Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  In the middle of Toussaint’s cavalry column, the doctor rode to Marmelade that day, and passed many hours of the night in the company of Riau—both of them taking dictation from Toussaint. The import of his message was simple enough: he wished his colleague Villatte to order three of his junior officers—Pénel, Thomas André, and Noël Arthaud—to attack Jean-François from the the area of Limonade and Trou de Nord. But, as always, Toussaint picked over his phrasing and kept them late into the night. When at last the letter was sealed and the scribes were released, the doctor rolled out his blanket beside Riau and fell into a sleep too deep for dreaming. Next morning he dozed in the saddle, all the way from Marmelade to Dondon.

  When Riau had offered to help in his search for Nanon and the boy, the doctor had been touched by this gesture of friendship, but without thinking much about what form this assistance might take. Well, perhaps it might be no more than an exercise in superstition. He knew Riau believed that his shard of mirror was a supernatural eye, connected to his gift of marksmanship and to an ability to see at even more improbable distances, and Riau had since told him that the silver snuffbox, somehow special to Nanon, might have a sympathetic power to lead him to her. All this might be called mere African simplicity, or worse, and yet the doctor felt it was not so simple as it seemed. For he too regarded those objects as talismans. The mirror he’d found years before, when the courtesan’s rooms Nanon had kept, or been kept in, near the Place d’Armes at Le Cap had been sacked and vandalized and looted in the rioting there. That was the first time she had disappeared from his life and well before he had been brought to recognize the depth of his feeling for her—nevertheless he picked up the broken mirror and had kept it ever since. As for the snuffbox, he could analyze its contents well enough by scientific method, but its meaning was not to be interpreted so readily.

  He carried each of these items in opposite pockets of his coat, so that they seemed to balance him somehow, keeping him centered in the saddle during those moments when he slipped away into dream on the rough, winding track to Dondon. The mirror was fitted to the palm of his right hand, the snuffbox to his left. It was as if they were magnetized.

  The village of Dondon was buzzing with preparations for the attack which was planned to begin in two days’ time, in coordination with the movements Toussaint had requested from the northern plain. Riau, Captain Riau, went off to organize ammunition and supplies for the troops in his command. As yet there were no wounded in the camp, so the doctor was left to his own devices. He unrolled his blanket and lay upon the ground. His secretarial exploits of the night before had left him weary, but he could not quite sleep. The absence of the little boy Paul nagged at him like an itch in an amputated limb, and as for Nanon . . . His first instinct would have been to search at Le Cap, since he knew Choufleur was posted to Villatte’s command there, but since Toussaint was marching to Dondon, the doctor had been drawn along with him.

  To be drawn in that way, as if by gravity or magnetic attraction, was a relief from the labor of planning one’s own actions. Riau was very much gifted with this ability, and when the doctor was in his company, he found it much easier and more natural to act without forethought. Thus they might both arrive where they meant to go, without developing their intentions. All the same, the doctor was surprised to learn, when Riau returned to him an hour before sundown, that he had been asking questions and obtaining answers, and that he had heard how Choufleur’s mother, a Madame Fortier, lived not very far away on a coffee plantation on the slopes of Morne à Chapelet.

  “It is just there,” Riau said, leading him up to the top of a knoll behind the Dondon church, “You see?”

  Just there looked an intimidating height, even at long distance, and the doctor knew from his experience that it would unfold further complications when they got nearer to it.

  “I’d better find a mule,” he said, shading his eyes to look at the sun-struck mountain.

  “Pou ki sa ou besoin mulet? Monchè, I don’t think you need a mule for that.” Riau laughed, then looked uneasy. “We don’t go anyway, until after the fighting.”

  “No, let us go at once,” the doctor said. “I mean tomorrow, early.” If there was to be fighting all over these mountains, he very much preferred to overtake the woman and the child, if he were so lucky, before it began.

  Riau still looked uncharacteristically fretful. “I can’t run away like that,” he muttered, and looked down at the gorge between them and the mountains of their destination. “Monchè, if I go with you tomorrow I will be shot.”

