman doctor went away. After all, he was not the master of this habitation, only something like a gérant, but the Thibodet slaves told to us that the master had died. Then, a few days after the doctor had gone, the Thibodet mistress came back from before, only she had then a new whiteman who was the gunrunner Tocquet, and had taken his name as whitepeople do. Now Tocquet was master of this habitation. The slaves of the fields were afraid of him at first. The little doctor was good to them, but Thibodet had whipped them all, so they waited, afraid Tocquet would whip.
Captain Riau knew this whiteman from another time, when he carried guns to us at our camps of Grande Rivière. Two black men were always with him then, Gros-jean and Bazau, and all three of them could live in the mountains like maroons. Tocquet was the strangest whiteman Riau had ever seen, and sometimes I thought he might not be a whiteman at all, but some strange pale kind of homme de couleur, only other whitemen treated him like one of them always. At this Habitation Thibodet, Tocquet lived in the grand’case with the white madame, but Gros-jean and Bazau built themselves new cabins in the quarters. Toussaint sent a detail of our free black soldiers to help them build it.
Tocquet and his white madame were very friendly with Toussaint, and often they asked him to eat at their table in the grand’case. Sometimes Captain Riau, or Moise or Dessalines would go with him to eat from this table, always dressed in a fresh washed uniform with the buttons newly polished and bright. Sometimes Captain Maillart went too, or the other whiteman officer Vaublanc. Around this whiteman’s table would be what they called conversation, and we ate the same as they. But sometimes Riau began to think that this friendship of Tocquet for Toussaint was like the friendship Bayon de Libertat had for his good commandeur.
Then also Toussant began to send details of soldiers into the fields for Tocquet. Not every day, but when the work was big—digging to plant new cane, or helping to repair the cane mill. I, Riau, went to direct them like a commandeur myself, still wearing my uniform of captain, but the men took off their uniforms if they had them, so when I saw them working I could not know them from the slaves of Thibodet. This seemed very bad to me. None of the Thibodet slaves wanted to run away then, because here was food enough and no whippings, and we soldiers kept them safer than any place they knew to run. No, all of them were singing there, that time. But if any had tried to run away, I thought Toussaint would send us after them to bring them back, the same like we were with the maréchaussée.
We did not have any drums in our camp except for drilling or any dances for the loa. Only prayers to jesus, even though we had no whiteman priest this time. Toussaint would make the prayers himself. The Père Sulpice was so happy with what he said to jesus in San Raphael that he had given Toussaint a rosary, without any skulls or jesus faces, only plain wood beads, and Toussaint knew how to count his prayers with this. Still in the night I did hear drumming from the mountains, where was the camp of Biassou.
In the night I was sleeping in my tent but my dream was in the fields of Thibodet. My ti-bon-ange went walking in my dream to see for me how things were there. The slaves were in the fields to work at night as well as day, and all of them were dressed in white, and my ti-bon-ange saw how all of them were zombi. When I woke, I heard the drum and so I went to it.
There at Biassou’s calenda Riau was a long time dancing but Og?n would not come into my head. The drum tried very hard to move me but I could not be moved, I was yet I, Captain Riau. So I gave it up, and put on my coat of officer again, which I had taken off to dance. I sat down with my back against a thorn tree. Ghede came walking to me then, all stiff-legged and turning his head like a snake. He had snaky eyes that looked at me, though he was mounted on the body of Jean-Pic. I had not known Jean-Pic had come again to the camp of Biassou.
“Give me bread,” Ghede said, but Riau had no bread to give to him. Ghede took hold of the uniform coat and rubbed the cloth with his stiff fingers.
“Give me BREAD,” said Ghede. “I am hungry—you must give me something.”
I put my hand into my pocket and brought out some coins that were there and offered them, but Ghede only laughed to see them.
“I cannot eat these metal pieces,” Ghede said. “I ask you bread.” With his stiff arm he struck my hand from underneath so that the coins went all scattering. Ghede laughed at me, and then I felt afraid of him.
“Would Og?n come to a whiteman’s head?” Ghede was sneering at the uniform of Captain Riau. “No better will Og?n come to you. Besides, you are a bad serviteur. It is too long since you have fed the loa.”
Ghede pushed me in my chest and I fell down against the tree. I watched Ghede go walking away to do his feasting in some other place. The coins were spilled all around me but I had no heart to pick them up, I did not want them anymore.
