Master of the Crossroads (55 page)

They were walking down over broken ground, stepping over ditches slashed by runoff from the mountain. The
ajoupas
on either side of their way seemed to be empty now, but there was a hum of voices from an enclosure further ahead: an oval shut off by flat shield-shaped panels woven of palm fronds. Torchlight from the interior pushed up against the bluish light of the moon.

Crossing a ditch, Arnaud slipped on a stone and fell but caught himself on a fist and scrambled up the other side, his stick trailing uselessly. Claudine had already crossed into the peristyle, but when Arnaud reached the opening in the palm panels, two black women crossed a pair of lances, draped with flags, to bar his way.

“W pa kab pasé,” said one, her eyes remote beneath the crease of her red headcloth.
“Sé pa pou blanc.”

“But—” Arnaud began. The doctor was plucking at his elbow. He let himself be led away. You cannot pass, the woman had said, it is not for whites. But Claudine had entered there. A path led around the outside of the frail palm-paneled wall, through which the torchlight flickered, and then more roughly to a ledge that ascended to higher ground above the peristyle.

“Here,” the doctor muttered, coming to a halt. “They will not mind us.”

Craning forward, Arnaud nearly toppled into a brushy ravine below the narrow ledge. He braced his stick on the crumbling dirt and pushed himself back. They were looking into that pagan temple as if into a bowl. Arnaud could make small sense of what he saw. A throng of blacks milled about inconsequentially under the light of burning splints of
bwa
chandel.
Disorder in all directions, so far as he could see. The big drum from the church had been placed between two smaller ones that played a rhythm full of dismaying shifts and dislocations, and someone was chanting words he could not understand. Divested of his priestly robe, Moustique capered about like some lord of misrule, circling backward round a central post, a cutlass wheeling, shimmering in his hand. From a distance, Fontelle and Joseph Flaville watched soberly, shifting from foot to foot. Arnaud looked everywhere but could not find Claudine.

The beat of the drumming changed, and a new hub of interest began turning in the crowd, a circle opening round a huge black woman, whose face was a mask of caked white clay. Eyes slitted, she rolled her hips in a billowing motion, her skirts held high and tight against her buttocks and her thighs. Arnaud was riveted to her movement, just as all those who stood encircling her were, but it was something deeper than sex, a still more primal power.

“Maman Maig’,” the doctor breathed, as if confirming something to himself, and at his words Arnaud recognized the midwife in this undulant figure who both was and was not her. The circle stretched into an oval and another dancer was admitted, dressed all in white with a white headcloth. By comparison her movement was pale and ghostly, like the tossing of an empty sheet in the wind. Her skin was white also—Claudine, Arnaud realized, in different clothes . . .

At the very moment of his recognition, she shrieked and tore at her head with both hands. Her cry was that of a damned soul or someone being flayed alive. The thought came to Arnaud that all he saw—the thrust of torch flames and insistent drums and guttural chanting and the grotesquely seductive dance—was part and parcel of the Hell he had imagined in the church and which, in her episodes of madness, he imagined Claudine to inhabit. Hell made immanent. All that these same people had performed in the church was sham, and what it covered up was this. He lunged in Claudine’s direction, but the doctor caught him up and he let himself be detained, mouth agape, watching: Claudine had toppled backward and lay in the crook of Maman Maig’s great fleshy elbow as if floating on a wave of the night sea, while certain congregants stroked her hands (“They will not harm her,” the doctor was saying) and still others whispered in her ears to calm her or inspire her. In Maman Maig’s free hand a gourd wrapped in bead strands rattled—once, twice, again, and Claudine rolled forward on her heels, regained her balance and took a stiff step forward as the people scattered away from her.

“They will not harm her,” the doctor repeated. “You see how they respect her.”

“But what can this be?” Arnaud hissed. He had seen her so before in her fits of madness: stiff angular posture and glittering eye and movements trembling with a terrible rigor. He felt now that the doctor was correct. They had not harmed her. Rather they were helping her, in ways he’d not been able to divine.

“What can it mean?” he said, as his breath sighed out of him.

