Devil's Dream (28 page)

Mister Little has a point. This country did teach me something I’d have never thought before. There is such a thing as nigger after all. Something a little less than a man. Born a slave. Dies a slave. Being a slave is built into him. I’ll leave you white gentlemen to consider who it was did that building
.

Henri stopped speaking because he could feel Matthew’s eyes boring into him, from where the boy sat with his long legs folded like a grasshopper.

I don’t mean you. I don’t mean me. Nor Denmark Vesey nor Nat Turner nor Gabriel Prosser nor Charles Deslandes. There are black men in this country
who walk with a warrior spirit. But just some is not enough. It needs to be all and so far it’s not. Not one time when I went up and down the Mississippi River. They won’t rise. Not yet they won’t
.

“I’d admire to see New Orleans,” Nath Boone said. “My uncle went there oncet on a flatboat. ’Course after that he had to walk back.”

La Louisiane. It was safe for me there. In a manner of speaking. I speak the languages. Spanish and French and the old tongue too. There’s not so much a mystery about what I am in that place. I’ll tell you what, Mathieu mon cher, down in La Nouvelle Orléans you’d be a man of color. Up here they count me as a nigger just like you
.

Henri stopped, or was stopped, rather, by the bitterness he heard in his own laughter. He’d meant to take a straight line backward, but his story was beginning to slip sideways. Nath Boone called him back.

“You ain’t from Loosiana either in the first place, is that right?”

No. I come from Ayiti
.

“Well, I never heard of any such a place—” Little began, but it was Kelley who stopped him this time.

“He means Haiti,” Kelley said. “The Black Republic.”

“What do you mean the Black Republic?” Little said. “That don’t make no sense.”

“It means the niggers are in charge,” Kelley said. “They run the plantations. They run the government. They run the whole country. They speak French too! The bottom rail’s on top is what that means.”

“I don’t understand you,” Little said. “What happened to the white folks, then?”

“They died,” Henri told him.

“That can’t be,” Little said. “Niggers running everything. It ain’t right. It ain’t natural. I don’t see how God could allow it.”

“I don’t see how God allows you,” Henri said. “As a matter of fact you’ve been disallowed already and just don’t know it yet.”

“But,” Kelley said, “why didn’t you stay in Haiti? I mean, I don’t understand why you would leave there and come over here to fight with Nathan Bedford Forrest for the Confederacy.”

“It’s a fair question,” Henri said. “I’ll admit that wasn’t exactly my plan.”

“Y’all hush,” said Nath Boone. “Let the man tell it.”

In Haiti is an emperor, a black man named Soulouque. I served in his army, but he took against me. Because of my skin, and the blood underneath it. I saw that if I remained in Ayiti, Soulouque would have me killed
.

“So then you came to Louisiana,” Kelley prompted.

I’m going backward
. His eyes still heavily lidded, Henri rocked slightly from the waist.

“The blood, then,” Kelley said. “This blood of yours that scared your black King so.”

Ah
. Henri rocked in place. His eyes popped open.
Yes. There is always something more behind the thing you see. There is for example Dessalines. Who spilled the blood of every white person he could catch. Hundreds. Thousands. At Jérémie a river of blood five feet across dried up and stayed until the summer rains. The nègres of that zone walked miles out of their way so that they would not have to cross it. But the blood of Dessalines is not my blood. No. I have the blood that made the first rising and sent the white men screaming into the sea. From the man without whom Dessalines would be nothing. Sé fils Toussaint Louvti mwen yé
.

“Toussaint Louverture?” Kelley said. “You’re the son of Toussaint Louverture?”

Henri did not appear to hear him.

Et deye sa? Et deye sa? There’s always another thing behind the thing you see. Behind Toussaint is Gaou-Ginou, and all the kings in Dahomey since the jaguar spirit made Arada and flew up into the night sky on his burning wings
.

“Stop it,” Little cried, as if in pain. “Stop all that wild nigger jabber. It’s nothing but superstition and savagery anyhow.”

Listen
, Henri said furiously.
There’s something else behind the jaguar too. When God made the first man he was black as the night with no stars in it. You people got that sick color of yours from a sorcerer’s curse or some kind of disease. From hiding in caves for five or ten centuries because you don’t have the spirit to stand in the sun. I’d like to see you call God’s first man a nigger
.