It went on long, this feeding of the loa. I sat by the tree, thinking I would be very tired on the next morning, when it was my time to do my work of officer, dancing with the Captain Maillart. But I did not go away. After a while, when Ghede had left the head of Jean-Pic, Jean-Pic noticed me and came to talk.
I asked him if he had gone to find the maroons of Bahoruco, as he had said he would do. Jean-Pic told me that he had done this, and it was very good there, better than even he had thought. He told me how they did things there, and how he was meaning to go back there, and he asked me if I would come with him. I pointed to my uniform and said I could not go. I told him how it was to be Captain Riau, what was the meaning of désert, and what would happen to an officer if he would desert. All the time Jean-Pic squatted by the tree, smiling and shaking his head slowly like he could not believe what I was telling. When I had done, he told me that no soldiers would ever reach those caves in Bahoruco.
Then Jean-Pic asked me about Merbillay, if she and Caco were with me in the camp of Toussaint. I told him that she was not there, because all the women and the children had been left behind in the mountains above San Raphael, we could not bring them with us to fight the whitemen in the whiteman way of fighting. Jean-Pic smiled and shook his head, like he did not believe that either.
Then Biassou passed by, walking slowly and making a small sound with his special asson. He looked at me, so I got up and followed him. Jean-Pic came too.
“C’est l’heure,” Biassou said, when we came in his tent. “Chacha has not gone to his ajoupa, but soon he will go.”
In Biassou’s tent there were all the things we had been making ready for the coup poudré. Long before we had put a toad into a box with a snake to make it angry, then we had killed the toad and dried it and ground it to a powder. We had cut out the insides of a puffer fish and dried them in the sun. We had taken graveyard dirt, and dust ground from the skulls saved from that place in Grande Rivière where Jeannot had liked to throw his bones. Now Biassou was mixing all these things together, while the strings of snakebones shivered from the ridgepole of the tent, and his cats watched from the corners with their strange-colored eyes. Biassou mixed everything together, and he also put in some pois-gratter and some pieces of broken glass.
When it was finished, Biassou put everything into a bag and gave it to me. He shook the asson lightly and stared into my face, his eyes as strange to me as those cats’ eyes. I felt a feeling then, even if Og?n had not come. I did not feel my uniform so much.
Then Riau and Jean-Pic left the tent, Riau carrying the bag. It was true, Chacha had not come to his ajoupa yet. Jean-Pic waited outside while Riau went in. In the place where Chacha would lie down, Riau poured the powder to make the vévé of Baron Cimitière. As he was going out, Riau poured the powder in the shape of a cross on the place inside the door where Chacha must step.
Then we went a little way into the jungle to wait for Chacha to come back. It was not so long before he came. When he first stepped on the burrs inside the doorway, he said a whiteman’s curse and dropped down on the floor of the ajoupa. I thought he must be holding up his foot to feel what it was that had bitten him, and maybe he even rolled over onto his sleeping place then, so that the vévé touched him with its broken glass. Then Chacha stopped his cursing and gave an awful moan of fear, because I think he must have known then what had happened to him.
In a little while it was silent there, and so we went away. I felt strange to myself all the time going back to Toussaint’s camp, and strange all the next day while I was doing my soldier work. It was not the same as cutting someone with a knife, or shooting someone with a gun. It was not even the same as the things Riau had done in those first days when we were burning the plantations.
In the afternoon, Jean-Pic came to tell me that Chacha had died in the night, and that they had already buried him this day.
FOR THREE MORE DAYS I DID MY WORK OF CAPTAIN, being parrain to Captain Maillart and he parrain to me, but I did not feel so much like a whiteman anymore then. Chacha was in the earth three days, the same as jesus. On the third night, Jean-Pic came for me, and I went back along with him to the camp of Biassou. I wore my uniform of captain and I took my two pistols with me, and the watch, but I did not take anything else with me, not even the banza.
Chacha was not buried very deep, about three feet. Then it did not take so long to dig him up. Riau dug while Jean-Pic held the torch, or I would hold it while Jean-Pic was digging. The torch was made from gommier wood and it burned very bright, with a sizzling sound. People from Biassou’s camp could see the light of it through the trees, but I think they were afraid to come there to see what we were doing.
