Dessalines sent twenty-five horsemen out the road to Port-au-Prince, to see if that way was open now, and I, Riau, went with them to see what they would learn. By this time I thought I had seen the idea behind Dessalines’s head. He had drawn Boudet, with many of his men, to the north of Port-au-Prince into the plain of Cul de Sac. If Boudet was still there, trying to learn the passes to Mirebalais where the blanc prisoners had been taken, or maybe fighting Lamartinière at Habitation Jonc, then maybe Dessalines could get into Port-au-Prince from the south, where no one would expect him to be, and burn the town at last as Toussaint had ordered, while the French blanc soldiers left it unguarded.
But there were still more French blanc soldiers on the road—many dragoons, fresh and well mounted, with red feathers in their helmets that swam in the air like flames. They were riding down toward Léogane as if they would attack us there. When Dessalines had got this news, he was even angrier than he had been the day before on the banks of Rivière Froide. Still, the day was not done yet. Dessalines had his men take all the cannons of Léogane, and all the powder and shot from the magazine, and any other stores they could carry, and bring them to the mountains of Cabaret Quart.
At the same time Dessalines went, with the help of Pierre Louis Diane, from one house to another through all the town, and swept all the blancs who lived there into the square of Léogane, which was a quiet place shaded by many tall old trees. When they were all brought there, one of the blancs stepped out from the others and began to read the proclamation of Napoleon Bonaparte, which said that the free black men of Saint Domingue were never to be made slaves any more, but he had not read more than the first words before Dessalines changed his snuffbox from one hand to the other, and the blanc was shot.
I wondered what Dessalines meant to do with all these people. There were four hundred of them nearly, and he could not take them back across the mountains the way we had come.
There was one man among them all, Fossin, who knew me well enough to catch my eyes, with his own eyes pleading, though he did not dare to speak, after the shooting of that other blanc. I knew him because he was one of the blancs who spied for Toussaint on the others, and sometimes I had received his messages. Also his wife was a blanche thought beautiful by many, and one of those who came in secret to Toussaint’s bed, to get some advantage for their families, or because they were drawn to his power. She was not there at Léogane that day, which was a lucky thing for her.
I took Fossin away from the others and brought him before Dessalines, and I explained that Toussaint would not want this one blanc to be mistreated. Dessalines looked at him for a long time, his fingers turning the snuffbox around and around, but in the end he said that Fossin was free to leave Léogane and go out and meet the soldiers on the road, if that would be his choice. Out of four hundred blancs that day in Léogane, he was the only one to go free.
The drum rolled then, and we began marching the crowd of blancs out of the square and through the streets and finally into the wide bed of the river. Our men were close around them with their bayonets for all that way, though it was not long, and the little snare drum kept rolling. At the place where we stopped the riverbed was a shoal of dry stones, because there had been no rain in this part of the country. There was no shade either, except along one bank where a little trickle of water still ran in a deeper part of the streambed. But we had stopped the prisoners in the full sun, and it was so hot I could feel the river stones burning through the soles of my boots.
Our men began to go among the prisoners and take whatever they had that was valuable. Of course they were not so willing to give up their goods, and many had hidden things in their clothing, so that the men went groping all over them for lumps that might be watches or coins or jewelry. Then, when some of the women’s clothes were torn, and their pink skin bare, and they were screaming, some of our men wanted to take pleasure from them. But Dessalines shook his head, only a little. Then Pierre Louis Diane caught one of the women by her hair and pulled her head back to cut her throat, and I, Riau, did the same with another, spinning her quickly down on the stones so her blood would not spatter on my clothes.
I did not kill anyone else after that, but stood apart and watched the killing. I did not really want to watch, but Dessalines would have not liked for anyone to turn his face away. It was all done with bayonets and knives, to save powder and shot, so it was a slow and ugly thing.
Now, long before this time, Riau had done such killings too, and delighted to paint himself in the blood of blancs, or to use their women and kill them after. But in that time, all blancs appeared as monsters to me. They were nothing like me or other children of Guinée. They were only loup-garou sent to torture us out of the life of our bodies. Also, on those days of blood long before, I often had my spirit in my head, so it was not I, Riau, who killed, or if it was, I killed to feed the lwa. And afterward, what I remembered of what Riau had done would be like a story told about the doings of another.
Those times seemed a long way off, almost as far as Guinée itself, which Riau could hardly remember. Since then I had come to know a few blancs, like the doctor, and even his friend the Captain Maillart, and some few others, who did not seem to be monsters out of another world, but persons like myself. Among the hundreds screaming in their blood there in the riverbed, I thought there must be at least a few like that. And my spirit was very far away!—so far I could not recall it. I was alone in my head as I watched the killing, with my two eyes drying up as I forced them to stay open, wondering if Ogûn would ever dance in my head again. It seemed I was alone more and more in this way, and I wondered what was to blame for it. I thought of the service I owed to the spirit of Moyse, and of all the things Quamba said that I must do, but it seemed evil to think of those things in that place, as if I had no right any more even to touch them with my thoughts.
