Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Perhaps I have been less impressed with the fervency of his devotions than was the Marquis d’Hermonas,” Cabrera said. He smiled thinly and rearranged some papers on his table. Upside down, at the foot of a letter, the doctor thought he could make out the name of Biassou.

  “There are some who contend,” Cabrera said, “that if Toussaint prays so long and loud, it is only the better to deceive those who observe him.”

  The doctor opened his mouth, but nothing emerged. Cabrera looked at him expectantly.

  “I have known this man since the first insurrection in the north of Saint Domingue,” the doctor said carefully. “I would put my life in his hands with no hesitation. Indeed I can attest that he has already saved it more than once.”

  Cabrera nodded, but said nothing. He reached for his pen and glanced at the door. The interview was at an end.

  Doctor Hébert found the junior black officers arguing in their encampment at the edge of town. Dessalines was for sacking San Miguel immediately, or at least for forcing entry to the house so as to liberate Toussaint and his family from this unjustified detention. Moyse seemed half persuaded to this course, while Belair and Maurepas were counseling restraint.

  “Doucement,” the doctor said. “Let us go softly, gentlemen, and bide our time a little.”

  Dessalines looked at him directly, which was rare; the doctor felt the pressure of his eyes like two palms shoving him smoothly backward. He forced himself to hold the gaze.

  “In such a case, I ask myself,” the doctor said, “what would Toussaint himself do?”

  “Nothing,” Dessalines said, snorting as he broke the stare. He shifted his weight and looked down at the blanket where he sat.

  “Nothing,” the doctor repeated. His eyes ran round the faces of the others. He was not in the confidence of these men, and he felt an uncomfortable thrill at the nakedness of the idea between them.

  “Watch,” Moyse said, “and wait.”

  Thus it was agreed among the four black officers to await developments, and the arrival of Don García, at least for one more day. The doctor found himself returning toward the town center, in the company of Maurepas—a more comfortable companion, certainly, than Dessalines or even than Moyse. His own question whined in his ears: What would Toussaint himself do? What did Toussaint mean to do? It struck him that since they’d left Ennery he had not been much in Toussaint’s confidence either.

  “No one knows for certain,” Maurepas said, quite as if he’d asked out loud, “and so it is with Biassou, and Jean-François as well. They fear Toussaint because he is becoming stronger, and because he has blanc officers among us, and other blancs like you, and because his understanding with white people was very close before the rising. You have seen men come from Biassou and Jean-François to join with us instead.” Maurepas smiled thoughtfully. “Because things are better ordered with Toussaint—one’s life may be harder but it is more sure. I think that Biassou has sent a pwen upon Don García and Don Cabrera, to poison their minds against Toussaint.”

  The doctor stopped in his tracks. “I did not know you were enrolled in such superstition,” he said.

  “It is Biassou who works in that way,” Maurepas said, “and my opinion does not matter. Besides, a pwen may be sent as a letter or a message, nothing more—and something has worked on the head of Don Cabrera, at least, for this is what we see.”

  The doctor fell into silence, stroking his short beard to a point as they continued strolling in the general direction of the town’s central square. When they turned the next corner, he was fairly astonished to encounter Suzanne, walking toward the market with a basket on her arm and holding the hand of her youngest, Saint-Jean. In his surprise he glanced at Maurepas, but the black officer was no longer there.

  Suzanne was flanked by two Spanish soldiers, but they did not prevent the doctor from approaching her, although they did stand near enough to overhear their conversation. On the assumption that they understood both French and Creole, it was out of the question to speak freely. While exchanging banalities with Suzanne, the doctor felt a small hand tugging his trouser leg. He stooped and lifted Saint-Jean into his arms and kissed his cheeks. The boy’s fingers brushed his palm, and the doctor closed his hand over a sort of paper bullet, which he put discreetly into his trouser pocket.

