In Darkness

by Nick Lake

  Instead, he wrote numerous letters to Bonaparte, pleading his case, arguing that all he had done he had done for Haiti, that his constitution had been intended to secure her safety, that he and the country remained faithful servants of France, but not slaves.

  These letters went unanswered.

  After some two months’ imprisonment, he received a visit from Bonaparte’s aide-de-camp, a man named Cafarelli. When the envoy was shown in, hope blossomed in Toussaint’s chest like a rare flower.

  — Toussaint l’Ouverture, said the man, I come from Bonaparte with an offer.

  Toussaint smiled, something he had not done in a long time. Perhaps he would see his son again, after all.

  — Tell me, he said.

  — The emperor wishes me to convey to you that, should you –

  — The emperor? said Toussaint in disbelief.

  Cafarelli colored slightly. He was small of stature, with thin whiskers in the place of a mustache. He seemed a little like a rat that had grown enormous on scraps of prison food, put on a doublet and hose, and come to pay a visit to the prison’s most famous inmate.

  — The . . . ah . . . consul is so styled now, Monsieur l’Ouverture.

  Toussaint laughed. The blacks had freed themselves after French philosophers argued that all men had a right to liberty, after the French rose up against their king. Now the French had replaced a king with an emperor.

  — Apologies, he said, stifling his laughter. I have interrupted your offer.

  — Yes. The emperor wishes me to convey –

  — You’ve done that part.

  — Yes. If you reveal to me the location of your buried treasure in Haiti, he will restore to you your freedom and pardon your crimes.

  — My crimes?

  — You rebelled against France.

  — No, said Toussaint. I rebelled against slavery. Never against France.

  The aide-de-camp shrugged.

  — Do you deny that you declared a constitution without permission? That you named yourself Governor-General without ratification from the con— the emperor?

  — No, but it was merely a constitution, and my term was merely three years, and the terms expressly forbade me from standing again. You should have seen what the Haitians wanted to give me. They’d have made me a king had I not resisted. I gave them freedom, I gave them peace, and they would have made me a dictator in return. Your emperor should thank me for my forbearance and strength of character in my insistence on democracy and my desire to maintain links of trade and amity with France. I even made Haiti a dependency! I could have severed all ties had I wished.

  — You deny that you enriched yourself at France’s cost?

  — Of course I do, Toussaint said. There is no treasure. You have been misinformed. He gestured to the slanderous play-sheets on the desk. Has Bonaparte been attending the theater too often?

  — He’s too busy for that, said Cafarelli.

  Toussaint rolled his eyes. The man had no humor. Still, he had based his judgment of Brunet on such fleeting impressions, and that man had deceived him utterly.

  — I’ve been instructed to ascertain the location of the treasure, said Cafarelli. Give it up to us, and you will go free.

  Toussaint put his face in his hands.

  — Then I will die here, he said in a low voice. There is no treasure.

  Cafarelli placed a hand on his shoulder; he was not wholly unsympathetic.

  — You only have to hand it over, he said.

  Toussaint wept then.

  There was no treasure. Anything that had been taken from the slavers had been distributed amongst his men, had been used to shore up the foundations of the country, to prepare for her freedom. But a playwright said he had buried riches and, believing him, Bonaparte wished to seize them. Toussaint recalled his wry amusement at the inventions of the man who had written his life for the stage. Now he would strangle him gladly.

  Days later, Cafarelli came again.

  — Do you continue to be obstinate? he asked.

  — I continue to maintain that I have no buried treasure, if that is what you mean, said Toussaint. Ask my men, if you wish.

  — Oh, we intend to, said Cafarelli.

  Toussaint cursed his runaway tongue. He would not have his men suffer for this madness.

  — I have been instructed to obtain from you a written response to Bonaparte, said Cafarelli, swearing that you possess no treasure. Tell the guard when you have finished and I will deliver your letter to the emperor.

  Toussaint waved a hand irritably.

  — Very well, he said.

  General and Emperor,

  You will permit me, Emperor, to say to you, with all the respect and submission which I owe you, that the French government has been completely deceived in regard to Toussaint l’Ouverture, one of its most zealous and courageous servants in Haiti. All I have done, I have done in the name of the blacks and in the name of Haiti, not to offend France or your exalted person. Indeed, when the English were finally repulsed and our constitution was declared, I made Haiti a subject and dependency of France, something I need not have done! I sacrificed my blood, and a part of what I possessed, to serve my country, and in spite of my efforts, all my labors have been in vain.

  I possess no treasure. I have no wealth, no silver plate buried in the earth of Haiti. I have only my freedom, which I achieved through the offices of my esteemed prior master, Bayou de Libertas, and which the French state was pleased to confirm. I labored long to acquire honor and glory from the government, and to gain the esteem of my fellow citizens, and I am now, for my reward, crowned with thorns and the most marked ingratitude.

