Master of the Crossroads (39 page)

Sleep came the instant he stretched himself out, resting his head on the supple leather of a saddlebag. Dreams whirled over him like filaments of spider web crossing and recrossing: trails and roads and
kalfou
and his constant movement, reversing itself like a whiplash cracking back along its braided length, or a snake coiling, striking, recoiling. Here yield, here retreat, feint, parry, flank. Here, make a stand, on the height above Petite Rivière, which Blanc Cassenave had fortified. Below, the brown river folded around the cliff, winding and constricting and, off to the southwest, a blue haze hung over the ocean and Saint Marc.

Toussaint woke, immediately lucid, aware of the writing desk’s hard edges through the saddlebag under the back of his head. A second later he knew where he was and how he’d come there. The old woman and the girl breathed softly on their pallets against the opposite wall of the small, square room. One of the feisty dogs got up to look him over, even though he had not moved. Then the dog grunted, turned and lay down. Toussaint could smell horse sweat from his saddle blanket on the floor nearby. And Blanc Cassenave was dead . . . Toussaint had written his epitaph in a letter to Laveaux, drafted by some odd coincidence the same day Brisbane had been shot.

During his detention Blanc Cassenave was struck with apoplexy, which had every appearance of an unbridled rage; he died of suffocation; may he rest in peace. He is out of this world; we must give thanks to God accordingly. The death of Blanc Cassenave abolishes any sort of procedure against him, as his crime had no accomplices.

A copy of this letter, among others, was shut up in the writing desk beneath his head. Now Toussaint had taken all the sleep he needed, though it would be hours yet before dawn. He was ready to compose and dictate, but there was no secretary. He lay still.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE—Blanc Cassenave had died in prison, arrested by Toussaint following what had practically amounted to a rebellion, a mutiny, or so it could be argued; the story might be told in more than one way. Was the man suffocated by his own rage as Toussaint had reported, or was it the weight of the chains laid on him? Toussaint had been elsewhere at the time of his death and did not know the answer for certain. It was no small thing to put a man in chains. He felt that Blanc Cassenave had himself to blame for his demise, though he had been among the most brave and capable of the colored officers to begin with. Indeed, he had made himself remarkable. But there was the matter of the four hundred pounds of gunpowder that he had failed to forward to Toussaint. Blanc Cassenave had shot forty men whom he claimed were traitors but whom Toussaint believed to be simply his personal enemies. Well, and he had openly defied Toussaint’s authority when reproached about the gunpowder, and had fomented dissension all through the posts along the Artibonite River (allowing the English to capitalize on the confusion). He had spread a rumor that putting the plantations back to work was only a masked design on the part of Toussaint, and even Laveaux, to restore slavery. His diversion not only of the gunpowder but also of munitions and other booty captured from the enemy suggested a scheme to set up his own private force—Toussaint understood very well what that signified since he had done the same himself while nominally under command of Jean-François and Biassou. Beyond this individual rebellion, it smelled as if Blanc Cassenave had been conspiring with Villatte, and perhaps there was even some larger conspiracy afoot among the mulattoes, for so many of them seemed to feel themselves racially superior to their black brothers in arms.

But now Blanc Cassenave was dead, and Brisbane, perhaps, would soon die. The Cordon of the Artibonite was in order, and the whole Artibonite plain seemed within Toussaint’s grasp, though he could not close his hand upon it until he had rooted the British out of Saint Marc.

The corner of the writing desk dug into the hollow at the back of his neck; it made his mind a hive of swarming words. Outside, Bel Argent lifted his head from grazing and whickered softly, then, as if the warhorse had anticipated it, the drumming began beneath the
mapou
tree beyond the next ridge. The idea of Moustique resurfaced in Toussaint’s awareness, and as quickly he wiped it away. Words rose up through the leather of the saddlebag, fuming into his head like smoke.