  “Ah,” said the doctor. “I didn’t think—forgive me, but I will ask leave for both of us to go.”

  Toussaint, though much occupied, heard out his request—heard it at much greater length than the doctor had intended. By simply holding his silence, rubbing his rather delicate fingers down the edge of his long jaw and looking at him with his slightly red-rimmed eyes, the black general seemed to compel him to keep talking, until the doctor found himself going far more deeply into the circumstances of Nanon’s departure from Habitation Thibodet—and even into the history of his own relations with her and the boy—than he had ever thought of doing. A group of the junior officers, Moyse and Dessalines and Paparel, had stepped out from under the canvas sheet where Toussaint was holding his councils; the doctor did not know whether they were within earshot, or if they’d care to listen to his tale, but by the end of his speech, he felt that he was flushed all over.

  “You are free to go on this errand,” Toussaint finally said, reaching one hand to the back of his head to adjust the knot of his yellow headcloth. “For one night only—both must return the next day.”

  The doctor bowed his acknowledgment.

  “Take note, as you go, of what people may be moving in the region of Morne à Chapelet,” Toussaint said as the doctor began to withdraw, and then, suddenly projecting his voice, “And pay attention to that one.” He pointed to Riau. “Sé grand marron li yé.”

  At this the junior officers all grinned and chuckled among themselves and agreed loudly that Riau was an incorrigible runaway. But there seemed to be no menace in all of this, and Riau made a good-humored retort over his shoulder, as the two of them went off to make ready for the journey.

  Next morning, the doctor left his saddle horse in camp, having requisitioned a black mule with a blue cross over its shoulders. If the animal’s high, pointed back made for a precarious seat, its surefootedness was well worth the exchange. Their way was difficult and, as the doctor had suspected, sometimes traversed ledges scarcely two palms wide. And as he had also anticipated, the distance expanded as they went, so that they spent hours laboring up the dizzy peaks and sharp defiles without drawing appreciably nearer to their destination. Now and again they passed across plantations fallen into desuetude since the revolt, and often little villages had sprung up among the coffee trees. Riau, whose sense of the Fortiers’ location turned out to be extremely vague, stopped at each of these bitasyons to ask the way, and also to gather the intelligence Toussaint had requested. But they did not meet any men under arms, and by report of those they spoke to it seemed that the troops of Jean-François had not penetrated this area for some time.

  By late afternoon the doctor had begun to despair of reaching the Fortier place at all—if it still existed. They must look for a place to camp for the night, then hope to find their way back to Dondon next day in time to comply with Toussaint’s order. He lost himself in this gloomy prospect as they rode around a bend in a stream bed they had been following for a mile or more. As the stream turned sharply uphill, the gorge around it widened into a gently sloping valley, sheltered by cliffs on either side, and terraced with well-tended coffee trees. Here the day’s work was just ending, and a line of black women was filing toward a wooden barn, with baskets of red berries balanced on their heads.

  “Nou la,” Riau said. We’re here. He called to one of the women to confirm his intuition; this was indeed Habitation Fortier.

  “It
is admirably placed,” the doctor said, looking up toward the house, an unassuming structure of weathered gray board, seated at the top of the valley above the coffee trees. The mule went zigzagging up the terraces, Riau’s horse following with only slightly less agility. The doctor found himself saddle-sore in a whole new way when he climbed down and hitched his mount. For a moment he stood admiring the expanse of the green terraces rippling down from the house, listening to the purl of the stream that ran beside them. Then he turned and walked with Riau up a pair of wooden steps to the narrow porch.

  Riau knocked on the door frame. Silence, a creak of floor boards, voices muttering low. A sort of curtain hung before the door, made of reeds broken into short lengths and gathered in star-like clusters on knots of closely hanging threads. Behind the reed curtain, the door opened, but no more than an inch. They waited, but there was no further sign.

  “This one is looking for him they call Choufleur,” Riau said. “Also the woman Nanon, with her child.”

  “They are not here.” A woman’s voice, rusty but melodious beneath the rust. “Go away.”