When the killing was finished, a horn was blown and our men began to form up slowly, to march out of the riverbed. Some of the men were in blood frenzy, with spirits mounted in their heads, and these walked as in a dream, with their bloody knives hanging down from their hands. The rest of the men could not meet each other’s eyes. They were all very tired from the work they had done, and I was tired too, though I had only been watching. I thought I had come a long way out of the good road, and all my turnings had been wrong.
As we were leaving, some bony yellow dogs came from the other bank down into the riverbed and lowered their heads shyly to begin licking the blood that still smoked on the stones. I looked back over my shoulder once and saw that some long-eared black pigs had joined them, grunting as they rooted among the bodies and turned the soft parts upward with their snouts. Then I wished that a flood would come, and wash it all away into the ocean. It was for that the work had been done in the riverbed, but there would be no rain today—the sky above us was empty.
Dessalines set fire to Léogane before we left it. He had saved enough powder to blow up the magazine. He was taking his army to Cabaret Quart. Some men had deserted during the hard march the day before, and others would slip away today, but not Riau. Dessalines knew me too well—I would be missed. I went to him then and said again how Toussaint had given me words for Laplume, and that I would not get a better chance than I had now to go to the south to find him. Dessalines was ready to let me go, and he told me I should bring him word of Laplume’s reply, if it was possible, because he had already heard a rumor that Laplume might be meaning to sell himself to the French.
I went more slowly now, to spare my horse. To the south of Léogane there was no fighting, and none of the French blanc soldiers had come there yet. People had heard something of the fighting at Port-au-Prince, and they wanted to get news from me when they saw my captain’s uniform. At the end of that day, I got for myself a plate of rice and beans and boiled plantain, and a bed for that night in a clay case, by telling the people of that lakou part of what I knew. I told them Dessalines had destroyed Léogane, and that Papa Toussaint would be coming soon
to drive all the blanc soldiers into the sea, but I did not say anything about the killing of the four hundred blancs in the riverbed.
In the light of morning I saw that my boot soles were sticky with the blood from the killing the day before. The blood was coated with dust from the roads, so it was not very plain what it was, but I knew. At the first stream I crossed that day, I got down and washed my boots until there was nothing left of that old blood, and went on with the leather damp against my feet. In the afternoon I found the camp of Lamour Dérance, which had moved from the place it had been before, but not too far. Lamour Dérance himself had gone away, maybe to parley with Lafortune, who had another band of maroons not too far off, or to see Laplume himself, or maybe he had even gone to Port-au-Prince, Jean-Pic said to me.
This I was surprised to hear, with all the French blanc soldiers there, and after all the fighting I had seen. But Jean-Pic told me then that the French general Boudet had stopped asking for the passports. That news surprised me even more, and made me wonder, and I saw it had done the same to Jean-Pic and all his people.
Since Toussaint had bound the men who were not soldiers to work on the plantations with the hoe, he had also ordered that any man must have a paper if he would leave his plantation to travel on the road, and especially to enter a big town like Port-au-Prince, each man must have such a passport paper to show. It had been the same in slavery time. No slave could travel without some piece of writing from his master, but in those days the rule was not very much respected. Under Toussaint it was much more strict, and truly it was hard for a man to go anywhere at all without a passport paper, unless he had a soldier’s uniform like Riau, or ran away to be with the maroons as Jean-Pic had done. It was such strictness that had made Moyse rise up, with a great many people pushing him from below. For a French general to do away with those passports was surprising, and I thought it might be some kind of trick. But Jean-Pic said one might go in and out of Port-au-Prince very freely now. He had not been there himself, but he knew some who had.
Next day I rode still further to the south, until I found Laplume at last, where he had stopped near Miragoâne. He did not have all his troops with him, only a few horsemen from the Twelfth Brigade, and he was coming out of Port-au-Prince himself. I was careful in my first words to him, because I knew he must have had some parley with the French. But I did let him know that I was carrying a message from Toussaint.
“Well, Captain Riau,” Laplume said. “It is not the first time you have come to us with something from Toussaint.” He folded his arms and looked at me then, and not in the friendliest way. But I did not have any great reason to lower my eyes before Laplume.
I had known Laplume from a long time before, when he was second in Dieudonné’s band, and before that too, when the three of us had all been in the band of Halalou. Later on, when I was with Toussaint again, and the English had taken Port-au-Prince and meant to take the rest of the country, Toussaint began to worry that Dieudonné might sell himself to the English. Then Toussaint sent both Riau and Guiaou to Dieudonné, with a letter which argued that he ought to come over to Toussaint instead of going to the English. But before Dieudonné could decide what to do, Laplume had made a plot against him. Laplume’s men jumped on Dieudonné while he was sleeping, and they chained him up as a prisoner, so it was Laplume who brought his band to Toussaint, but Dieudonné died soon after, wrapped up in his chains.
These things were true, but in all that history there was no more shame for Riau than for Laplume. In the end Laplume was the first to lower his eyes. He played with the braid on the cuff of his uniform coat, then moved his hand to cover the round Commissioner’s medal which once belonged to the blanc Sonthonax, who gave it to Laplume just before he left our country.
