‘Is that the bad men come in on the boat Sunday night?’
‘That’s them,’ replied January grimly. ‘You don’t happen to know if they had a woman with them? A mulatto woman—’
‘There was two,’ said a little girl. ‘One of ’em had a gun.’
‘My mama say she gonna take me to Port-au-Prince, see the doctor there,’ volunteered one child. ‘After we get the coffee picked, so she can pay for it. I got sore eyes.’
‘Well, let me get Michie Sefton here wrapped up,’ said January, carefully winding strips of the faded cloth Mambo Danto had given him around Hannibal’s ribs and shoulders, ‘and then I’ll have a look at your sore eyes. Maybe we can save your mama and you a trip into Port-au-Prince.’
When he emerged from the hut it was full dark, and torches had been kindled in the little peristyle in the courtyard. Mayanet carried a gourd dish of legrim – the savory stew of the island – in to Hannibal, though January doubted that the fiddler was well enough to eat. More legrim, and dishes of yams and rice, stood on the table in the peristyle, which doubled (as such structures often did) as an outdoor meeting place or workspace, when not in use for the voodoo dances. Somewhere in the night, drums were beating, and families gathered around their cook fires in their hut doors, while children darted around like swallows.
Mambo Danto sat at the table in the peristyle and waved to January to join her. ‘You come a long way, my granddaughter say, you and your friend. My grandson Ti-Do, he tell me the Egbo follow these indios north, but he say most of the Egbo in the east. Spanish come over the border, across the mountains and up the Cul de Sac, Trinitarios under Guerrero.’ She shook her head. ‘He a bad man, Guerrero, a whore who kill his own people for money … Only, nobody here got any money, so we all got to watch out. Those who follow these indios, all they can do now is watch.’
While January ate, he talked to Mambo Danto about the lakou, and the way life was lived in Haiti: the world cut off from the world of the whites, who saw it and everything in it as property which had been reft from them unlawfully. A republic trying to build itself with a population that was over nine-tenths illiterate, men and women who had never known any other occupation than work in the cane fields, still burdened with that legacy of ignorance.
Back in the hut, he’d heard the smaller children whisper to their elders, ‘What’s Paris? What’s France?’
For them, the world ended at the margin of the sea.
A population easily swayed by words, by dreams, by exhortations or by drumbeats in the night, without sophistication in sifting rival stories, without the breadth of experience that says, Hang on a minute, is that person lying to me?
They had won their freedom because they believed, with a belief that had never paused to ask questions. In freedom, most of them had only that uneducated, unquestioning belief, and the ingrained desperation for survival at any cost. When their leaders started fighting for power among themselves, no contender had lacked for followers.
The whites had gone, but they’d taken with them everything that might possibly give this land the hope of succeeding as a nation among nations. In the same spirit that had moved the rebelling slaves to systematically destroy every sugar mill, every grinding house, every cane field and coffee orchard so that no conqueror would be able to re-establish bondage in this once-profitable hell, the whites – those who’d survived the vengeful massacres in Cap Haïtien and Port-au-Prince – had removed education, had removed the Church, had removed anything resembling the wherewithal to purchase guns and train soldiers to defend the freedom that they’d won.
The fact that, over forty years later, these people were still free, still living as they chose to live, was literally jaw-dropping. January wondered how much longer it would be permitted to last.
Yet, seeing the faces of the boys and girls turned now and then towards him in the torchlight, he knew that most would never know a world beyond their island. The girls would have babies because that was what girls did, and most of those babies would die. The boys would work in the fields and snuff quietly out at the age of thirty or so, of pneumonia or fever or infected small injuries.
They would be what they were, while beyond the shores of Haiti the world changed around them, and others made decisions for them that would alter their lives.
After he’d eaten, January examined the boy with the sore eyes, for whom Mambo Danto had prescribed an eyewash of diluted honey: ‘The sore come back and come back …’
‘Use salt water,’ advised January, and while he was demonstrating how to mix that – and two or three other remedies for conjunctivitis whose ingredients he guessed would be available – a young woman came diffidently up and asked, was it true he was a doctor like they had in Port-au-Prince, and might he look at her baby who wasn’t able to eat properly? In the end, January looked at about twenty people in the lakou – sprains, toothaches, slow fevers, coughs, and a pregnancy which seemed to be doing just fine under Mambo Danto’s guidance, but the young mother just wanted to check with an Otanik Doctor, as she said – a real doctor.