“I do not know,” the doctor murmured. “Only that, by their belief, Claudine is herself no longer—one of their gods has entered in her place.”

“The Devil!” Arnaud said, cold to the core despite his words’ heat. The echo of her scream still pierced him like a frozen blade. “You mean she is possessed by a demon.” In his confusion he remembered the story of Christ driving demons from the man they rode into a herd of pigs, and at the same moment wondered if he’d damned himself to the same end by taking the sacrament unshriven. Over the cliff with the swine into the pit . . . Hair stood up on his neck and arms, but he felt the doctor touching his forearm and calming. He watched his wife, moving with a step unlike her own, addressing the congregants who swirled about her with a fierce authority.

“I would not say as much as that,” he heard the doctor saying. “It may be that they do not imagine angels and demons in the way that we do. I know that when one of their spirits descends, they don’t imagine it comes for ill.”

Some few days later, riding south to Gonaives, the doctor revisited the scene in his reflections—Moustique had given him some introduction to those African mysteries; had shown him where he might stand to watch without, himself, being observed by the celebrants . . . but he hardly knew what to make of what he saw. Perhaps it was Mesmerism . . . some African strain of Magnetism—how would they have come by it? According to rumor, some European mountebank had introduced a corrupted version of Mesmer’s practice among the colonists of Le Cap, shortly before the insurrection, and so the blacks might have absorbed it from their masters . . . yet the doctor felt it was not so. Unconsciously he touched the shard of mirror in his pocket. After these observances, if not because of them, Claudine was calm and lucid, seemed perfectly sane and even almost contented, as if she had been cured. If that were so, what did it matter if he understood?—though certainly Michel Arnaud would be less easily persuaded. The doctor let the rumination go. They had passed Plaisance and the crossroads for Marmelade and were descending toward the coast and the port town. On either side of him, the helmet plumes of Toussaint’s guardsmen tossed in the dry wind.

At the foot of Pilboreau the road inland to Ennery attracted him, but though he would very much have liked to see Paul and Sophie and his sister again, he could not stop. Perhaps on the return. His mission to Gonaives was too urgent, too delicate. The wax seal of Sonthonax’s letter chafed against the inner lining of his coat.

From the moment of Sonthonax’s return to Saint Domingue, there had been a certain prickliness between him and Toussaint. Nothing overt, no open conflict. On the face of it there was scarcely any difference of opinion between the two. Sonthonax had not quarreled with Laveaux’s appointment of Toussaint as Lieutenant-Governor of all the colony; on the contrary it agreed very well with his own policy to promote black men to posts of high leadership. Early in June, Sonthonax had declared it a crime for anyone even to say aloud that the freedom of the blacks was not irrevocable, or that one man might own another. And yet the doctor sometimes felt that Toussaint was not entirely overjoyed to see the commissioner acclaimed by the freed men as author of their liberty.

He struggled to put these thoughts from him. A short way south of the Ennery crossroads, he called a halt and dismounted to buy a pannier of mangoes from the market women gathered in the shade between the river and the road. He shared out some fruit among the men of his escort, and took a piece to eat himself—the mangoes were too ripe for slicing, so eating them involved one’s whole face. The guardsmen grinned at each other, sucking the pulp of the seeds; the doctor’s beard got sticky from the juice. He washed his hands and face in the river stream before they mounted and rode on. The balance of the mangoes he’d present to Toussaint and his family.

In the midafternoon they came to the
caserne
at Gonaives, where the doctor found Captain Maillart, attached to the headquarters as an aide-de-camp. Toussaint was away, but was expected before evening.

“What news?” the captain cried, holding the doctor’s horse as he dismounted.

“Dispatches,” the doctor said, “and mangoes.” He opened his coat to show the commissioner’s seal on the letter he carried.

“I’ll leave you that delivery,” the captain said.

“As bad as that?” the doctor said, letting his coat fall shut as he unfastened the pannier of fruit from his saddlebow.

“I don’t say so,” the captain said, looking about uneasily, and lowering his voice, “only the commissioner never got on so well with our general as when they were passing out those muskets to the cultivators.”

“But of course,” the doctor, said, ruminating as they walked toward the building.

