by Nick Lake
— Don’t worry, I’m not taking anything, he said, noticing Toussaint’s look of impatience.
He handed the paper to Toussaint, before hurrying from the room. Toussaint began to fold it, to put it in his pocket for Boukman to read later. But to his surprise the black scrawls jumped off the paper into his mind and formed words there. He stared at them in disbelief. But I can’t read! he thought. Yet the paper offered itself to him and opened up its meaning.
He put his hand to his heart, felt it beating fiercely. The whole room seemed to swim, to breathe. Is this magic? What happened to me in that clearing? He felt at once himself and not himself. Wasn’t it a fact – an undeniable fact – that he couldn’t read? And yet here he was, looking at this piece of paper, apprehending the words written on it. He felt that he might faint, and steadied himself by seizing the corner of the sideboard. He stared, open-mouthed, at the paper.
I, Bayou de Libertas, being of sound mind and good health, do hereby declare that my Master of Horse, who goes by the name of Toussaint, is henceforth, from this night of 8th of August 1791, free. Please accord him all the rights and liberties of a French subject.
Stunned, Toussaint turned to the door, the paper rustling in his trembling hand.
— You cannot declare it, he said.
De Libertas had already gone into the dark chambers of the house, so Toussaint spoke to the wood of the door instead, and the iron nails.
— You cannot declare it because I am already free. I am no one’s subject, French or otherwise.
He stood still for a moment. So catastrophically did his old master seem to have misunderstood the enormity of what was happening that Toussaint could almost feel sorry for him. When you have been free, and then have been stolen and carried away to another country, you understand that things can change places. When you have always been master, this insight is closed to you.
Just then, there came a great banging from downstairs. Toussaint went to the window and looked out to see more slaves massed there, weapons in their hands, the moonlight glancing off blades.
Hurrying to the door, he paused and turned back to the sideboard. He folded down the writing slope, brushed his fingers underneath to find the hidden catch, and released the drawer containing the pistol. He was certain that de Libertas did not realize he knew of this hiding place – but a good slave knows his master. He checked that the pistol was loaded with shot and powder, then resumed his course out into the hallway.
De Libertas was rushing to the stairs, breathless, a child under his arm. His mouth dropped open when he saw the gun and machete in his hands.
— Toussaint, no . . . You said yourself that I’ve been good to you.
— Be quiet, said Toussaint. Follow behind me. Appear meek. Hobble, if your pride can bear it. This country will be mine but, as you say, you’ve treated me well. I’ll get you out of it alive before it runs with blood.
De Libertas paled as there came a splintering sound from below, and a yell of triumph from the mob. Fear twisted in Toussaint’s belly like a snake. He hoped Isaac was safe; hoped, too, that his son hadn’t joined the angry mob. He would not see his son killed, but he would not see him kill, either.
As soon as I can, he thought, I’ll send Isaac away from here.
— They’re your brothers, de Libertas said, gesturing to the door. They’ll kill you for resisting them.
Toussaint smiled.
— No, he said. That’s not my destiny.
Now
I wake and open my eyes. And for a moment I panic.
I’m blind.
Then I remember the darkness. It’s strange, but it’s blacker with my eyes open. When they’re closed, I see the pulses and swirls of my blood, fireworks against my eyelids, and I remember this one time, when I was lying under the sun with my eyes closed, with Tintin nearby, floating on a rich man’s pool, drunk on stolen liquor.
Only here, in the hospital, there is no sun.
Here, when my eyes are open, I see nothing.
The wound in my arm is itching. I’m thirsty again; my mouth is consuming me. Thinking of my mouth gives me a strange feeling and I remember that I had anpil dreams when I was sleeping, curious dreams in which I was Toussaint l’Ouverture and I was riding horses and clutching machetes and other weird shit. I think of Dread Wilmè cos it was Dread who first told me about Toussaint, the hero who freed the slaves and made Haiti independent. He was Biggie’s hero, too. Biggie loved Toussaint even more than Dread – he wouldn’t stop talking about him.
