All Souls' Rising (47 page)

I laid the
banza
on the ground and breathed out through my teeth. I heard this story times before but never from Toussaint.

“It was all in the open,” Toussaint said. “You know where we water the horses at Bréda. There must have been twenty slaves that saw it. No white men, though. Béager got up. He touched his mouth and showed me blood on his fingers. He took a step toward me where I was holding Treize still. The horse was tossing his head because he wanted to go drink the water and die. Then Béager turned around and went into the
grand’case
by himself.”

I, Riau, I had not believed this story before. It was like stories that you hear of jesus. In that time, before we rose, no slave could strike a whiteman and live afterward, it was unknown.

“What did you do,” I said.

Toussaint shrugged and rocked back on his heels with a slow rhythm. “I walked the horse,” he said. “Circles and circles, on into the night, till he was cool again. All that time I knew I was a dead man. I was walking like a
zombi
, Riau, do you know how it feels?”

“
Ouais
,” I said. “I know it.”

“Béager never came out of the house,” Toussaint said. “The horse was saved though. It was five days before I saw Béager again. He never spoke of it or of the horse. We went on as before. Maybe he thought that a good horse was worth more than a nigger after all. I won’t ever know what he was thinking. I was walking like a dead man for five days.”

Toussaint stood up then, and his shadow fell across me.

“Who knows, Riau,” he said, “do you? Maybe I have been dead all the years since then, only I don’t know it.” He grinned at me then, and went away without saying anything more.

So I did not go to train with the soldiers that day or the next. But in some days that followed I saw that of all those I had fought with around Fort Dauphin, the only other one who did not go was Chacha Godard.

After I began training with the others, Toussaint made me a lieutenant, like he did Moise and Dessalines and Charles Belair. Lieutenant Riau. Now when I met Paul Lefu or César-Ami while they must stand very straight and throw me a salute, though it was hard for them to do it without laughing. And sometimes I must laugh myself at this Lieutenant Riau. But not where anyone could hear my laughing.

There were good things about this way of training, I soon saw, beyond the foolishness of lines and squares. It made that each man would know to keep his musket clean and ready to fire. Each man would always have his musket and his bayonet, good weapons that had come from the Spanish whitemen, and each man would wear two leather belts across his shoulders with two cartridge boxes always full. Every man would always know to have these things all of the time, even if he had no shirt or shoes, and most did not.

Also we could make many men move as quickly as one man and all together. And any one man or any few would do what they were told to do, that moment they were told it and no question—as slaves do. But it was good to know these things when fighting came. And it was good that we had learned it, because it was not long after that Laveaux came out from Le Cap to fight us with new soldiers.

These were new soldiers who had come oversea from France, they had not long been in the country so they were not yet sick. They were not like the old soldiers of Blanchelande or the militiamen, we could not scare them so easily, and when we spread away in the jungle, they would still come after us very fast. There were thousands of them too. It was not long before they had broken up most of the men of Jean-François and Biassou and made them run away.

All we who were with Toussaint were left to hold the hill called Morne Pélé, which was keeping the whitemen out of our camps at Dondon and Grande Rivière. Toussaint knew we could not win this fight, I think. We were hundreds, but there were four thousand soldiers coming. Toussaint was meaning to make time for Biassou and Jean-François to get their men away into the mountains. This was a new thinking which came from him talking to the whiteman officers. But he did not tell us that we could not win the fight at Morne Pélé.

At Morne Pélé we began on the high ground and we killed very many whitemen with our guns while they were coming up the hill. But they were many and they did not stop charging and at the last we could not keep them from coming among us with their swords and bayonets. I saw Toussant fighting a whiteman officer face to face with a sword. It was the Chevalier d’Assas, we found out later, and he gave Toussaint a big cut on his arm, but neither one of them died from this fight.

We were chased back to the fort that Toussaint had made us build at La Tannerie. But next day we attacked them again on the top of Morne Pélé. Toussaint wore his arm in a sling, all bandaged with the herbs he knew to use. All the other men he had tended through the night went to this fight behind him, all the wounded who could walk and use a hand. We surprised the whitemen just at dawn on the top of Morne Pélé, and drove them down the hill again to the place that they had started from, but still they would not give it up.

