Toussaint had made Dessalines captain-general to carry out those work orders in the south and in the west, along with all the other things Dessalines was doing there. In the north, he made Moyse the captain-general. I, Riau, did not know how Moyse would like the tightness of the orders. Toussaint had sent Riau to report to Moyse, but I felt that he wanted me to report to him about Moyse also, although he did not say so openly. But by the time we reached Dondon, a rising had already started.
This was a rising of all the field workers, and it poured down on to Le Cap like a wave, gathering more and more men as it passed over the plain, like the rising that had come against Hédouville. Moyse did not try to stop it. No, it was Moyse who had made it start. But I saw soon enough it was not a real soulèvement. There was much noise and waving of cane knives and torches, but no one was cut, and nothing was burned. It was my patrol, along with many others sent out by Moyse, that was charged to be certain there was no killing or burning and that the blancs at their plantations on the plain would not be harmed. They were not harmed, or their property either, but the blancs on the plain were very much frightened, and reminded that they were not master anymore.
Toussaint was master. It was his hand that moved Moyse in this affair. The rising was against the agent Roume, who had taken back the order he had once given which allowed Toussaint to take control of the Spanish side of the island. Moyse had stirred up all the field workers with the thought that the Spanish still held slaves, and that they were stealing people from our side, to make them slaves again across the border. That much was true, and I could join in that cry, but only with half my heart, because it was not a real soulèvement.
For Agent Roume, though, it was real enough. He was brought back to Dondon and shut up in a chicken house, until he gave the answer Toussaint wanted.
After it was over, there were big bamboches at Dondon and all over the plain. The people were happy, because they had a holiday from working in the fields, and they had shown their power, or believed that they had. There was rum and feasting, and cows and goats were killed for the loa, but I, Riau, I did not go to the drums that night. I stayed with myself, thinking coldly. I did not know where Toussaint was, but I saw the idea in his mind—Moyse might make a false soulèvement into a real one. I saw that Toussaint expected me to warn him if that happened. But Moyse had done no more than what Toussaint had wanted him to do.
Soon after, we started across the Spanish mountains with a large part of the army, eight thousand men. Half went south under Paul Louverture, but I was with Moyse, striking north toward Santiago. We had all made our hearts tight and bloody for the idea of killing more whitemen who still held slaves. It was different than the war against the colored people. I felt so, and I could see that Moyse felt the same. We were all very much ready to fight, but in the end there was not much fighting. We met the Spaniards at the river called Guayabin, but the fight there did not last as much as half an hour before they ran away. There was one other fight, less than one hour, along that road, and then Santiago was surrendered to Moyse without any more fighting at all.
Moyse put the General Pageot in charge of the town, and we went on to join Paul Louverture at Santo Domingo City. Toussaint had crossed the border himself by then, and he was moving more men along the way his brother had opened. They had not much fighting to do on those roads either. It seemed there were not many people east of the mountains at all, neither whitemen nor their slaves. Nothing was there but cattle where we passed following Moyse, or horses and mules running half wild, and once in a long way a single herdsman’s hut standing by a corral. In the towns there were more people, but they were not meaning to give any fight.
At Santo Domingo City, the Spanish General Don García made his surrender to Toussaint without any trouble. Anyway it had all been settled before by a peace paper between white people across the sea. So there was no reason for a battle. It must have been sweet for Toussaint to beat Don García so easily. All the time that Toussaint had been fighting for the Spanish, Don García had set Jean-François and Biassou above him. Now those two had disappeared, and Toussaint stood above the man who’d been their master, though it was in the name of France. Still, all of us who came with Moyse had seen Roume in that chicken house.
Toussaint ordered that there would be no vengeance taken on the Spanish people, the same as he had said about the mulattoes at Les Cayes. Here in Santo Domingo, the order was respected. I noticed this very much and I saw that Moyse had noticed it too.
