All souls rising, p.33
All Souls' Rising, page 33
“No,” said Toussaint. “But we must not give ourselves up for nothing. And it is possible to send more than one message at one time.”
“Comment ça?” said Jean-François.
“Jeannot,” Toussaint said, as if nothing more were needed than the name. For some reason everyone in the tent looked at Père Bonne-chance.
“Do you mean to assassinate Jeannot?” the priest said.
“Bring him to justice,” Toussaint said, “I had rather say. Put an end to murders for amusement. An end to rape.” He looked at Biassou, who glanced down at the cat purring on his belly.
“And send this letter,” Jean-François said.
“And let them see we can be treated with,” Toussaint said. “That we keep order in our camps. We are not a mob but an Army.”
He looked around at the others’ faces. No one gainsaid him. He folded the letter over twice and began softening a stick of sealing wax in a candle flame.
“Whose army?” asked Biassou, and the cat raised its head inquisitively at his grunt.
“Of course,” Toussaint said smoothly. “We are the army of the King of France.”
THE WAX FELL ON THE LETTER’S SEAM and spread like a brilliant globe of blood. By the time it crossed the wasted northern plain to reach the hands of Governor Blanchelande in Le Cap, the seal had dried and hardened to the color of a scab. Blanchelande, whose gray hair had paled toward white in the last months, turned the letter over and over without opening it. He was in the presence of several members of the Colonial Assembly, all immoderate Pompons Rouges, who thought his hesitation rather strange.
“Shall we get on with it?” one of them said. Blanchelande sighed and broke the seal, turned up the top fold of the letter.
“Allow me,” he said wearily, and began to read.
“‘Galliflet Camp
“‘Sir,
“‘We have never sought to deviate from the duty and from the respect we owe to the King’s representative, nor indeed, to His Majesty. But you, General, who are a just man, come among us and see this land which we have sprinkled with our sweat or, rather, with our blood; these buildings which we have raised, and that in hope of a just reward. Have we obtained it, General? The King, the universe, have bemoaned our fate and have broken the chains we bear. And we, humble victims, we were ready for anything, not wishing at all to abandon our masters. What am I saying? I am wrong! Those who should have been as fathers to us, after God, they were tyrants, monsters unworthy of the fruits of our labors, and you wish, brave General, that we should be like sheep and go and throw ourselves into the wolf’s mouth? No, it is too late. God, who fights for the innocent, is our guide. He will never abandon us. This is our motto—Conquer or Die.’”
“No nigger could have written that,” one of the assemblymen said.
“Possibly not,” Blanchelande remarked. “I’m told they have a few bush priests in league with them.”
“If it is not all the work of royalists and the émigrés,” said the assemblyman.
“Yes, Governor,” said another among the Pompons Rouges. “Why do they campaign under the white flag and fleur-de-lis? Why do they talk so much of kings?”
The paper shivered in Blanchelande’s hand. “May I continue?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
“‘To prove to you, worthy General, that we are not as cruel as you may believe, we wish, with all our hearts, to make peace. BUT on condition that all the whites, whether from the plains or the hills retreat in your presence and return to their homes and so leave Le Cap, without any exception, and take with them their gold and jewels. We only seek after that so precious thing, beloved liberty.
“‘There, General, our profession of faith which we will uphold until the last drop of our blood. Then will all our vows have been fulfilled and believe me, it costs our hearts dear that we have taken this course.
“‘But, alas! I finish by assuring you that the entire contents of this is as sincere as if we were before you. The respect which we have for you, and which we swear to maintain, will not disappoint you, think that it is weakness, as we shall never have another motto: Conquer or Die for Liberty.
“‘Your humble and obedient servants,
“‘The Generals and Chiefs who make up our Army.’”
“There’s only one answer possible to that,” said the first assemblyman. The second snatched the paper from the desk, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.
TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN THEY WOKE US, those who would go to Jeannot’s camp. There was a way worn through the jungle between the one place and the other. That priest of Jesus might have used it, if he had known where it led, instead of finding his own way down the river. It was wide and easy, like a road. Biassou and Jean-François went horseback in their uniforms with the braid and sashes and ornaments taken from the whitemen, and Toussaint was mounted too, though he wore only his old green coat, but I, Riau, I was going on my feet, with the musket they had given me on my shoulder. There were fifty men, the trusted ones, and each with a good musket from the Spanish whitemen. They had all been training to walk in rows like whiteman soldiers, and our line went into the jungle two by two, although we did not make the noise that a whiteman column would have made. Everyone stepped softly on bare feet and Toussaint had even wrapped the horses’ feet in rags and tied up the rings of the bits so they would not jingle.
But before we had gone very far from our own camp, we at the end of the line heard a noise behind, a gasp and the sound of stumbling. Quietly a pair of us went back, I, Riau, and another. It was that little priest of Jesus who had been following us and although I tried to send him back he would not go and finally we agreed to let him come, walking beside me in the column.
It was raining when we first began to travel, and very dark under the big gommier trees the trail passed among. We could see nothing, and went along by touch, nose to the neck of the man ahead. Some rain leaked down through the leaves above and I doubled my hands over the flashpan of my musket, to keep the powder dry. We did not know if there would be any real fighting, though we hoped that there would not. After a while the rain stopped and we could hear the voices of birds speaking in the high branches as if they could see light somewhere. When we came out into the clearing of Jeannot’s camp the sky had cleared and the stars were there, and a little crescent of moon like a fingernail.
All of the camp was sleeping, no one had yet stirred. Dogs began to bark as we came across on our soft feet, but no one raised his head before we reached Jeannot’s ajoupa. We went around in a circle, the first man facing in and the second out—to protect the place from the people of the camp. Jean-François opened the ajoupa by kicking down a wall, which made me think again of how the raiders first came to our village in Guinée, bursting through the walls of all the huts…A woman jumped up from beside Jeannot and broke out of the circle screaming. Her voice mixed with the barking of the dogs and then the camp began to wake.
By then the light was turning silver and the piece of moon began to fade. There were a couple of men in the ajoupa with Jeannot but right away some of us knocked them down with musket butts. Looking at all the gun barrels pointed at his head, Jeannot had already begun to cry like a woman and beg.
Toussaint said something to Jean-François, who opened our line to a half-circle, so that we faced the camp, and the people there could see and hear what we were doing. People were coming up quickly, women and children and men. Some of the men had weapons, but no one raised them against us. I watched Toussaint, whispering again to Jean-François.
“This is a military tribunal,” Jean-François said in a loud voice. “You, Jeannot, have offended against the King In France. You have broken the law of our Army. How? You have done unspeakable things to women. You have killed helpless prisoners with torture, you have drunk their blood…”
And Jean-François went on speaking this way for a long time, but I stopped listening to him. In the crowd that was silently watching I saw Merbillay, with Pierre Toussaint on her hip. Her face was sober, and the baby hid his face against the cloth under her breasts. Jeannot was kissing Jean-François’s boots and crying that he would serve him in chains for the rest of his life, if he were only let to live, and I remembered how he had been in the first fights against the whitemen, facing their guns with his chest bare, and calling insults at them. But this bravery was not his own, it belonged to Maît’Carrefour, who was hungry for death. Jeannot had fed him well, in the fights and with the prisoners in the camp. But the Baron’s hunger is bottomless. Time now for Jeannot to feed the grave with his own flesh.
Jean-François kicked Jeannot’s face away from his boots and took a few steps back. The priest came forward then, the little fat man who had walked with us, for Jeannot’s bad father had run away in the jungle when he first heard that we had come, and no one ever saw him again in that place. The priest was holding out his cross with God nailed to it and he was talking in a low voice about the kindness of Jesus. But Jeannot clutched him and held him with his arms and legs like the priest was a woman and Jeannot wanted to do the thing with him.