“I don’t see that man here,” said Little, bristling.

“No you don’t.” Henri said wearily. “You don’t see a damn thing.”

Little subsided and raised a placating hand. “Henry,” he said. “I don’t mean you any offense.”

“Dear God,” Henri said. “I believe you might be fool enough to actually mean what you just said.”

Little opened his mouth but said nothing. He turned his head to spit to the back side of the log where he was sitting, and did not raise his eyes again.

“Let me see if I’m folleren you right,” Nath Boone said. “You come here because you want rile up our niggers to kill all the white folks?”

“You could put it that way. It’s a shame they won’t do it. Things don’t always work out like you plan.” Henri looked in the fire for a minute, then back to Boone. “On the other hand, you’re doing a really nice job of killing each other.”

He fell silent. The old language hummed in his head. Going backward had a gravity to it. You fell into that and kept falling. He thought of the giddy surge of black men rising. How it should have been that way for John Brown but was not. Should have been that way for himself but was not. At most of the plantations he had visited the slaves looked at him like he was some dark spirit come to steal their souls. Some did rise to his suggestion, but only a very few—young men, or hotheaded boys really, without attachments or the full knowledge of fear. There were many more willing to run than to fight. The memory of Africa had been bred right out of them.

Still, he was looking across the clearing into Matthew’s eyes, which burned yellowish like a cat’s in the dark. In the space behind those eyes at least, the flame of Henri’s thought found fuel.

Jerry then unveiled his skillet and a warm full baking smell embraced the men. Within the circle of the iron the biscuits, airy and golden, seemed to float.

“Thank God,” Kelley said, and surreptitiously wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth. No one said any more of a blessing than that. But when Jerry reached into his poke and drew out a pat of butter wrapped in damp leaves a sigh went round the group. When a honeycomb in a cracked white bowl appeared, that sigh became a moan.

Henri forced himself to eat slowly. So as not to burn his mouth, or choke. To make it last longer too, of course. He thought of the cassava he had used to eat (with luck) during his campaigns with
Soulouque’s army. Cassava kept better and one could march longer on a smaller amount of that bread. But these light hot biscuits were very, very good. Henri was near weeping with joy as he ate his portion and he saw the other men were too. Only Jeffrey Forrest, waltzing the woman he held tight in his arms to the thin droning tune the Old Ones sustained, seemed unaware of the feast before them. Even the woman he held had tilted her weight toward Jerry’s pan, her soft eyes melting toward a few crumbs that remained there.

“Look here,” Little said suddenly. “Something is wrong with this biscuit, Jerry. Look, my jawbone goes right through it.”

Jerry wouldn’t look at him. Hunkered over the dying fire, he was scouring his iron skillet with white ash. “Listen at the haint fussen bout a biscuit,” Jerry said “Haint, you lucky to be getten biscuit at all.”

“But …” Little’s faintly transparent lips were trembling. He put the biscuit into his mouth and bit at it savagely, but the biscuit reappeared whole and unharmed in his palm beneath the point of his jaw.

Nath Boone choked, covered his mouth with his huge calloused hand, and scooted away from Little on the log.

“They ain’t nothen wrong with my biscuit,” Jerry said. “Sompn wrong with
you.”

A
FTER THE MEAL
, while the others slept, Henri circled the top of the knoll like a dog following a fence round a yard. The fog that swirled around his knees was yellowish and smelled of burnt gunpowder. It seemed that the bloodstained river wrapped all around this hilltop now, and it also seemed to Henri that the water was rising. Wagons and guns and mules and men were getting sucked down in the bloody stream, where at first there was shouting and crashing and the concussion of gunfire, but as the water rose further it all grew quiet and corpses and wreckage revolved in silence.

By the hollow tree, Kelley hunkered over his heels, gazing intently at a space of packed earth between his knees. His mouth moved silently, Henri could see. He might have been praying. He might have been talking to himself in Chinese. Henri turned back to
his view of the river, studying how bundles of blood-thread unraveled in the water without exactly ever dissolving.

