In Darkness (11 page)

Then he rode off, the rope attached to his bridle, dragging Chérie behind, screaming. Toussaint looked away from the bumping, twisting body.

Toussaint’s father tried to make eye contact with Bayou.

— Could you not have stopped them? he said.

Bayou would not meet his gaze.

— She belongs to him, he said. What could I do? Be glad I didn’t give you to him.

He remembered a man.

Toussaint was younger at this time. Perhaps eight. His father had been called to a plantation five or six miles away, further up in the foothills. There was a slave who had been wounded, and his master – hearing of Toussaint’s father’s abilities – had requested his help.

They rode down an avenue of poplar trees that had been implanted from France, both on the same horse, for although Toussaint’s father was well treated by Bayou de Libertas he was only allowed the use of one old nag. When they arrived at the property, all Roman columns and greenhouses, they were shown to an outhouse that had evidently, until recently, contained animals of some kind. Pigs, Toussaint guessed, from the smell.

The master stood imperiously in the center of the room. He was flanked by another white man, possibly his son, who was holding a machete in one hand and a rifle in the other. Both wore suspicious expressions on their faces – Toussaint thought they had that look all white men get when they find themselves in a confined space with blacks they’ve never met before.

By them was a canvas stretcher on which a large black man lay, face down. His back was a horror. A few thin, ribbon-like tatters of skin still adhered to the flesh, but mostly it was a mess of bloody muscle, in one or two places bone showing through, the whole thing like the map of some evil country. The stench was awful. Toussaint could tell at once that the flesh was rotting, for he had seen decaying meat often – had been fed it sometimes – and he knew what it looked and smelled like. There was a white fluid oozing from the wound – if it is possible to call a man’s whole back a single wound.

Toussaint’s father kneeled by the slave and examined his back.

— He was whipped? he inquired, his voice neutral.

— Yes, said the master. He stole from me.

— What did he steal? asked Toussaint.

His father shot him a look, but the master laughed.

— A curious one, your boy, he said. The man stole bread. Apparently he thinks that I don’t feed him well enough. He’s wrong. We always feed our slaves well, otherwise what use would they be in the fields?

He laughed again, and the younger man laughed with him. Both had double chins that wobbled as they laughed, and mustaches that quivered. Toussaint noted that their eyes were blue and pale, a color that he forever afterward associated with cruelty, to the extent that he could not bear an early summer’s day, when there were few clouds in the sky.

— The whipping was perhaps . .  . a little zealous, said Toussaint’s father.

Even at his young age, Toussaint could tell he was measuring his words carefully, as if they were very expensive and had to be rationed out.

The master shrugged.

— It’s a lesson to the others, not just to this one, he said.

Toussaint’s father sniffed at the putrefying flesh, and opened one of the man’s eyes. He sighed.

— The infection has spread, he said. See these red filaments running through his flesh? That is poison in his blood. I can make him some willow-bark tea for the fever, and there are plants that can be mixed to treat the blood poisoning. With careful attention he may live. He’ll need plenty of food – I suggest porridge, thin enough to be spooned down his throat. And water, naturally. If he survives, it’ll take weeks, possibly months, for him to recover. He won’t be able to work for a long time. And there’s no guarantee that –

— Enough, said the master.

He held out a hand and the man who might have been his son handed him the rifle.

The master shook his head.

The younger man handed over the machete.

The first blow didn’t take the injured slave’s head off. Nor did the second. The man woke up, of course – he whimpered and jerked, his eyes rolling. It took four great hacking slashes before the head finally dangled from a half-broken length of spine.

Toussaint began to cry.

His father was trembling, close to tears himself.

— The man was yours to deal with as you chose, he said hesitantly, but might not a bullet have been more humane?

— Bullets cost money, said the master.

He turned and left the outhouse.

That was when Toussaint fell to his knees and was sick. His father stroked his head and murmured, but that didn’t make it better.

He remembered a woman.

This woman, like the baby, belonged to Coste. Toussaint had steered clear of this master and his slaves since the incident of the baby, but it proved impossible to avoid him forever.

Toussaint was older in this memory, perhaps twenty, and his father was growing more feeble by the day. So it was Toussaint who was sent to a woman in a nearby village, to give her succor during childbirth. He took with him several herbs and concoctions, and was relieved to find that, when the time came, he was able to remain calm and to ease the woman’s pain, even as he delivered the baby. With scissors heated white-hot in the fire, he cut the umbilical cord, and by the early hours of the morning he was ready to leave mother and baby, and ride for home.

All of these medical skills would help him enormously when he became a general. He would be the first to start tending to the wounded after a battle, and the last to stop. His compassion, too, would serve him well when it came to leading men.

But it did not on that night.

Coming along the track to the Libertas farm, he passed a number of shadow-shapes moving in the sugar cane and the darkness, and heard a woman scream. He hitched his horse, then made his way through the tall stems of the plants. He came upon Pierre Coste, who was the old master’s nephew, and several of his friends raping a black girl who could not have been much older than seventeen. It was she who had been screaming.

When Toussaint stepped into the clearing they had made in the cane, she did not even register him – her eyes were a white emptiness. She had been beaten, Toussaint could see. He had seen a lot of people beaten; he didn’t need his medical skills or his compassion to recognize the signs.

