Master of the Crossroads (75 page)

Part Four

THE WAR OF KNIVES 1799–1801

Si ou mouri, ou gen tò. . . .

—Haitian proverb

If you’re dead, you’re wrong. . . .

By the fall of 1798, Toussaint Louverture had seen the departures of three
white representatives of the French Republic: Laveaux, Sonthonax, and
Hédouville. His enemies claimed he had engineered these departures in
order to extend his own power in the colony. Toussaint, however, always
maintained his loyalty to France, where he had sent his two eldest sons for
their education. He had certainly declined an offer of British support, tendered by General Maitland, in setting up Saint Domingue as an independent state, perhaps with himself as its king.

One official French agent still remained on the island, Roume, an
elderly Creole from Grenada who had been part of various French commissions since the first slave rebellion in 1791, and who had represented the
French interest in Spanish Santo Domingo since the signing of the Treaty
of Basel. Toussaint now invited Roume to return to French Saint Domingue in the role of French commissioner, though his enemies claimed he did
so only to give a shading of legitimacy to his own enterprise of setting up an
essentially independent government.

By 1799, Toussaint’s most powerful enemy on the island was a recent
ally, General Antoine Rigaud. During the repulse of the British invasion,
Rigaud, a native of Les Cayes on the southern peninsula, had emerged
as the principal leader of the colored minority, just as Toussaint emerged as
the principal leader of the black majority. Rigaud and Toussaint might
have come to blows eventually because of racial politics, but their conflict
was accelerated and exacerbated by Agent Hédouville’s parting gesture: he
formally instructed Rigaud to disregard Toussaint’s authority.

31

It was strange, because he was a
blanc,
while I, Riau, was
fils Ginen,
how sometimes I would feel myself to be walking in the same spirit with Doctor Antoine Hébert. I felt so very much that day at La Fossette, when he would not kill Choufleur, although he could have killed him easily, and with less danger to himself than it cost him not to do it. That was not because I wanted Choufleur to keep his feet walking on our earth, because he was a dangerous man who was sure to cause more trouble. It would be for the better if someone did kill him, but the doctor chose not to do it, and Riau was glad, and even the Captain Maillart felt that same harmony that was among all three of us as we came riding out of the swamp with its rotting smell of graves, the sun shining down on our backs in its rising out of the sea.

After this thing had happened I thought I would ask the doctor to be
parrain
to the child who had two fathers, when that child would be brought to the water of the whiteman’s church. It seemed to me that Guiaou would be for this idea as well because he had also worked with the doctor in healing, and with Riau too, and I did not think Merbillay would be against it. But none of us were able to go Ennery then, but instead we were all sent here or there all over the northern plain.

Hédouville had been driven away, and Toussaint sent a long letter after him to the masters of France, saying he had not meant to chase their agent from the country, whatever Hédouville claimed himself, and still there was no one above Toussaint after Hédouville had left, except for Roume, across the Spanish border. Also there was Rigaud in the south, but no one yet knew what he would do, and there were many mountains between him and Toussaint. In the north was peace, but Toussaint made himself very busy getting ready for more war, and he seemed to think that this war would come in French ships from over the sea, no matter what letters he sent.

War wants guns, and guns want money, and money wanted sugar and coffee to be brought out of the trees and the cane fields. For that, more of the
grand blancs
were coming back all the time, after Hédouville had gone. They agreed with Toussaint, now, even better than with the French, and that hurt the confidence that some felt in Toussaint, especially with Moyse, and a few others. I, Riau, I was doubtful too, although I kept the doubt hidden behind my head. I saw many of Toussaint’s letters and the letters which came to him, so I thought he was right that the war was not finished yet, and I knew we would need more guns, with powder and bullets to feed them.

For that, it happened that Captain Riau was sent with men to bring Michel Arnaud to his plantation on the plain again, with his wife who served the mysteries, because they had run away again from that place when the rising against Hédouville happened, and they did not know what they would find when they came back—if the place had been burned again or not, or if the people of the hoe there would have stayed. The doctor came with them also, to begin a hospital there for people who were sick or hurt. He had said to Arnaud that if he cared for the sick ones on his plantation, that would be a protection for himself, because people would return the good he did for them. Arnaud seemed to listen to this, although I thought it was against what was truly in him. No one was more savage to our people than Arnaud before the slaves broke off their chains.