Some of those drifting phrases gave him pleasure; for instance, his report to Laveaux on the ambush of Dessources’s Chasseurs on the Artibonite, in which Toussaint had captured seven supply wagons, slain sixty of the enemy and scattered the rest. As for Dessources himself,
he
owed his escape only to the speed of his horse
—yes, that had been felicitously put. The prisoners reported that Dessources had also been wounded in the thigh, but Toussaint certainly hoped he would survive and return to the field—he found Dessources an amusing opponent, courageous certainly but weakened by contempt for the enemy and an excess of pride, two qualities which made him easy to draw. His immediate subordinates, whether colored or white, were similarly self-willed and volatile, to the point that they were barely capable of acting in concert. As for the black soldiers that made up their numbers, these were distinctly undercommitted to the proslavery struggle and so collapsed easily under pressure, though many of these same men fought bravely and stubbornly once incorporated into Toussaint’s own troops.

The texture of the drumming changed and intensified, and Toussaint, slipping again partway toward dream, felt his limbs moving lightly on the mat, as if in water, but he did not wish to give way, and then, with the harsh cry of the
loa
descending, the drumming stopped. He was conscious of his cool detachment, as if he had become a
blanc.
The boiling of language in his head subsided and the words flattened out again on their papers, inside the desk sheathed by the leather bag. There were others skilled in the art of marshaling words on paper, most dangerously the mulatto Pinchinat, who was involved in some obscure machination which connected Villate on the north coast with Rigaud in the Southern Department (but Toussaint did not want to think about that just now . . .); meanwhile even Jean-François, in his angry letter rejecting an invitation to join the French Republicans, had managed a fine flourish:

Equality, Liberty, &c &c &c . . . I will only believe in that when I see that Monsieur Laveaux and other French gentlemen of his quality giving their daughters in marriage to Negroes. Then I will be able to believe in this pretended equality.

That letter had been written quite some ago, and quite likely someone else had furnished Jean-François with the phrasing, but still this shard of rhetoric was difficult either to bypass or digest, and similar arguments continued to gain sway among the people of the Grande Rivière valley. Even some of Moyse’s men at Dondon had been moved to defect to Jean-François, and though Toussaint imagined they had been more persuaded by proffers of Spanish gold than by any words spoken or written, the problem was serious and must be addressed. He had already countered by accusing Jean-François of slave trading—
You
ask if a republican is free? It takes a slave to ask such a question. Do you
really dare—you, Jean-François, who has sold his brothers to the Spanish,
brothers who are actually digging in the mines of that detestable nation, to
supply the ostentation of its king. . . .
and Jean-François was truly guilty of this charge, as Biassou had been guilty of the same action before him. Toussaint could well have wished that Jean-François had disappeared from the scene instead of Biassou (who according to rumor had gone to Spanish Florida and perhaps been killed there in a brawl), for Biassou was the weaker general, as Dessources was weaker than Brisbane, though not by so great a measure. Jean-François could be defeated, though not without effort and difficulty. There was no one who could not somehow be defeated.

But when Jean-François had been dispatched, the question he had raised might linger and attach itself to another and another after that, for all black men and women in the colony would be most loyal to whoever they believed would protect their freedom. And freedom to do what? There must be work to feed the struggle—Laveaux’s French faction had no gold, nor sufficient supplies nor ammunition, so that Toussaint must take most of what he required from the enemy. This he had so far managed to do, but still there must be money to purchase weapons and supplies for the future, and so there must be work which produced something exchangeable for money—thus, plantation work, but that resembled slavery.

Here was another problem Toussaint did not wish to think about, for he could not immediately solve it. Here the circle closed upon itself. As he had proclaimed to the former cultivators in the area of Verrettes:

Work is necessary, it is a virtue; it serves the general benefit of the State. Any slothful wandering person will be arrested and punished by the law. But labor also takes place under the condition that it is only through compensation, a justly paid salary, that one can encourage it and carry it to the highest level.

It was well enough to speak of working for a proportion of one’s own benefit measured against the common good, and Toussaint himself believed in this principle, but for the great majority, this was not liberty. Freedom was here, in this mountain village with a few animals and gardens on which the people might easily live; freedom was what he himself had come here, for the space of a few hours, to enjoy.