  As soon as he had turned the next corner, he unballed the paper. Toussaint’s crooked writing and phonetic spellings were instantly recognizable—as was his subtlety of mind. A shadow fell on the paper as he examined it; Maurepas had reappeared, or perhaps simply cast off the cloak of invisibility he had somehow assumed. He and the doctor exchanged a furtive smile and began walking briskly back toward the black encampment.

  The letter, addressed to Don García, was part protest, part apology, part self-justification, and part assault on potential enemies. An apparently general thrust went straight to the heart of Biassou, for instance. But all the while Toussaint sustained a tone of humble, bemused, yet honorable simplicity.

  At camp, the doctor found his own writing instruments and made a fair copy of the letter, correcting the spelling but leaving the style and argument intact. As a flourish, he managed a passable forgery of Toussaint’s signature, complete with the customary three dots closed within the extravagant curlicue of the last letter. He was just wondering where to send the missive when word came that Don García had in fact arrived at San Miguel.

  All through the following day, the Spanish general took no apparent action, either on Toussaint’s letter or on any other arguments which might have been addressed to him. Toussaint’s men fretted, while their leader remained incommunicado, and the tension grew. The next afternoon, Don García rendered himself to the house where Toussaint was detained and stayed there for nearly four hours. That evening the Spanish guard was lifted and Toussaint’s officers went in to him, the doctor among them. In a clipped and neutral tone, Toussaint let them know that the following day they would return to the campaign in the French colony, on Don García’s order—immediately following morning mass.

  Only Maurepas and Charles Belair accompanied Toussaint to services next day. Suzanne and the children were nowhere in sight. When Toussaint uncovered as he entered the church, the doctor was slightly surprised to see that a blood-red mouchwa têt replaced the yellow madras headcloth he ordinarily always wore. Toussaint prayed more efficiently than usual, and in a lower, harsher tone, his thumb snapping the beads of his rosary as if he were filing protests before God.

  As soon as he had taken communion, he beckoned to the others and stalked out of the church. Dessalines was waiting in the square, at the head of perhaps seventy of the original hundred horsemen. Guiaou tossed the reins of the brown gelding to the doctor, who hurried to mount, seeing that Toussaint was already in the saddle, wheeling his horse. A few Spanish foot soldiers came on the run, calling in unintelligibly accented French. One snatched at the bridle of Dessalines’s horse, but Dessalines knocked the arm down with the flat of his sword. Then they were leaving the town at full gallop.

  All through the morning they rode hard, as fast as they could go without overheating the horses. There was no pursuit, or reason for any—Toussaint was following Don García’s order, however brusque his departure had been. The reason for their haste became more apparent when they overtook the rest of the cavalry at the opening of the first mountain pass on the plateau’s edge. Suzanne and the boys were among that group, just climbing out of the Spanish gift carriage.

  While the older boys were mounting on burros, several of Toussaint’s men quickly unpinned the wheels of the coach and laid them in the closed interior. Suzanne rode the blue mule sidesaddle like a market woman, her forward knee hitched high; she smiled and flicked up the mule on the withers with a foot-long stick she held in her right hand. Saint-Jean rode pillion with Toussaint. Eight of the men dismounted and lifted the carriage by its axles and singletree, and carried it into the mountains at a trot that equaled the pace of the horses.

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  From Port-de-Paix toward the end of the western peninsula, the road wound high on the rim of scrubby hills above the ocean. Dark water foamed and sucked at the rocks below, and there was a steady, salty wind from the north, which had trained all the trees to grow leaning backward, twisting and stooping over the slopes. Still in mufti, Captain Maillart rode westward, leading his small party at a brisk trot. In time his hair grew sticky, clumped by the salt wind. He was second in the short column, following a black soldier named Charlot whom Laveaux had sent out with them as a guide.

  The road was a dry, hard surface of bedrock overlain with pale dust and pea gravel. Presently Maillart’s horse picked up a stone in his hoof and went slightly lame. The captain dismounted and picked the pebble loose from the tender frog, while one of the black soldiers held the horse and another supported the injured hoof. He walked the animal for twenty minutes, then mounted and rode on as before.

