The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Then the two shadows parted as the door opened between them, and from the highest point of the vault he looked down to see Franz and Amiot walk in. Amiot called the name, Toussaint. When no reply came the commandant crossed the cell and brusquely shook the body slumped in the chair. The cold face skated against the wall, and the dangling arm jerked stiffly; Amiot recoiled as if he’d reached for a human hand and touched a snake instead.

  The abandoned pot foamed a scum of oatmeal onto the fire. Franz stooped to move it from the heat, then knelt beside the chair. He lifted the dangling hand and held it for a moment between his, stroking the wrist for the absent pulse and looking up toward the top of the vault as if, perhaps, he had recognized something, but Toussaint was already gone.

  Amiot held the wax stick to his tilted candle’s flame. A red blob dripped to the fold of his last letter, and he impressed it with the seal carved on his ring. Outside, the castle bell began to clang, but Amiot was too distracted to count the strokes. It was night and dark and bitter cold. The wax hardened quickly on the edges of the paper where he’d inscribed his request to be relieved of command of the Fort de Joux. Bonaparte’s trust was surely a valuable prize, but Amiot had begun to curse the aspect of fate that had made him a jailer.

  At his left hand the other documents were signed and stamped and sealed as required. There was the report of the autopsy conducted by Doctor Gresset and the surgeon Pajot: A little mucus mixed with blood in the mouth and on the lips . . . Bloody swelling of the right lung and of the corresponding pleura. Mass of purulent matter in that organ. A small fatty polyp in the right ventricle of the heart, of which the rest was in its normal condition . . . In consequence we conclude that apoplexy and pleural pneumoniaare the causes of the death of Toussaint Louverture.

  There too was a report of Toussaint’s effects which had been sold at auction in the town of Pontarlier; commencing with a suit of calmouk rayé, half-worn-out, sold for nine francs after several bids to the counselor Faivre, bookseller of Pontarlier and concluding with six blue quadrille kerchiefssold after several bids to the citizen Jenat, merchant of Pontarlier, for nine francs. Between, the other items auctioned consisted mostly of personal linen, with one riding coat and two religious tracts. In a separate document Amiot had reported other articles which had been confiscated and were in his own possession before Toussaint’s demise: one gold collar button, one watch with a gold case accompanied by a chain and a key of perfectly convincing imitation gold, one pair of silver spurs, one uniform in bad condition, decorated with a light gold braid, with yellow leather buttonsand two epaulettes, one used hat decorated in gold, and one case with a razor. These items remained in Amiot’s charge because he did not know what to do with them. Perhaps they might be returned to Toussaint’s survivors; there was supposed to be some family, though he didn’t know much about it and did not wish to know more.

  To the Minister of Marine Amiot had reported the date and hour of Toussaint Louverture’s death, at eleven o’clock on the seventh of April; that he had sent a special messenger to notify the general in chief commanding the sixth military division of the event, and that he had caused Toussaint’s body to be buried by a priest of the commune by the old chapel of the Fort de Joux, where in former times soldiers of the garrison had been interred. I believe, he concluded, that in taking these precautionsI have fulfilled the wishes of the Government. He had taken the further precaution of leaving Toussaint’s grave unmarked, lest it should somehow become a shrine, this action too, in his belief, fulfilling a wish of the Government. As if the savage blacks who had been his fanatics could travel round half the curve of the earth to bring their furies here.

  And so he came to his last letter, which he lifted and placed on top of the stack. Let the reply come soon and be favorable. Amiot felt confidently justified in requesting his relief, because he had accomplished his mission, which had been—had always been, as he certainly knew—to see Toussaint Louverture dead.

  Already he was anxious to be gone, though he knew he must endure some days of waiting, he hoped not weeks. What a joy it would be to depart from this place. He had begun to think that there really was something about it which deranged people. Toussaint was far from the only person to have suffered and died in the fort’s oubliettes, but Amiot, as a rational man, refused to believe that the place could be haunted. More likely the air at this altitude was simply too thin, or the cold impeded circulation of the blood, so that the brain, starved of its nourishment, produced these peculiarly plaguing fantasies.

