The Haitian Trilogy: Plays: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth (2 page)

PÉTION

I agree with what Brelle says;

We should transcend these partisan rages …

DESSALINES

Cackling of old women, talking politics to savages,

You still persist in framing gentle laws?

I have seen virgin debauchery, bacchanals, heresies, shouting

Under a swaying moon, drinking goat’s death and wine,

A shriek ahead of spinsterish piety.

We should know better, not be merciful.

Iron decisions make a Caesar, and a Caesar is what

This country needs.

I will assemble powers.

I plan a temporary amendment, call it enlargement

Of Toussaint’s constitution. If these men will not work,

Since we have their good in our intentions,

We will punish them like a stern father.

BRELLE

You will have to contend with the aristocracy.

SYLLA

What aristocracy? Treacherous white rags of flesh,

Dogs under skin, who sold his exile for the Judas kiss

Of comfort. Welcoming Toussaint when he routed Rigaud,

Throwing jewelry and laughter under his horse—

How many are left now? Not enough to spit on.

BRELLE

When will this eating another be over?

PÉTION

For you, that’s easy; your cassock makes you calm;

But I remember in these soft-edged voices,

In the waning sun, actions so fresh

The gutters seem to run like lymph; the smell

Of blood cooks in my nostrils, the blood sticks

Wet, very wet, on my memory.

BRELLE

We cannot answer vengeance on vengeance, because

As far as the eye can warn, the incision instruct,

The cycle will never end. Blood grows

Where blood is uprooted …

SYLLA

Father, a priest, you are safe.

Dessalines is right, we’d better watch the whites.

I saw them fawn on Leclerc, your very archbishop,

Who owed to Toussaint his ecclesiastic spiral,

Leaped nimbly to the side that wore his flesh, the whites:

His robes did not hinder him.

BRELLE

You seek to kill the founders of your country?

DESSALINES

Who are the founders of our country—the Big Whites?

Wild geese that, adopting a finer climate, assume

The white divinity of the swan; and all their brothers,

A babble of shopkeepers, murderers, dispossessed.

You say they founded this country. What did they found?

Bastardhoods whose existences they denied, privileges pruned,

Cruelties devised to adorn an indolent minute,

White Jesuit fathers built presbyteries from slavery,

Swinging annulling incense over wound-humped backs,

Tired with the weight of Africa,

Baptising with a tongue in cheek …

SYLLA

Stop, Jacques, this ordinary heresy …

PÉTION

Shut up, old man.

BRELLE

I too have seen much; the actions of the Church

Are not always exemplary, but the Church’s laws are perfect.

Messengers miscarry, fall prey to the time’s temptation,

And the Church has done grave wrongs in Haiti,

Or where it has not done, it has often allowed it.

I grant Archbishop Mainvielle treacherous, refractory,

And I condemn him as a man, but

I cannot question his right to bless his flock …

DESSALINES

I have decided.

Although it defy an old archbishop whose voice

Is weak as water.

BRELLE

The archbishop is ineffectual. If

I were archbishop …

DESSALINES

When you will be archbishop, I will not be King,

And if I am King, you will never be archbishop. So even priests

Conceal ambitions?

PÉTION

You seek to exclude and deprive the whites?

DESSALINES

Be frank, I seek to cut them down.

BRELLE

Massacre would be more frank.

DESSALINES

Call it any name, the syllables do not matter.

BRELLE

Whose conscience do you ferret out on that?

Whose law? What love?

DESSALINES

My own, my conscience, and the memory

Of a red past.

BRELLE

Conscience is the jackass you ride to history on, the mule

You heap excuses on, but watch your step.

You defame Toussaint.

What is your alphabet, the bullet?

What is the bayonet, your bible?

You betrayed Toussaint to Leclerc,

Then you betrayed the peasants to Rochambeau.

What is your dictionary, only treason?

Then, when the tide changed, you betrayed the French.

If I had the authority …

DESSALINES

Priest, your cassock is your comfort; do not waste

Your safety, leave us.

BRELLE

So you must rule?

I hope Christophe contests it.

You throne yourself on cruelty. So you will rule?

We are embarrassment to our hopes, when

They are fulfilled. Ah, time, how men shame

The achievement of their whispers!

You are bald of mercy. But I warn all of you,

The extreme of tyranny happens when

The gaoled turn on their gaolers.

I’ve said my fill.

(
He exits.
)

DESSALINES

And overflowed the cup.

Now, gentlemen, to make our policy plain,

Our simple trick impedes Christophe:

The messenger hastens cautiously to his camp,

Days later will arrive too late.

Christophe will be helpless to prison power.

I assume a monarchy.

(
There is consternation.
)

PÉTION

Monarchy … Not even Toussaint …

SYLLA

Christophe will work a civil war against it.

DESSALINES

Who is Christophe? My victory over Rochambeau

Here at Cap Haitien rides freshly on my crest.

We have beaten the French, splintered

Napoleon’s indestructibles, fever has furrowed them,

Sickness scythed them in harvest …

Think, gentlemen, a black nobility, the white flower destroyed.

But keep this in the antechambers of your secrecy.

Crack Christophe’s spirit in open policy,

Force painful petitions from peasant mouths,

Force favour from fools, to make me King

Christophe cannot query petitions.

Publish a monarchy in your quiet hope.

SYLLA

We have spent the night making ourselves miserable

With riches; there is no hope in the grey dawn spreading

On a halcyon sea where dreams shrivel.