Mambo Danto, at January’s side, listened with the absorbed expression of one who is taking mental notes.
‘I remember that for next time,’ she said, when he’d finished gently resetting a broken hand. ‘Thank you.’
‘I come here starving, a stranger in a strange land,’ he returned, ‘and you thank me?’
Danto laughed and shook her head. ‘I do what I can, but you been to school. There’s some things I can’t do.’
‘And there’s some things I can’t, either. But the trouble your child saved us –’ he used the term p’titt caye, a child of the humfo – ‘that’s worth me seeing everybody on this island.’
He sat silent for a time, trying to force back the panic that came to him every time he thought about Rose, bound north four days ago with Maddox and his Creeks … to meet Bryce Jericho? To be killed in the crossfire if Jericho and whatever men he’d hired overtook them? To be killed by the Egbo, or the Trinitario band currently moving in the green glades of the mountains?
Two days from Gonaïves to La Châtaigneraie, maybe … From there, four to come south again to L’Ange Rouge. Of which two were already spent, and how long would it take him and Hannibal to reach the place, with or without help from Mayanet? No way of knowing how to find them, other than to be at that place before them.
To find whatever it was that Lucien Maurir had hidden …
Blood and gold. Gold and blood …
From the shadows of the nearby hut, Hannibal’s voice spoke softly – quoting Catullus, of all things – and the drift of Mayanet’s cigar smoke tinged the air.
‘The god is in her, isn’t it?’ he asked softly, and Mambo Danto glanced quickly sidelong at him with her dark eyes.
On the altar in the hut’s front room, January had seen the images of the goddesses: the sensual and perilous Erzulie – Ezili she was called in New Orleans – who would kill a man who refused her kisses. The fishtailed La Sirene, mother of sorrow; the skeletal death-goddess Maman Brigitte. And the one who was called Marinette in New Orleans, Marinette who had a thousand forms and natures, both evil and good. Her image was often taken from old French and Spanish prints of the soul in Purgatory, the dark-haired woman shackled in the flames yet calm, knowing she will come through and see God in the end. She is strong, Olympe had told him, showing him the picture on her own altar back home. One of the strongest. She knows pain, she come through the fire. She’s a protector, a protector of women.
Mambo Danto sighed. ‘Since Maria was a little girl, the goddess Mayanet would come on her at the dancing. After her own little girl died, she became a mambo, and sometimes Mayanet stay in her for days. Now, Maria wasn’t never a meek girl: she agidi, got a strong head on her. Maybe that’s why Mayanet take to her. But when the loa inside her, you see the marks on her wrists, from the chains in Purgatory. When she’s herself, the skin smooth as a baby’s.’
January nodded. He’d s
een stranger things, when as a young boy he’d slip out at night and go to the brickyard on Rue Dumaine where the voodoos danced. He’d seen, too, in France, nuns and holy men whose devotion to the Passion of Christ had induced the bleeding echoes of His wounds on their bodies, in imitation of the sufferings on Golgotha. ‘Is she one of the Egbo?’ he asked softly.
‘They only men.’ The old priestess folded wrinkled, tiny hands. ‘Her brothers in the Egbo, an’ it may be if you meet them on the way to this old sucerie you lookin’ for, she can save you.’
Young men came to the door of Mayanet’s hut, speaking in low, tense voices. He heard the words ‘Spanish spy’ and ‘blan’’ – white man – and when she appeared against the darkness within they gestured toward the night beyond the dim torchlight of the humfo yard, where drums tapped some urgent message.
Mayanet blew a line of cigar smoke and asked, ‘You want maybe I should read the shells for you?’ Her eyes mocked them – the eyes that had, for one moment on the road yesterday, filled with tears when he’d spoken of his child.