It had been long, a very long time, since my spirit had mounted on my head. I had not gone to the drums after the false rising Moyse had begun to frighten Roume. There was no bamboche nor any drums after the Spanish gave up their country at Santo Domingo City. Toussaint would not allow it. It must be all quiet and strict discipline, as in the whitemen’s army. All this time I had been alone with myself, Riau, thinking in ticks like that officer’s watch which I kept always tightly wound in my pocket. This was loneliness. When I slept, I was wrapped in the dark, and no part of me traveled away into dream.
After the Spanish had surrendered, Toussaint told Moyse to divide his men in small patrols and send them around the northeast part to root out any Spanish soldiers who might not know of the surrender. I was to lead one such patrol myself, at the head of my twenty men.
This news lightened the weight I had been feeling on me for a long time then. The night before we set out on this errand, I dreamed. My ti-bon-ange was flying like a hawk among high mountains, with such swoops and sharp descents that my heart was many times swollen with fear. Those mountains were high and jagged and wrinkled like the mountains of Saint Domingue, but no trees were on their peaks, only mounds of snow and edges of ice. The sky was cold blue and there was no cloud, no sign of rain, and the cold was like the death when all the blood stops running in your body. In the life of my flesh I never had seen snow nor ice, though I had heard of these things from the whitemen. In my dream it struck me that the whitemen carried the seeds of this ice somewhere inside them, wherever else they went in the world, and the cold stabbed out through the blue of their eyes.
On the cold, cliff side was a sacrifice to Baron, bones hanging in chains against the stone. These were bones of a man, I saw, when my ti-bon-ange swooped near. Across a deep frozen gorge from the bones was a whiteman’s fort built on a peak, with all the roofs and walls piled up with snow. The voice of Toussaint was in my ears, though Toussaint was nowhere to be seen. Is it not to cut off a man’s legs and command him to walk? The voice was gentle and warm on the side of my head, but still it struck me through with fear. Is it not to cut out a man’s tongue and command him to speak? The wings of my ti-bon-ange banked along the wall of the fort, and I saw within a small barred hole a figure of something I took to be an animal at first, but then it appeared to be a whitewoman, bony and shriveled, her hair in strings and her face all streaked with caca. She stared at the bones across the gorge, with eyes that had no understanding. Her eyes were more blunt and stupid than any animal eyes I knew.
Is it not to bury a man alive?
Toussaint’s voice was still at my ear, so gentle it seemed I could not bear it. My dream sucked up into the cold sky, in a spiral like the flight of the malfini, until the world below was no more than a smudge.
When I woke, the watch had stopped, and I did not rewind it. My spirit was more clear than it had been for a long time, and it seemed to me that I knew the future. Or better, that there was no future, nor yet any past, but everything was already happening in the way that was to come. When I saluted Moyse at our parting, I saw his death and the part Riau must play in it. Moyse had been one-eyed for a long time now, and he was very near, that day, the place where he was bound to go. No power could change this for him, but on that morning even my sadness was as clear as glass. We rode up to the north, toward the coast and Puerto del Plata.
Old silver mines were in the mountains there, but these had long been abandoned. The mine holes were full of the bones of the Tai
nos whom the Spanish had made to work until they died. Farther on we met a squad of Spanish soldiers who stood ready to fight. They fired on us, but I, Riau, sat my horse unmoving, like Halaou with his bull’s tail or his white cock in his arms, and the bullets bent their paths to go around me. The Spanish broke and ran away, pursued by their own fear. We did not trouble to chase them down and kill them.
On the third day we came to a small plantation in the hill where they were growing tobacco. There were slaves there still, with only a few white people over them. Just one family of blancs lived there, the father and two sons and the wife and abuelita both dressed in Spanish black. We let this head blanc know that France had taken his part of the island and so slavery was finished there now. The black people who were in our hearing did not seem very excited by this news, though they looked curiously at our horses and our weapons, and some of the young women gave us shy and secret smiles.
