Like a cool tongue on a woman’s thigh.
YETTE
Let me go, sir.
DESSALINES
Rub your arm on these muscles. Feel.
You feel how smooth and black they are, mulatresse?
Do you like an emperor made of pure ebony?
This is your own flesh, your grandfather’s flesh.
And look into my eyes now and find your pride.
Like the skin of a trotting panther, yes, black
Like the galloping panther that carries
Two yellow candles in his eyes, whose pads
Are quiet as ashes, whose teeth are fine bone,
Who has the night for his cave, whose skin
Smells of the jungle, and whose eyes are stars
Searching the heaven for a face like yours.
I’m like a black candle melting when you touch me.
YETTE
S’ous plait.
DESSALINES
Do not beg me.
I cannot stand people to beg me.
(Pause.)
Look, that is not your husband in the grass there?
Sitting out in the dew. Crying into the dew,
A big man like that? You married a child!
YETTE
No. He is a man. As much as you.
DESSALINES
I thought I tell him to go somewhere else.
He disobey his Emperor. Well, maybe
He does not want his room.
You have heard what I do men who disobey me?
YETTE
Yes. Don’t hurt him.
DESSALINES
Hurt him? Me?
Listen, you will not believe it,
But you will boast when you are an old woman
How, in that same room, you fucked a king.
(He waves to POMPEY, makes a sign on his lips of silence, and moves from the balcony with YETTE.)
Scene 14
Interior. Dark. The bedroom. Dawn. DESSALINES, YETTE in bed. Half-dark. DESSALINES on YETTE.
DESSALINES
… dit … Jacques … Call me Jack.
YETTE (Softly)
… Your Majesty … Your Majesty.
DESSALINES
… Jacques … dit Jean Jacques …
YETTE (Her eyes open, dry.)
… Your … Majesty … Majesty …
DESSALINES (Slapping her.)
… Jacques … salope! Jacques!
YETTE (Wincing; tears begin.)
… Majesty … Majesty …
DESSALINES (Slapping her.)
… Say it … Yellow bitch … you sweet
Yellow bitch …
(He slaps her.)
… say Jacques! Jacques! Jacques!
YETTE (Quietly)
… Nègre … nègre … cochon!
(DESSALINES slaps her frenziedly to a climax.)
DESSALINES
That’s better. Better. Yes … Nègre …
(He rolls off. Watching the ceiling.)
Yes … c’est ça moi y est …
(Pause.)
Un nègre …
(He turns to her.)
Merci. I thank you.
(He removes a ring.)
Here. Take it. For your wedding.
(Fade-out.)
Scene 15
Dawn. The same, but the yard. DESSALINES enters the yard and shouts towards the arches of the Great House.
DESSALINES
It’s sunrise. Wake up. Where is my Minister
Of Agriculture? Christophe! Minister Christophe.
(He crows like a cock.)
The cock is trumpeting, Minister of Agriculture.
And the golden cock, your Emperor, is calling you.
(CHRISTOPHE, partially dressed, comes out onto the balcony, then descends. DESSALINES is in a corner of the yard, peeing.)
Peace. I hate peace. I piss on peace.
(CHRISTOPHE joins DESSALINES.)
Pee with me, Minister. That is a command.
CHRISTOPHE
You should get some sleep, Jean Jacques.
DESSALINES
Pétion and his mulatto army are over there
Behind those blue hills. He will not fight me.
He hides in the south. Look at these hills,
This earth, how dry it is. I sprinkled it.
I sprinkled it with an emperor’s golden dew.
Kings will grow out of this soil; my seed
Will grow more emperors.
CHRISTOPHE
Kings. Yes.
And the peasants cut them down.
DESSALINES
I must lend you my crown sometime, Henri.
CHRISTOPHE
Make it a crown of olive, Your Majesty.
DESSALINES
Olive? What is it?
CHRISTOPHE
A tree. The crown of peace.
DESSALINES
Ah yes. Peace. You know when peace will be?
When every yellow skin in Haiti goes dry as corn.
When we bury all the treacherous mulattos.
We had dusty times in those hills, though, General.
Boukmann. I kissed his head. Remember that?
Now it is time for me to administer justice.
These people will not plant.
They must go back to planting.
You hear me, Minister of Agriculture?
Now bring in the one who refused to work.
CHRISTOPHE
No more whipping. They have been beaten enough.
I have to protect them, to encourage them.
You need sleep.
DESSALINES
Bring him in front me.
The one who wouldn’t plant.
CHRISTOPHE
No more whipping.
DESSALINES
No more whipping? Don’t we whip mules, horses?
When they don’t move? What’s wrong?
What are you staring at, Minister of Agriculture?
CHRISTOPHE
An animal.
DESSALINES (Turning.)
What animal? Where?
CHRISTOPHE
You can’t see him.
DESSALINES
Why? A ghost?