Now she looked every inch a goddess, cool and shimmering in her ownership of the land and men’s souls. Framed against the darkness, her raised arms braced on the door frame and her dark Spanish hair curled like a gypsy’s, she exuded a fey peril, like a leopard herself. January wondered if she had the reputation of a werewolf also, though there had never been a wolf in Haiti in all its history. Such was the power of the legends of the whites, even after they were gone.
‘No, no,’ said the young men hastily, ‘we got no quarrel, M’aum, if you speak for him.’
‘I do,’ she said, and smiled.
And watched them as they retreated across the court, to one of the fires before some other hut.
In the darkness the drums rapped out their warning, little answering big. Spies and strangers were abroad in the land.
They must be hunted and killed, hunted and killed.
Rose would hear them, January knew, lying bound in the darkness among the men who had killed her brother.
And trusting that all would be well.
TWENTY-EIGHT
They left the humfo before first light, Hannibal, January, and Mayanet, with Mambo Danto along to take the donkey back. In Gonaïves, Mayanet found a fisherman at the harbor who agreed to take them across the Gulf to Port-au-Prince, and if anyone told Captain Linfour that his suspected spies were back in town, he didn’t come down to the waterside to check.
Crossing the Gulf of Gonâve – blue sky, blue sea, blue as the veil of the Mother of God, with the mountain shadows shortening and shortening and gold light coming up into the sky – January prayed: for Rose, for Hannibal, for Baby John. Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, none of this mess is Rose’s fault, or Hannibal’s. Help me get them out of this safely.
Beyond the low green hills to the east lay the fertile Artibonite Valley, once one of the richest sugar-producing bottomlands in the world. Mayanet, still smoking the stub of her cigar, sat in the stern, her eyes turned south-east for the first glimpse of the Haitian capital, and January had the uncomfortable feeling that however much this woman believed herself to be the chosen mount of a goddess, it wouldn’t keep her – or himself and Hannibal – from being shot.
Maybe there is no way out. Maybe the whole island lay under a curse – from the 20,000 whites slaughtered by Toussaint and Christophe and the vengeful fury of the rebelling slaves; from the uncounted hundreds of thousands of slaves, worked to death, tortured to death, beaten to death in the name of profits and good order. From the thousands of mulattos in the towns that the invading French had simply massacred, and from the 24,000 French soldiers and seamen who had succumbed to yellow fever during the abortive invasion … The very air of the island, thick and humid, oppressed the soul.
Maybe we’ll simply disappear here, the way poor Jeoffrey Vitrac set off for New Orleans with the hopes of tracking down the family treasure and never came back.
Leaving his wife to mourn him – thank God she has wealthy parents to care for her. Leaving Baby John to grow up motherless and fatherless, never knowing what became of us or why we left him to others’ care.
Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, help us. Me and Mayanet …
If I get out of this alive I’ll be doing penance for ten years …
‘There it is.’ The goddess pointed with the stub of her cigar. ‘Port-au-Prince.’
Backed by wooded hills, Port-au-Prince lay in the very gullet of the crab-claw Gulf of Gonâve, its wide streets and spread-out houses making it seem even lower than New Orleans. January recognized the flags of France and Britain, of Holland and Austria, on the jackstaffs of the few merchantmen in the northern of the city’s two harbors – the source, he supposed, of the stylish silks he’d glimpsed on the mulatto bourgeoisie in Gonaïves. But only a handful of ships floated at anchor, bumboats coming and going from the wharves with water, supplies, sacks of coffee and hogsheads of sugar and indigo.
Inland, the resemblance to New Orleans was increased by the stucco of the unpainted houses, the low cottages with shed-like galleries facing the streets. It was New Orleans as he recalled it from his childhood, the half-Spanish city before the Americans had built their white wooden houses upriver of Canal Street. The ring of fortifications remained, which had vanished from New Orleans, and the forts which guarded the harbor flew the black-and-red banner of the defiant black republic.
Slave owners, take heed.
Slaves, take heed.
It CAN be done.
