Master of the Crossroads (22 page)

As Toussaint emerged from the composition of his memoir, time began to weigh on him more heavily once more; the first day that Jeannin did not return passed very slowly. Not that the secretary had furnished conversation—indeed he had never spoken at all, except when, infrequently, he echoed one of Toussaint’s own phrases by way of confirmation. After the first hour Toussaint had understood that Jeannin’s silence must have been ordered by Baille or else by someone who stood above the commandant. This hardly mattered. But Toussaint had been warmed and distracted by the act of composition and by the sight of the stack of papers steadily growing under Jeannin’s trained hand.

Too little space was here, and too much time. In Saint Domingue, in (why not admit it, to himself?) his own kingdom, he would have been at some active work—campaigns or battles or oversight of cultivations—whenever he finished his
travail du cabinet.
But here he was caged in his own thoughts. As one chess player imagines the mind of another opposing him, he pictured Napoleon Bonaparte: a man of slight stature (like himself), a fine horseman and cavalry commander (like himself) who had come to political power not only through his military prowess but through a native political sagacity.

How would he, himself, respond, supposing their situation to be reversed? In Saint Domingue, certain men had died, ignored, in prison, such as Blanc Cassenave and Dieudonné—but he, Toussaint, had not killed these men! Such reproaches were inaccurate, and injust. Dieudonné, for example, had died as the captive of General Rigaud, at Les Cayes, while Toussaint was at the opposite end of the country, in the Department of the North. It was said that Dieudonné had been loaded with so many chains that at last he suffocated under their weight . . .

Now in his cell at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint felt the cold cut through to him again, and he was sweating, but his sweat was cold, and there seemed insufficient air in the cell for him to breathe. When Baille presented himself with the day’s rations, Toussaint declared that after all there was something more. Something different. After all, he would not send the document he had composed, or would not send it now. In its place, he would send a letter to Napoleon, no more than a line or two—five minutes of Monsieur Jeannin’s time. Toward nightfall, as the diamonds of weak daylight died on the cell floor, he dictated to the secretary the briefest of notes, which merely said that after all certain matters had been too delicate for commitment to a written memoir—matters it would be best to communicate in person.

When Jeannin had left with this last letter, Toussaint’s agitation drained from him. He sat for a while longer in the waning light of the fire, suffused with a sense of renewed calm, a patience too deep even to be aware of itself. The gongs of the fort’s bell no longer impressed him. He lay down on his cot and slept, free of dreams.

Part Two

BLACK SPARTACUS 1794–1796

Let righteousness cover the earth like the water cover the sea . . .

—Bob Marley, “Revolution”

In the spring of
1794
, the military map of Saint Domingue was signifi-cantly redrawn by Toussaint Louverture’s abrupt shift of allegiance from
the Spanish monarchy to the French Republic. While in Spanish service,
Toussaint had taken pains to reinforce the line of military posts known as
the Cordon de l’Ouest, which ran from the seaport of Gonaives through the
mountains to the border of Spanish Saint Domingue in the interior. The
Cordon de l’Ouest effectively cut off the Northern Department of Saint
Domingue, with its important town of Cap Français, from the rest of
the colony, whose coast from Saint Marc (the port immediately south of
Gonaives) to Port-au-Prince was now occupied by the English invaders
or their allies. To control this line improved the French Republican position immeasurably.

Governor-General Etienne Laveaux had technically become the highest
French authority in Saint Domingue upon the departure of Sonthonax.
The scope of his authority was greatly enlarged by Toussaint’s
volte-face,
which made it possible for Laveaux to return from his hemmed-in position
at Port-de-Paix to the seat of government at Cap Français, the northern
capital. During Laveaux’s protracted absence, Le Cap had become a
mulatto stronghold, under the command of the colored officer Villatte, and
members of the colored land- and slave-owning class had substantially
rebuilt the town, from which most whites had fled when it was sacked and
burned in June of 1793.