  The guardsman Franz was already gone. Amiot would have liked to punish him, but could find no legitimate pretext. So he had simply given him a two-weeks leave to visit his family hovel across the Swiss border. With any luck, he himself would have departed by the time the old soldier returned. He had proposed that Franz needed a leave to rest and recover, on the evidence of the mad thing he had uttered when he and Amiot had discovered Toussaint dead in his cell.

  The very sight of Franz had become odious to Amiot, with his deep-set eyes and his war-weary face and the outmoded pigtail he persisted in wearing to remind everyone that he had served the First Consul in a former avatar, when Bonaparte had been a liberator. Even now, when it was late and his office tasks were at last concluded, he was reluctant to lie down and close his eyes, lest the image of Franz should appear before him, kneeling, holding Toussaint’s stiff hand between his, parting his lips to pronounce his queer sentence. It was nonsensical, but Amiot could not elude the phrase. It invaded his head in the night when he woke and could not sleep again, or wormed into moments of the day when he believed his mind was empty: The prisoner has escaped.

  Weté Mò anba Dlo Haiti

  April 1825

  Since Quamba died at Vertières, I, Riau, I keep the hûnfor on the hill at Thibodet. Quamba did not go to the fighting before, but he carried Guiaou’s coutelas to Vertières, and the last of the French blanc soldiers were defeated there, though Quamba was killed too, with others of our people. I, Riau, before that time, had gone to Grande Rivière to fight with Sans-Souci. When Toussaint was taken, I got up from the mud where Maillart’s weight had pressed me, and I turned my back on the blancs forever.

  Since Guiaou has gone beneath the waters, Riau does not wander any longer, but stays with Merbillay in the case behind the hûnfor where Quamba lived before. Caco is a man now, and lives with his woman and the children she has given him in the case that once was Merbillay’s, where Riau’s banza still hangs from the roof pole. I, Riau, go there sometimes to play the banza, and see the little children dance and laugh. The letterbox is left there too in Merbillay’s old case, that box where Toussaint hid the tokens of his blanche lovers. I put new paper in the box, and quills with a knife to sharpen them, but no one calls Riau to copy letters now.

  Yet sometimes I will open the box and smooth the paper and sharpen the quill and mix water with the dust of the old ink. I write the names of my children and Guiaou’s, and Caco’s children, and the names of the children Yoyo and Marielle will begin to bring. I do not often think of anything more to write when those names have been written. Nothing comes to me any more, to make the words march up and down the page like soldiers, as Riau sometimes used to do. Toussaint showed me how the mind of a blanc could climb through the words to come into my head and move with me as a spirit moves. This I still know, and sometimes I go walking with that spirit for a little way, but I give it no more service than the rows of names, which I place in the secret part of the box, where Toussaint’s souvenirs were hidden.

  Merbillay still cooks for the grand’case, though all the blancs are gone. Only the doctor stays there now, with Nanon and Paul, who is a man now too, married to one of Fontelle’s younger daughters. And Fontelle stays there, and Zabeth and the children she made with Bouquart and Michau, and I have written their names too and put them into the box, where no one ever reads them but Riau.

  Only the blanc gunrunner Tocquet seemed to understand what was certain to happen when Dessalin
es called all the grand blancs to come back to the country and make sugar and coffee again on their plantations, the same way that Toussaint had done before. Only Tocquet saw how different was Dessalines’s spirit from the spirit that once had walked with Toussaint. Those blancs made a reunion in the Cigny house at Le Cap and I, Riau, stood with Bazau and Gros-Jean in the next room, so I heard some of what they said. I heard Madame Isabelle Cigny stamp her foot and cry, “It cannot happen again. It will not!” Then Tocquet said in a low voice, “But it will,” and Isabelle demanded, “Why?” Tocquet did not often raise his voice, though he was always ready to slit a throat, but I could hear his anger when he answered, “It will happen again. It will never stop happening. Because the people who rule don’t know history.”