Before leaving the humfo that morning, Mambo Danto and Mayanet had stained Hannibal’s face, hands, and neck with a dye of coffee beans and oak bark. ‘My reward from Heaven,’ remarked Hannibal as they came down the gangplank of the little fishing vessel, ‘for all those sets of papers I’ve forged to let octoroons pass for white.’ It would fade within days, but there were enough men in Port-au-Prince – as there were in New Orleans – of Caucasian features and African hue for him to pass unchallenged through its streets, particularly under cover of darkness. Hell, our butler was lighter than I am! Guibert de Gericault had written to his friend.
And, reflected January, he probably was …
And there they were, in every lamplit doorway and beneath the torch flares of the harbor, men with the dark, straight hair of Spanish or Indians or Frenchmen, with high-bridged European noses and thin European lips. Market women barely darker than a drop of ink in a quart of water: Next thing to white, Papa Grillo had sneered.
If their grandparents had been slaves at all – and not librés, as most of January’s neighbors were back in New Orleans, born free of free parents like any white in the city – then those grandparents had been house slaves, maids like Ginette and her sister Reina, servants like Claudio and Fia back on Hispaniola in Cuba, like Alice Vitrac’s maid Lallie in Grand Isle.
Emmanuelle and Calanthe – Ginette’s mistress and her fellow-plaçée – had been nearly white, he thought, looking around him as they left the leaping gold light of the cressets around the harbor, passed into the blackness of Port-au-Prince’s streets. And Dr Maudit had spent months, haunting the slave-markets, choosing just the right light-skinned manservants, not satisfied with just any, searching as the Devil instructed.
Searching for what?
He thought he knew.
Mayanet led them to a humfo in the so-called ‘New City’, the high ground around what had been the government complex under the French. The hougan there welcomed them, but January noticed how the man’s glance went from Mayanet’s hard, over-bright eyes to the weals on her wrists. ‘They say you goin’ to find the Spanish that come in from San Juan,’ he said.
‘They say that, hunh?’
He spread his hands. A workingman’s hands, January noticed. This was no man who lived solely on what the members of the humfo donated. ‘The Spanish killed two men by Lake Enriquillo, and then headed north into the mountains. Guerrero, they say. They say you got a Spanish with you.’ He looked at Hannibal, who tried to look indignant.
He lowered his voice to a whisper, and went on, ‘They say they’re after a treasure …’
‘An’ what you think more likely, Azo?’ Mayanet asked. ‘That I go help the Spanish steal some gold? Or that I go meet them and destroy them with the thump of my fist, with the smoke of my cigar?’
Azo the hougan looked uncomfortable, like a priest, January reflected, confronted by a parishioner’s blind willingness to stake life and property on the off-chance of a miracle.
Nevertheless, he gave them food and a bed on the floor of the badji – the sanctuary – amid the paraphernalia of worship: Papa Legba’s crutches, Baron Samedei’s hat. Clusters of necklaces hung from nails on the wall; macoutes full of gaudy, faded flags lay in the corners. The city humfo was not part of a lakou, but was supported by contributions from those who came to dance there on feast days and used the services of its hougan as healer, counselor, warlock and friend.
‘I must say,’ remarked Hannibal as they crept under a tattered tent of mosquito-bar overlooked by the glimmer of the moonlit altar, ‘I’m going to be fearfully disappointed if we reach the de Gericault plantation and find it looted long ago.’
‘The treasure there,’ returned Mayanet, stretching out beside him. ‘People might hear of it, but nobody touch it, all these years. It’s cursed …’ She shrugged and pulled off her tignon, shook her long, black hair down in a torrent over her shoulders. ‘Your enemies all die of it. You don’t need to worry.’
She lay down and was asleep in moments. On the altar, the ever-present spiders of Haiti – yellow banana-spiders, a tarantula bigger than January’s spread-out hand – crept and picked among the beaded gourds, the whittled images, the plates of tobacco and half-empty rum bottles of the altar. Toads in the gutter beyond the closed jalousies kept up a basso chorus as they hunted centipedes as long as a child’s arm.
‘Well,’ sighed the fiddler, ‘I should worry a great deal less if I was assured that the curse wouldn’t strike us as well.’
Crimson Angel Page 26