by Nick Lake
Anyway, Route 9 came later. For now, all you need to know is that me and my family, we were living on a strip in the middle, between Dread Wilmè’s territory and that of the rebels.
You understand? No man’s land. Manman told Papa we should leave, but he didn’t want to.
— It’s not our war, he said. We’re anyen to them. If we move to either camp, then we’ve taken a side. And they’ll kill us for it.
Me, I think Manman would have liked to go to the Lavalas side, to Dread Wilmè’s territory. I could see she was happy when we were there, playing at being Marassa. But she must have loved my papa, cos she never pushed it.
So, on the day I’m talking about, Marguerite and me were playing all by our ownselves, while Manman and Papa argued inside. Occasionally we heard a bit.
— They’re just children!
— You’re exploiting the sick!
I didn’t understand what those words meant then, not really. But I do now. And you know what? I think Papa was wrong.
One: we weren’t just children. There’s no such thing as children in Site Solèy, only smaller starving people, only smaller dead people. On the road next to ours there was a morgue – Morgue Privée, said the sign. It was one of the first things I learned to read. On the sign also, which was really just paint on a wall, there was a little girl, and above her an angel, flying her up into heaven. You think this was meant to manipulate people; you think it’s kind of sick. But it wasn’t. It was a reality. You didn’t take your husband to a morgue – you couldn’t afford it, could you? But when your child died, then you found the money, if you could. Your family helped you, maybe. Unless it was a baby you didn’t want. Then you just threw it on the trash.
That sign, it wasn’t about manipulating your emotions. It was like a car-shop sign with a tire on it to say, we change tires. Only instead it said, we look after dead kids. And the Site was full of dead kids.
Two: exploiting the sick? I don’t think so. Me and Marguerite, for sure we didn’t like to touch them. But if you saw the expression on their faces when they thought they’d been blessed, your heart would fucking break. If some of those people didn’t think themselves healed after they believed the lwa of twins touched them, I will turn myself into a parrot.
But back then we didn’t really know what Papa was saying, and we didn’t care, either. We were just glad we weren’t in trouble.
We had a game: you had to flick bottle caps and make them jump into a tin can. It was a good game. We had five bottle caps each and if I won, then Marguerite had to be my slave for the day and do everything I told her. I could have been really mean, but I never was. If she won, which wasn’t often, then I had to be her horse, and she’d sit on my back as I rode her around the street. I told her it wasn’t as good as having a slave, but she loved horses. She’d never seen one, but she loved them all the same.
Biggie never saw a Cadillac Escalade or a bottle of Cristal, but it didn’t stop him rapping about them.
Anyway, on this occasion I had lost, so I was on my hands and knees, Marguerite whooping on my back, pretending to whip me with her hand and laughing.
Suddenly there was a scream. It sounded like Manman.
I bucked Marguerite off and she landed in the mud.
— What’s happening? she said.
— I don’t know. Stay here.
I ran over to the shack and ducked inside. I saw anpil young men in there, with baseball caps on their heads. They were carrying baseball bats and machetes, and had scarves around their faces like bandis.
Manman was backed against the wall of the shack, screaming and screaming. One of the men grabbed me and held me tight, my arms against my sides. He held me a long time. I struggled and he hit me and the world went black, and I don’t know how much more time passed after that.
More men came in from the street.
— The girl? said one of them.
— Done.
— No, not my – began my papa, but one of the chimères kicked his legs out from under him and he fell hard on his back.
— Shut up, another man said.
Papa got to his knees and swore. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear.
— Let my family go, he said.
The chimère who seemed to be the leader sighed. He made a little gesture and one of his friends slashed down with his machete, then Papa’s arm was gone below the elbow. That’s how easy it was. After that the others started hacking and stabbing, too, and I was struggling in the arms of the one who was holding me, and he was laughing, and everything was flying blood and twisted faces and terrible, wet noises.
Eventually, I closed my eyes. I think I maybe fainted. I remember hearing someone say:
— What about the woman?
And another man said:
— He said she should live.
Another said:
— Well, yes, but . . .
And all his friends laughed.
Then blackness.
See? I’ve been in darkness before, with bodies. I know this place. I wonder now if the hospital is only the shack again, and maybe I wasn’t shot in the arm but in the heart or the head, and all of this is hell, or the land under the sea where the dead go to be lwa of the Gede family. Maybe I’m back in the room after Papa’s murder, and that’s where I’ll always be now.
I take a deep breath. Everything I remember is too vivid. My fallen-down hospital room is a cinema with the lights turned down – it’s total blackness, and my life is too bright against it.
So, the shack.
At some point the darkness ended and I was looking up at one of the men with guns. He winked at me.
— This is what happens when you fuck with the Boston crew, he said.
Another chimère laughed.
— For sure, he said.
I didn’t understand. Papa hadn’t fucked with anyone. All he did was take us away from the peristyle, where we were pretending to bless people. Even then, though, I think I knew that this had nothing to do with that, cos I understood that the chimère was Boston, not Route 9. I clung to that.