The arrival of Toussaint Louverture in their camp was not necessarily
welcomed by this mulatto class. Toussaint did have colored officers in his
own force, and he cooperated with Villatte and other colored officers of the
Le Cap region, under the command of Laveaux. Nevertheless, the mulatto
faction of the north regarded Toussaint’s sudden ascendancy, and Laveaux’s
rapidly increasing dependence on him and his men, with suspicion and
even a degree of alarm. This anxiety was shared with the Republican colored party in the south, led by André Rigaud, a general of considerable
ability who was fighting the English invaders with some success on the
southern peninsula, also known as the Grande Anse. Pinchinat, an elderly
colored gentleman respected as a rhetorician and feared as a propagandist,
carried messages back and forth between Rigaud in the south and Villatte’s
party in the northern region.

Toussaint, meanwhile, was busy fighting a war on two fronts. Along
the interior border, significant Spanish forces (mostly composed of black
auxiliaries) remained to be dealt with. These troops, under the command
of Toussaint’s erstwhile superiors Jean-François and Biassou, were less well
organized and well trained than Toussaint’s own men, who were usually
successful against them. At the same time, Toussaint’s army made repeated
but unsuccessful attempts to dislodge the British from Saint Marc and
fought numerous engagements in the region of the Artibonite River, the
next significant natural boundary south of the mountains of the Cordon de
l’Ouest. These areas remained in dispute, but from Dondon in the interior across the mountains to Gonaives, Toussaint—and thus the French
Republic—was impregnable.

10

Papa Legba,
we were singing,
Attibon Legba, ouvri baryè pou nou
. . . We sang, and Bouquart, the big Congo maroon with the cross-shaped marks of his people in Guinée paired on his stomach, struck the Asoto
tambou,
there at the center of the
batterie
of three drums. He touched the Asoto drum with his left hand and a small stick crooked like a hammer in his right. Papa Legba, open the gate for us . . . It was Bahoruco Mountain where we danced, on a height above the mouth of one of the great caves, and when the drums played, the cave spoke too in a drum’s voice. The drums called Legba to open the crossroads, let the
loa
come up from the Island Below Sea into our heads, and I, Riau, was singing too for Legba, not hearing my own voice any more than I felt the salt water gathering on my face. We call for blessed Legba to come, but sometimes it is Maît’ Kalfou who brings himself to the crossroads, the trickster, betrayer sometimes,
magouyé.

Singing still, I watched Bouquart, his face sweat-shining, with a motionless grin gleaming as he drummed. The fleur-de-lys was branded on his left cheek, to punish him for running away, and for another such punishment his right ear had been lopped off, and for the same reason he wore on each leg a
nabot
the size and weight of a cannonball, welded around his ankles, and yet he had still run as far and fast as Bahoruco. If there had been a forge, I, Riau, might have struck the
nabots
off his feet, using the powers of fire and iron (for that Riau who was a slave had learned blacksmithing from Toussaint), and equally the power of my
maît’ têt,
Ogûn-Feraille, but there was no forge at Bahoruco, only the voices, the drums, the low droning out of the caves, then silence with hands fluttering on the drum skins light and soundless as the wings of birds, their gray and white feathers shivering, and the scream that came from Riau’s body, stripped the body from the mind, as the god came up from beneath the waters, through heels and spine to flower in his head.

It was not Ogûn who came, they told me after, not the proper master of my head, but Maît’ Kalfou who took my body for his horse, though never before had that one mounted Riau. Jean-Pic told me it was so, when Riau came to himself again at dawn, the cool mist rising round him at the edge of the sacred pool. It was quiet then, the birds speaking softly, hidden in the leaves, and only a drum’s echo beating slowly somewhere behind my head. Maît’ Kalfou, Jean-Pic told me, had walked among the dancers, his arms raised in the shape of the cross and his muscles trembling from their own strength, and had spoken in his wet, croaking voice, but Kalfou’s words belonged to the proclamation of Toussaint from Camp Turel.

My name is perhaps not unknown to you.
But Maît’ Kalfou must have already been recognized by the
serviteurs
there . . .
I have undertaken to avenge you. I want liberty and equality to reign throughout Saint
Domingue. I am working toward that end.
How such words must have sounded in the harsh, damp mouth of Kalfou . . . on the morning after my throat ached from his shouting them.
Come and join me, brothers,
and fight by our side for the same cause . . .

