In Darkness

by Nick Lake

  I see people coming through the walls, pulling the concrete apart with their bare hands, coming to rescue me. I’m pretty sure they’re not real cos I see them, and it’s not possible to see anything real in here – it’s too black. But they seem real, these people, with their strong hands and their smiling faces.

  I’m hallucinating, I know this. Do I? I’m seeing shit that isn’t there. I’ve taken drugs before – everyone does in the Site – so I know what it feels like. Maybe I even dreamed those people calling?

  My mouth has grown enormous again. Hours or days ago I had to pee and I collected the liquid in my hands, as much as I could, and I drank it.

  Oh, Manman. Look at me now. You told me I would get what was coming to me.

  At some point I close my eyes. Suddenly I’m drifting up, up through the half-fallen ceiling, the concrete flesh of the building skeletoned with rods of steel, and then further through floors upon floors of twisted metal and bodies, and then up into the sky. It’s light out here. I can see the hospital below me. It’s so broken that it doesn’t look man-made at all; it’s just a pile of random blocks.

  I’m in the clouds. I think, maybe I am magical, maybe I am still Marassa, even if my sister is gone. In the Site, ever since we were born, people said we were special. They said we were Marassa, and that gave us powers to change the world. They said we had been given life by Aristide, and so the spirit of the people and the revolution was in us.

  Even after Marguerite was taken from us, people said these things. They said that Dread Wilmè had died to protect my life, so all that rebellion had been made even stronger, like when you put carbon into iron and it makes it harder, makes it steel. Some even said that Dread Wilmè lived inside me, and they would look at me strangely as I walked down the street.

  I thought that was stupid, but now I think, maybe it’s not so stupid after all.

  I can see the whole of Port-au-Prince – the palace, the homes of the rich, the open-air prison of Site Solèy. It’s all collapsed. The palace is just dust and rubble, the homes are destroyed. Only Site Solèy looks the same, and that’s cos Site Solèy was a ruin to begin with.

  There’s a gull beside me in the clouds. It peers at me, and banks and screams. I can see planes circling above the airport, and helicopters flying back and forth above the city. There are people crawling over the wrecked hospital below me, like little ants in hard hats.

  Earthquake, I think, cos it’s the only thing that could smash everything up like this. When we were little, my sister and me, we would make cities out of the mud in the gutters of Site Solèy, and then we would say we were dinosaurs or earthquakes and stomp those cities to nothing.

  The devastation I pictured in my head never got close to this, though. From above, Haiti looks like it’s been wiped off the earth by an angry god. Maybe Dread Wilmè was made into a zombi, and he’s come back to punish the land and has shaken everything to pieces in his anger.

  I wonder if I can fly, and I try to bank toward the palace to get a better look. But I can’t move where I want. Suddenly I’m rising again, up, up among the clouds and then bursting through them, and it’s like the flattened city had never been there; I’m in clear blue sky above soft white clouds and it goes on forever.

  Then I’m descending very fast. It’s night-time now, which seems strange and at the same time not strange. I must have flown far over the clouds, cos I’m not above the city, either; I’m looking down on marshland, dense with trees. There are no electric lights, though I can see a tentative, reddish light on the other side of the trees, flickering like bloody water, which must be torches or candles.

  My speed increases. I’m breaking through the treetops now and I see that there are people below; they’re standing in a circle and looking very intently at a man who’s dancing and singing like a mad person. They turn from him and look at another man – he’s big and tall and wildly ugly, his nose sort of squashed and swollen. He’s leaning back, screaming, it seems to me, looking straight up at me as I hurtle downward. I just have time to see that he’s foaming at the mouth – he’s having some kind of fit – then his mouth is getting bigger and bigger, like mine did when I was so thirsty, and his mouth takes over the world, like mine did, contains it within its twisted and blackened teeth, its diseased gums, and I’m inside it and I’m sinking, sinking into the darkness.