  “But, I beg you,” the doctor said, and the door stopped closing. Riau looked at him solemnly, but the doctor did not know what else to say. He took the snuffbox from his pocket and held it with his two cupped hands containing it like water. Behind them the wind breathed through the trees. The whole house seemed to take a deep inhalation, and the door swung inward. Through the suspended bundles of reed the doctor could discern a tall and slender silhouette.

  “Wait where you are,” the voice said, and the figure turned and faded into the interior.

  The doctor exchanged a glance with Riau. He put the snuffbox back in his pocket. From deep in the house came a murmuring too low to be understood. Then the silhouette reappeared.

  “My husband wishes to know if you will sit at our table, blanc, and call us by our proper names.”

  “Of course—it would be my honor.”

  “Very well,” the voice said. “Vous êtes le bienvenu. Welcome to Habitation Fortier.”

  The doctor hesitated a moment more, then parted the reed curtain with both hands and went inside.

  For the long duration of the evening meal the doctor did not in any way allude to Nanon or Choufleur or for his real reason for being there, but instead affected to be paying a social call. The conversation was rigid with politeness, couched in formal, antique French. The doctor was careful to address his hosts as “Monsieur,” or “Madame Fortier,” whenever he spoke to either of them. They talked mostly of nonpolitical news from France: art, the theater, scientific and medical developments—quite as if the colony were not shredded by war all around them. Riau followed the conversation, alert but without saying much himself. He ate diligently, though not too fast. The cooking was unusually good. No wine, but their water glasses were fragile balloons of crystal.

  Monsieur Fortier was considerably darker than his wife: a griffe, sacatra, marabou?—the doctor had not perfectly mastered the complex colonial categories for mixed blood. Fortier was also younger than his wife, though prematurely bald. He spoke little, in short, clipped phrases, and ate sparingly, without pleasure. Sometimes his whole face would seem to swell and he would lean forward over his plate as if he would burst into some violent reaction. But instead he would always maintain his silence, the tension draining from his face by slow degrees.

  Madame Fortier seemed perfectly at ease, untroubled by her husband’s peculiarly noticeable discomfort. She was a graceful and nimble conversationalist—skilled in that art as any Frenchwoman, though without the slightest tinge of frivolity. Partly because of her great height and her regal posture, she cut a striking figure at the foot of the dark wooden table; also, though she was past the middle fifties, she was still a handsome woman, and must certainly have been a splendid beauty in her youth. In the light of the guttering candles, her complexion was the color of pale honey. Her hair was iron-gray laced with white, like moon-rays pouring out from her face, then swept back and captured by the complex turban which rose from the back of her head.

  “Take your chair out onto the porch,” she told the doctor, once the meal had concluded. “Someone will serve you a glass of rum.”

  The doctor did as he was bidden. With a brief word of thanks to the Fortiers, Riau went to the room they’d been assigned to share. Outside, the doctor placed his chair against the house wall, and sat looking out over the starlit terraces below. His mule, tethered on a long cord, looked up at him, snuffled and went back to grazing. Behind the reed curtain the doctor seemed to hear the same sort of muttering as he had that afternoon before they’d been admitted to the house.

  Presently Madame Fortier came out alone, carrying a tray loaded with two glasses, a calabash bottle, a clay jug, and a cut lemon. From the calabash she poured a measure of rum and passed it to the doctor, then indicated the water jug with a tilt of her head. The doctor declined. He squeezed a few drops from the lemon into his drink while she filled her own glass. They drank.

  “Santé,” Madame Fortier said. She sighed, then busied herself filling and lighting a small black pipe.

  “Monsieur Fortier has retired?”

  “Monsieur Fortier has gone to the ajoupa he keeps on the other side of this hill,” she said. “Sometimes he likes to sleep on a straw mat on the ground and listen to the night song of the siffleur montagne. Perhaps it is romantic, but my bones are too old for it. I hear the night birds very well from my own bedroom. Also, my husband is discontented by your presence here, blanc. He is no lover of white people. He would have had me send you away, but I told him that as you wished to show us courtesy, you deserved our courtesy in return.”