I thought maybe these people did not understand our language, so I told the head blanc he must repeat the words in Spanish. It seemed to me that he did so truly, though I did not have so very much Spanish in my head myself. Still there was no great movement among the black people when he spoke. I told the blanc we must bring the news to the others who were in the fields, and this we did. There were not so many slaves on this habitation anyway, something less than thirty men, sixty altogether with the women and the children.
At the drying shed we found the smuggler Tocquet, with Gros-jean and Bazau, and one of the white sons who was helping them to load their donkeys with leaf tobacco. Tocquet saluted me, with his cayman smile, and I took his hand. I was glad enough to see him, and especially Gros-jean and Bazau. As if they were marrons themselves, those three had never paid much attention to the border.
The head blanc spoke to the workers in Spanish with the words that I had given him to say. When he had finished, the slaves shrugged at each other and went to sit down on felled logs outside the shed. They smiled and muttered among themselves, but it did not appear that any great change had fallen upon them. They looked like they might go back to the same work once they had rested for a while.
Because I knew he understood Spanish better than I, I asked Bazau if the blanc had spoken truly. Bazau answered that he had.
Then I did not know what to think. I took off the tall hat I had got from the English hussar and rubbed the back of my head with my hand. The clarity of my dream was gone, for that moment. But there was another place which I heard of, not far off. Tocquet and his pack train started back to the west, but Riau and his patrol kept riding toward the north coast.
I thought, as we rode, that it was not all for nothing. At my left side was Bienvenu, whom I had set free from the headstall when he ran away from Habitation Arnaud before the rising. At my right side was Bouquart, whom I had freed from his nabots. And in the rear was always Guiaou, and it could be understood that Riau and Guiaou had each made the other more free than either one had been before.
At dusk we came to the last hills above a narrow plain which ran flat to the sea. This plain was a small, tight pocket with two mountain ranges between it and Fort Dauphin. I had heard that it was here, but never before seen it. We stopped, under cover of the trees. A ship was at anchor off the beach, and it seemed some sailors were camped on the shore. Nearer the mountains were clay houses, and the small green squares of rice fields, and the long, low shape of a barracoon. When the wind blew from the sea, we caught the sour smell of the people shut up there.
I kept my men well hidden under the trees, but later, long after darkness, when the fires in the camp had burned low, I slipped down with Bienvenu to look. About two dozen men were there, whitemen of the lowest type and a few blacks and mulattoes. The sailors in the beach camp made ten more. One could not tell how many were closed in that barracoon, and there were also some other slaves who were not shut up there, but were working in the rice. There was one small brass cannon covering the trail which led into the mountains to the west, and another one on the beach. The first cannon was watched by two men, but both were sleeping, and Bienvenu wanted to kill them then and there. This we could have easily done. I, Riau, had slipped into whitemen’s camps by night, with Dessalines himself, and Moyse and some others, to do this work with knives. But tonight I did not want to do it. If the watch was changed before morning, the whole camp would take alarm.
We crossed a mud dike of the rizières to get back into the mountains. Those other slaves were standing on the dikes around us, unmoving, white-eyed, still as egrets standing in a swamp or horses sleeping on their feet in the field. They did not need to sleep like ordinary people, because they were already dead.
The hair was walking by itself on my neck and my arms when we passed among them, and this feeling in me reached out to greet the same feeling in Bienvenu. Zombi. It was true. Biassou had kept this place for a long time before he left the country, and it was said that Jean-François also had used to sell slaves from the island, and still the same thing was always going on. Riau had heard of it for a long time, and knew more of it than he was willing to remember.
The sureness of my dream came back to me, but at the same time I needed to think and to plan as Toussaint would have done it. Four parties of five men each. Bienvenu would take his men to seize that cannon in the mountains and move it quickly to the cliffs above the sea. Bouquart and his men would break into the barracoon. Guiaou would lead a charge on horseback across the dike of the rizières. I, Riau, and my five men would handle the boats and the camp on the beach.