The drumming had begun again, under the mapou tree. Toussaint shut down his mind. Only so much could be gained from thinking, reasoning like a
blanc;
problems which did not yield to reason might be dissolved in other ways. He calmed himself by silently reciting, against the driving of the drums, a chaplet of the names of camps that surrounded and protected his positions: Grande Saline, Rossignol, Poinci Desdunes, Latapie, Laporte, Théard, Chatelain, Pothenot, Donache, Boudet, Remousin . . . Then it was dawn.

Midmorning, he came riding down the zigzag path out of the
mornes
above Marmelade. Women swinging empty baskets as they climbed to the provision grounds stepped aside and smiled at him as he passed. Toussaint touched his hat to the prettiest, and also to the oldest among them. Now and then Bel Argent’s hooves dislodged a shower of pebbles which rattled down to startle the quick brown lizards that flicked this way and that across the trail.

Skirting the square with its church and the building he’d adopted for his headquarters, he rode to the house at the edge of town where he had installed his family. Suzanne was just returning from the river as he dismounted—she stopped dead and hugged her bundle of clothes. Behind her, the hugely pregnant Marie-Noelle was startled enough to drop the bundle she was carrying. The girl covered the O of her mouth with one hand and crouched awkwardly, knees splaying around her swollen belly, to collect the spilled garments and brush off the dust.

Suzanne set her bundle inside the door and stretched out her hands to her husband; Toussaint leaned in and pressed his cheek to hers. He was content that he had surprised her even a little, though she did not show a great deal of surprise.

“Where are my sons?” Toussaint said, but Saint-Jean, the youngest, was already running from the house to wrap his arms fiercely around Toussaint’s thigh above the boot top. Toussaint took a step back to regain his balance. Suzanne smiled at them from the doorway, hands on her hips, as Toussaint swung the boy onto his hip and kissed his forehead.

“The others are at their studies with the priest,” Suzanne said.

Toussaint lowered the boy to the ground; Saint-Jean scampered toward the white warhorse, then hesitated and looked back.

“But this one must study and learn also,” Toussaint said. “Eh?”

“Oh, the priest receives him later in the day,” Suzanne said, cocking up one hip. “He takes him alone and the other two together.”

She went into the house and, a moment later, set a chair outside the door. Toussaint removed his hat and coat and handed them to her. He carried the chair to the shade of a mango tree and sat down, pulling off his boots and stockings and working his bare toes in the loose dirt.

Marie-Noelle had sorted out her washing and was carrying part of it away toward the main square. Toussaint raised his arms slightly from his sides, allowing the breeze to run through his shirt sleeves and comb over the madras cloth tied around his head. A speckled hen plopped down in a sunny spot of the yard and began a luxurious dust bath. Saint-Jean came around the back of Toussaint’s chair and threw both arms over his shoulders, pressing his hands on his father’s shirt front and laying his cheek on the back of his neck.

Briefly, Toussaint closed his eyes. When he reopened them, Suzanne had appeared with a calabash full of cool water. He took it from her hands and drank. For some time longer he sat quite still, only his toes flexing a little, his mind deliciously empty and clear. When the shade of the mango tree began to move away from him, he put on his boots with the ghost of a sigh and crossed the yard to knock on the frame of the door.

“Will Saint-Jean go now to the priest?”

“He will go later,” Suzanne called from within. “After the heat.”

Toussaint went down across the square before the church. Indeed, it was very hot already, the sun vertical above the plumes of his hat, and the dust stirring white around his boots. When he came near the house behind the church, he could hear the drone of the boys’ recitation from the priest’s study. Occasionally, there would be the slap of a hand on the table to punctuate a correction l’Abbé Delahaye had made. Then the drone began again. Toussaint stood outside, half smiling as he listened.

When the lesson had ended the boys tumbled out, knocking into each other in the doorway: Placide the taller, scrawnier, serious-looking, with his high forehead. His skin had that coppery Arada tone, while Isaac was darker and more compact—somehow denser, it seemed. From his first years he had weighed as much or more than his brother, as if his bones were made of stone.