“Look well, Riau,” he said. “You see that we are both officers in the French army, do you not?”
“It is so,” I said. Though Laplume was a General of Brigade, and Riau only a captain.
“These new soldiers who have come out from France respect our ranks,” Laplume said. “Both mine and yours. If Toussaint fights them, it shows that Toussaint is trying to keep power for himself. Look around you—it is peaceful here, but in Le Cap, I hear, everything has been burned again, because Toussaint would not accept the French . . .”
“And at Léogane, too,” I said.
Laplume looked at me sharply then, and I guessed he had not yet known about Léogane.
“Burned for nothing,” Laplume said finally. “Nothing but the ambition of Toussaint. And his rule has been harder upon us than what the French would bring. They have not come to bring back slavery—I have this promise from themselves.”
“So it is done, then,” I said.
“Yes,” said Laplume. “It is done.”
I saw it would be a great blow to Toussaint, that Laplume was already sold to the French. Laplume had commanded more than three thousand men at Les Cayes, and he controlled the way into all of the Grande Anse, which was almost a third of the country. That was the old country of Rigaud. The French would have the use of that land now, with the sea-ports and all the goods, except maybe for Jérémie, where Dommage was for Toussaint.
“You see, I am now speaking for the French,” Laplume said. “It is no different than before, only that I accept the authority of the Captain-General Leclerc. Have I done you any harm, Riau? You may come along to Les Cayes with me, or go to Port-au-Prince to see for yourself.”
I chose to go to Port-au-Prince then, but after all I was not so sure that my uniform would be a good passport there. At a crossroads south of the town, I bought two of the big woven panniers the marchandes use to carry their goods on their donkeys—big enough to hide the leather saddle on my horse. I put my uniform coat and shirt and boots and my weapons and even the bridle of the horse into these panniers, and covered them up with green oranges. Only my pistols were just at the top, where I could reach them quickly. I went into Port-au-Prince on foot, leading the horse by a rope halter, as if I were going to market. There were French blanc soldiers at the gates, but no one asked for a passport paper or paid me any attention at all.
I walked around the town then, leading my horse. It had not been very much damaged in the fighting of a few days before, and everything seemed peaceful, as Laplume had said. I wondered if it was true that Le Cap was burned again. I felt lighter and cooler without my uniform coat to wear, and it was good to have my feet free of the pinch of those boots for a little while. Also, I sold some of my oranges for more than I had given for them, in a market under some trees in a corner of the Place Royale, not far from the government buildings. All those trees had nailed to them a proclamation of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was addressed to all the people of Saint Domingue, no matter what their color was, and it began by saying that all of us were equal before men and before God. This was the same paper the blanc had tried to read in the square of Léogane before he was shot.
I felt eyes on my back while I was reading this paper, and when I looked across the panniers, I saw the Captain Maillart, drinking with some other French officer at a table outside a tavern door. I stood mostly hidden from his view, but Maillart knew something about horses, and he must have seen that mine was not really a packhorse. He got up then and came toward me, and said in a booming voice: “How much do you want for half a dozen of those oranges?”
He was a little drunk already, and I smelled the rum on him when he came around to my side of the horse, but he was still in his senses.
“What are you playing at, Riau?” he said to me more quietly. “I didn’t know what had happened to you. What is this masquerade?”
Maillart put his hand on my bare shoulder in a friendly way, but I did not know how to answer him.
“You see everything is all right,” he said and turned his eyes for a moment to the proclamation nailed to the tree. “Now get yourself dressed properly and come and have a drink with us.” Then he took the oranges he had asked for, and went back to the table with the others.
IF ANYONE TELLS YOU, “THESE FORCES HAVE COME TO TEAR AWAY OUR LIBERTY,” REPLY, “THE REPUBLIC WILL NOT SUFFER THAT IT SHOULD BE TAKEN FROM US.”
It seemed to me that Maillart believed these words, and I began to ask myself if Toussaint really disbelieved them.
15
“Uncle! Uncle! Tonton Antoine!” Sophie’s was the first voice the doctor heard, as she came rushing toward them from the steps of the Thibodet grand’case with her heavy dark hair flying out behind her. She slammed into him as he swung down from the saddle, with nearly enough force to knock him from his feet. How she had grown! And she got her height from her father, so she was already almost as tall as he. The Thibodet enclosure was all confusion with the arrival of so many riders. Paul stood at a little distance, with his black friend Caco, and when Sophie had released the doctor he came up more shyly to greet his father. The doctor kissed him on both cheeks. Then Elise had appeared at the gallery railing, calling out, “Antoine! Isabelle! oh, thank God you are safe . . .”
Isabelle dismounted, sagging for a moment against the flank of her mare, then tottered toward the steps on her numb legs, as Elise came tripping down to embrace her. The wind was skirling around the ground, and a rogue gust peeled away the doctor’s straw hat. Sophie ran after it and brought it back to him, laughing.
“All very touching, I am sure,” said Cyprien, who remained in his saddle. “But where is Toussaint Louverture?”
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 30