Chacha’s eyes were open, under the ground, as the eyes of the dead must open if you do not weight the lids. His jaws were closed tight but the lips had pulled away from them, so that he gave a dead grin of a skull. Dirt was lying on the white part of his eyes, and the earth had stained his teeth. I saw that he was truly dead enough he could not blink the dirt out of his eyes.
But then Biassou came crouching over him, like Chacha used to crouch over the bodies of his women when he still lived. Biassou pried his jaw open with a spatula of bone, and pushed in a paste of dark shiny leaves that he had mashed together, and poured in a tisane the leaves had been boiled in. There was nothing, because Chacha was gone, there was only corps-cadavre, and the tisane ran back out of his jaws like a cup that is overflowing. As dead as that. But Biassou’s eyes were shining in the torchlight. He put his lips to Chacha’s lips and blew his breath in him. He pushed the paste in deeper with his piece of bone, and rubbed on Chacha’s throat and pushed his jaw so that it made the chewing movement.
Then Biassou sat back. How his eyes were shining—Riau cannot forget. If the jaw of the corps-cadavre was still moving it was only that Biassou had pushed it, Riau thought. Or it still moved itself like a machine. The thing was choking, spluttering out the leaf paste. Then the thing was sitting up, spitting out dirt and leaves across its knees. It put its hands on the edges of the grave and rose.
It was not Chacha, it did not even look like Chacha anymore. There was no shining there around the body, and it could not cast a shadow anymore. The gros-bon-ange was gone away. The ti-bon-ange was gone. Maybe someone could catch the ti-bon-ange for the making of a zombi astrale, but it was the corps-cadavre that Biassou had come to take.
Biassou made the zombi eat more of the leaf paste. He took it under the shoulders and raised it up to stand beside the grave hole. He picked up a rod the thickness of three fingers bunched together, and he beat the zombi across the back and shoulders until it fell down to its knees. The zombi moaned and cried out like the wind across a rum bottle, like the dead thing which it was. Biassou kept on beating it until it put its face into the ground and covered the back of its head with its dead hands. Biassou was sweating and breathing like a runner and a lover. He kept on beating the zombi until the rod broke in his hand.
Riau thought he must have killed it, that it could not move again. But when Biassou commanded it to get up, the zombi rose once more. It stood with its head swinging and its two arms hanging down.
Biassou led the zombi to the edge of the trees, where some other men were waiting. They would take the zombi away somewhere. Maybe it must go to the farm which we had heard of, where Biassou had fields of zombis who must work for him. Or maybe he would sell it for a slave. He was still selling slaves over the Spanish side, we knew.
Jean-Pic and Riau did not wait for Biassou to come back from where he had taken the zombi into the trees. We stuck the torch in the loose dirt by the grave, still burning, then we left that place.
His ti-bon-ange and his gros-bon-ange were still with the body of jesus when jesus came out of the grave where they had laid him. That is the story Toussaint tells, and all the priests. I remembered the beads of the Père Sulpice, all those jesuses and skulls. It was not that way with Chacha. I wanted to raise the dead to life! Instead, we made a dead thing walk.
So I took off my uniform of captain, and hung the coat and trousers in a tree. I took off the soldier boots that crushed my feet. I was not going back to Toussaint now, but I was going to Bahoruco, with Jean-Pic. I had only a cloth to bind around my sex part, and a pouch hanging over my shoulder to hold my knife and pistols and the watch. I was only sorry to leave the banza, but if they did come after I would not want to carry it. All this time I was pretending to be a whiteman soldier, I did not have much time to play it anyway.
In Guinée I was alive, but they brought me out a dead thing. I was not three days but three months in my tomb. Each day they brought us on the deck and made us eat and made us dance, still nothing moved but the corps-cadavre. As a dead thing I was sold to Bréda. There Toussaint was my parrain, and there could be none better. Toussaint taught me how to be a slave, how to bear my death. It was the h?ngan Achille, when he came down from the mountain with his band, who touched my lips and eyes and made me live again.
So I was running behind Jean-Pic, quick and sure-footed in the dark below the trees. No one was chasing us, but we ran because we liked to. The air of the night was sweet on my whole skin, and they were both the good black color. I could not see Jean-Pic or see myself in all this dark, but I knew I was Riau again, only Riau, and I was glad to be running away to Bahoruco.