  Then Tocquet took Elise and Sophie and Mireille across the border at Ouanaminthe, with Bazau and Gros-Jean and their women and children and a few others who wanted to go with them. None of the other blancs would go, however Elise begged. They all still wanted to believe in the world Toussaint meant to make, where he had saved a place for them. All but Tocquet’s people. From Santo Domingo they took a ship to North America, and sometimes even now the doctor has a letter from his sister in the place called Louisiana where they stay, but those people will never come back any more.

  There are no more blancs in Haiti. At Thibodet, no one grows cane, but only coffee, and not much of that. The doctor treats the sick of all the canton of Ennery, and so the people in the grand’case live, though usually he does not ask for pay.

  Sometimes I put names of blancs in the box, though I do not know for certain why I do it. I have written, Isabelle Cigny, Robert Cigny, Héloïse Cigny. Michel Arnaud, and Claudine Arnaud. Monsieur Cigny I have written too, though now I can’t remember any longer if his name was Bernard or Bertrand, and besides he was killed before the others and in a different place. It was not long after Tocquet took his family across the border that Dessalines hunted all the blancs of Le Cap out of their houses and herded them into the Place d’Armes. Some of these blancs tried to pretend they really were gens de couleur, but then the soldiers made them sing—

  Nanon pralé chaché dlo

  krich-li casé . . .

  Anyone who sang French words instead of Creole was known to be a blanc.

  Nanon’s going to look for water

  her jug is broken . . .

  They were all caught, whose names Riau has written, and the doctor was taken with them. The doctor could have sung that song very well, but he would not do it. His own Nanon and Paul were not taken, since it was plain Nanon and Paul had the blood of Guinée. When he walked before the blancs who were herded together in the Place d’Armes, Dessalines stopped to look at the doctor for a long time, but the doctor never dropped his eyes, and finally Dessalines moved his snuffbox to his right hand and said, Li nèg —and the soldiers let the doctor walk away. He is black, Dessalines had said. The doctor’s back was straight and he held his head up with his beard’s point sticking out, and the only thing that showed of his feeling was a small tremble in his finger ends. He did not stop to look back at the people he was leaving behind him.

  Then Dessalines’s band played “La Carmagnole” and the soldiers marched all the blancs to La Fossette and killed them there, the men, the women, and the children, all, but I, Riau, I did not follow to that killing ground. I ran away for the last time into marronage, because I did not want to kill any more people whether they were blancs or not. Later on I heard that at first the other soldiers did not want to start the killing either, until Clervaux caught a blanc baby by its legs and smashed its brains out on a rock, and so the rest of them were able to begin.

  I knew that when Toussaint had asked the grand blancs back to live in peace and freedom, they betrayed him and sent him away to die alone in France. Boisrond Tonnerre gave the words to Dessalines: For our declarationof independence we must have the skin of a blanc for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for pen. I knew the reason Dessalines acted as he did, but still I did not want to join in that action. At first I went to Grande Rivière, though Sans-Souci was already dead by that time. Christophe had tricked Sans-Souci to a meeting at the foot of Morne la Ferrière and killed him there. Later on, when Dessalines was killed too, Riau came home to Ennery.

  There was nothing I could do to save my captain Maillart.

  People say that when the soldiers came back with their bloody hands from La Fossette, the band did not play any music at all, but I, Riau, I was not there to hear them if they played or not. Before that day, Dessalines had already gone down to Arcahaye, where he tore the white band from the middle of the French flag, and Catherine Flon sewed the red and the blue cloth together. Since then there are no more blancs in Haiti. Even the doctor is nèg.

  Sometimes when the day is ending, I sit and drink rum with the doctor on the gallery of the grand’case at Thibodet. During those times we do not talk much, but only listen to the voices of the doves finding their nests under the eaves, and the hum of the bees who go in and out of the holes they have bored in the wood of the gallery. When the sky darkens I feel that the doctor is thinking how everything might have ended differently if Toussaint had not gone to meet Brunet that day, or if some other small thing had been other than it was. Maybe it could have been, but it is not.