Biggie, he was the general of Route 9, and before that he was the right-hand man of Dread Wilmè and a big dog in the Site. He did all the shit the government should have done in the slums. He funded the schools, provided security. He punished thieves and rapists.
He sold drugs and killed people.
He made me what I am today.
I have not forgiven him for that, not yet.
But Biggie, he knew about Toussaint, too, and would spout shit about him all the time. It’s cos of that, I think. It’s cos Biggie told me Toussaint’s story, that’s why I’m dreaming about him. But I’m not convinced. I know dreams and that didn’t feel like one, and anyway, there was more detail in that dream than Biggie ever told me. I think of the burned smell of that corn, which I put out with my coat, and the sound of people hacking at a door with axes, and the feel of an ivory-handled pistol in my hand.
No, I think. I’m just going mad, that’s all. It’s the darkness and the smell of death. Mouri pourri, I think. Then I giggle.
I thought the worst thing would be to survive. Now I realize the worst thing would be to survive but to no longer be myself. If they dig out a madman from this hospital, then I haven’t really survived: I’ve died and come back as a zombi.
Don’t go mad, I think to myself.
That makes me giggle again. I pinch my arm, where the bullet went in, and that makes me scream.
— Don’t go mad, I say.
Good.
I can still speak.
I saw two men killed before I was eleven years old, and my papa was the first. This was a long time ago – 2003, the tenth of February. I was eight. It was, like, a year after me and Marguerite found the baby.
Papa was a fisherman, you could say – he shared a boat with another man from the Site. It brought him piti-piti money, but enough to send us to a small school.
Manman told me afterward that Dread Wilmè wanted to pay for our education, but Papa wouldn’t agree – he thought that someone like Dread Wilmè would want something for his money one day. He was right. I know these things now.
At this point, I mean in 2003, Dread Wilmè was in charge of the Site. Dread Wilmè was a big strong man with dreads down to his shoulders. If Dread Wilmè caught a man stealing, he’d cut off his hand. If he caught a man raping, he’d . . .
You understand.
Dread Wilmè was an old chimère, a drug dealer who had become so powerful he was like a mayor – in one part of the Site anyway. But he got his guns and some of his money from Aristide, to protect the Lavalas supporters, so really it was Aristide who was in charge of the Site; Dread Wilmè was just someone who did Aristide’s work for him, who kept his people safe. Only no one had jobs still, and no one had any money. So it seemed like not very much had changed, and people were starting to complain about it. There were rebels who tried to fight the government and assassinate people. Most of these rebels lived in the Site. So Aristide gave guns and money to Dread Wilmè to make his own private army and keep control of the slum.
In the end, though, he was only able to take control of half of it – the other half was controlled by the rebels who lived in a part of the Site called Boston. These two gangs, Dread Wilmè’s and the rebels, they were always fighting, always shooting one another. At the same time, the attachés were coming into the Site and killing people.
Dread Wilmè began as a chimère and he ended as one. But he built schools, too. He paid for people to go to the doctor. Nothing is as
simple as it seems, you’ll come to see that. What’s for sure, though, is that Manman and Papa did not agree about Aristide. Papa didn’t like him – he thought he was as much of a robber as the French and Americans he hated so much. I would hear them arguing about it, and I always tried to block it out, cos I didn’t really understand anything apart from that they were angry.
The week before Papa was killed, there was a big disagreement between him and Manman. It was cos of me and Marguerite. I mean, it wasn’t our fault, but it was cos of something Manman had done with us that Papa found out about. Actually, it was something she had been doing for a while. It was just that Papa didn’t know about it.
Till that day.
Till the week before he died.
I don’t know if Manman has ever forgiven herself for that.
Thing was, Dread Wilmè was doing a lot of good in the Site the way Manman saw it. He paid for people to go to hospital, he had houses repaired, he supported the schools. For this, he got some money from Lavalas, but Manman felt it wasn’t enough. I didn’t understand anything much of this at the time, you realize. I filled it in later.