  Then

  Toussaint looked at Boukman’s concerned features and tried to work out what was wrong. It took him a while to discern that the angle between his eyes and the man’s face was awry – that he was, in fact, lying flat on his back. He raised a hand for help and Boukman seized it, pulling him to his feet.

  — You were chosen, said Boukman.

  — Pardon? said Toussaint.

  He wasn’t sure how he had ended up on the ground but, now that he was on his feet again, he found that he was looking around him with something like satisfaction and something like equanimity. He felt like he belonged in this place, like he would be comfortable speaking to any of these people, like this was his land and it would support his feet no matter what tried to upset his balance. That’s usual, isn’t it? He had the strange feeling that he had always been incomplete until this very moment.

  He remembered, before now, feeling always on the outside of things. At the same time, it seemed to him that he remembered being young and angry, and hurting many people, and this was peculiar because he had never hurt anyone in his life. Terrifying images flashed across his vision: a curved thing of metal and glass on wheels rolling down a strangely smooth, black road between shacks, before exploding in a white-hot flash, people screaming, diving out of the way; young men in bizarre dress with objects in their hands which could have been guns if they weren’t so compact and alien-looking; a great flying thing, hovering like an enormous insect, fire spitting from inside it, the whole contraption roaring.

  As he saw this thing a foreign word echoed in the recesses of his mind, a word that matched nothing in his mental lexicon, meant nothing to him. Helicopter. He clutched his forehead.

  He saw many people lying dead in a muddy street, burned and bleeding. He was looking at them and he knew it was his fault they were dead, and he was aware that in his hand was another of those unusual guns.

  All this time, he was still in Bois Caiman.

  He had a sudden and all-encompassing conviction, something which struck him with the force of lived experience, that revenge could only lead to pain. This, too, was odd, because he had never taken revenge on anyone in his life. But his mind felt . . . different now. He felt simultaneously wise and hopeful and vulnerable.

  It hurt, but it was extraordinary.

  Toussaint shook his head. He looked around him and saw the gathered slaves observing him with awe. Previously he would have shrunk away, but now he understood – he was whole now, and he had to lead them.

  Why? he asked himself. Why you? You’re more than fifty years old.

  Because, he answered himself, they’re rebelling only to hurt the whites. They’re doing it for revenge, not freedom, and that will kill their revolution before it’s even born, like a slave mother doing violence to herself to destroy her mulat baby in the womb, the fruit of rape killed on the branch before it can fall.

  He asked himself why he was rebelling, then, but he already knew the answer. He himself was free – as free as he needed to be, anyway. He enjoyed satisfying employment and lived with his son, Isaac, in a cottage with a vegetable garden behind it. But others were not free. Every day he saw them sold and exchanged and raped and murdered.

  Now he would attempt to stop this ownership of people and the evils it engendered. Somehow – perhaps it was something Boukman had said, perhaps it was the ceremony – he knew that he could.

  Boukman leaned in close and whispered to him:

  — I told you. Now you are Ogou, and you will make us strong.

  — No, said Toussaint. Not Ogou. Something else.

  Boukman looked troubled.

 
— Are you sure?

  Toussaint nodded. Boukman lowered his head in disappointment.

  — I’m so –

  Toussaint smiled.

  — I didn’t say I would not do this thing.

  He turned to the blacks all around him, all of them armed with the best weapons they had been able to lay hands on – knives and machetes and spades.

  — Tonight, we rise! he shouted.

  For a moment he grasped for the right thing to say, but just for a moment – the only thing he could possibly say was at the forefront of his mind. It was a lie, but a truthful lie. Fifty faces, maybe more, gazed at him from out of the darkness.

  — Ogou Badagry is inside me! he shouted. He tells me we will win this war! We will be free!

  The assembled slaves and free blacks screamed their approbation, even as Boukman looked at him with a frown on his face. Toussaint ignored him – he would explain everything later, when the night was done.

  Good god, this is what power feels like.