Those words were heard before in Bahoruco. Maît’ Kalfou had not been the first to bring them here. The words of Toussaint’s letter had come from both sides of the border, from the whitemen of France and the whitemen of Spain, and on the same day that the French Commissioner Sonthonax declared that all the slaves were free. Toussaint had signed his letter
Toussaint Louverture,
a name that he had never used before that time, when everyone had called him Toussaint Bréda, from the name of the
habitation
where he had been a slave.

I had not thought much of Toussaint’s words when they first came to us, though I saw that he was trying still to use words to sway men at long distances (as Riau had helped him to do, before Bahoruco), sending the words that walked on paper as his messengers, teaching them to speak with the voices of others. But the name . . . he had invented it, so much was sure, unless it was given to him by his
mystère,
but Toussaint always claimed that he served only Jesus, not the
loa,
and no one had ever seen a spirit mount his head. After Kalfou had let Riau’s flesh drop in the wind-fallen leaves beside the sacred pool, the understanding came to me, that in calling himself
Toussaint of the Opening
he meant to say it was Legba working through his hands.

But sometimes it is Maît’ Kalfou who comes . . .

“Go to the
cacique,
” Jean-Pic said, when I had spoken part of the thought to him. And I got up from the leaves and drank water from a spring nearby, and touched cold water to my face and the back of my head. Jean-Pic and I shared a mango he had picked. We went down toward the cave mouth where the
cacique
was, but the way there was not straight. Below where we walked the
bitasyon
spread among the folds of mountain in and out of sight, the square
cays
built of mud and stick and sometimes fenced with cactus thorn, the corn plantings twisting to follow veins of good earth among rock ledges on the slopes. The path twisted the same way between the corn and the yards of the mud-walled houses. All down the mountain the cocks were crowing and people waking to the day, stepping out upon their packed-earth yards. Farther down the gorges were the palisades of sharpened poles and the mantraps dug and hidden for attackers to fall into, or for anyone. Riau, I myself, might have been so taken, only that I came here with Jean-Pic who knew where the mantraps were dug. Under Santiago the maroons of Bahoruco had promised with the French whitemen to return escaping slaves for a reward of gold, but now Santiago was dead and by the words of Sonthonax there were no more slaves in the land, but still the maroons of Bahoruco mistrusted the coming of any stranger from outside.

The little crook-jawed pin-tooth dogs scampered and turned behind their cactus fences as we passed, but they did not bark or growl because they knew our smell. It was those dogs that gave the warning when the whitemen came, or anyone outside the
bitasyon.
Outside one
cay
a young woman looked up from where she was pounding dried corn into meal to smile at us both as we went by, but there were few women here, and the men were not so many as the whitemen believed they were. They told, when Santiago went to make the peace paper with the French whitemen, he brought one hundred thirty-seven grains of corn to show the number of the people, but that was trickery, there were more. Though not the thousands the whitemen believed, there were some hundreds there.

We walked the twistings of the path, worn deep in rocky earth by people walking, with a stream twisting beside it, lower down, until we turned the point of the ledge and came to the cave opening where the
cacique
was. Bahoruco was a cave of many mouths, and when too many of the whitemen soldiers come, our people knew to run into one mouth and come out at another, far away. The caves were full of the Indian mysteries carved in stone, so that the whitemen did not like to go in, or maybe they were only afraid of the darkness. In times before, enough
blanc
soldiers came to drive our people from Bahoruco back to Nisao, and they burned the corn and wrecked the houses, but afterward the people returned here, and the
bitasyon
had all been rebuilt and had been standing for some years.

The
cacique
had already come out to sit on the ledge before his cave mouth. He was old, with white hair hanging in flat strings, and the gold-colored skin of his face bunched in fine wrinkles. His belly skin was slack and loose and because of an illness he had to carry his balls in a basket when he walked. Now he sat, the basket folded in between his legs, and took the sun on his high cheekbones and his closed eyelids. They called him
cacique
not because he was truly a chief among the Indians but because he was the last Indian in that place. There was still blood mixture to be seen in the maroons of Bahoruco, in the angle of cheekbone, smoothness of the hair or slant of the eye, but it was sinking to the invisible, washed away in the blood of Guinée. Only the
cacique
remained with his Indian blood pure.