Anyway, Manman had come up with a way to raise money for Lavalas, for Dread Wilmè. And that was where me and Marguerite came in. That day, we were in a peristyle deep in Solèy 19, far from where we lived. This was where Dread Wilmè’s power was the strongest. A mambo, a female vodou priest, was leading the ceremony. She did the call to Papa Legba to open the gates, the usual. This wasn’t the first time Marguerite and I had taken part in such a ceremony, so we didn’t really listen. The place was a basement and it was concrete and gray, filled with gray smoke. It was like a world with all the color taken out. All around the walls were people, gangsters really, it was obvious to me, but Manman didn’t care. Dread Wilmè himself sat on a big chair, his dreads a deeper dark in the darkness. They all chanted along with the mambo – Dread Wilmè, too.
Me and Marguerite, we sat in the middle. We were special. We were like mascots for the Lavalas, you know. We were delivered by Aristide, the hero of the party. We were Marassa. We were capable of maji, of performing spells.
The basement was small. There were lots of people packed in there: young, old, gangsters, and not gangsters. The room, it seemed to contract, to expand, and was filled with noise like thunder. After a while, we felt the atmosphere shift. We had felt it before; we knew what it was. It was like a prickling on our skin. Then everyone was looking at us through the smoke, and we knew that the Marassa were coming. We looked at the mambo, and we saw that she was drawing the Marassa veve on the ground, drawing it in chalk. I say we looked, but I don’t mean I assume Marguerite looked as well. I say it cos I know. Everything we did in those days, we did together. I looked at the veve. That means Marguerite looked, too.
We were twins. We were one soul, halved.
Back in the day, Manman said, they would have taken two chickens and cut their throats, a gift to the Marassa, the pwen to make them pleased. But people didn’t do that kind of thing anymore, even Dread Wilmè, who loved old vodou. Instead, a skinny kid came up to us with a lale, a basket kind of thing, and on it were all these sweets and chocolates and shit like that and we would have loved to eat them, but we knew that wasn’t how it worked. We were smart, me and Marguerite, we didn’t need to learn the same lesson twice.
No. We didn’t try to take the sweets. We just nodded to the kid, and he went round the peristyle, scattering them on the floor. There were a couple of toys, too, cos the Marassa love toys – plastic things, figures, like tiny dead people. Even so, I would have liked them. I never had any toys; I never saw a toy till the first time Manman took us to the peristyle. But I knew they weren’t for me; they weren’t for us. We were Marassa, but we weren’t the Marassa. Even at that age we understood we were only a door. A pipe. A window.
The chanting started.
— Marassa Simbi,
Mwen engage dans pays-a,
Marassa Guinin, Marassa la Côte,
Mwen engage dans pays-a!
It was a song to the Marassa of Africa. It called to the Marassa; it told them the people loved Haiti, and they knew the Marassa loved Haiti, too. You know I don’t believe in this stuff – I’ve told you that already – but when you’re in a dark place and the mambo is singing, it’s kind of powerful, even I will admit that.
The chanting got louder and louder.
Me and Marguerite, we knew what we had to do. We did it together, like we did everything. You looked at us, you saw a person in a mirror – someone reflected to make two people. We were in sync, like drums, man. We started to shake, and then we went all stiff and weird; to anyone looking at us it seemed we were possessed. It was a trick we knew how to do.
Then we chanted back:
— Mwen rele Marassa,
Mwen engage dans pays-a.
My name is Marassa. I love this country, too.
Around us, everyone went crazy. They were shouting and singing and throwing the sweets in the air, and I thought, throw one of those sweets over here. And now I could say it cos now I was Marassa, and Marassa could do what Marassa wanted to do. I glanced at Manman. I knew she would be pissed, but I didn’t care.
— Give us sweets, we said, cos to be sure Marguerite was thinking the same thing.
— Give us toys.