They were very tough then, these soldiers of d’Assas and Laveaux. All this second day they kept on charging up the hill. In the afternoon, they broke us once, but Dessalines caught the horse of some whiteman officer who was killed and rode it down on them, alone at first, calling the others to follow which they did, even I, Riau, charging with the bayonet, and only I not Ogûn in my head to lead me. Dessalines was young then, a tall man, red-skinned like a coal in a fire, and he wore no shirt or coat that day. We could see the tangle of white scars of old whippings all across his back, because he had a bad master when he was a slave.

That day Dessalines was hurt in the foot, but not so that he could not fight. We held the whitemen one time more, but we had many killed, and when they charged again we could not hold and so they chased us back and we had again to run to our fort of La Tannerie.

Toussaint thought then we could not hold La Tannerie either. I know he was sorry to leave this place, and I too, for all the work of building. I saw men crying to give up this fight, still they had not known they could not win it. But we had many dead, almost two hundred, and Toussaint said that we must go. In the night he sent out men ahead to drag the cannons we had there at La Tannerie, and all through the hours before dawn we began to slip out of the fort to the place in the Cibao mountains to the east where Toussaint had sent our women and children a few days before.

By morning, we were all gone out of La Tannerie. Only I, Riau, and Chacha Godard stayed there, hiding in the tops of trees outside the fort, so we could see these soldiers and know what was their strength. When the sun was well up, columns of soldiers began to come out of the jungle, very carefully at first, with their guns ready, but soon there was shouting all back down the line when they found the place was empty.

Then the officers came up, Laveaux and the Chevalier d’Assas. They walked up and down under the tree that I had climbed to hide, and I could hear all that they said. Laveaux was carrying a little riding crop and he pointed this at all the things Toussaint had made us build—the deep ditch full of water we had run in from a stream, the palisade of logs with their sharp points sticking out behind this ditch, the gates all covered with copper plates to keep out the cannon balls.

On the far side of the ditch, where my tree was, there was clear ground, and not far from the trees, Toussaint had told us to drive some stakes, so that the musket men would know their range. When whitemen came as far as the stakes, that would be the time to shoot them, but we never got to try it at La Tannerie. Laveaux flicked his crop against one of the stakes and frowned and then he pointed the crop at one of the places in the palisade we made for the cannons to look out.

“
Vous voyez ça
,” he said to d’Assas.

“What of it?”

“Gun embrasures,” said Laveaux.

“But these niggers have no cannon,” d’Assas said.

“I think they do,” Laveaux said. “I think they have them still, wherever they have gone. What manner of men are these?”

“There must have been thousands of them here,” d’Assas said. In my tree, I could have laughed to hear that, but they would have caught me.

“Whatever they are, they are not savages,” said Laveaux. D’Assas pulled his mustache and did not answer him.

All that day Chacha and I hung in those trees, watching the soldiers make camp at La Tannerie. I had not known they were so many. I could not believe we had been fighting so many for two days. When night had come, Chacha wanted to cut throats and take ears before we went away, but I wanted to get off from that place alive, and I brought Chacha with me. A few ears taken would not have frightened these soldiers out of our place anyway.

So we came into the Cibao mountains, near the Spanish border, or across it maybe—who could know in that place. In the mountains it was cold and raining almost all the time because the heads of the mountains stuck up into the clouds. We had our women and our children though, more than Biassou and Jean-François had theirs. Their men were in big camps not far from us, but they had run so fast away they left their women and children behind, and many of them who were left so gave themselves up to the whitemen and were slaves again.

There were then six hundred men of Toussaint’s band who were not killed. We did not know what we would do. It was all hunting and looking for food, and taking care of the ones who were hurt in all the fighting.

I made a tight
ajoupa
to keep the rain off Riau and Merbillay and Caco. I had brought my
banza
with me from the other camps, with my pistols and my musket and my cartridges. I sat under the roof watching the rain while I played the
banza
.

One day I was sitting in the
ajoupa
and Toussaint came and asked for me to play something for him. I was surprised, but I picked up the
banza
and did what he asked. I had not thought he cared anything about a
banza
. At Bréda, he would never go to any kind of dancing, or if he did go he would not dance. But I played a slow sad song for him because I was thinking of the ones who had been killed while we were fighting all the time. Paul Lefu had been killed there at Morne Pélé and I had been the friend of Paul Lefu.