I told myself, one day all of these Boston pigs are going to die.
Then there was a loud bang that I recognized as a gun firing. I looked up and Manman was standing with a semi-automatic in her hand. She was crying. One of the chimères, the one who had spoken to me, was screaming. Blood was pouring from his shoulder. I noticed that there were skulls and crossbones on the bandanna over his face.
— Bastard, he said.
— Get out, said Manman. Get out now.
The chimères backed away. Manman stood for a long time holding that gun, and we waited in the silence. But they didn’t come back.
I was still on the ground. Papa’s blood was on my hands and my face; it was sticky and smelled of everything bad. Manman stepped over me and went out into the street, holding the gun in front of her. A minute or a day later, she came back inside. There was a flat, cold look in her eye. She was shaking, and I was worried that the gun might go off by accident. But then she seemed to seize control of herself and she was Manman again.
She picked me up and gently prised open my fingers.
— What do you have there? she said.
It was a bottle cap. I hadn’t realized I had been holding it.
Manman carried me out through the back of the shack. She walked and walked, and I didn’t know where she was going. Then I smelled the sea and I knew she was heading for the boat, the one Papa used for fishing, and she said we would sleep in there till we could find somewhere else.
— What about Papa? I said.
— We can’t help him now.
— And the gun? Where did you get the gun?
— It doesn’t matter.
— But what about Marguerite? What happened to Marguerite?
In my mind’s eye, I saw my sister sitting on my back, smiling. I hoped she had run away.
Manman stopped and looked at me. That flatness had come into her eyes ag
ain.
— They took her, she said eventually. Those chimères.
— Why?
Manman hesitated.
— She’s a girl, she said. And she’s pretty. One day she might be valuable.
I thought that was stupid. I thought Marguerite was valuable now. Manman looked like she was going to cry, and I didn’t blame her. But there was one thing I was grateful for: Marguerite was alive.
— I’ll get her back, I said.
Manman, she kind of nodded her head.
— It’s hard, she said. But we should count our blessings. We’re alive and we’re together, you and me. We have each other.
— Yeah, I said.
Manman, she liked to count her blessings. It didn’t usually take long.
We walked across the sand to where the fishermen moored their boats. I could see the one Papa and his friend used. I wondered then if Papa really was a fisherman. Manman wouldn’t tell me where the gun had come from, but what if it was his? What if he was a chimère, too?
Maybe I didn’t wonder that, actually. It’s hard for me to remember. But I do wonder it now.
— I’ll do whatever it takes, I told Manman. I’ll bring Marguerite home.
— OK, she said. OK.
I don’t think she believed me – but she should have. If she had, I might not be in this mess. When you keep hurting someone, you do one of three things. Either you fill them up with hate, and they destroy everything around them. Or you fill them up with sadness, and they destroy themselves. Or you fill them up with justice, and they try to destroy everything that’s bad and cruel in this world.
Me, I was the first kind of person.
Then
In his dream, Toussaint rode back to Bois Caiman. He knew the blind houngan lived there. People said he could speak to the alligators and had become their king. They said there were dead people in the marshes, zombis who he had put there and that he could make rise up and kill anyone who threatened him. Toussaint thought those were good stories to put about if you wanted to be left alone, and anyway, he knew perfectly well how zombis were made – it was a process more of pharmacology than death.
He followed a dim light through the trees, careful of the swamp on both sides of the track. A small voice inside him said that this was not really happening, but he was still scared.
There was a rich, vegetable smell of decay. It was dark, the moon that had been so full and fat the previous night obscured by dense clouds. He could see very little other than the looming shapes of the trees, the spidery shadows of the vines. Last night he had been amongst friends – fellow slaves. Tonight he was a warm living thing in the midst of an indifference of chilly mud. He could easily imagine that the smell came from rotting bodies, that there were dead people, zombis, in the mud to either side . . .
He shivered, tightening his grip on the horse’s bridle. He focused on the light, followed it until he came to a small hut. He dismounted, tethered the horse, and knocked before entering.
The blind houngan sat on a chair in a simple, clean room. Except for some jars of powder, two chairs, some veves drawn on the floor, the room was empty.
— You came back, said the houngan.
— Yes. Is this real? Am I here? Or is it a dream?
— Can’t it be both? said the houngan. Tell me. This spirit that is inside you, do you want me to take it out?
— I want you to . . . I don’t know. What is it? I told the others it was Ogou, but I don’t think that’s true.
— I don’t know for certain what it is, said the houngan. It’s not Ogou Badagry, I agree. I would’ve been aware of his coming. We all would – Ogou is the lwa of war, and when he possesses a person, there is usually violence.
Toussaint shook his head vehemently.
— I don’t know if I want this, he said. I felt good to begin with. Righteous. But we’ll have to kill so many if we want our freedom. Last night it was all I could do to stop the slaves killing my master. And he was never cruel to them.
The houngan nodded.
— Life must be paid for with death, he said.