We moved an hour before full dawn, just as the light was turning blue. On the beach I waited for the shot that meant Bienvenu had got the cannon. It was easy enough to kill the blancs on the beach as they struggled up from their sleep, but the most important thing was to smash in the three longboats drawn up there and aim the cannon at the ship. I did not know how many men might be on that ship, or if there were more boats or cannon there.
The whitemen inshore had jumped up to meet Guiaou coming across the rice field and now they were being cut down by swords from horseback. The barracoons were open already, and the parties under Bouquart and Bienvenu had joined in this killing. The zombis were all still standing white-eyed and motionless in the rizières, except for two who walked stiffly toward the barracoons with buckets hanging from their arms, carrying grain and water. They did not seem to understand that the barracoons had been emptied out. There were no chains. The people had been coffled up with ropes and wooden yokes, so it was easy enough to cut them free.
Then the ship did fire a cannon, and we answered quickly from the beach, but our shot miscarried. Couachy, on the heights above, was the better gunner, and he managed to drop a ball from the cliffs onto the ship’s deck. The ship’s cannon fired another time, but without hitting anything that mattered. Then the ship loosed its moorings and sailed away without doing anything more.
It was over, except the zombi-master was hemmed up in a corner of the rice field, with the zombis gathered tightly around him. Guiaou’s men were keeping well back, because they were all afraid of the zombis, and none more than Guaiou. The zombi-master was a blackman like us, and I knew him from the camps of Biassou, from long before I went to Bahoruco, though I did not care to remember his name. He was wearing a Spanish uniform still, with many ribbons and coins pinned over the front of it. I think he knew me also, for he seemed about to say my name, but I shot him twice, a pistol in each hand, and he fell over backward into the swamp.
Let the crabs take him. I loaded my pistols and put them in my belt. Now the zombis were all moving aimlessly around like ants do when one has kicked over the hill. Everything rushed up at me, swooping as in my dream, this zombi farm and the barracoon and the slave ship still waiting on the beach and the men in the tobacco who scarcely cared if they were free and Moyse’s death bound soon to come and all the people across the border working quietly, tightly, under Toussaint’s order. All this at once, and the same voice in my ear, but now the words were different.
What they did to us, we have learned to do to ourselves.
Where would it end? There could be no end. I saw this plainly at that moment, but I had always in my pocket the bag of salt I had gathered from the pans below Gonaives.
All my men were hanging back, afraid of the zombis still. The people freed from the barracoon were afraid of them too. I saw this had been the way of the zombi-master, using this fear to keep them down. All those people had been captured near the border, one at a time or in little groups, when they strayed too far from their villages, in the direction of the Rivière Massacre. They were mostly women, and children of all ages. Some of the older boys had taken up the guns of the dead whitemen.
It was true that the zombis looked frightening. There were thirteen of them, naked except for a cloth at the waist. They were starved to skin and bone and the cords that strung the bones together, and their eyes were more empty than the eyes of animals, like the eyes of that blanche I had seen in my dream.
I took some salt into my hand and went to the nearest zombi, holding him by his upper arm. He understood nothing, and I had to rub the grains against his mouth. But when he had once tasted it, a thread of life came into his eyes, and the stiffness began to leave his body, and he pushed at me for more. Then they were all pressing up around me, pushing, nuzzling, spilling the mound of yellow salt from my two cupped hands, their lips heavy and loose as the lips of horses.
All but one.
The people, my soldiers and those from the barracoon, were all looking upon Riau as if he were BonDyé himself. As they awoke, the zombis began to mingle with the people we had freed. They were given clothes from the dead men. It seemed that some of them were recognized from lives they’d lived before they were brought here to be among the dead. Some of the freed women from the barracoon had opened the supplies of the slave traders and were beginning to cook food. They had tapped a barrel of rum as well, so the mood was that of a bamboche, even though it was just barely morning. In the east, the sun had just pushed its edge above the sea.
Master of the Crossroads Page 83