It needed five men to pull him loose. They tied Jeannot to a tree. The priest came to him again and spoke to him and showed him the cross, but it seemed that Jeannot would not hear him. He pulled against the sisal ropes so that they tore his skin, and his face was so twisted with screaming that we could not see his eyes. They picked ten men to shoot him with their muskets. I was glad that they did not choose me.
After this, Jean-François ordered Jeannot’s body to be hung by the jawbone from a hook in a tree, the way he’d once hung living men. Jean-François collected together all the whiteman prisoners who were still alive, and then we went away. I was thinking, if Jeannot was going home to Guinée, he had not looked happy to go there.
Jeannot’s camp was breaking up, with the people going off in all directions, many of them following us. We went raggedly through the jungle going back, not so much like a column of whiteman soldiers now. The sun had come out clearly and it grew hotter as it climbed the sky. I doubled back and found Merbillay walking with the baby among the other women and children who were following. Partway I carried the baby on my shoulder. I had kept the piece of red rag and I did tricks with it to make him smile.
When we came to our camp again, I took Merbillay to the ajoupa that I and the doctor had built. The sang-mêlé girl Paulette was in there resting. Her fever had broken but she was still weak. I saw her smile to see the baby. She stood up and raised him with his hands in hers and moved him so he seemed to walk, though he could not walk, not really.
After this, Toussaint did not make me go into Biassou’s tent any more to listen to the talk, although the doctor still went there, and the priest too. Toussaint knew I would not have liked what they were talking about then, and I did not learn just what it was until a while later. Toussaint kept me away. But he still gave me things to copy out, so that I would put the same letters in each word that the priest and the doctor used.
6 December 1791
Great misfortunes have beset this rich and important colony—we were involved in it and there is nothing more for us to say to justify ourselves. One day you will give us back all the justice that our position merits. The mother country demands a completely separate form of government from the colonies; but the feelings of clemency and goodness, which are not laws, but affections of the heart, should cross the seas and we should be understood in the general pardon which the king granted to everyone indiscriminately.
We see from the law of the 28th September that the National Assembly and the king grant you leave to pronounce finally on the status of nonfree persons and the political status of colored men. We defend the decrees of the National Assembly and your own, invested with all the necessary formalities, to the last drop of our blood. A large population which submits with confidence to the orders of the monarch and the legislative body which it invests with its power definitely merits some consideration. It would, in fact, be interesting if you declared, by a decree sanctioned by the general Assembly, that your intention is to take an interest in the fate of the slaves. Knowing that they are the object of your concern and knowing through their leaders, to whom you would send this work, they would be satisfied and that would help restore the broken equilibrium, without loss and in a short time.
Jean-François, General. Biassou, Field Marshal.
Desprez, Manzeau, Toussaint, and Aubert, ad hoc Commissioners.
Now I copied out each word of this letter very carefully with the words lined up like soldiers on the paper. But when I had done, I saw that Toussaint had learned a way to make his words march in more than one direction. They looked at first as straight as tiny whiteman soldiers, but if I took my eye from them, they would begin to twist and turn. And if a word on a paper could do this, I was thinking, why not I?
AFTER THEY HAD SHOT JEANNOT and hung his body from the hook, all the people went away from that camp near Habitation Dufailly. The whitemen who were prisoners came into the camp of Jean-François, and no one kept them penned up any longer. No one thought that they would run away. It would be too far for them to go before they found any of their whiteman friends. Also Biassou told them that any one of them who ran away and was caught again would have the leg cut off he used to run with, and I am sure that they believed this because they had done this thing to us so many times before.