CHRISTOPHE
You would have to be where I am to see him.
DESSALINES
M’as comprends. Stand where you are to see an animal?
I am standing next to you and I cannot see him.
CHRISTOPHE
I can smell him.
DESSALINES
Yes? What smell? Close?
CHRISTOPHE
Very close. He is here, a spine-backed boar,
Rooting through the earth, grunting, furrowing
And foraging with his black snout, head down,
And a tail like a question, he crowned himself
The monarch of swinedom. Le roi cochon.
DESSALINES (Stepping back.)
Waiter …
CHRISTOPHE
Yes.
DESSALINES
Remember when I met you at L’Auberge de la Couronne?
CHRISTOPHE
Yes.
DESSALINES
When I had chains around my foot? Look there.
You can still see it. You remember all that?
Good. Then remember who you are talking to.
(CHRISTOPHE picks up DESSALINES’s coat.)
CHRISTOPHE
I know the work you were doing in there, and why
You have your coat flung down in the dirt. Here,
Wear it. You’re supposed to be my Emperor, even
At six in the morning. This medal here, Toussaint
Gave you at D’Ennery. I stopped fighting to watch you,
Crouched at a gallop, your course fixed like a panther,
A black scream for your banner, you were then
The sword and reason of the war, left and right
You cutlassed legions of dragoons like sugar,
&
nbsp; And wheeled round again like a tiger spinning
On its heel, till all the lances of the French legions
Were piled level as canes and there was nothing standing
Between your fury and the setting sun’s.
And so it went, from Cap to Artibonite,
Across the ridges, the soldiers saw your body
Half-welded to its horse, like a black centaur,
And whispered, “This is an African, magical, singing
Sabres whistle through him and he joins his halves.
He slaps off bullets like mosquitoes, what
Chembois, what amulets preserve him?”
And I wondered myself, I lost myself
In utter and unutterable admiration
Like a man wandering through a forest
Whose compass is the moon, and when the moon went,
I took even a deeper pride in blackness,
In the night’s skin; for us, you were the night,
The constellations were your medals,
The clouds, your plumes, you were a forest
Where our ancestral spirits lived, you were,
Jean Jacques. Then, you had majesty.
When you had nothing on your back
Which was already velvet, like a panther’s,
Then you had grace, but what you are today
Turns the same eyes that watered with admiration
Away from you, makes us move from your shadow
As if it were a curse; you betray yourself,
One action noble, then the next one common,
One moment this, then the next moment that.
If you find peace has less purpose than war,
Then make a war inside you, fight with yourself,
And then I’d crown you myself, but all your actions
Endanger the republic, or what was once
A republic, before you made yourself a king.
Jean Jacques, the greatest king, the absolute monarch,
Is the man who knows his work has earned a crown
But who refuses it, or crowns the one who offers
It instead. You should give back the crown
To the republic, dissolve the monarchy,
Dissolve yourself, and then you’ll know yourself.
And I’m saying what everyone around you feels
But is too scared to tell you.
(DESSALINES weeps.)
Tears may be good for us. When a king cries,
There’s hope. That means he’s still human.
DESSALINES
I think you said enough, yes.
CHRISTOPHE
I said enough. Yes.
But I haven’t written enough. Watch what I write.
(He finds a stick.)
DESSALINES
You know damn well I can’t read. What is that?
(CHRISTOPHE writes in the dirt with the stick.)
CHRISTOPHE
Toussaint L’Ouverture. Jean Jacques Dessalines.
This one there is your name. No, this one here.
It is written in the Haitian earth forever.
Even if I scrape it out with my foot, like this.
(He rubs out the names with his boot.)
DESSALINES
Where’s your name? Why you don’t put it there?
So, you can write now. Me, I just use my stamp.
I am not a stick. I don’t break. Where’s the man
Who refused to work? Bring him here in front me
And you’ll see who break. They have to plant,
They have to grow, they have to obey.
To make example, give him fifty lashes,
And since he won’t listen, cut off his ear.
CHRISTOPHE
Not me. Not me again.
DESSALINES
Not you?
CHRISTOPHE
Not me, Jacko.
(Silence.)
DESSALINES
All right. Then me. Is I who do everything anyway.
I who begin, and I who end. You come in, you join
When everything was going good. I am the beginning,
And I am the end. Haiti is me. Ous tendre? This!
(He stamps his foot.)
Is. Me. I will send you his two ears.
(He exits.)
CHRISTOPHE
Jacques!
(Two LABOURERS, barefooted, in dirty clothes, enter, then wait.)
FIRST LABOURER
Monsieur Le Ministre, ’ous tais v’iler voir nous. Ous dit nous espérer.
CHRISTOPHE
’Jourd’hui.
(FIRST LABOURER puts on a boar’s head.)
SECOND LABOURER
Eh bien, ’jourd’hui. If today is the day, today is the day.