He had witnessed a few of those scenes—products of Sonthonax’s first exuberance at returning to the colony. Under Toussaint’s escort, he had convoyed out onto the northern plain or into the mountains round Limbé, with wagonloads of muskets shipped from France. With his own hands Sonthonax had distributed the weapons, sometimes brandishing a firearm before delivering it into eager hands, and constantly repeating the phrase which had become the motto of such occasions: “Whoever would take this weapon from you would take away your freedom!” Wild cheering greeted all such demonstrations, while Toussaint smiled behind his hand, or moved to loosen the canvas from the wagon beds, no doubt calculating all the while that all those guns would sooner return to his own command than to that of the Commission . . . which had sailed into port with thirty thousand muskets, four hundred thousand pounds of powder, but only nine hundred European soldiers.

The doctor had discussed the implications of that situation with the captain before, but now was not the moment to revisit the topic—there were too many of Toussaint’s black subalterns standing about within earshot as they stepped beneath the door lintel to enter the shadows within the building. In the inner courtyard, the doctor drank the glass of rum that Maillart offered him, then pulled off his boots and stretched out on a borrowed cot. For a time the cot seemed to sway with the same motion as his horse. He thought how those muskets had seeded the hills. Thirty thousand former slaves equipped with muskets—did Sonthonax imagine that he ruled them? In case of conflict, those men would much more likely respond to the discipline of Toussaint—if to any rule at all. Toussaint of the opening. Strange numinosity in the phrase he’d chosen for his name. He of the aperture, the gap, the tear in the fabric of the world that had been before. With that the doctor fell unconscious and slept until dark, when someone came to let him know that Toussaint had arrived and was ready to receive him.

In a small private office Toussaint waited for him, alone; he had asked for a service of coffee but sent the orderly away. Now he motioned the doctor to serve himself. It was close and warm in the little room, though outdoors the evening breeze stirred litter on the street. Doctor Hébert produced the letter, and Toussaint set down his coffee cup to accept it. He cut the wax seal with his thumbnail and sat back, crossing his leg and pursing his lips as he held the document high toward the light.

In one of my last letters, dear General, I let you know that your children would be able to leave for France on the battleship Wattigny; as we must order this ship to depart very soon, I beg you to send them to me at once; they will stay with me, and I will offer them every friendly attention up until their departure . . .

The doctor stirred sugar into his coffee and drank. He was still woozy, from having slept in the daylight and awakened after dark, but the strong brew returned him some lucidity. Toussaint held out the letter toward him, indicating he should read.

You can count on all my solicitude, and that of General Laveaux, that your children will be brought up in France in a fashion which corresponds to your views. Rest assured that the Minister of Marine, who is my close friend, will offer them all the protection of the Republic.

Doctor Hébert set the letter on the desktop and reached again for his coffee.

“The
Wattigny,
” Toussaint said, “is the same ship in which Villatte and his partners in crime were deported.”

“A warship sufficiently well armed to force the British blockade,” the doctor said carefully. “This passage has been arranged to ensure the safety of your sons.”

Tousaint folded the letter so that the edges of the wax seal were rejoined, and spread his fingers out across the paper, leaning forward. The back of his hand was netted with pale spiderweb creases in which the white dust of the roads round Gonaives was permanently engrained. His son would be safe on the
Wattigny,
the doctor reflected, and also safeguarded, and also under guard.

“The commissioner has established schools at Le Cap,” Toussaint said. “For the sons of the colored men, and equally for the sons of the blacks. He has made it known that in the future no man will be promoted officer who cannot read and write his name.”

“It is so,” the doctor said.

“I have taught my sons to read and write,” Toussaint said. “Their names, and more. They have read Holy Scripture, and something of natural philosophy as well.”

The doctor nodded.

Toussaint lifted his hand from the letter and leaned back in his seat. “You may know,” he said, “that under slavery, only the
gens de couleur
might send their sons for education in France. Sons of black men, even if free—even if born in freedom—had no such opportunity. For that one had to have a white father, a white grandfather. But now—it is well for my sons to see the French Republic with their own eyes and be instructed in the duty of French citizens.”