  First, Emperor, it is unfortunate for me that I am not known to you. If you had been thoroughly acquainted with me whilst I was in Haiti, you would have done me more justice; you would have known that my heart is good. I am not learned, I am ignorant; I could not read ere my fifty-fourth year on this earth. But my father and my friends showed me the road of virtue and honor, and I am very strong in my conscience in that matter. I did not lead my men for my own personal glory, but for the glory of freedom, which was an idea we learned from France and her own Revolution. If I had not been devoted to Haiti, I should not have been here – that is a truth! I am wretched, miserable, a victim of all my services.

  I ask you for my freedom that I may labor, that I may gain my sustenance and support my unhappy family. I call on your greatness, on your genius, to pronounce a just judgment on my destiny. Let your heart be softened and touched by my position and my misfortunes.

  I salute you, with profound respect,

  TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE

  In addition to the letter, he sent with Cafarelli an account of his life, which he hastily composed in the hope that it would cause Bonaparte to look more favorably upon him. He pre -faced it with a request for a fair trial and expressed hope that this account might inform the legal process, might be given to judge and jury as testimony of his honor. He omitted the ceremony at Bois Caiman, which, he feared, could tend to make him appear savage and unformed. He said instead that his ability to read, although coming late in life, was conventionally won. He wrote of a French mercenary whom he had paid to teach him, smiling as he wrote at the felicity of his invention, for words were a kind of weapon, and so he had commissioned from this mercenary precisely what he would normally sell. So taken was he with the idea that he almost came to believe it true, and he could even see in his mind’s eye the many hours he had spent with the French sell-sword.

  He commended both these things to Cafarelli’s care, then he waited.

  And he waited.

  For weeks, no reply came. Months, even. Then, with no warning, things changed. The director of the prison was sent away, and a man named Colomier left in charge. This man took from Toussaint his writing equipment, his desk, his bed, and, finally, his cell. Colomier took away his view of the mountains, confining him to an underground cell, tiny, without windows of any kind. Toussaint found him
self languishing in a dungeon, the walls slimy with damp and mold.

  All of a sudden, he was in darkness. Food stopped coming, and water. He licked the moisture from the cold stone walls, but he knew it would not sustain him many days.

  In this darkness he could no longer distinguish between his dreams and reality, and he tried to tell his story to an invisible audience, an audience that never spoke back, in an attempt to preserve his sanity.

  He understood what was happening here – or thought he did, because there was a possibility that he had gone mad, that paranoia had seized him.

  Yet . . .

  No, he was sure he understood. This was his trial, this his judgment. He had been sentenced to death.

  A slow death.

  Since the director of the prison had been sent away, he could not be held accountable afterward. This Colomier, who had replaced him, was young and inexperienced; he would say, no doubt, that Toussaint had attacked him, or offered resistance in some way, and in self-defense he had consigned him to the darkness. That would be the story. Toussaint’s death would be marked on the prison’s records as caused by general malaise, not deliberate starvation.

  Yes, Toussaint knew how these things worked. He was an inconvenience, so Toussaint would be left to die. His testifying before a court was inconceivable since he would only say that he had done nothing wrong, and that could not be risked; no slight to French honor would be borne. If he died in prison, however, they could continue to paint him a criminal, to make up calumnies about him, to talk their silly talk of treasure, as if he were a pirate. And they would quietly bring slavery back to Haiti and undo all his achievements.

  Toussaint lay in the darkness.

  He did not know how long he had been in this place, or even whether to measure it in days or weeks or hours. He knew from his time with his army that a man could last little more than three days without water, three weeks without food. He had continued to nourish himself with water from the walls, but with no food forthcoming he soon lost the strength to do so.

  He was no longer himself, either, it seemed to him.

  One instant, he was in the prison cell, in darkness, and the next he was standing on a street lined with rickety edifices made of strange, gray material and metal, and there were signs everywhere that he didn’t recognize. He saw another of those rolling metal carriages with wheels as it exploded in a ball of flame, like at the ammunition store in Guildive, and guns were going off everywhere – but this was not Guildive. He saw young men in strange dress and soldiers in black uniform, carrying shining guns that looked smooth and alien.

  At one point, he was floating above a ruined country, looking down on buildings that had been transformed to rubble, and circling with him in the air were great machines with blades spinning on top of them.

  At another point, he was a man with peculiar hair that fell past his neck in thick ropes, and he was standing in a muddy street, a strange flying machine above, as men with masked helmets fired bullets into him and through him, the pain unbelievable. He was dying, but he was crawling toward a boy who was lying in the mud, and he knew that he had to stop the vehicle that was about to crush the boy.

  At yet another point, he was in a place only subtly different from his cell, and here there was a weight pressing down on him, and he could smell blood and decay. He was a boy, a young boy who was never going to see the light again.

  He understood that somehow, in some sense, he was this boy and this man simultaneously.

  After the incident at Bois Caiman, Toussaint had spoken to Boukman of the impossible things he had seen and asked whether he was going insane. Boukman had replied:

  — We can be possessed by the lwa of our ancestors, the Gede spirits, so who is to say that we cannot be possessed by the lwa of our descendants?