“Blood on the moon,” Kelley said, bracing his hands to the small of his back and stretching from his long hunker on the ground. “Or to put it more clearly,
the sun became black as a sack of goat hair, and the moon became as blood.”

Henri looked at him. There was no moon. It was daylight, after a fashion—the damp misty no-time and no-place of this hilltop. Kelley looked at him still, in rather a friendly fashion.

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that story you told.”

Henri studied him until he understood what he must be talking about.

“That was no story,” he said. “That was the truth.”

“Ah,” Kelley said. From a grubby handkerchief he unfurled a fragile pair of spectacles which he settled fastidiously onto his nose. He looked into the palm of his empty hand as though something were printed there. “I once had read something of your Tuissant le Overture,” he said. “It seems to me that he must have died—oh, around the turn of the last century.”

Henri watched him. Kelley furled his spectacles back into the cloth and tucked them cautiously into his breast pocket.

“This proposition that you’re his son,” he said. “Why, you’d have to be sixty-five years old, Henri! At the very least. And I’d scarce take you for forty.”

“You people think you know what time is because you invented watches,” Henri said.

Kelley put a finger on his lower lip and appeared to be thinking this last remark over. Henri got a grip on himself. “A man may get a child in other ways than with blood and spunk,” he said. “A man may have a son of his spirit.”

Kelley dropped his hand from his face and looked at Henri with fresh interest.

“A child of God, you may call yourself,” Henri said.

“That’s from a song you people sing.”

Henri looked away from him, shaking his head. Gaps had begun to open in the mist and through them he could see that the bloodstained
water was now beginning to recede. On the long shelves of limestone emerging from the flood, there appeared to be etched events from either the past or the future: Fort Pillow, Parker’s Crossroads, Chickamauga … Was it the future that hadn’t happened yet? Or was that the past?

Henri said, “I didn’t know
you people
knew about Toussaint.”

“Ah well,” said Kelley. “We didn’t really
want
to know about him, but some of us did. I believe he may have been the most remarkable nigger to have ever lived, as a matter of fact. But it wouldn’t do to talk too much about him here—only get
our
niggers all stirred up.”

Kelley did not seem much perturbed by the look Henri was burning on him now. “Let’s say it’s true you were with John Brown,” he said. “What would have happened if he had succeeded? Do you suppose a pack of Africans can make a nation? No, they must revert to savagery, and you will have nothing but war and destruction. As you described it under your chieftain—the one who rules Haiti today.”

Henri shaded his eyes with one hand, squinting at reflections from the receding water below the knoll. “Pardon me, Mister Kelley,” he said, “But what exactly do you think you’ve got here and now?”

“A judgment on us, possibly,” Kelley said. “I have considered that.” He regarded Henri with his eyes pale blue behind the speckled lenses. “But what about you?” he said. “Monty has a point, don’t he? I mean, the Yankees are fielding black regiments now. Why aren’t you leading one of them?”

“Because that’s not what happened,” Henri said.

A white owl flew in out of the mist and settled on a limb of the dead tree. It preened its yellowish feathers and shrugged. Henri turned away when the owl’s large black eyes fell upon him.

“The Romans believed it meant death,” Kelley said. “An owl looking at you, I mean.”

“That’s nothing to me.” Henri swallowed a laugh. “Are you sure he’s not looking at you?” He knew Kelley would survive the war but more than likely Kelley didn’t know that.

“
And the owl, and the nighthawk, and the cuckoo and the hawk after his kind, and the little owl and the cormorant and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gyre eagle
. All abominations,” Kelley said. “According to Leviticus, eleven sixteen.”

“He only meant you’re not supposed to eat them,” Henri said. When he looked at the owl again its eyes were closed.

“Bedford Forrest is a man I can follow,” he said. “I don’t know if I can really tell you why that is.”

“But maybe I know what you mean,” Kelley said. “He takes whoever comes his way one at a time.”

“It could be I’m not meant to lead but to follow,” Henri said. “That might be why I couldn’t get the slaves to rise.”

“Or it could be that God’s design is for black people to be ruled and governed by white,” Kelley said. “Mister Jefferson said so in his book, or rather he
suspected
so.
I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments both of body and mind
. A great many others have thought so too.”