No – he had seen a lot of
slaves
beaten. He had seen men whipped for not working hard enough; he had seen men whipped for working too hard and wearing themselves out.

— Stop, he said.

The men looked up at him.

Pierre Coste gave a snarl that was more animal than human.

— Be off with you, negro, he said.

Toussaint drew a breath.

— You’re hurting her.

The young man sneered.

— You’d rather we hurt you? he asked.

It was a rhetorical question.

They hurt Toussaint – badly. When he finally crawled back to his father’s cottage, he had one eye forced shut by swelling, three broken ribs, a crushed hand, a broken leg, and a cracked skull. He was bleeding from his mouth and his nose and his eyes.

Bayou de Libertas was horrified and saddened when he heard what had happened.

— Men like that give us all a bad name, he said.

Toussaint nodded, although he didn’t agree, feeling as he did so the ache in his neck from the men’s boots. He thought most men would become like that if they were presented with people and told that they were not so much people as belongings, as chattel. Toussaint had, at this point, already become acquainted with Boukman and his revolutionary ideas, but it was when he saw his own blood behind him in the dust of the road that something crystallized in his mind – something he had almost apprehended, but not entirely grasped, when he had seen the baby killed years before.
The blood of all creatures is the same, and mocks their uniqueness
. His, the baby’s, the mother’s, all the same, all indistinguishable from the blood of any animal, no different from that of a horse, nor of a pig. As he dragged himself back to the plantation, Toussaint saw the magic trick of slavery, and he knew Boukman was right.

This was the magic: it was merely an idea that made men into animals.

Yes, there were slave owners who were relatively kind and gentle – Bayou was one of them – but animals were disposable for good men and bad alike. Even Bayou, for all his natural goodness, for all his squeamishness, had stood by as butchery was committed on his soil. Although Toussaint could see that Bayou was truly pained to see his favorite slave’s wounds, he would never seek real reparation for them. A man might love his horses, might not whip them as others do, but if his horse were to kick a wealthy neighbor, he would stand aside whilst his neighbor punished it.

This. This was the truth that Toussaint suddenly saw: that an evil idea makes bad men of everyone who believes in it.

And that, to Toussaint’s regret, included Bayou de Libertas.

After the attack on Toussaint, Bayou didn’t require him to work for some weeks, in order that he could recover. That was what passed for mercy amongst the whites.

So it was that sometime later, Toussaint was sitting outside under the eaves of the cottage, watching the sunset, when the young men from the Coste plantation came riding up the path to the Libertas house. They didn’t even glance in his direction – perhaps they didn’t recognize the slave who had tried to ruin their fun.

Less than half an hour later, the young men left again.

That night, Toussaint saw Bayou as he visited the cottage to check on his father. Bayou was ten years older than Toussaint, in the prime of his life, and he was vigorous in his habit of patrolling the perimeters of his property and checking all his belongings, including his slaves, before retiring to bed.

— Pierre and his friends . . . said Toussaint, as he let the man through the door. Did they come to apologize?

Bayou de Libertas gave a wan smile.

— They came to give me this, he said, drawing a money pouch from his pocket. My compensation for the time that you’ve been unable to work. Men like that, they don’t apologize. To them you’re just property. But Pierre’s uncle was angry with him for damaging
my
property, so he told them to bring this money.

Toussaint stared at the pouch.
Compensation?
He had thought the beating painful, but this cut through him like a knife. He mumbled something – afterward he couldn’t remember what. He could see that Bayou was angry with the boys, could see, even, that Bayou was ashamed by their behavior, but still, a thought echoed around his mind.

You didn’t have to take the money
, was the thought.
You didn’t have to accept the compensation.

His resolve to help Boukman stemmed from this moment. If there was to be an uprising, he would be part of it. He could not live in a world where a man could break the bones of another, and then pay compensation if they felt like it, if their esteem for the man’s owner was great enough to warrant it.

He remembered it all.

He remembered it all, and he wept.

His son woke. Isaac came to the bed and asked what ailed his father. Toussaint told him he had dreamed a bad dream, but it was better now. It was all going to be better now.

He thought, as he lay there in bed, of how he had never learned to read, as Boukman had. What point was there in reading when you were nothing but an owned thing, to be whipped or sold on a whim? When the only things to read were written in the language of the whites and did not speak to you?

Now he could read, despite never having sought the ability. It had been accorded to him, granted, a gift. This gift – and his visions of the future – were how Toussaint knew that he had been chosen. It is not given to the common ranks of man to suddenly know, in a single night, how to read and write and compute figures.

His decision had been made. He would lead the slaves; he would destroy the idea of
masters
for good, and there would be no more slaves. One could call a master a good master because he did not whip his slaves, but ultimately he was still an owner of men, and men were not made to be owned.

One could call a tiger a good tiger because it kills only to eat, not out of pleasure as a cat sometimes does, but it still kills. And Toussaint’s father had always said, in the Creole that was his only language, ptit tig se tig.

The son of a tiger is still a tiger.

Like father, like son.

My father was a great man
, thought Toussaint.
Perhaps I will be a great man, too.

His determination coursing through his veins, he closed his eyes.

Then he was in Bois Caiman again, staring up at the night sky as something entered him, as something possessed his soul. If anyone had been watching Toussaint, they would have seen him tense, his eyes rolling back, before he unmoored himself from the world and floated into a dream.