  If that were true, thought Toussaint, then he truly had accomplished nothing, for his descendant was also trapped in darkness, was also dying, his flesh was also slowly enervated by deprivation. He had staked his life to give his people freedom, but his people still were not free.

  He even questioned if the dead would be reunited, as he had come to believe on the ship leaving Haiti, or if everything would stay broken and never be made whole. He tried to picture his father’s face, Boukman’s. He could not. There was only a hint of a recollection, a memory as impossible to grasp as a reflection on moving water. All that was left of them were a few features, a story or two, the odd thing he remembered them saying. He was not even sure if these memories would accord with those of others who had known them, or if, in remembering, he was warping the dead, changing their shape as the sea or the earth do, stripping their bones.

  I am in darkness, in a small space, and my mind is a small dark place, too, he thought. We are all trapped in a cave, and that cave is ourselves. The shape of its walls moves like water; this barrier disturbs what little light gets in and makes everything we see unique to us.

  The Boukman Toussaint saw and remembered was not the Boukman anyone else saw, and for this reason Boukman was destroyed not once, but twice: a death in the world and a death in the memory. He was pulled apart and changed by a hundred different minds, all perceiving the world differently.

  How could a person be reborn, be so mauled and twisted by distinct minds? How could murder be undone? And how could it possibly be that one day Toussaint would walk into a cool cavern underneath the sea and Boukman would be waiting for him, saying, it has been too long?

  He thought of the trick Boukman had performed at Bois Caiman, of the zombi who was dug up and interrogated about his experiences in death. Toussaint smiled. There were no zombis, only the chicanery of theater. No one who was buried would rise again, coughing on the loam of the earth in which they were interred.

  No, he would die in darkness and would go on into darkness, too. There would be no reunion, and nothing would be made whole. There would be no Rapture – he had known that before – but now he saw that there would be no return, either.

  There was only exodus.

  Toussaint closed his eyes, or thought he did. He could not be certain in this darkness whether his eyes were open or not.

  He was weary. It seemed to him that it would be easy to slip over from this dark place into some other reality, and that death would not be long in coming for him, in taking him away.

  He was right.

  And yet . . .

  And yet . . .

  And yet it seemed that death was not the end, after all.

  Toussaint was taken aback, soon after dying, to find himself drifting up above his body, hovering in the air of the cell, and looking down on himself.

  There was no pain anymore, no anger. When he looked down he saw with a dispassion he had never been capable of in life how emaciated he had become, how the French had turned his face into a death mask, almost fleshless, the cheeks hollow, dark shadows below the eyes. He saw his bones pressing at his skin from within as if eager to break out, to be free.

  Although it was dark, he could see the cell walls. Lichen clung, sickly green, to the stone. They bore scratches, some the raking parallel lines made by fingernails, some illegible words, written by illiterates, perhaps, or ordinary people who couldn’t see in the dark.

  Strangely, although his fury and disappointment had left him along with the feelings of cold and starvation, although he seemed to have left the sensations of the flesh behind him, he felt drawn to that husk of a body below. He felt that he would like to drift down again, to sink into it, to comfort it. It seemed a sad and lonely thing, an empty vessel that he ought to fill. He strained toward it, yet nothing happened.

  Then it was as if something caught him, some updraft like those thermals that suspend birds in the sky, and he was pulled upward.

  His body faded below, and then he was inside Fort de Joux, looking at the stone from inside, and for just an impossibly small iota of time he knew what it was to be stone, to breathe and flow so slowly that a century passed in a heartbeat. Then he was in the
light again, drifting through the iron bars of the cells above, a rusty taste in his mouth, before bursting through the roof and lofting his being into the alpine air.

  He gazed down at the castle that had held him, so small now, an eyrie perched in the mountains. Below lay a valley which began as a rocky ravine, angled down through pine trees, and ended as soft green pasture. The road to the prison twisted and turned through it. He smiled, for it was the essential quality of a valley that it must have an issue, that it must come to an end and spill out into fertile lowlands. A valley, he reflected, was an escapable thing by its very definition. It was difficult to find your way out of a cave. But a valley, ah, a valley. You could walk out of a valley, out of the dark place, away from the awful sharp towering of the mountains, and into the world.

  As Toussaint floated, a light rain began to fall. Droplets passed through him, became, for brief instants, one with him. He felt the freshness and the eternality of the water, and when he saw the white rivulets of the waterfall, tumbling from the cliff to his east, he understood that all water was the same, how no drop was different from any other.

  He had no body, so he did not feel joy precisely – he was joy, just as he was water, and stone. He was the air and the air was free and that was joy. He managed by an inflection of his thought to float down, over the prison, toward the grassy lowlands. He was above the birds; a crow circled, cawing, underneath him. The sun was high and bright in the sky; the trees and grass yearned toward it.

  Toussaint understood that he was dead. He did. But he understood, too, that they couldn’t hold him anymore; they couldn’t keep him in that place where there was no light. He was finally and completely free.

  No . . .

  No . . .