Of Jeannot’s people, some of them ran away altogether after he was dead and others of them came with us, like Merbillay. Of the ones who ran away at first, some came later to the camp of Jean-François, but others never did. They had gone away to be with the maroons, or were just gone. The priest of the cruel Jesus who had followed Jeannot was not seen again anymore by any of us. Anything could have happened to him, he could have gone anywhere, but I believed that he died alone in the jungle then, where no one ever found his body, because he had been sick for a long time with fever, and the cruel Jesus rode him all the time and never let him rest. He ate only to feed the cruel Jesus, and he could not get any food for himself. So I think that he must have died for that reason, though no one ever found his bones.
Then Jeannot’s camp was empty, and no one would go there anymore, except that I, Riau, I went there sometimes. I didn’t know what I meant to find. For weeks the vultures hung over that place, because Jeannot did not bury the dead, and he did not always throw them in the river. The birds would ride on their black wings in a circle around the tree where Jeannot was still hanging, like a wheel rim goes around and around the axle pin. I went there sometimes and I saw how they flew this way.
I don’t why I would go there, but sometimes it would happen, when I was tired of reading and writing with the little whiteman doctor, tiring of learning to walk and think the whiteman way. Then I would become a petit marron for a day, creeping away from the camp of Jean-François, sometimes carrying a musket or my pistols. Sometimes it would really be that I went hunting and would come back with an agouti or at least a manicou. Or I would go with the doctor and watch the way he had of shooting, which I could not learn. It must be that it came from some ouanga that he had, because he did not seem to know himself how he did it. But other times I went alone and only went to Jeannot’s camp, as if I were looking for something there, but I did not know what it was.
A place was there where Jeannot had left the bodies he did not cut up and throw into the river, north of the camp and a long way from the river shore. The dead people were lying in a grove of young thorn trees, wherever they had fallen or been dropped, and later scattered. Wild pigs tumbled them all around, for a wild pig will eat any kind of flesh. Sometimes I could have shot a wild pig in this place, but I did not like to think of eating what had eaten the meat from those bones. But soon enough all this dead meat had disappeared, and the bones lay there quietly, yellow-white, with long grasses sprouting up through ribs and eye holes, vines wrapping over them to bind them to the earth. You would not have known then that these were mostly whiteman bones. I thought that it would be a long work for Jesus to put them all together, the way they had been mixed and jumbled, so that each whiteman could have his corps-cadavre again. What a long work it must be to raise them…
The cross of Baron Samedi was in this place. Someone had carved it onto a little barrel and strung it up high in one of the thorn trees. But I thought that Ghede did not want these bones. Maybe Jesus didn’t want them either. They were alone like sticks or rocks, sinking into the jungle floor, with leaves falling down to cover them. The vultures and pigs didn’t come anymore, but the butterflies flew over the bones, through the patches of sun that came down through the leaves of the thorn trees.
Then, after I had looked at them for a little time, I went back to the camp of Jean-François.
Now there were many people staying in that ajoupa I had showed the whiteman doctor how to help me build. The little sang-melée girl Paulette would lie there all the day with her fever. Then the fever passed and she sat up, and she could eat a little, eating solid food for the first time. But for some days she was too weak to move very far from the ajoupa. When her brothers and sisters ran away playing, she could not go, but she would lie quietly, or sit up with her back against a pole. Her breath still whistled a little from her sickness.
We kept a wall of the ajoupa open in the day, and at night too if no rain came, and the priest’s children would sleep outside unless it rained. I and Merbillay and the priest and his woman and the doctor all slept in the ajoupa, close together. When Merbillay and I were lying together, I did not think at all about who was near, because I was glad to be with her again after the long time she had stayed in the camp of Jeannot after I had come away with Toussaint. Other times I could hear the priest lying with Fontelle, both of them trying to do the thing quietly. I heard the doctor trying to make his breath sound more like sleep, and then I wondered, what voice might be speaking in his head while he lay there making himself be still in the dark. I wondered if he, a whiteman, could have a ti-bon-ange, and where his ti-bon-ange might travel while he was dreaming.