  He stalked over to where a horse stood tethered to a tree. It wasn’t his horse, but that didn’t matter. He untied the horse and swung himself atop it, machete in hand.

  — Kill anyone who resists, he shouted. But only them. If a white lays down his arms, give him safe passage. Let him go to Port-au-Prince and tell the people there that we’re free now. Let him go to France and tell the king.

  As he turned the horse ready to make for his plantation, he thought of something else.

  — Destroy no property, he called out. This land will be ours soon, and we must needs live off it.

  Then Toussaint whirled the horse round and kicked his heels into its flanks, heading for the trees. Their branches seemed to reach out at him, clutching. Wild shadows shifted, dancing in the wind, as the moon hung bloated above him. He was aware of people following, some on foot and some on horseback; he could hear the beating of their feet and hooves on the dense, loamy ground. Torchlight flickered. Forms rose up from the swamp on either side of the path. He hoped they were just logs and not alligators.

  Gritting his teeth, he spurred the horse on further, leaving the sound of his followers behind.

  Once on the road to the Libertas plantation he began to pass small, huddled groups of people. Boukman had already assembled those most capable of influencing the masses, but all of the slaves knew something important was happening at Bois Caiman tonight, and they were gathering, excited.

  Toussaint noted one group cutting down a black man who had been hanged from a tree. He rode the horse into a lather.

  I’m not a leader like Boukman said, he thought. Not yet.

  He was deathly afraid. It was a distance of only a few miles between Bois Caiman and his home, but he was a black man on a horse at night. If there were any slave owners or militia out at this time of night, they would arrest him on the spot.

  All those slaves who had been at the ceremony would be returning to different places. They would be scattered and some of them would die, but this was only the first sally in their war. They needed to unite and form a more cohesive force if they wanted to carry the country. He would need to unite them.

  There was time for that, and he had an advantage now, for he knew the story of what had happened at Bois Caiman, of how he had been possessed, would spread quickly, and many would soon know his name. He could use that story to bring the slaves together, to convince them that if they joined under his command he would give them their freedom.

  First, though, he had to reach the plantation before the other slaves did. He had told them to kill only those who resisted, and who was to say that Bayou de Libertas would not resist? Toussaint’s master was a good man, but he was proud, too, and he had a wife and daughters. He had books and possessions which he loved, and which he would no doubt die to protect, as stupid as Toussaint thought that sentiment.

  As he turned a corner rounding a low hill, men who had been sitting on the grass leaped to their feet, shouting. He couldn’t tell in the dark if they were black or white, so he clung to the horse, keeping his profile low. There was a bang and he saw dirt near the horse’s hooves forced upward from a bullet. Swearing, he pressed the horse even harder, wondering if he would make it at all.

  When he passed the cornfields belonging to the Comte Vendoux, he saw a black man there, a shadow in the darkness, putting a torch to the corn. Toussaint stopped, swung himself from his horse, and flung his cloak over the flames – small at this point, but greedy and devouring. When the thick fabric settled over them, they went out, and acrid smoke billowed up.

  The slave shoved him. Toussaint noted that he had a flattened nose, twisted in places. Broken at some point in a fight with another slave, or more likely by his master.

  — Why did you do that? the man asked. My blood fed this corn. Our blood. I have to burn it to be free.

  — Only blood will feed you if you do this.

  The slave looked at him blankly.

  — When the country is ours, said Toussaint, what will you eat then? When you have burned your corn, what will sustain you?

  A glimmer of understanding crossed the man’s face and he sullenly lowered the torch.

  — There will be soldiers, said Toussaint. From the commission, perhaps even from France. You would do better to burn them than to burn our inheritance.