We had still the Indian-woven fish traps, the bows with their arrows almost as long as a man was tall, and some said even the gourd and bead
asson
which our
hûngan
shook in time with the drums as the spirits came down, that the
asson
had first been given by an Indian
mystère.
They said the
cacique
knew those mysteries, who had made him wise. Sometimes he could speak in Creole, but today he spoke only his own language, high and quavering as it floated out from his mouth over the green gorges, and the sound of it gave me sadness for my language of Guinée, my mother tongue, which Riau had forgotten.

A basket of
loa
stones,
pierres tonnerres,
lay by the
cacique
’s knee, and I sat down and lifted one, holding it in both my hands. It was black, cone-shaped, and heavier than any ordinary stone, from the weight of the
loa
who stayed inside. I did not know the language the
cacique
was singing over the hills, but understanding came to me. It seemed to come through the palms of my hands, which were both curved to the shape of the
pierre tonnerre.
I saw that Toussaint, when he chose his name at Camp Turel, would have known already what Sonthonax meant to say. He knew many whitemen and was known by them, so that he would have had this knowledge from their councils, before Sonthonax had spoken. He made his message then, choosing the same day, to show it was Toussaint, not Sonthonax, who would open the barrier to freedom.

I went away from the
cacique
’s ledge then, to the
cay
I shared with Jean-Pic and Bouquart and one other. There was no woman in the house, not one among the four of us. Jean-Pic had gone up into the corn plantings, and the others were gone too, so the house was empty. I took from a hole in the clay wall my two pistols and the watch plundered from the body of a whiteman officer long ago, also a box of writing paper and two packets of letters, one tied up with string and the other with blue ribbon—these last things Riau had taken when Halaou ran over a
habitation
in Cul de Sac, and also two long candles of white wax.

I lit one candle and wound the watch, then opened its face so I could see the thin black fingers counting away the bits of time like crumbs falling from a round cassava bread. With all these objects placed before me, alone in a house, I became perfectly like a whiteman, except there was no chair and everything lay on the floor.

Sometimes I would use pieces of sharpened charcoal to copy words and sentences from the letters, so that my skill in writing, which Toussaint had first taught me, would grow larger. By this copying I learned to compose each word with letters that properly belonged to it. Bouquart had interested himself in this art, and sometimes I would try to teach him, but he learned little. I was not such a teacher as my
parrain
Toussaint, who could train a horse and could train a man to train that same horse in place of himself, and who had given me an itch for words on paper which would not leave me, not when Riau first ran from Bréda to join the maroons of the north, not when he ran from Toussaint’s army to come to Bahoruco. When I copied the letters to the paper, I was altogether
I
—myself here, the words and paper there, and the whiteman language filled up all the space inside my head, but I knew it was an act of power. When I practiced this writing, I gained more power than my
parrain,
for Toussaint himself did not know how to put the same letters into his words each time he wrote them.

Both packages of letters had been sent to the
gérant
, a whiteman sent out of France to manage the plantation. Those tied with string were from the owners of that
habitation,
who lived in France but wrote mostly complaining to their
gérant,
that too much of money was spent, too small of harvests returned, that the slaves cost too much in money and would not work long or hard enough, that they cost too much in food, and too many ran away to the mountains. The last of those letters, written after the slaves had risen in the north, complained more bitterly of the disasters. But the letters tied with ribbon were sweeter to the taste of eye and mind—they came from two whitewomen of France, the
gérant’s
mother and another who sent words of love to him although she did not have his child. BonDyé had not joined these two together before Jesus, but it seemed they wished it, though now the ocean was between them. Those letters spoke words of love to the
gérant,
and went on whispering his name whenever I opened them, though the
gérant
had been dead since that night we had all come to that Cul de Sac plantation with Halaou, and when I copied the words they spoke again. Sometimes I thought of writing such a letter of Merbillay, who had my child—make the love words speak to her from paper. I could write
my son
to Caco, how the letters of the
gérant’s
mother always began—
my
dear son.
But I did not know if Merbillay was still with Toussaint’s camp wherever it had moved to, or if she had gone somewhere else, but wherever she was, she could not read and had never thought of learning.

This day I wrote nothing, copied no word, but sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, looking across the candle flame at the glitter of the watch and the metal pieces on the pistols. In learning to use such tools as these, Riau might enter the mind of a whiteman. Of Toussaint and Sonthonax, which was the greater
magouyé
?