When I stopped playing, there was no sound but the rain coming down on the leaves of the
ajoupa
. Toussaint was looking out into the rain. Then he looked at me with a queer smile.

“Have you heard the violin, Riau?” he said. I did not answer him but still he said, “When we are in the government house at Le Cap, then we will hear violins and golden horns.”

He sat by me for some while more before he got up and walked away into all the rain that kept leaking down from the high trees that shut out the sky. It seemed strange to me then, what he had said, but later I thought he must have always known that we would go there one day, where he said that we would go.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

D
OCTOR
H
ÉBERT WAS IN SOME ANCIENT MOUNTAIN FORT
, alone and unattended except for his wife and child. The place was under attack, it seemed, with men wearing chain mail and curious antique helmets charging the gate with a battering ram, the shock sounding a throaty bass note, repeated at a slow interval. The baby was crying, somewhere out of view, and the doctor looked about himself for help or some means of defense. There was only a rusty medieval pike, leaning against the huge rough-cut stones of the wall. As he reached for it, he overbalanced and was falling—then came to himself sprawled over the floor beside the bed, tangled in a snarl of mosquito netting. Insects thirsty for his blood had clustered on the netting and he had evidently crushed a good number of them in falling out of bed; there were a good many small bloody smudges on the pale planks of the floor. The knock at the door repeated itself, but with no more than ordinary force.

It was still daylight, though dim from rain, and he had dropped asleep without intending to. He sat up on the floor and pried the piece of mirror from his pocket. In the cupped palm of his hand his one eye hung suspended as within a pool. He closed his fingers over it, put it into his pocket again. Sweat was running in the hollow of his throat. The knocking, which had ceased, commenced again.

He cleared the net from his legs, bunched it and tossed it on the bed, then walked to the door and opened it a crack. Since the deportation of Desparbés and Cambefort there had been fewer open disturbances in the town, and the
petit blancs
were again kept mostly in check by the troops the commissioners had brought, along with two thousand other soldiers under the command of Rochambeau, who’d lately been denied a landing at royalist Martinique. These things being so, the doctor no longer felt compelled to answer the door with a weapon actually in hand.

A blurry identification of the uniform of the Regiment Le Cap moved him to pull the door open wide. But it was not Maillart who entered. The face above the uniform collar was pale, but swirled with chocolate freckles. The doctor stepped aside to let him pass, remaining near enough to the door that he might easily have reached the rifled long gun down from its pegs above the lintel. He had come to know Choufleur by sight and by his sobriquet, though he had never spoken with him. Choufleur was not a usual caller here, and the doctor thought that Nanon seemed ill at ease when speaking of him, that she avoided the topic when she could and even tried to keep the two of them apart.

But Choufleur was not attending to him now. No more than if the doctor had been Nanon’s footman at the door. He walked over the rugs in the center of the room, silver spurs jingling at the heels of his military boots, looking superciliously at the pieces scattered over the chessboard, then at some bibelots arranged upon a cabinet shelf. With a suppressed chuckle he picked up a small silver snuffbox and turned toward the doctor.

“Do you take snuff?”

The doctor shook his head blearily. “Nor would I recommend its use to anyone,” he said. “It fouls the nasal passages and conduces to catarrh.”

Choufleur snorted and set the snuffbox down, unopened, on the high shelf beside the pistol case. He resumed his idle circuit of the room, twirling a slender gold-pommeled cane, its tip describing loops an inch or two above the carpets. The doctor hid a yawn behind his hand. In the heat of the day he had broken off his medical rounds and returned here to rest for an hour, but he had not intended to sleep so heavily as he seemed to have done. It was later than he’d thought. He was enough confused to imagine that he might still be dreaming.

“Was it me you wished to see?” he asked.

Choufleur turned and glanced at him dismissively. “I came for the lady,” he said in an easy tone.

“I believe she has stepped out,” the doctor said. He stooped slightly to peer out the window.