  By now the island of Tortuga had dropped out of sight behind the gentle curve of the coast. In the late afternoon a drift of cloud blowing in from the ocean began to grow thicker and darker till it covered the sky, and the seawater itself changed from royal blue to an oily black. The wind twisted and whipped, raising the salt-stiffened locks of the captain’s hair and teasing at the mane of his horse. But before the actual downpour began, they had reached the village of Jean Rabel.

  The town was tiny, consisting of a mere two streets converging on a square parade ground before a small wooden church. The French tricolor flew from a pole at the center of the square, and as Maillart’s party rode in, two black men dressed in tattered French uniform trousers had begun striking the flag against the coming rain. The captain was pleased to see the colors; they were now very near to the English bastion at Môle Saint Nicolas, and he hadn’t been completely certain that the sphere of French influence still extended this far. Meanwhile, the wind was lifting coils of dust from the ground and the air grew more heavy and damp at every moment. Charlot parlayed with the two men as they detached the flag from the lanyards and began respectfully folding it. The captain, half stunned from the day’s ride, paid small attention to their conversation, though he noticed that Charlot’s gestures became broader and more expressive when the rain began in earnest. Maillart was caked with sweat and salt and dust from the road and was almost grateful to be bathed in rain, though he knew a drenching was dangerous, in his state, and could very well lead to fever. But before he was quite soaked to the skin, Charlot concluded an arrangement and one of the flag bearers quickly led them to a warehouse on the edge of town where they might shelter.

  The warehouse was a sizable barnlike structure, at the border of the town proper with the land of Habitation Foache. In former times it had been used to store the indigo for which the region of Jean Rabel was noted, but now there was nothing here but a few dozen baskets of coffee beans, still in their red hulls. The men and horses came in together; there was plenty of room for both. Rain swept over the thatched roof with a regular hissing, sizzling sound. In one corner the thatch had rotted through, admitting a silver stream of rainwater and a shaft of rain-streaked daylight. After a moment of hesitation, Maillart stripped off his wet shirt and went over and washed his face and torso under the waterfall, then cupped his hands to take a drink. The black men laughed quietly among themselves, then followed his example.

  Maillart tethered his horse to a hook in the wall, unsaddled the animal and dried the leather with a blanket he kept in his saddlebag. He wrapped himself in the blanket and lay down, resting his head on the saddle, half dozing as he listened to the rain and the drone of Creole conversation among the other men. Without knowing it, he must have gone to sleep entirely, for suddenly he woke, shivering a little, aware that the rain had stopped and night had fallen.

  The warehouse was empty now except for the horses, but he heard the voices of the men beyond the door, and there was also a cooking smell. Maillart hung up his civilian clothes on the square nails and hooks that studded the walls, to dry as best they might. He put on his French uniform and stepped outside.

  His party had grouped around an open fire, covered by an iron stewpot which an old black woman was stirring with a wooden spoon two feet long. They had been joined by a black man who wore the ragged tunic of a French lieutenant, a bandolier but no trousers—apparently a true sans-culotte. At the sight of Maillart, he drew himself up and saluted.

  This was the officer who commanded on behalf of the French Republicans in the region of Jean Rabel. In the course of the conversation, Captain Maillart was able to learn that this tattered lieutenant had at his theoretical disposal as many as two hundred men, but that the great majority of these were lately liberated slaves of the region who came and went very much as they pleased, who had no regular military training and whose performance (and attendance) at battles was far from reliable. Meanwhile the English were very well established at Môle Saint Nicolas. The lieutenant had word that they had lately been reinforced from the sea, and that they had mounted an expedition whose result he did not know against Bombarde, another small French post on the south side of the peninsula. Were the English to march on Jean Rabel, the lieutenant could not predict an outcome; he had no more than forty well-trained and reliable men to count on, although, if God so willed, he might compose a force of two hundred fighters of some description.

