All Souls' Rising (34 page)

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-François 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-François 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-François, 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?

A
FTER THEY HAD SHOT
J
EANNOT
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-François, 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-François, 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-François, 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-François.

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 Ogûn in his head again instead of all the shadowy thinking words. I wanted my
maît’tête
to come again. Each week all us would dance and feed the
loa
with Biassou serving, or some smaller
hûngan
. Riau would be there dancing with the rest, hearing the drums the others heard, but Ogûn 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.