  Without looking back, he swung himself up onto the horse and spurred it toward the plantation. The revolution had spread quicker than he expected – he was surprised, in point of fact. He had ridden hard from Bois Caiman and yet it seemed that the flames of rebellion had spread even faster, and it would take a larger coat than Toussaint could tailor to put them out. He knew the rebellion was an idea that had taken root, sending tendrils through the ground more unstoppable than any weed. The idea had been sown in fertile ground, and once a seed is planted it cannot always be controlled, especially when that seed is fire. Toussaint had seen forest fires in the mountains; they started small, but had the potential to consume everything. The irony was that this idea, like their slavery, came from Europe – it had been conceived by those revolutionaries in France who had declared themselves free and called for the dissolution of the monarchy.

  When he finally drew near the plantation, dawn was beginning to break. Birds called from the trees around him. He saw the red stain of the rising sun on the eastern hills, and part of him saw it as blood, and part of him saw it as a new start.

  He crossed the entrance to the plantation, relieved to see that no one was hanging from its posts. The other slaves were milling around in the courtyard, as if awaiting direction. They stared at him in a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. They already looked up to him, he knew. He had treated most of them when they were sick or wounded; he had told them stories. On a couple of the younger faces, though, he saw something, a kind of excitement, that troubled him. He recognized it as bloodlust. He scanned the crowd for his son, but the boy didn’t appear to be amongst them. Good, he thought. He hoped that Isaac had remained inside the cottage, as he had instructed. Toussaint’s son was a sensitive lad, although nearly a man, and not the type who should be involved in violence.

  — Bayou is in there, said one of them.

  Toussaint didn’t know the man, thought perhaps he had come from one of the neighboring smallholdings. He was pointing to the door of the house.

  — We’ll pull them out, said another. Make them pay.

  Toussaint raised a hand.

  — Bayou has treated us justly, he said. Let’s give him free passage to Cape Town.

  — Why? said a woman. Tonight the whites die.

  — No. Tonight the blacks rise, said Toussaint. And the whites flee, if they have any sense. If we kill those who surrender, we’re as bad as they are.

  He sensed their hesitation and seized it.

  — Wait for me, he said. Arm yourselves. Look out for commissioners, for white vigilantes, but do not take up weapons to kill an old man.

  Silent, shrugging, they let him past into the hous
e.

  Bayou de Libertas was abed still. Toussaint opened the door without knocking and knelt by the bed, taking pains to conceal his machete. Nevertheless, when he touched the master’s shoulder and de Libertas awoke, he looked at Toussaint with anxiety.

  — What is it? Is it the mulats?

  The attempted rebellion by the mulats, and its brutal suppression, had occurred only a month before. That had been confined to the towns, though, where the rich mulats lived, spending their fathers’ money on whores descended from their mothers’ bloodline, and on wine grown by their French forefathers. The mulats’ rebellion had never reached the countryside.

  — No, he said. No, Bayou. It’s the blacks.

  De Libertas shrank from him then, and Toussaint felt his heart harden.

  He suspects me, Toussaint thought. After everything, he looks at me and he sees an animal.

  With an effort, Toussaint regained his composure. Madame de Libertas was awake now, too, and staring about her in alarm.

  — I don’t mean you any harm, said Toussaint. You’ve been good to me. But you must leave. Now. Tell anyone you meet that you surrendered, that your land belongs to the slaves who farm it.

  Bayou de Libertas nodded – he was ever a man of quick understanding. He got out of bed in his nightcap and gown, and went over to the sideboard. He began to take items from its drawers.

  — It’s better if you take nothing, said Toussaint. No money or weapons. There will be less cause to kill you then.

  Madame de Libertas began to cry and her husband shushed her.

  — Gather the children, the master said, although he was master of nothing now. Toussaint will prepare a carriage.

  Madame de Libertas hurried from the room, but not before turning and directing at Toussaint a look of fear and suspicion, an insult that needed no words to deliver its blow.

  — Take horses, said Toussaint. A carriage will be too slow.

  De Libertas continued to arrange items at the sideboard, taking a quill from a wooden stationery box, dipping it in the built-in inkwell – how many times Toussaint had replaced that ink! – and leaning down to scrawl something on a leaf of paper.