  The captain mused silently on this situation: the French position in the northwest was still more precarious than he’d known for certain . . . and perhaps collapsing, if Bombarde had been lost. The Spanish line came down to the coast at Borgne, which cut off Laveaux, at Port-de-Paix, from the land route east to Le Cap . . . though given what the captain had seen at Le Cap, it seemed unlikely that Laveaux could expect much support from that direction anyway. But the Spanish held Borgne thanks to Toussaint and his men, so if the black general did switch his allegiance, the military map would be quite significantly altered. Maillart carried this thought with him to the woven mat on which he passed that night.

  From Jean Rabel they rode along the cliff edge high above the crashing water: the Côte de Fer, where the sea was always high and rough and the rocks lethal to shipping—no vessel could attempt a landing here. But on the shoal of Port d’Écu, a long, sheer drop below, there was a natural salt pan whose crystals shone like diamonds in the rising sun as they passed. Because of the sea wind and the early hour of their leaving, it was cool for the first hours, but by the time they had come down to the Bay Moustique onto the flat, arid plain that ran to the peninsula’s furthest tip, the sun was high and scorching and the steady wind off the ocean only seemed to parch them, as it parched the land. All around the country was dry and barren but for desert scrub: prickly pear, raquette trees and nopal cactus.

  A mile or two outside the town of Le Môle they fell in with a train of donkeys led by blacks bringing water in from farther up the river. Maillart negotiated a drink for himself and his company, and when they had all quenched their thirst, he dumped the remains of the gourd over his sweat-streaked hair and face, and went on considerably refreshed. In another few minutes they had an overview of the large, deep harbor of Le Môle, where several warships rode at anchor, flying the Union Jack.

  They followed the water sellers to the square of the town. The principal street was divided by a small, shallow canal of fresh-looking water running down its middle—indeed each side street was similarly irrigated, so that Maillart wondered at the need for hauling in more water. Perhaps what flowed in those rivulets was not fit to drink, but the sound and sight of the rippling made the town seem cooler and gave the streets a certain charm. There were plenty of people abroad in the streets, blacks and mulattoes and more than a few whites going about their business as usual, and no one seemed especially astonished at the arrival of Maillart and his party.

  They rode to the central square, which was bordered on three sides by wild fig trees, in plantings that ran to the steps of the church. Maillart asked a loitering British redcoat where he might find the quar
ters of the Dillon regiment. The soldier directed him to the barracks at the upper end of the town.

  The original French casernes were at a slight elevation above the civilian residences. Recently some wooden buildings had been put up, and these now housed recently arrived British troops. When Maillart inquired for the Dillon regiment, he got only a look of bewilderment, but when he asked for Major O’Farrel, someone volunteered to let that officer know that he was wanted.

  Maillart waited, alone with his horse in the dense cool shade of another wild fig; he had left his men to scare up lodgings lower in the town. The casernes were well situated, he thought—there was a pleasant view and the elevation would be advantageous for the health of the troops billeted here. Presently O’Farrel appeared in the gateway, looking this way and that. Maillart did not instantly recognize him in his British scarlet, for he had known him in French colors, at Le Cap two years before. Moreover, O’Farrel’s hairline seemed higher on his head than previously, his sandy mustache rather more speckled with gray. His eyes crossed Maillart with no hint of recognition and went on searching, elsewhere, until Maillart called out his name and stepped toward him, hesitantly holding out his hand.

  “I didn’t know you,” the major said, twisting one end of his mustache, over a smile that might have been a little too ironic for politeness. His cool eye rapidly scanned Maillart’s civilian attire.

  “Some say it’s the uniform makes the man,” Maillart replied, and watched to see if O’Farrel would flush in his red coat. But the other returned his gaze, his pale eyes level, and unreadable. At Le Cap they had once come near to quarreling, over a woman, but one or the other or both of them had found enough forbearance that they had not come to blows. The memory of that woman softened Maillart now, and O’Farrel relaxed and smiled and invited him in.

  The major’s apartment was a good one—in general the officer’s quarters at Le Môle were good. However, to Maillart’s surprise, it was not O’Farrel who commanded the post.