He indicated the chair beside him, gestured for Toussaint to sit.
Toussaint did so, and he was aware that he had just lied, although he hadn’t intended to. He might not want to lead the rebellion, not precisely, but he knew that he would. It was his destiny. And who was to say that it wasn’t the very thing to possess him that would give him the strength to lead his people?
In his previous dream, he had been in a city like none he had ever seen before, with houses made from metal and people dressed in the clothes of lunatics. Yet he had known it was the future, and in that land blacks walked free everywhere and there were no whites that he could see. There, he was a boy, or he was in the dreams of the boy; he was not sure which. At the same time, he was himself. It was a strange sensation, one that had lingered long after he had woken, and even though he had forgotten much of his dream, he remembered one essential truth.
He knew that they were going to win, because the boy he had been in that strange future knew it was not right for one person to own another, not anymore. That was why Toussaint had no doubt that he would lead. No one else had the same conviction. No one else could pursue the cause knowing that it was not only just, but that it was possible.
The problem was that he didn’t necessarily want to. He had never killed anyone in his life, and he didn’t want to start now. He wanted to understand all sides of a conflict before he ever had to pick up a weapon.
— How do you feel, otherwise? the houngan said. What do you know of the thing that entered you? Because something did. I sensed it. We all sensed it.
— I like it, said Toussaint. That’s what scares me. And I can read! I could never read before.
The houngan nodded slowly.
— The lwa bring strange gifts, he said.
— I’m not sure if it is a lwa, said Toussaint. Is there a way to tell? Can you . . . examine me?
The houngan put out his hands.
— Give me your head, he said. Lean forward.
Toussaint inclined his forehead and felt the old man’s calloused hands gently cradle his head. Some time passed whilst the houngan made little noises of consideration. Finally he took a deep, deliberate breath, released it unevenly, and he let go.
— It doesn’t make sense, he said.
— What doesn’t?
— There is only one soul in you. There is only one you. It’s as if . . . as if there isn’t anything else. The houngan was talking to himself as much as to Toussaint. But I was there! I sensed you buckle, and be taken!
Toussaint stood up shakily.
— When I was a boy, a houngan said that I had half a soul. My twin sister died when we were young. The houngan told me about Marassa, said we had had power when we were together, but when my sister died the power was lost. My mother thought . . .
Toussaint had been about to speak of his twin sister, and how she had died, how it had made him feel, but he stopped. He did not want to speak of his life to the houngan. He kicked at his chair instead and sent it sprawling across the dirt floor.
— What should I do? he asked.
— I can’t tell you, said the houngan. Boukman says you’ll lead the people to freedom, but what do I know? I’m a blind man. The whites did that to me. So many of them will have to die. You said it yourself. So perhaps you should run to the mountains, live there with your son whilst the war wages. They may even win without you. Boukman says you’re indispensable . . . unique, but you seem an ordinary man to me. One soul, one nose, two eyes.
Toussaint trembled. He was thinking of the future, where he had walked through streets of black people living all together in their own homes. He was thinking of how in the future he had glimpsed he had been a boy, and the boy had known the name of Toussaint. He stepped over to the chair he had kicked and he righted it. He was startled to see the houngan standing right in front of him all of a sudden, with some kind of pipe in his mo
uth. He took it out, made a circle of his lips, and blew.
Smoke drifted toward Toussaint, curled around his face until he was standing in a gray fog.
He woke.
He was lying in bed in his cottage. Slaves had already begun to gather in the courtyard of the big house, in the fields, awaiting his word. Yet, to his surprise, de Libertas had been able to escape and his grand house still stood, not yet burned.
Toussaint stared at the ceiling and the grayness around him, and he thought hard. He did not want to kill the whites – it was true what he had told the houngan. He was filled with an overwhelming desire not for vengeance, but for justice. He saw a world that crushed people beneath its wheels, and he determined to take its reins and steer it onto sweeter ground.
It seemed to him, lying there, that there were three kinds of slaves, three kinds of people. There were those who were so filled with hate by their experience, by their oppression, that they snapped and destroyed property or people. There were those who were so filled with sadness by their experience that they snapped and destroyed themselves; someone would find them hanging in the barn, or lying in the field with slit wrists; Toussaint had been that someone several times, had found them like that. It made him cry, always. The third kind of person, though, was filled by their experience with a fierce longing for justice, a fierce desire to make things right in the world, to redress the balance.
In the darkness, Toussaint fancied that he was the third kind of person, and to fire his soul, to fill himself with a sense of the need for justice, he called up the faces that embodied for him slavery’s evil.
He lay there, and he remembered.
He remembered a baby.
This baby was not Toussaint’s; it belonged to a Chérie, a woman slave from the neighboring plantation. Or, rather, it didn’t belong to her – it belonged to her master, and this was the root of the problem. Toussaint had been fourteen when Chérie arrived one moonless night at the small cottage where he lived with his father. She knocked at the door in the dead of night, startling them both badly and making them think something terrible had occurred. It hadn’t, but it was about to.