People started to scrabble on the floor, picking up all this stuff that the kid had only just thrown there. They brought it to us. And when they put it in our laps, they put money, too, and sometimes they asked questions. It was hard to hear and it was hard to see, with all the people and the smoke. But we did our best.
— Will I ever have a baby?
— Yes. Yes, you will. Marassa bless you.
— Will I see my Nerese again?
— When the time is right, yes. Marassa bless you.
— Will my karamel come back to me? Will she leave her husband and come back to me?
— No.
— Will Aristide stay in power?
— Yes.
Always yes to that one. Always, with no hesitation.
You had to do the touch, too, of course. A blessing is not a blessing if it’s just words, everyone knows that. Got to be touch with it. So each person who drops money, you hold out your hand and you touch them on the hand, or on the head if they’re kneeling, and they get this dumb expression on their face like they just saw the clouds open and angels fall out, or some shit.
Some of them, they only wanted the touch. No questions; they just came limping, crawling, even, and they waited there for the touch. I felt kind of bad about those people. You knew them: you knew them cos they had arms missing, or legs, and they stared around with blank eyes, or they had bits of them swollen up like watermelons, or they were just gray and thin – and those were the worst ones. We didn’t like to touch them. But we did it. We did it cos we were told to, but also cos it was all we could do. We always gave them our blessing.
Well. Almost always.
And at the end, there we were, with toys and money and sweets in our laps. It was like a damn party, but we couldn’t enjoy it right then cos we had to seem like we were wise and magical and from old Africa. Course, sometimes we had to be rude, or not make any sense, cos that’s what people expect from Marassa – as lwa, the twins are powerful, but they’re kids. They don’t do everything all goody-two-shoes and clean and predictable.
— Is my husband cheating on me?
— Of course he is. You’re ugly.
Sometimes, and this was the nasty thing, you had to turn away from the sick people, too. Marassa are childlike: the twins take against some people, no fault of theirs, no fault of the lwa, either. Me and Marguerite, we hated doing this. We chose before the ceremony – like, every third man, we’ll ignore him, OK?
Sometimes these people cried. It was fucking terrible.
So, anyway, all of this was like it always was. Manman, she went over to Dread Wilmè and was talking to him, and people started to file out.
W
e began to put the money together. What happened was that we gave this money to Dread Wilmè. The sweets, we could keep. Not the toys. Papa might see the toys and then he might know what we were doing, and even though we didn’t really understand it, we knew that would be bad.
Daylight always came down from upstairs when the trapdoor was opened, but suddenly there was a solid shaft of light in the basement, like someone had thrown the trapdoor wide open. And in that shaft of light were the rickety stairs from the upstairs world.
Papa came down the steps. It hadn’t seemed like a strange day till then, but at that moment it did. We were two liars, sitting with sweets in our laps that we didn’t deserve.
Me and Marguerite, we looked down, ashamed.
— Come, said Papa. Now.
His voice was cold, like nothing I had ever heard before. Dread Wilmè stepped up to him and started to say something, but Papa turned away, didn’t even reply. He picked us up from the ground, effortless, like we were light things. The sweets fell. He swung us; he carried us to the stairs.
— It’s for a good – began Manman.
Papa held a hand up.
— They’re not performing monkeys, he said.
After that, there was a lot of coldness between Manman and Papa. There was no shouting; Papa didn’t shout. When he was angry he was quiet and cold, like the deep sea, and that was worse.
Me and Marguerite, we played outside on the street whenever they discussed something, which is what they called it when they argued. At first we thought we were in trouble, but it didn’t seem like we were.
It seemed like it was Manman who was in trouble.
There weren’t any other children on our street to play with us – no one lived on our street, not anymore. We were the last family on the street. On one side of our street was Boston, which belonged to the rebels, and on the other side was Solèy 19, which belonged to Dread Wilmè. Later, Solèy 19 became Route 9, cos that’s the name of a big road MINUSTAH are building on our side of the Site, to join us to the rest of Haiti. They’ve been building it for years now, and it still isn’t done yet.