  Depi nan Ginen, nèg rayi nèg, the old people say. Since Africa, people have hated one another. I see it is not the only truth, but there is much to prove it. I see that Christophe killed Sans-Souci because neither he nor Dessalines could bear to know that Sans-Souci began the last fight against the blancs before them, and they could not bear that others knew it too. I see that Dessalines and Christophe and even Maurepas did work of the left hand against Toussaint for the same reason, and for that same reason Dessalines killed Charles Belair. Now Dessalines is dead himself, his body torn to pieces where they killed him at Pont Rouge, and Christophe after him is dead, killed by a bullet of his own gun in the midst of another rising.

  I, Riau, will live to grow old. Already I have made more than half my journey. In the letterbox I keep the names of many who have gone beneath the waters or will go, Macandal, Boukman, Moyse, Toussaint, Sans-Souci, Charles Belair, Maurepas, Dessalines, Christophe, CharlemagnePeralte, Benoît Batraville, Sonson Pasquet, Riquet Pepignard, Phito Dominique, Jean Chenet, Jacques Alexis, Richard Brisson, Gerald Brisson, Gusle Villedrouin, Roger Rigaud, Réginal Jourdan, Louis Drouin, Marcel Numa, Georges Izmery, Antoine Izmery, Père Jean-Marie Vincent, Guy Malary, Amos Jeannot, Brignol Lindor, Jean Dominique . . . There are worms who come into the box to feed on the paper where the names are written. Those worms are too small for the eye to see, and they do not hurt the wood of the box, but they make holes through all the papers, till the paper is like lace. No one reads the names Riau has written but the worms.

  When the time was right, I, Riau, I made the Weté Mò anba Dlo, and called the spirit of Toussaint to the canari where still it rests, at one with Attibon Legba, in the kay mystè high on our hill above Ennery. There was no one better than Riau to make that service. The sons of Toussaint’s wife never came out of France again, and Toussaint’s bones were scattered a long way off in the land of the blancs, but his spirit is still waiting here, amidst all sa nou pa wé yo. There is more of what we don’t see than what we do. Sometimes the spirit of Toussaint will walk a little way with one whose name Riau has written in the box, if it is one who has already died or one who has not yet been born.

  Now my eyes don’t see the things of this world as clearly as they used to do. My eyes turn toward les Invisibles, les Morts et les Mystères. I see that day which is long ago now, when Riau called Toussaint’s spirit back from beneath the waters, to sigh in the jar where still it waits for a name strong enough to carry it all the way to the end of its road. There were no clouds and no wind on that day, and the air was so clear that one who stood with Riau on the hilltop could see beyond Ennery all the way to the coast. Away to the west the horizon curve
d up to meet the falling of the red sun, and the top of the ocean was like the skin of a drum stretched tight.

  GLOSSARY

  During the Haitian Revolution, Haitian Creole had no systematic orthography. The spellings of Creole words used in this book are modeled on those used by francophone writers of the period, and are not meant to be consistent with the orthography of Haitian Creole today.

  À LA CHINOIS: in the Chinese manner.

  ABOLITION DU FOUET: abolition of the use of whips on field slaves; a negotiating point before and during the rebellion.

  ABUELITA: grandmother.

  ACAJOU: mahogany.

  AFFRANCHI: a person of color whose freedom was officially recognized; most affranchis were of mixed blood but some were full-blood Africans.

  AGOUTI: groundhog sized animal, edible.

  LES AMIS DES NOIRS: an abolitionist society in France interested in improving the conditions and ultimately in liberating the slaves of the French colonies.

  AJOUPA: a temporary hut made of sticks and leaves.

  ALLÉE: a lane or drive lined with trees.

  ANCIEN RÉGIME: old order of pre-Revolutionary France.

  ANBA DLO: beneath the waters—the Vodou afterworld.

  ARISTOCRATES DE LA PEAU: aristocrats of the skin. Many of Sonthonax’s policies and proclamations were founded on the argument that white supremacy in Saint Domingue was analogous to the tyranny of the hereditary French nobility and must therefore be overthrown in its turn by revolution.

  ARMOISE: medicinal herb for fever.

  ASOTO: large drum.

  ASSON: a rattle made from a gourd, an instrument in Vodou ceremonies, and the hûngan’s badge of authority.

  ATELIER: idiomatically used to mean work gangs or the whole body of slaves on a given plantation.