Outside, a mass of purple cloud was beginning to be pierced by a few shafts of evening sun. The rain had momentarily stopped, but it was very close and humid in the room, and he was still sweating from his nightmare. Barefoot, he padded to a stand and poured some water from a pitcher into his hand, then dabbed it at his temples. He had mostly undressed before lying down, and now wore only a pair of loose trousers and a blousy white shirt, untucked.

“You are much at home here,” Choufleur observed.

“You caught me asleep,” the doctor said simply.

Choufleur kept looking at him, but he did not elaborate. The mulatto turned and moved past the pallet where the girl Paulette lay sleeping, toward the cradle. Doctor Hébert took note again of the uniform he wore and wondered what it might portend. Of recent weeks, Sonthonax had been raising more and more mulattoes to posts of importance in the military and the civil government. The commissioner’s speeches inveighed more and more heatedly against race prejudice; in turning against the local Jacobins, he had denounced them all as “
aristocrates de la peau
.” The doctor knew from Captain Maillart that these developments, especially the military promotions, were causing a rise of tension in the Regiment Le Cap.

Choufleur shifted the mosquito net from the crib on the point of his cane. The doctor moved up on him quickly and quietly, standing just behind his shoulder. The child was sleeping quietly enough.

“What pains she takes,” Choufleur murmured, his tone half mocking, half wistful.

The baby clicked his tongue in sleep, and made a nursing movement with his loose lips. His hair was dark and straight and fine; his skin indistinguishable from white. Of course there were the fingernails, as Madame Cigny had explained. A mosquito lowered whining from the ceiling, toward where the netting gapped above the child’s head. The doctor crushed it with a one-handed clench; his fingers made a smacking sound against his damp palm. He stooped to detach the net from Choufleur’s cane tip and replaced it over the crib. When he straightened, Choufleur was looking at him with a sardonic twist to his lips.

“Yes, I think he does resemble you,” he said, as though he had been considering the point for some time and only now had come to his conclusion. “What do you say?”

The doctor stroked his spade-shaped beard. “On the day he was born he most resembled his great-grandfather,” he said. “Since then I believe he has come to take after the mother’s side a little more.” He waited for Choufleur to sort through the implications of this remark.

“You are a strange man,” Choufleur said.

“People are always telling me so,” said the doctor. “I confess that I do not find myself so remarkable.”

“One insults you, but you are not insulted,” said Choufleur. “A
grand blanc
would have called me out, perhaps.”

“A
grand blanc
would not have lowered himself to duel with a mulatto,” the doctor said, raising his chin slightly so that his beard’s point seemed to jut, “but would more likely have arranged for you to be hung from some lamppost, I imagine.”

Choufleur’s lips tightened for a moment under the cloud of his freckles. The doctor saw that the colors had not mixed in him, but remained particulate, at odds with each other all across his face. The mouth opened and Choufleur laughed.

“I will not be insulted either,” he said. “I will be equal with you. But it is strange—that you should keep the company of a man like Michel Arnaud, or officers of the
ancien régime
like your Captain Maillart, and all the while live openly with a
femme de couleur
.”

“Consider that I am a friend of the world,” the doctor said. “I see by your uniform that you and Captain Maillart are become comrades in arms.”

“Oh, but you are mistaken there,” Choufleur said. “The Regiment Le Cap refuses to receive me or acknowledge my commission. Their suggestion is that I be posted to the Sixth—with the other mulattoes, you understand.” With quick clicking steps, he walked to the door. “But I will have my place there in the end…if the Regiment Le Cap continues to exist.”

The doctor looked at him where he stood framed in the open door, rain-gray daylight behind him. “Shall I tell Nanon that you called for her?”

“You needn’t trouble,” Choufleur said. “No doubt I’ll find her at home some other day.”

He went out, slapping the door behind him. The doctor opened his hand, brushed away a mosquito leg. The blood was browning in the creases of his palm—he wondered what mixture it might be, and smiled to think it hardly mattered.

He turned back toward the crib. No doubt the baby had not cried at all; that part had been only dream. He yawned. The visit had unsettled him, and yet he would have liked to detain Choufleur, and ask him a few more questions. Nanon was always uncomfortable in speaking of their acquaintance, would only say that they had been born on the same plantation, near Acul, and had known each other as children, before she came to Le Cap and he was sent to Europe to commence another sort of education. The doctor knew that women in Nanon’s position would often keep a lover of their own color—quite unbeknownst to their
grand blanc
whoremasters, as a rule. But if there were rivalry, he still might be counted the winner, thus far—after all, the child was his.