But when we did come to Habitation Arnaud, the people had not burned the cane fields. The mill had been only partly rebuilt since they had knocked it down the first time, but they had not knocked down that part which had been raised again. And the people had stayed there instead of running away, in their
cases
around the borders of the cane pieces. The people seemed quiet to me, too quiet, and they turned their faces from us and lowered their heads when we came riding up that
allée
of stumps which led to the main compound.

Arnaud was happy—one could see his head lift up and his spine unkink itself—because he had expected it all to be destroyed. As for his woman, when she stepped down into the yard, she turned her head around and around like an owl, looking for that shed which was no longer there, and when her eyes found the burned patch where it had been, they rolled back white, and she fell away from herself toward the ground, but Arnaud came quickly and caught her up. The people of that place were watching from the hedges to see if the
loa
would rise up in her body, but she had only fainted, and Arnaud carried her into the house.

I, Riau, I had not seen the burning of the shed, but I had heard about it from the doctor and also from Flaville, and I knew what was in the shed before it had been burnt.

We stayed at Habitation Arnaud for eight days. As Captain, Riau might have slept in the
grand’case
with the doctor and the other
blancs.
Arnaud invited me to sleep there, but I did not want to stay in his house. Bouquart found a
case
down below the cane mill, and I went there at night to stay with him. In the day, I worked with the doctor and some of the men Arnaud had called in from the cane fields or the mill to help with raising the hospital. His woman Claudine came out then, and took an interest in what we would do; she asked for a brush arbor to be raised next to the room which would be for the hospital, where she might teach the children of those who worked the fields. Arnaud ordered this done to please her. All the time she walked high on her toes like a cat trying to cross water. It appeared that she was meant to stand over the leaf women who would tend the hospital, and the doctor taught her certain things to do. She was slow, but willing when she did these things, and she had a gentle touch. The children were drawn by this softness in her, so that they came willingly to the brush arbor when it was made to learn the letters in her book. Yet I wondered if this gentleness was really her own.

Arnaud thought it wasteful, this business of teaching the children. He said nothing, but his thought showed in the curl of his lip. He was suspicious of the hospital too, and so were the people who worked his fields. In the old days Arnaud had given himself to wounding, not healing. There was no great illness, and no one was badly hurt while we stayed there, but some of the men came to the hospital with the ordinary cuts on their hands and faces from the cane leaves. Claudine and the leaf women poulticed their cuts with
gueri trop vite,
so that they healed more quickly.

But one day there came to the hospital a runaway who had been caught by the
maréchaussée
and brought back to Arnaud during slavery time. She was an old woman now, or looked to be so. She did not come right into the hospital, but remained standing at the edge of the bush, with her breasts hanging slack against her ribs and the stumps where her hands were held up before her. Arnaud had cut off her hands as a punishment, when the
maréchaussée
brought her back to him. There was nothing to be done about it now, so the doctor turned his face to the wall, but Claudine did not look away, and the bolt of pain that passed between them was like thunder.

That handless woman stayed in her
case
all through her days because she could no longer do anything. Claudine persuaded Arnaud to take a girl out of the cane field to care for her in the daytime. Also she had made a wooden hook and a spoon to be fastened to those stumps, so that the woman could help herself a little. After Claudine had done those things, some of the other people began to meet her eyes more freely when she looked at them, and some of them would shyly touch her hands, although they were still fearful of her spirit.

On the fifth night that we stayed there one of my soldiers forced a woman from the plantation to open her legs for him, and I ordered him to be shot. There was nothing else to do about it. By dawn a great stir had begun among the woman’s family and spread all through Arnaud’s cultivators, and they would have risen against us if the man had not been punished. I shot him myself with my own pistol, but left it to others to bring his flesh to the cemetery. It was what Toussaint would have wanted and what he would have done, the same as if Toussaint himself were working through my hands, and in fact he told me so himself when I reported it to him. After this had been done, the people became calm again, and they went quietly back to work—too quietly.

I wondered if perhaps Arnaud practiced his old cruelties on them when no one else was there to see, but I learned from the people that this was not true. This I found out mostly from Bouquart, because he had taken up with a woman there, who gave herself to him freely, and that was a good way of getting the news. I teased him about Zabeth at Ennery, but there was not much heart in my teasing. Bouquart told me that the people were not downhearted for anything Arnaud had done to them, but because of Toussaint who had ordered that any man not in the army must work and stay on the land he worked for his whole life long, or else be punished by the soldiers with their guns. Also Toussaint had taken away many of the Sonthonax guns from the men who worked the land, saying he would return them if there was need to use them. No one said it was like slavery again, the way they had spoken about Hédouville, but I could feel them thinking so, although they would not say it to my face.