  “Merci pour ça,” the doctor said. The hot burst of rum in his throat reassured him.

  “De rien,” said Madame Fortier. “Regarding your purpose here, I can also offer you exactly nothing, except my advice that you abandon it.”

  “Have they been here?”

  Madame Fortier’s lips tightened on her pipe stem. “Yes, but briefly.” She blew out a wreath of smoke. “But they are not here now, and I do not know where they have gone. I tell you, blanc, if the woman has left you, let her go. What does it matter?”

  “I think of the boy, if nothing else.”

  “What can this boy be to you, this little sang-mêlé? ”

  “He is my son,” the doctor said. The sentence rang between his ears. Perhaps he had never made this statement aloud in the presence of another person.

  “Give me the snuffbox,” Madame Fortier said.

  The doctor complied. Madame Fortier lifted the box near to her face and examined the fleur-de-lys stamped on the lid. She turned it this way and that in the vague starlight, and ran her finger around its scalloped edge.

  “I can tell you something of such sons,” she said. “For example, there is my son Jean-Michel, whom you more probably know as Choufleur—this matter of naming is something to be discussed. His father is a blanc like you, the Sieur de Maltrot—perhaps you knew him also.”

  “By reputation only,” the doctor said. “Well, by sight. He disappeared during the first months of the insurrection.”

  “He is dead,” Madame Fortier said, still turning the snuffbox in her hands. “As you may be also, blanc, if you persist. I have for my son the feeling of any mother. I also recognize that he is vicious as a poisonous snake or a mad dog. He would certainly kill you, blanc, if you put yourself in his way, and perhaps he is even hoping you will do so. I tell you this for your own benefit—it is nothing to me if you live or die. I do not love you. Take more rum whenever you are ready.”

  “Thank you,” the doctor said. He reached for the calabash. “Permettez-moi.”

  “But you are too kind.” Madame Fortier dropped the snuffbox into the lap of her skirts and held out her glass for him to replenish. “Santé,” she said. They drank.

  “You have not the manner of a colon,” she told him. “Perhaps you have not been long in Saint Domingue?”

>   “I came in the summer of ninety-one,” the doctor said. “About two months before the risings.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You chose an interesting moment, no?” She took a moment to refill and light her pipe. “But let us consider this matter of names. Possibly you do not know that before the commissioners brought the new laws from France, we who are of mixed blood were not allowed the use of our own names—not if they derived from the names of white people. But no, it must be le-dit Maltrot, the so-called Fortier . . . Thus you may comprehend the sensitivity of my husband on this point.”

  “It is very understandable,” the doctor said.

  “For similar reasons, my son has seized the name of his white father and even his title and now calls himself the Sieur de Maltrot. Whereas his stable name Choufleur was first coined by his father, as a mockery of his freckled skin, as if the child were a speckled cauliflower. Maltrot invented it for spite, and still it was taken up by friends and family, and I used it myself with no thought of harm, and yet my son cannot hear this name without humiliation. Still, why must he rush to claim his father’s name? Maltrot was cruel, even for a white man.”

  “That was an aspect of his reputation,” the doctor said. Madame Fortier had fallen silent. He heard the whistling of a night bird somewhere above the cliffs that embraced the valley.

  “Of course, cruelty is the first quality of any and all blancs,” she said. “Cruelty and greed, no matter how you may hide it. The Church was the first and best disguise. But whatever God created white people must be sharp-beaked as a hawk, or better yet, a vulture. Now we see blancs coming out of France blathering of equality and brotherhood, but underneath it is the same, I tell you—cruelty and greed. I challenge you, find me one Indian on this island—here or on the Spanish side. Three hundred years ago Ayiti held five kingdoms under five caciques —there were half a million of them. One finds their tools and relics everywhere, but not an Indian, not one. All of them destroyed by the whites. And now the blancs are doing the same work in Africa. Will they rest until the last children of Guinée have been stamped out of existence altogether?”