DESSALINES

What dreams? What dreams, old man?

SYLLA

They reassemble after Angelus;

When the drums beat a skull of death, they rustle sheets,

And utter blood to the moon—that same sharp moon

That is a scythe to clouds—clawing the sky.

I have had all these dreams in my sleeping tent.

We have all been great generals, but idleness

Is settling on us like a grave disease,

While Time is turning us from prowess to politics,

And age, advancing his last insignia, plants white-haired surrender,

Raises citadels of fatigue over the rubble;

Time has white hairs.

My eyes are sick, and I have dreams in this waste

After long war.

This is a silence that is more deadly

Than the silence smoking over the burnt city,

The dead corruption hanging over toothless walls, the heavy

Heat in air, over the burnt city;

We have no activity, only

Corrupted purposes.

PÉTION

These, at least, are old soldier’s dreams,

Easily explained.

We must dress for the early Memorial Mass.

SYLLA

I wonder how the dawn breaks

For Christophe; what comfort does it afford

His soldier’s repose?

DESSALINES

For an old man, you certainly talk

A lot of bloody rubbish.

I shall have coffee served, and then to church,

To pray for Toussaint grinning among

Pink idle angels …

PÉTION

Yes, Your Majesty.

(
DESSALINES
looks at him cautiously, then smiles, then bursts into laughter, as the bell sounds and the lights fade out.
)

Scene 2

CHRISTOPHE
’s camp at Les Cayes. Dusk. The sonorous tolling of the cathedral bell in the preceding scene is imitated by the sound of a ship’s bell in the distance. Three
SOLDIERS
are facing the gentle suspiration of an open tent, quietly, as though expecting someone to emerge. A flag with an escutcheon streams on the strong sea wind.

FIRST SOLDIER

The news is good, I feel it in my bones.

SECOND SOLDIER

These messengers are too circumspect; they

Could have told the officers.

THIRD SOLDIER

I wonder what has become of Toussaint.

FIRST SOLDIER

I cannot wait to hear what I fear and expect,

That if Toussaint is dead, we have lost our respect.

We stand like gargoyles in the Angelus

That speaks a cruelty we cannot endure, and the ship’s bell

Clappers a lost creed to a ruined army.

I seem to see, now that the sky bleeds, spreading

The sea with a luxurious death, I think I see

Hope falling like the sun from the empty air.

SECOND SOLDIER

Toussaint is dead.

If he were living, Christophe would have said.

FIRST SOLDIER

We talk nonsense.

Dessalines has sent the last standards scattering

North at Le Cap, flung their strength from the last promontory,

Split their authority over the narrow sea.

Napoleon is numb, although he has Toussaint.

If Toussaint returns, and that is impossible …

Dessalines meditating monarchy in the burnt city,

And Christophe here, far from a corrupt city,

Thinks of the day his sun alone shall hang

In the sky’s arena, without

Dessalines’s interference.

THIRD SOLDIER

I cannot imagine Toussaint dead.

Here is the general.

CHRISTOPHE
(
Coming from his tent.
)

Why are the men here?

THIRD SOLDIER

For news, any news, General;

We saw the ship anchor hours ago,

Saw you hold conference with heaviness;

Curiosity and love laid us close;

We wait here, hoping.

CHRISTOPHE

Fold up your hopes to show them to your children,

Because the sun has settled now

Behind the horizon of our bold history.

Now no man can measure the horizon

Of his agony; this grief is wide, wide,

A ragged futility that beats against these rocks, like

Sea-bell’s Angelus.

The man is dead, history has betrayed us …

FIRST SOLDIER

You talk of duplicity; you yourself betrayed him.

I think we mock-turtle him with tears.

CHRISTOPHE

These sharp tears that prick my heart are genuine,

And as for betrayal, who has not betrayed?

Mainvielle the archbishop, Ogé, Dessalines, Telemaque,

And I, time, I.

Toussaint …

I cannot list his braveries, I can only tell

Things that the memory shudders to remember,

Hurt by its love. He broke three nations,

He disrupted intrigues, curbed civil wars;

He was no hammock general directing fools

Into a cannon’s yawn, he rode to wars with you,

He held his generals, although they were refractory,

Like those who triumphed in Troy after

The duplicity of the horse—

Sylla, Maurepas, Dessalines, Pétion;

He forded rivers, a furious forager.

But now, they tell me, he, made limp in spirit,

Crucified in a winter’s stubborn nails,

An old man dancing on a stick of time, all skin and groan,

Wearing respectability to rags, died,

Coughing on a stone floor.

All this because a man was black.

But we must triumph. Under that winter death

I will perform the rites of spring, if

You will let me, or let Dessalines …

We need more than a wavering sceptre in this twilight.

Slavery must never hold us again, not while

I live.

(
They cheer.
)

Call in the chaplain, or the priest at Les Cayes, let

The quartermaster distribute no more liquor, call

Mourning through the regiment, and tell the chaplain,

Conduct a Mass under the mourning trees.

Make sorrow severe as it suits a soldier.

I want to see my captains. To your offices.

Today we break camp for Cap Haitien. Where

Are my lieutenants?

(
The
SOLDIERS
leave.
VASTEY
and another
GENERAL
who have emerged quietly during
CHRISTOPHE
’s elegy remain behind. With the
SOLDIERS
gone,
CHRISTOPHE
’s whole bearing changes immediately.
)

Why was I not informed earlier?

Here there is only talk of intrigues, policies,

While Dessalines rules. Caution and discussion