Bouquart was always away with his new woman at night, so I was alone in the
case.
I did not like this, and often I could not sleep. One night I rose as if a voice had called me and walked around the cane mill to the open yard before the
grand’case.
The moon was two days past the full, and in the light of it Claudine came drifting from the house and stopped in the burnt circle of the shed where Arnaud had once kept his slave-catching dog which the doctor had shot, and where later Claudine had murdered the maid named Mouche. She turned within the walls which were burned down, turning and turning under the moon.

From the shadow of the mill wall, I watched her. Arnaud was watching too, from a seat on the gallery of the
grand’case.
He sat very still—only the pommel of his twisted stick kept falling from one of his hands to the other. It made me uneasy to think that he probably saw me too, inside the shadow of the wall. Riau had more power than Arnaud then, but for that moment I did not quite believe it.

After a while I saw that someone else was watching too, a woman who stood inside a fringe of trees, across the clearing from the mill. I went to where she was standing, exposed to Arnaud’s eyes under the moon, though he made no sign that he had noticed me. The woman was Cléo, a mulattress who had been housekeeper here. I had known her in the camps of Grande Riviere, where she had run after Claudine slashed the throat of Mouche in the shed. It was Cléo who told me all that story.

“Zombi,”
she said now, pointing her chin at Claudine where she turned, but I shook my head.

“No, she is waiting for Baron,” I said.

Cléo turned to me with her mouth round in surprise, and I told her what I had seen at Le Cap, in the
hûnfor,
how Baron, or sometimes Erzulie-gé-Rouge, would mount the head of this whitewoman.

When Cléo had understood this, she stepped out of the cover of the trees and went to Claudine and took one of her hands in her own and put the other hand at the base of Claudine’s head. A breath went out of Claudine like wind, and she let her head roll back against Cléo’s hand. Cléo led her slowly to the house. All the time Arnaud was watching from the gallery, as if he had expected all these things to happen, though it had been years since Cléo set her foot on that plantation.

Two days later we were riding back to Le Cap, the doctor and Bouquart and I, and the other men in my command, to report to Toussaint that soon Arnaud would be sending brown sugar to the port, along with many other planters on the plain. That sugar would be loaded onto ships for England and America and would be traded for more guns and powder and shot. But the people were cutting the cane and milling it to sugar under force from the army, and if they did not want to do it, perhaps there would be chains for them again, perhaps the whip. When they saw us riding toward them, they lowered their heads and turned away, because I, Riau, was a soldier of the gun, while they were only workers of the hoe. It was like I had myself turned into a
blanc.
When I thought this, I was cold all over, as though my spirit had gone away and left me to become a
zombi,
dead flesh forked across the saddle, my arms and legs answering to someone else’s will.

The Commissioner Roume had come to Le Cap by the time that we arrived there. Toussaint had sent for him across the mountains. I heard the
blanc
secretary Pascal and some others who muttered that Toussaint had done this only to hide the truth that it was really himself who did and commanded everything now. Roume was an old man then, and frail, but his heart was strong, and he spoke and acted by what he believed. He was a believer in Toussaint. But also, Roume wanted to make peace between Rigaud and Toussaint, or bring back the peace that Hédouville had broken between those two.

For that, he called Rigaud and Toussaint to meet at Port au Prince, and so Toussaint marched south, with a part of his army. We stopped for a day and a night at Ennery, where Toussaint saw his family, and Riau saw his. That child who had two fathers was born another girl child, and we had agreed among the three of us to name her Marielle. When we left Ennery for Port-au-Prince, Guiaou marched in my command, and I had put him in charge of a squad of men, because he was respected for his fighting and I knew the men would trust and follow him.

But there was not supposed to be any fighting on this march. Peace covered the whole way to Port-au-Prince, and the plantations of the Artibonite Valley were back at work, and so were those of the Cul de Sac plain. When we came to Port-au-Prince, Rigaud was there as expected, and there was a great celebration of the end of slavery. Beside Rigaud was Beauvais, and with Toussaint was Christophe Mornet and also Laplume, who had been leading Dieudonné’s men since Dieudonné was taken and killed. All of these chiefs made a contest who could shout the loudest—
Gloire à la République!
That night there was a big
bamboche
with drums and dancing, on the open ground above the town.