C
APTAIN
M
AILLART WAS HAVING SOME DIFFICULTY
concentrating his mind, for the meeting room of the Regiment Le Cap officers’ quarters was a welter of confusion, with all the young men talking at once. There was chaos too in the court of Les Casernes. Through the windows he could see enlisted men milling about in a state of excitement. Some members of the suppressed Jacobin club had arrived with a handcart and were distributing copies of what purported to a proclamation of the French National Assembly, making it illegal for colored officers to command white troops in the colonies. Within the room, the arguments carried on unmoderated.

“Look at that rabble—and the troops are listening to them! When they ought to be clubbing them down with their musket butts—”

“But what if the proclamation is true?”

“Of course it is an arrant fabrication!”

“Don’t be so sure, and if it is not true, it ought to be.”

“Gentlemen,” said Captain Maillart, “let us have at least some semblance of order.” But the hubbub did not abate. So many senior officers had been deported with Cambefort and Desparbés that there was no one clearly in authority in this group.

“Let them listen to it,” someone was saying. “Let them believe it. It would be the very thing we need to rid us of the Jacobin dictatorship of this Sonthonax…”

“And throw in our lot with that
petit blanc canaille?
It’s scarce two months since they were all arming
themselves
to murder us…”

“But if they are the enemies of our enemy, after all—”

“This Sonthonax is a slippery fish,” said Captain Maillart. “Who knows whose enemy he really is? He raised those
petit blancs
up to be his Jacobin brothers, and now he reviles them as
aristocrates de la peau
…”

“Well and it may be that white skin will be our last aristocracy in this place,” someone said sarcastically.

“Can’t you see through him then?” said another officer. “I’ll tell you what he is at bottom—a bloody abolitionist.”

There was a brief, surprising silence at that. In the courtyard, disbanded members of the Jacobin Club were still crying the “news” of the National Assembly.

“If Desparbés had not lost his nerve,” someone said in a lower tone, “we might have done it in September. And if
we
do not lose our nerve, we may yet do it now.”

It continued quiet in the small square room, with the men all looking at each other tensely. There were fifteen or sixteen of them there, and scarce a one over twenty-five years of age.

“We have again the National Guards to reckon with,” said Captain Maillart. “The mulattoes of the Sixth…”

Someone leaned over and spat conspicuously on the floor. Captain Maillart raised his voice just slightly.

“These
petit blancs
are not to be relied on, even if our interests have momentarily coincided. Then there are the two thousand troops who arrived with Rochambeau, which I predict will remain loyal to the Commission…”

“What are you saying, Maillart?” someone said. “Whose side are you on?”

Captain Maillart turned his hands palm out, an unconscious mimicry of Cambefort’s signal for calm.

“Well, and if we’d only denied the commissioners a landing as they denied Rochambeau at Martinique, we’d be in a better situation now…” someone said.

“Here’s to that,” said Captain Maillart. “I am for the king, as I always was.”

Quiet again. “
Vive le roi
,” someone said, but the phrase fell flat in the still room, less like a cheer than a prayer of unbelief.

Some change transpired in the quality of the disturbances in the court, and Maillart looked out the window to see that Laveaux had dismounted from a horse, tossing his reins to a trooper to hold, and was striding across toward the building where they were gathered. Soon he’d passed within the portal, in a moment he’d be in the room.

“Oho,” someone said. “So they did call him back.”

Laveaux had entered, or almost; he stood handsomely within the door frame. His air was almost diffident, for although he had been promoted to full colonel following the September riot, he did not like to presume on his rank in any less than formal situations. Once again the room had fallen silent.

“May I come in?” Laveaux said.

There was a murmur, and someone pulled out a chair for him. Laveaux sat down. He looked from face to face, but most eyes turned away from him, though he was well liked by almost all of them, partly because he shared their youth.

“Let us come quickly to the point then,” Laveaux said. “There are rumors of insubordination, mutiny even. I hope to discover them all false.”

No answer.

“Monsieur Sonthonax has been greatly concerned—” Laveaux began.