CHRISTOPHE
The boar will find him, as he found the boar.
On the same beach. Do what you have to do.
(Fade-out.)
Scene 16
Belle Maison. 1820. A room. YETTE rises out of bed and goes to a chest of drawers, one of which she pulls out carefully, so as not to wake POMPEY. She eases the drawer out, without looking down, watching her face in the dressing-table mirror steadily. Her hair is greying. She brings up an object from the bottom of the drawer. It is an effigy of CHRISTOPHE, doll-size, in coronation robes and with a little crown. The doll wears a crown, a figured golden robe, red coat, the Star of David on its tiny breast, its right cloth hand gripping a straw sceptre, its fat cloth legs splayed apart.
YETTE places a crucifix next to the doll king. She dips the pin in the paste. She heats and turns the long, sharp pin slowly in the flame. She rests the doll at an angle. She plucks a hair from her head sharply and lights a dressing-table candle. She burns the hair and draws it across the face of the black doll king. Fade-out.
Scene 17
CHRISTOPHE’s palace. Night. Dressed exactly like the doll but without a crown, CHRISTOPHE limps across the floor, past the high arches to his throne, and sits there, squirming in agony at the stabbing pain in his legs. Fade-out.
Scene 18
Belle Maison. For every stab of the heated pin into the doll’s leg, CHRISTOPHE wrenches and twists in agony. YETTE keeps stabbing.
YETTE
No more kings. No more kings. No more kings.
(A MAN climbs over a rail, peeps at YETTE through the window. She feels him watching her and turns. He scurries away.)
CHRISTOPHE
My crown! Bring me my crown! My crown!
(Fade-out.)
Scene 19
Interior. The palace. Morning. CHRISTOPHE in his red coat with its star, his leg propped on a stool. Behind him SOLDIERS. On the floor is a huge scale model of the citadel at Sans Souci. POMPEY and YETTE enter.
CHRISTOPHE
From the Hotel Couronne to this. I was a waiter.
A waiter. And this was a good leg.
Tell them again what she did to this waiter.
Say it, man.
SOLDIER
She prayed for victory for General Rigaud,
The enemy of our Emperor Henri Christophe.
CHRISTOPHE
Didn’t you remember I was your King?
Perhaps you cannot believe in a black king!
You prayed for this mulatto. But of course.
You and he are the same people.
Did you see victory for Pétion? Eh?
For you and all the mulattos, eh? Mulatresse?
POMPEY
I will speak for her, with your permission.
CHRISTOPHE
She has a tongue. I know she has a tongue.
I knew her when she was the army’s yellow whore.
(Pause.)
They say, these people,
You made chienbois against me. Is that true?
They say you prayed against me. Is that true?
(YETTE nods.)
Maybe she just like playing with dolls. Like children.
You all have children?
POMPEY<
br />
No.
CHRISTOPHE
Is she barren?
In Le Cap, in the big fire, I lost a child.
The soil can be dry. In your part of the country.
But never barren. You had a good crop this year?
(POMPEY shrugs.)
Do you see that thing there in front of you?
It is not the castle of a doll, men like you
Are building it now, on the ridge of Cap Haitien.
An army can march on the walls. If I tell that army
To march straight off into the precipice, they would
Obey me, to prove their obedience, as General Moise
Obeyed his uncle. It will be, after I choose to die,
One of the wonders of the world. When men like you
Are tired, they will look up into the clouds
And see it, and take strength; the clouds themselves
Will have to look up to see it. Does she think
Little pins in my legs will stop it?
Ask her. Why is she silent? Make her speak.
POMPEY
She is silent as the earth self silent, sir. Pardon me, yes, Your Majesty. But I have seen so many kings, me and my woman here, that we have to be afraid. One King say to us he is the sun, and we niggers answer yes, and we was his shadows, and the sun set, the King dead, and it was night again until the next King come, and we again was shadows. It wasn’t for a king all this begin? I mean to say the King they kill in France? Was not for that King, the sixteenth sun that rise and the last King to set in France, that we came free? It had no talk of king, then, Your Majesty. It was only poor people, it was slaves, and those who work and die as if they was white niggers under the sixteen kings of France, every one a sunrise, every one a sunset, that Haiti live so long in a long night. It had one talk then, I remember, under the old coachman, and that talk was not who was king but who would make each man a man, each man a king himself; but all that change. We see them turn and climb and burn and fall down like stars that tired, and cut my hand, my head, my tongue out if you want, Your Majesty, but my life is one long night. My country and your kingdom, Majesty. One long, long night. Is kings who do us that.
CHRISTOPHE
You work in dreams. Listen, last night, alone,
I had a terror of a dream. I saw the coachman
Drawing his country behind him like a black hearse
On a long, long road where stars were placed like candles,
The Haitian Trilogy: Plays Page 24